Writing & essays

We keep describing our institutional crisis as one of 'belief' or 'truth.' But in practice, the bottleneck is 'standing.' An essay on why 'we hear you' is a trap, and how to distinguish between providing input and triggering obligation."

A guide to the difference between moral language and structural constraint

Stop assuming leadership is ignorant. "Tragic Institutionalism" argues that institutional harm is priced in, and your burnout is the fuel.

From Chicago to Gaza, AI is turning "threat scores" into self-fulfilling prophecies. A critique of epistemic laundering and the automation of state violence. AI systems like Palantir and Axon don't just predict risk, they manufacture…

We build institutions for every crisis, then forget to give them an off-switch. This piece argues for “institutional apoptosis”: designing governments, programs, and platforms that know how to die before they devour the people inside them.

We must reclaim the maintenance that keeps people alive rather than the one that keeps systems standing.

A theory of Primitive Accumulation applied to time. Just as capitalism once enclosed land to create value where there was none, it is now enclosing intervals (waiting, boredom, sleep) to capitalize assets that were previously outside the…

Modern efficiency hasn't solved volatility; it has just offloaded it onto you. An analysis of how the removal of buffers, inventory, and downtime created a brittle world where every mistake is a crisis.

Exploring how modern systems are built around an imaginary “reasonable” user, blaming real people for design failure and arguing for infrastructures that accommodate messy, complex human lives.

Explore how system architecture, not intent, makes harm the path of least resistance in institutions. Learn why brittleness and structural fragility offload damage onto vulnerable humans.

Predictive systems don't "find patterns," they establish rules about who gets access, who faces scrutiny, whose harm matters less. Their builders claim neutrality while governing lives. It's time to name it and accept accountability.

AI's fluency removes the friction that keeps our heads on straight. On lucid disorientation, and rebuilding resistance to machines that never say no.

Critiquing the myth of self-sufficiency and outlining a new politics of shared dependence, where care, maintenance, and cooperation become the foundation of autonomy.

We have a deep-seated instinct to punish what doesn’t fit. Here's how data, management, and moral culture pathologize deviation.

Machines once bent to save people. Now people bend to save machines. A design essay on how digital systems reverse the ethics of safety, making people the shock absorbers for machine perfection.

​"Sterile control" makes systems fragile. Why reason must move from purity to porosity, embracing error, feedback, and accountability to survive.

​A new framework for understanding persistence. This essay redefines stability, arguing that justice is the allocation of repair and proving collapse is a political choice.

When "okay" stops being a feeling and becomes a clearance code, care collapses into compliance. A new essay on "clearance culture" and the ethics of being cleared to return.

Why embracing human limits can make our relationships, ethics, and systems more resilient. An essay on how dependence and maintenance define love, freedom, and what it means to live together.

“Charismatic systems” replace persuasion with smoothness. From social media to AI ethics dashboards, design now governs through affect. This essay explores how legitimacy, once earned through truth, is now engineered through vibe, and how…

The real danger isn't that AI is cold and inhuman; it's that it's becoming perfectly, fluently "kind." "Counterfeit tenderness" is a new form of moral arbitrage.

Empathy can’t scale, and conscience can’t keep up. This essay introduces Ethotechnics, a framework for embedding moral capacity directly into code, policy, and architecture so systems can detect and correct harm in real time.

Before an institution can do immense harm, it must first learn to feel good about itself. It must learn to translate its contradictions into virtues and its risks into responsibilities.

Hospitals, platforms, universities, and economies all improve the metrics that define success while quietly eroding the conditions that make those metrics meaningful.

The moral geometry of measurement, and how to read the metrics that lie without lying.

We’ve measured morality by character for too long. The Architecture of Goodness argues that ethics must be designed, not preached, replacing heroism with corrigibility and purity with feedback. A humane system makes goodness the path of…

When a society, an institution, or even a piece of software continually produces heroes, it offers clear evidence of a broken architecture.

Longevity isn’t virtue. The systems that last the longest often do so by pushing their stress onto others. This is how survival turns into capture.

We replaced repair with disposal. It’s time to build a more human world.

A good system shouldn’t need saints. It should metabolize harm before someone has to transcend it.

