The Next Import Bill May Arrive as Cognition
India’s old bargain was to import energy and export services. The machine age is turning that into something stranger: imported cognition, exported workflows.
Culture
The Cutting Floor.
Notes, fragments, and signals from a world entering maintenance.
Recent essays
30 of 102The Battle for Second Place
Decline rarely speaks honestly. It invoices.
After being needed
On the cost of becoming load-bearing
The Dashboard Cannot Discover
The first strange thing about the new management dashboard is not that it is wrong.
The Fruitless Things
a defense of the unaccountable hour.
We Ate the Feed
There is an old rule in fairy stories.
The Red Dot
Speech used to die.
No Successor
On craft, apprenticeship, and what cannot be uploaded
The Fifth Draft
What happens to a state when its documents lose their scars?
The Future Has a Price
A note after America 2036, China Is a Blessing to the World, and Hungry America
A Hungry America
In America 2036, I argued that the United States did not restore the old order so much as strip it for parts and rebuild it as a machine civilization.
China is a blessing to the world
Because the future was too expensive
America 2036: the machine and the world around it
By 2036, what surprised people was not that the United States had become more industrial.
Barzakh
The traveller enters the border before leaving home.
Feels like today and all the days to come...
Ruins on the New Continent
The newspaper was already a relic before one reached the article.
The Cutting Floor (updated 23 May 2026)
Essays on how the future becomes real before official language catches up.
AI x AI: What is the political fate of human labor in the AI era?
Two distillations x two rounds
The Future Has Terrible Filenames
Notes on weak signals, strange readers, and the work of keeping judgment alive
Love is a resource
A cluster of essays on AI, small rooms, and the return of the unfinished human
The Stopping Power of Water
Infrastructure stacks, AI natives, and the Hansa we need
The Fracture Dividend
Why Southeast Asia specialized in not becoming East Asia
The Map Starts Acting
China’s electro-social state, America’s hydrocarbon-silicon republic, and the old technologies gaining machine tempo
The Owl Flew at Dusk
On AI, old technologies, and the future we have misnamed
The Mud Fights Back
How machine civilization externalizes what it cannot digest
The Forms That Bind
Friction Design in Two Machine Civilizations
The Snapping Point
Managed disorder and the inevitability of monetary friction
The Registry State
American “resilience” is mostly unpaid systems integration by citizens. Palantir wants to flip that by bringing the operator back from above.
The Future Became Mandatory
will desire take the return train?
五四百年,"德先生" 在西方迷了路
This was written before the pandemic I think ….