A curated introduction to my writing on organizations, work, artificial intelligence, legitimacy, crisis, and culture.
Views expressed in these essays are my own.
Normative control for elite workers, technical control for everyone else
An essay on post-bureaucratic capitalism’s classed division of labor control: lifestyle, authenticity, and normative discipline above; metrics, platforms, and technical discipline below.
Labor, vendor dependence, and the cost of losing the ability to leave
A work-in-progress essay on AI labor substitution, organizational dependence, credible exit capacity, and capture without ownership.
Regulation theory, distinction, and the subjects of post-Fordist accumulation
A regulation-theory account of status competition as the mode of societization of post-Fordist accumulation, traced from makerspaces to social platforms.
How AI Decides Who Deserves to Be Believed
A new audit measures how a language model assigns different burdens of proof to identical claims depending on the institution attributed to them.
Cheap AI, human capital, and the political economy of collective intelligence
Why cheap computational intelligence increases the value of universities, expertise, organizational memory, and the collective institutions that American capitalism has spent decades weakening.
Data centers, overcapacity, and the bubble that may not leave an infrastructure legacy
An essay on AI data centers, fixed capital, energy demand, overcapacity, and why an AI crash may leave a different kind of stranded infrastructure than earlier bubbles.
On desocietization and its discontents
Post-legitimacy, desocietization, and the substitute forms of belonging that appear when institutions stop persuading.
Movies, post-legitimacy, and the cultural scripts of crisis
A working essay on movies, popular culture, institutional erosion, and the frames publics use when official explanation loses authority.
Twin Peaks, Dostoevsky, and the embarrassment of goodness
An essay on David Lynch’s non-ironic moral seriousness, Twin Peaks, Dostoevsky, Major Briggs, the Log Lady, Albert Rosenfield, and the difference between postmodern form and ironic evasion.
AI, objectified memory, and the erosion of embodied discernment
An essay on objectified culture, embodied memory, AI-mediated retrieval, monopoly over cultural access, and the democratic conditions of discernment.