Why do we grill our loved ones harder than corporations or governments? Stricter in Love Than in Law reveals how modern institutions turn excuses into operating systems, outsourcing the labor of repair to the public. From euphemism to…

Feeling stuck or hollow in your career? This essay explains why the "career ladder" is a myth and a hidden "filter" rewards conformity over merit. A new way to see your professional life.

​“Be real” is the gospel of our age, chanted by politicians claiming to speak from the heart, influencers in “no-filter” confessionals, and employers urging us to “bring our whole selves” to work.

From medical implants to insurance portals, from stress fractures to eviction notices, the physics of failure hasn’t changed. What’s changed is the scale of the harm.

Why the same harms keep recurring, no matter who is in charge.

In journalism, science, and law, we know that a single, smooth answer is dangerous. So why do we call it “best practice” when it comes from an algorithm?

What we call “vibes” today are the sedatives left after centuries of cutting survival out of culture

How to Fight the Feeling and Reclaim Your Voice

We often use lengthy explanations after a mistake to manage our own discomfort. But true accountability requires concrete steps, not just eloquent speeches.

Stop searching for an ethical AI CEO. The job is impossible. The problem isn't a lack of individual virtue, but a system that makes virtue a liability.

The powerful have always used the language of weather and physics to enforce their will. The best counter isn't a better argument—it's seeing the absurdity of the play itself.

For more than a decade, we've treated misinformation as a problem of persuasion. Fact-checks, media literacy drives, AI detection tools all assume that lies persist because people don’t know better. It hasn't worked.

Anarchism is often described like a bonfire: a political philosophy of no institutions, no coordination, just a perpetual “no.” But the anarchist claim is subtler and more demanding: end domination, not organization.

Sacralization is power’s aftermarket armor. It’s the trick that makes the preventable untouchable.

The political question isn’t if shocks arrive, but where the load lands. This essay reframes “policy” as applied physics—and legitimacy as a system’s load-bearing capacity.

How hostile systems draft us into our own denial

“Fickleness” is not always a moral failure; it’s fair to oscillate between incompatible demands.

On Revision Privilege, a system that quietly distributes grace to the powerful while demanding finality from everyone else

Everywhere you look, people are proving how sorry they are through self-condemnation.

Resisting rule by expertise is not anti-science or anti-technology; it is a defense of democracy

You’ve heard the advice before: choose yourself; put on your own oxygen mask first. It sounds rational, but when you try to apply it, another voice cuts in. It calls this work what you secretly fear it is: selfish.

The tell of empire isn’t its power, but the sheer work required to maintain its appearance of inevitability.

An idea can be banned without being outlawed; when the direct route is blocked by formal censorship or the chill of algorithmic disfavor, ideas learn to travel in disguise.

It’s quick, flattering, incomplete, and it puts the problem in human nature, not in the systems shaping people’s lives. But is it true?

It’s a neat, tidy, and incredibly convenient fantasy for cops, bosses, and security guards.

Israel took the word “evil,” ran it through a supply-chain dashboard, and executed it in Gaza.

Are they really helping or just trying to take control? Here's how to know.

Try it tonight and see what happens.

Tiny, everyday verbs like must, should, may, ought, have to, and need to function as subtle carriers of authority

Ten years ago, Gilead Sciences did what modern medicine says it exists to do: it cured a disease.

Bureaucracy isolates us on purpose. Still, in the margins, people find each other.

It’s the diagnosis pulled out whenever a doctor or nurse pushes back on some new system, tool, or “transformation.” To outsiders, it sounds neutral—a “change management” hiccup.

How American Policy Manufactures Bystander Inaction

There’s a peculiar contradiction at the heart of modern public policy: Propose universal provision—unconditional meals, healthcare, housing, or cash—and you’re told it’s utopian, “unrealistic,” unaffordable.

From 1493 papal decrees to 2025 AI eviction pilots, and the single profit logic that sustains them.

How Denial Became a Revenue Stream—and What It Will Take to Break the Machine

In health insurance, credit, and employment, private actors mine ZIP codes, prescription histories, résumé gaps, and spending habits to assign risk and deny access—often through algorithms that are neither visible nor accountable.

