Writing
Notes from inside the machinery
Longer pieces on standards, institutions and trust. Scientific publications are listed separately.
Essays
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AI Slop, AI Slobs and the Innocence of the Prompt
Generative AI did not invent performative writing; it merely became very good at it. On why the problem is better named for the person who pressed publish — and where blame is the wrong instrument, and where it is not.
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The gift and the trap of a standard
A standard is a common reference point before it is a wall. On what food safety costs the countries it was not written for — and what an inclusive alternative to pass-or-fail would have to contain to be worth having.
Book in progress
I am completing a book, in six movements, about how humans construct institutional reality and then forget that they constructed it — and about what follows from taking that forgetting seriously.
It argues that the same feature which makes institutions useful, the displacement of agency from persons to abstractions, is the feature that makes them unaccountable; that our entire apparatus of accountability presupposes a subject with a nervous system, which institutions do not have; and that the way through is neither cynicism nor reform by framework, but a discipline of compassion grounded in the recognition that people act within constraints we usually cannot see.
Food safety runs through it as the worked example, because it is the domain I know and because it illustrates the abstract dynamics with uncomfortable specificity.