Essays published on Medium, sorted by date.
When war exposes what was already breakingThe immediate temptation, when confronted with a new war in the Middle East, is to treat it as just another regional crisis: grave, bloody, destabilizing, but still ultimately co...
The Morally Empty Machine in a Morally Exhausted WorldIn The Time Machine, published by H. G. Wells in 1895, the future does not appear as triumph. It appears as bifurcation. When he travels hundreds of thousands of year...
In a world that rewards operation without understanding, comprehension becomes a costFor a long time, functional illiteracy was treated as a residual problem of schooling. The term generally referred to someone who had g...
The art of calling decline adaptationEvery age of rupture produces solutions presented as temporary. In moments of war, economic collapse, or diffuse threat, societies accept exceptional measures with relative ease, so l...
It Just Delivers LessHave you noticed that your favorite product has changed? A little smaller. A little worse. A little more expensive.That is not a coincidence — and you are not imagining it.What we are living through...
How a fortunate generation came to mistake the end of an exception for declineThere is something childish — and perhaps inevitable — in the way human beings imagine history. Almost everyone measures the world by the smal...
Why authorship matters more than the text in the age of AIIn The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco gave Jorge of Burgos the conviction that certain kinds of knowledge are too dangerous to circulate freely — and that the way...
The Knowledge WorkerThere used to be a curious job on the railways: a man walking alongside the train with a small hammer, striking each iron wheel one by one. From the sound alone, he could detect cracks, wear, and defe...
Each boundary the machine crosses pushes the human into a more abstract refuge.The Metaphysical EscalatorThe Flight to the Last Human StrongholdFor a while, the dominant critique of artificial intelligence was childish.A...