It’s structural, intentional, and systemic.

You text “Dinner?” at six and only see the reply when you’re elbow-deep in dishes.

Ask someone outside the US to describe American life, and they might mention sprawling homes, last-minute December donations, business trips that double as vacations, the ubiquity of side hustles, or the proliferation of home studios.

American power has long been driven by what I call an “ergonomic ideal”: squeezing every bit of extraction out of a system while disguising or displacing any strain or struggle.

Why Denial Is the Core of Structural Power

You were trained to read like a browser tab—fast, extractive, always behind. This micro-guide shows you how to pause: roll a shoulder, unclench your jaw, question every “Accept All” click, and reclaim your attention.

Power’s greatest conquest isn’t crushing lone rebels or dispersing crowds—it’s sneaking into the everyday interpersonal bonds we rely on.

We’ve grown so accustomed to equating silence with peace that we overlook the heavy toll it exacts.

I nearly scrapped this draft because I’d already unpacked institutional forgetting in The Amnesia Engine. My inner editor—raised on Omit needless words and Kill your darlings—hisses, “If it’s not novel, kill it.”

Capitalism doesn’t just cut corners—it cuts people out.

What happens when grief is routinized? When mourning scripts follow mass shootings, airstrikes, or police violence—but policy doesn’t move?

It’s only human to need help — but we have to be able to admit it.

I don’t want you to just avoid burnout, I want you to see labor as a site of struggle, defaults as political choices, and for us to reforge our systemic blueprints into infrastructures of care.

To confront planetary crisis meaningfully, we must insist on refusal, accountability, and explicit, structural consent.

When systemic harm is repeated, profitable, and structured, complexity is not an explanation. It’s an alibi.

You’re looped in once the decisions are made—asked to “help it land,” not to change it. You learn to turn harm into “alignment,” risk into “tone.” It feels like trust, until you stop doing it.

How institutions metabolize critique, erase context, and make crisis their only teacher

Why neutrality isn’t fairness—and what it hides when institutions say it is.

Clarity that arrives before the group is ready gets coded as friction. And friction gets managed, not engaged with.

Seamlessness isn’t always neutral. It’s often subsidized—by someone else’s time, attention, and emotional capacity.

Every hurricane season the ritual repeats: a governor steps to the mic, announces billions “secured on the capital markets,” and declares the state resilient.

You open your phone to check the news; twenty minutes later you’re overstimulated and underinformed.

In August 2024, we decided to end Andwise, with no formal press release, no dramatic pivot tweets—just a resolve to shut it down before becoming something we never intended to.

While conventional thinking holds that only big bureaucracies can deliver universal healthcare, anarchist practices illustrate a very different path: communal collaboration, bound by solidarity, can ensure care for everyone.

You arrive at the hospital from the airport, taking MARTA straight to Northside.

Why Waiting for Boomers to Disappear Won’t Save Us

When does cunning becomes a strategic choice? Or, why are shitty people so wealthy?

Why “No” Makes Every “Yes” More Real

We Grew Up Asking If We’d Get To Have Kids. Now We’re Asking If We Even Should.

Real Cheaters Slip Away While the Vulnerable Get Flagged

From the 1996 Olympics to SoDo’s “Tech-Led” Land Grab

How Strict Building Rules Undermine Real Community

AI won’t rescue us from our own willingness to discard people—it just magnifies it.

We live in an environment flooded with illusions.

Are You Afraid of Being Too Big An Ask?

Once you label entire groups “too expensive,” friction-based eugenics is always just one step away

Most institutions—hospitals, welfare agencies, workplaces, schools—claim to prioritize “care,” “efficiency,” or “fairness.” Yet behind polished mission statements and talk of limited resources, they often quietly discard the very people…

We keep witnessing departures that resist easy explanation:

Or, Why We Can’t Debias Our Way Out of a System Built to Exclude

How AI Helps Hospitals Quietly Filter Out Complex Patients and Call It “Efficiency”

Gatekeeping is what blocks care, not scarcity.

Reactionaries Will Use Disability Statistics to Justify Technofascist Control

When do "Standards of Care" tell us more about entrenchment than about efficacy?

