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  • 8 min read

On Slop

The word arrived with the force of revelation. Slop. Scrolling through feeds thick with AI-generated images, articles, videos—content that felt somehow wrong, uncanny, excessive—we finally had a name for the unease. The term spread because it captured something visceral: the texture of language that reads smoothly but says nothing, images that resolve into coherence without ever achieving meaning, an endless tide of stuff that nobody asked for and nobody quite wanted.

The complaint is now ubiquitous. Graphite's analysis of web content found that over half of new articles are now AI-generated. Bynder's research shows a majority of consumers report reduced engagement when they suspect content is machine-made. The Macquarie Dictionary named "AI slop" its 2025 word of the year. The diagnosis seems clear: AI is flooding our information environment with garbage, and the flood is drowning authentic human expression.

But what if the diagnosis is wrong? Not factually wrong (the volume is real, the uncanniness genuine) but conceptually wrong. What if "slop" is a category error that mistakes volume for vice, aesthetics for ethics, and origin for orientation? The question isn't whether AI produces garbage. It does, in abundance. The question is whether that's the right thing to be worried about.

  • 39 min read

Remix / Remake / Remade

In China Miéville's The City & The City, two cities occupy the same physical space. Besźel and Ul Qoma share streets, share buildings, share the very air, yet their citizens are trained from birth to unsee the other city. You learn to recognize the architecture, the clothing, the gait of the other place, and you learn to let your gaze slide past it without acknowledgment. The unseeing isn't ignorance—it's a disciplined practice, socially enforced and after long enough, automatic, a learned incapacity so thorough that the other city becomes invisible not through absence but through cultivated blindness. To see is a crime called Breach. The citizens of Besźel walk past the citizens of Ul Qoma every day, their shoulders nearly brushing, and neither acknowledges the other's existence.

We are practicing the same unseeing now.

  • 14 min read

The Cockpit That Remembers

In the 1900s, over 4,000 wagon manufacturers dominated American transportation. They had infrastructure, expertise, and supply chains refined across generations. How many became car companies? One. Studebaker. One company out of four thousand made the transition.

  • 17 min read

Walking and Flying

There's a particular kind of knowing that comes from walking—from months spent in neighborhoods where you learn which doors open easily and which remain forever closed, from conversations that drift and return like tides, from the smell of cooking that tells you more about a place than any survey could capture. Ethnographers have walked like this for decades: slowly, attentively, building trust one cup of coffee at a time, noticing the things people don't say as carefully as the things they do. It's intimate work, this ground-level knowing; embodied, reciprocal, achingly slow.

  • 21 min read

Cathedrals versus Commons

The best pranks take ten thousand years to set up.

That's what the Dwellers do in Banks' The Algebraist: beings who live for eons in gas giants, playing elaborate jokes on each other because when you have infinite resources, reputation through novelty is all that matters. One Dweller breeds a sentient species just to have an audience for their poetry. Another spends centuries setting up a pun.

They would find our current situation hilarious.

Consider the hospital administrator's daily reality: You're running critical infrastructure on OpenAI's API while your radiologists use sketchy Discord models on the side. Your lawyers demand compliance certificates. Your engineers contribute to repositories that will make your product obsolete. Your board wants quarterly growth. Your mission statement talks about serving humanity. Three different economic games, incompatible rules, everyone pretending this is normal.

  • 12 min read

Beyond the Flywheel

For twenty years, we've lived with a particular story about how digital growth works—the flywheel spinning faster with each turn, users attracting more users, data improving services which draw more data; it's a narrative that explained why Amazon felt inevitable, why Facebook seemed unstoppable, why Uber could burn billions and still look like the future. The flywheel wasn't entirely wrong, of course. It captured something real about network effects and compounding advantages; it gave us services that were genuinely transformative, at least for a while. Yet what looked like perpetual motion from one angle, we now see, looked like extraction from another.