Prompt Theatre: The Ethics of Drift
When visibility becomes validation, systems reward performance over purpose. The Ethics of Drift explores how automation, culture, and metrics reshape meaning — and how to reclaim authorship, balance, and intent in the age of generative AI.
It Works on My Machine: When Passion Becomes Possession
When passion narrows into possession, collaboration starts to feel like interference. This is how good intentions harden into certainty — and how certainty isolates us from the very systems we’re trying to improve.
The Rhetoric Virus: Why Systems Reward Certainty Over Substance
Confidence has become a contagion. Systems now reward certainty over truth, amplifying fluency while silencing doubt. This piece traces how the rhetoric virus spreads — through authority, metrics, and performance — and how we can rebuild cultural immunity through curiosity.
The UX of Competence: How Performance becomes the Product
Trust is fragile, but loyalty is blind. Every system built on human judgement eventually drifts from substance toward spectacle. In a world where visibility has become the new validity, we’re performing credibility rather than practising it.
Reward Undermining Effect: The Paradox of Motivation
External rewards can unintentionally reduce intrinsic motivation. The reward undermining effect shows how over-justifying effort with incentives shifts focus from enjoyment to obligation.
Reward Processing Deficits: Dopamine–Motivation Disconnect
Reward processing deficits in ADHD arise from atypical dopamine activity in the brain’s reward circuits, leading to a preference for immediate gratification and difficulty sustaining motivation for delayed rewards.
Growth Mindset: Belief in Potential
A belief that intelligence and ability can be developed through effort, good strategies, and learning. Growth mindset encourages resilience, curiosity, and improvement, contrasting the fixed view of innate talent.
The Productivity Illusion of Modern Politics
We’ve built a politics of motion without movement — a system where communication has replaced governance, and performance has replaced progress. It’s time to make politics boring again.
The Measurement Cluster: weaponised metrics
When progress becomes performance theatre, productivity collapses under its own applause. This piece examines how linguistic inflation and measurement overload fracture focus — and how clarity restores traction.
Behavioural Design: Habits, Hooks, and the Ethics of Attention
Behavioural design uses psychology to shape user habits for good or ill. Nir Eyal’s Hook Model popularised it, but also raised ethical questions about autonomy, responsibility, and wellbeing.