I used to believe my late-night scrolling was purely a personal failing—maybe I had “no willpower,” or my brain was “wired for dopamine hits.” That was the narrative fed to me by pop neuroscience and digital minimalists alike.

Fisher’s emphasis on capitalism’s complexity and adaptability can be—and often is—misread.

Take the endless city highways of Los Angeles or Houston, jammed with rideshare vehicles during rush hour.

When the world’s biggest challenges—climate disaster, healthcare failures, rampant inequality—dominate headlines, two levels of power usually hog the spotlight: macro (government or giant corporations) and micro (individual habits…

“We’re so fucking cooked.” It’s what people say when the news cycle cycles through another catastrophe—wildfires, economic collapse, rising fascism, another study confirming what we already knew about how bad things are going to get.

Healthcare hackathons have surged in popularity over the past decade, championed by initiatives like MIT Hacking Medicine, Stanford’s Health++, and local Hacking Health chapters in cities such as Montréal and Berlin.

If everyone already knows the emperor is naked, there’s no point yelling about his clothes.

A Critique of Unprincipled Pragmatism in Light of Ash Sarkar’s Public Commentary

Crises, now, are not interruptions but integral to capitalism, systematically leveraged to expand financial control and wealth concentration.

Before I understood myself, I believed competence was everything.

Palantir and predictive intelligence will not disappear, but their dominance will wane as adaptive models prove superior.

There’s an understandable appeal to the idea of physician-owned hospitals.

AI in healthcare is not a neutral innovation—it is a strategic instrument of financial extraction, corporate consolidation, and labor control. While sources like Rock Health (2025) and KFF Health News (2025) acknowledge AI’s impact, they…

Stop Using “Tradition” as a Shield for LGBTQ+ Exclusion

Resisting biotechnical fixes and fantasies of adaptation in plastic-washing efforts

On Ecosystems of Care and Regeneration that Grow in the Cracks

Medical residency is mythologized as a rigorous yet fair process that molds future physicians into competent, compassionate practitioners.

2024 wasn’t a year of triumph or resolution—it was a year of fractures.

Our healthcare system, most often celebrated for its technological advancements and life-saving capabilities, is a machine of harm.

Time is not merely a neutral backdrop to human activity—it is a contested and deeply political resource.

Rethinking Control in AI Systems

Proof governs the boundaries of existence. It decides who crosses a border and who is detained, who receives support and who is scrutinized, who is believed and who is ignored. Marketed as a neutral arbiter of fairness, proof is anything…

On Universal Crip Time and Non-Capitalist Productivity

“Post-truth,” the hypothesis that our current era is dominated by emotional manipulation, misinformation, and the rejection of objective facts—has shaped much of the discourse surrounding modern influence.

In a world structured by borders and paperwork, does human dignity require state approval?

We find ourselves in another chapter of struggle: the faces in power change, but the machinery behind them—consolidating control, maximizing profit, and exploiting people and resources—remains the same.

As artificial intelligence weaves itself deeper into the fabric of modern life, it subtly reshapes our perceptions of behavior, identity, and belonging.

Authority—the unseen force gently steering us through life.

If rights were merely words on a page, we’d all stand on equal ground. But “having a right” is far more complex, conditional, and deeply political than we often admit.

I argue that by creating bureaucratic hurdles and reducing ethics to metrics, transparency becomes a tool for maintaining corporate power while diverting attention from the deeper questions of control and governance.

Disaffection isn’t a quiet disappointment—it’s a deep, seething anger at a system that feels rigged.

Tech abstinence—unplugging from social media, deleting apps, limiting screen time—has been embraced as a response to digital fatigue, surveillance, and the mental health impacts of constant connectivity.

I keep returning to the unsettling realization that much of what we understand about corporate power is too surface-level.

Quiet Misalignment and Unspoken Needs

Defining an emerging genre we too often mislabel

Toxicity in relationships is often hard to spot because it hides behind values we hold close—things like vulnerability, independence, and rationality.

Neurodivergence, Alienation, and the Data Economy

I'm a neurodivergent biomedical engineer who's always been fascinated by how tech can be used to manage and explore sensory experiences.

