Red Lines in Blue Ink: The Systemic Cost of Ruling by Rhetoric
When a government starts borrowing the language of its opponents, it doesn’t just change how it speaks — it changes what it sees. This piece examines how political rhetoric can quietly rewrite purpose, distort priorities, and weaken trust, revealing the hidden cost when systems start ruling by story instead of by substance.
When UI Masquerades as UX: The Politics of Performative Reform
Polished announcements can make a broken system look coherent, but that doesn’t mean it works. When the interface of reform shines brighter than the experience of delivering it, the gap between promise and process becomes impossible to ignore.
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.
Authorship, Autonomy, and the Algorithm
A reflection on how fear shapes our response to new tools — from calculators to ChatGPT — and how embracing collaboration between human and machine can redefine creativity, authorship, and ethical progress.
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.
When Rhetoric Replaces Reality: Safety Without Truth
When systems lose linguistic integrity, they lose the ability to adapt. This essay explores how Britain’s comforting class vocabulary sustains fragility — and how a new, truth-based taxonomy could turn language back into infrastructure for change.
My brain is not a buzzword
After years of engineering my own focus systems, I finally have an official label for the mind that built them. ADHD hasn’t changed who I am — it’s simply given my methods a name. This piece is about ownership, not confession: how to hold a label without being held by it.
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.