Recent essays
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The Hand That Sorts the Cards
Michel de Certeau’s tactics reveal why frontier LLMs are never neutral tools: every workaround users invent inside a platform’s ‘proper place’ can be captured, generalized, or closed off.
Who Pays When AI Is Wrong?
AI can loosen authorship without loosening accountability: the person who signs an output may lose credit for producing it yet become the system’s moral crumple zone when it fails.
No Clean Slate
Failed rollouts do more than create scepticism: they teach employees that action is futile, turning the next AI initiative — however sound — into a test of trust already depleted.
All the Unwritten Processes
Every agent roadmap begins with work it cannot see: people translate tacit practice into legible inputs, then absorb the exceptions, repairs, and coordination that keep automation running.
The Ghost Competence
Automation can make a workforce look more capable while preventing competence from forming: people inherit outputs without the judgment, calibrated trust, or ability to take back control.
Briefing Is Not Chatting
Chat narrowed the skills gap by supplying answers. Agents widen it again: they reward those who can turn ambiguous work into briefs, constraints, and evaluable sequences.
The Articulation Gap
The AI super-user is less a technical type than the visible beneficiary of Bourdieu’s linguistic capital: LLMs reward the ability to formulate, frame, and judge — then turn class advantage into performance.
Who Is Conducting Whom?
AI does not simply extend thought; it changes the plane on which thought moves, opening fast, rhizomatic exploration while weakening the intuitive ground that lets us know where we are.
The Human Bottleneck
Agentic AI removes the machine bottleneck only to expose another: the finite human capacity to set direction, retain context, verify outputs, and decide what deserves trust.
The people in the middle of GenAI adoption
GenAI adoption is not a technology problem with a training solution. It is a social adoption problem, carried by the people between leadership and frontline peers whose trust and professional identity determine whether use sticks.
When Feedback Fails
Feedback is not a free good: more than a third of interventions lower performance, making the design of the system — not good intentions — the real management problem.
When the Train Comes Off the Tracks
Underperformance triggers control; control makes honest information costly; the organisation then loses the very signals it needs to understand the decline.
Recently reviewed
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WF
The War for Kindness
Strong diagnosis of why systems select against empathy. The prescription (rebuild kind systems) is less fully developed than the problem statement — which is where the book's limitations become visible.
BL
Blindsight
The most unsettling argument against consciousness ever written. Watts asks whether awareness is an evolutionary dead end.
GO
Good Power
The Boundary Paradox section is worth the whole book. The claim that setting limits increases your perceived value rather than reducing it took me a while to fully believe, then I watched it work.
MU
Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter
Read this after a project where I was the bottleneck without knowing it. The 'Accidental Diminisher' chapter named something I'd been doing for two years.