The future of knowledge is not institutional—it is lived, communal, and diverse

From Espionage to Zero Trust

Power addiction, especially in its masked form, operates much like substance abuse

Exploring one of the most ethically complex and socially impactful issues of our time, beyond surface-level data ownership and privacy critiques

Knowledge isn’t pure; it’s not neutral; It’s not floating above the blood-soaked history of power, untouched by politics, immune to corruption.

For many, psychedelics like LSD, psilocybin, DMT, and MDMA have a reputation for unlocking deeper self-awareness, fostering emotional healing, and even offering a window into spiritual insights.

Punishing someone might feel amazing in the moment, but so do other drugs

You wake up, check your phone, and the noise starts again.

AI-Driven Time-Series Modeling Will Reshape Political Campaigns

While these sensory signals are intended to improve UI, we are on the verge of an overload that few have yet acknowledged

Before my autism diagnosis, therapy—as it turned out—was reinforcing my masked self

Ta-Nehisi Coates and Intellectual Incubation

Documenting language as lived experience

An Insidious Betrayal of Inclusion

We often mistake comfort for the absence of discomfort

There’s a part of you that has remained hidden for as long as you can remember—a silent echo, tucked away, sometimes even from yourself.

For the unknowingly neurodivergent, they can be devastatingly confusing

It’s 7:32 p.m., and a notification lights up your screen.

The way someone talks about their cat can offer you more than just funny stories.

and that you are welcome to take on at any time

What happens when you stop writing for approval?

Signs It Might Not Just Be About the Vibes

On clear communication, authenticity, and mutual respect in relationships and romance

Might as well, you'll be here a while

Reframing Well-Being: The Questions We Should Be Asking

When People Don’t Get Your Jokes (And Why That’s Perfectly Fine

Should anyone be denied care, shelter, or education because they can’t afford it?

A False Narrative of Impossibility

And what we can do about it, from my personal experiences and research

How Traditional Frameworks Fail Neurodivergent Individuals

A closer look at Public Expression, Attention-Seeking Behavior, and the Right to be Unpredictable

Internalized Oppression, Dangerous Ideologies, and Parent-Child Relationships

How to arm our messages against neoliberal co-optation and dilution

Characterizing the levels of social pressure exerted in various settings

Understanding why Classics departments got funded helps us clarify their irredeemability

Why Incremental Models Will Never Restore Our Right to Narrate

A Comparative Critique of Victimhood, Exclusion, and Violence

The lay-practice of aparigraha is not about owning less. It's about rejecting ownership.

Navigating Boundaries and Autonomy through Modifiable and Revokable Consent

Exposing the Co-opting of Suffering and Peace-Washing in the Israel-Palestine Conflict

Reproductive rights are not just an issue for those capable of pregnancy, but a universal fight for bodily freedom

The Perils of Fetishizing Metrics in the Pursuit of Justice

and a little bit about how I do it, too

Turning Power Against Itself Through Provocation and Delegitimization

We can lower our economic, psychological, and social barriers to liberation

MENLO PARK, CA—Alib.io, a startup that uses artificial intelligence to generate plausible alibis, has raised $30 million in Series A funding led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the CIA.

How U.S. Healthcare Policy Restricts the Fundamental Act of Caring for Others

Navigating Change, Resistance, and Recognizing When It’s Time to Let Go

It'll take time, but I can offer you some shortcuts

Burnout as a Non-Metaphor and Unmasking as a Revolutionary Act in Neurodivergent Experience

A Path Toward Justice and Emotional Liberation

Relaaaax! You can make your life easier too.

The first ten amendments, but written with clearer guardrails based on current application.

Navigating Identity, Trauma, and Self-Compassion in Surreal Worlds

An Allegory

Rethinking Originality and Individual Creation

DNC, Surveillance, Expectation, and the Prejudice of Representation

Reclaiming Knowledge for the Common Good

The Trap of Authenticity, Passing, and Liberation from Internal Gatekeeping

on Spivak, Death, and Palestinian Resistance

Weaving Fictional Realities into Cultural Critique

Blending Seriousness with Wit for the Neurotypical Mind

Nobody is going to show you what love is. Love is being allowed to do things nobody has shown you.

or, How to get your ass beat. YMMV

From One Human to Another

We Are Lady Parts and Monkey Man are scratching the surface of the work we need to do

Confronting a Neglected Past: A Historical and Cultural Exploration

Unlike many religions, Ascetic Jainism was built in absence of, and in opposition to, state power

A better world for the neurodivergent is a better world for everyone.

on chokepoint detection, precision targeting, and (of course) autism

It's not about dimmer light fixtures in prison cells, but a hell of a lot more

Let's take a closer look at non-autistic people

or maybe to you, at some point in time

What does it mean if we're experiencing the effects of neuroplasticity in the constant presence of a hyperreal self?

conceptual art's evolution from Duchamp's Fountain to Amaarae's Fountain Baby

The most valuable asset to an AI company is knowledge of how it's artificiality is detected and perceived

If not, then where should we point our fingers?

I frankly don't have what it takes to survive today's version of medicine. But who really does?

how will I help my children grow into their authentic selves in a way that minimizes external pressures and dissonance?

The most pressing dangers of AI are not confined to some future cataclysm; they are here now, embedded in the systems that shape our lives

legal systems should assume everyone involved could potentially be autistic and be unaware of if

on Hannah Arendt’s Notion of Moral Reflection in the Context of Wealth and Power

on Crimes Against the Future

"I'm looking to do something a little more mission-driven, even if there's a slight pay cut"

Lessons I need to remember about How To Live

How to create ideas that resist co-optation, Or, How to Avoid Raising a Pete Buttigieg

we sure do love to consume our position as spectators in a world of Logan Roys, Bobby Axelrods, and Raymond Tusks

it is reasonable to assume somebody else is taking any given business model to the absolute limits of what's legally justifiable

the reasons you vape might be different from the reasons your friends do

Breaking the Cycle of Internalized Ableism and Its Ties to South Asian American Mental Health Awareness

power preservation can be artfully disguised as altruism

on part 3627 of 'Why is This Still Legal'

maybe we should make work people can do whenever they feel like doing it, instead of making people do stuff that just feels like work but really isn't

Redefining Comfort in the anti-Ableist tradition, or, How Feel-Good Narratives Serve Power

if power relies on collective myths for legitimacy, re-imagination dismantles it

if you thought attention-seeking strategies were dangerous in media, wait until you see how they get used in the workplace

Terra nullius, Jim Crow, ISDS, and our collective myths of impartiality

conflating the two serves power. critical analysis is a constructive force

Autism, Clubbing, and Unseen Joys in the Tyranny of Unwritten Rules

How Pre-IPO Compensation Erodes Ethics and Stifles Innovation in Healthtech

a mission statement hate to see an autistic employee coming

How We’ve Been Misled into Glorifying Suffering Over Creativity

we set up a trap for ourselves and walked right into it

Causes, Misconceptions, and the Path to Rebuilding Trust

the new view of medical work as less of a calling and more of a job is a rational act of self-defense

CEOs in Trouble for Doing Their Jobs Too Well

the community's reluctance to disavow Hindutva in its pursuit of Hindu adjacency reeks of a Faustian bargain

moving Jainism beyond Ethical Consumption towards Systemic Transformation

A Subaltern Critique and the Emergence of Left Jainism and Jain Leftism

connecting Deaf Gain, the neurodiversity movement, and queer critical theory

reject any structure in which denying oneself the richness of life is a rational response

on the Hidden Costs of Club Night Mystique

why otherwise smart people fall for this guy's drivel

what is it you're most interested in trying to keep alive?

you do not, under any circumstances, "gotta hand it to 'em"

nobody wants our money-mangled clinical decision support systems

Neoliberalism's Impact on Autistic Existence and Identity

and you're either lying or ignorant if you think it should be one

STEM’s dominance in healthcare has become an untouchable doctrine.

contemporary retellings of America's long march of progress distort our shared understanding of healthcare

politics pervades every aspect of how we prevent illness, deliver care, and pay for health services

a fresh perspective with Inherent Care Theory

how Inherent Care Theory expands our understanding of healthcare outside of the clinical setting

institutions cannot provide care; they are only capable of restricting our natural propensity to care for one another