Essays
2026
- Wrestling With Eels
Can You Observe Yourself When the Ground Is Moving?
- Shitty Castles
On The Art of Digging Fake Moats
- Dancing With the Shoggoth
On designing friction into AI writing workflows.
- The Best of All Possible Worlds
On Gambas, Gardening and Panglossian Optimism
- Start With a Hunch
The art of asking better questions begins with finding words for what bothers you
2025
- What I Learned from the Silicone When I Fixed My Windows
Principles of craftsmanship for post corporate careers
- I Tried to Be a Data Center but Ended Up on the Floor
What do we loose if we think of ourselves as scalable machines?
- Drive vs. Agency
Feeling agentic and having impact is not the same thing.
- History Machines in the Margins
What I learned from three hours at Singapore airport and a book about 12th century Java.
- Stoic Unsettling
How to deal with a crumbling industry?
- Large Language Agency Traps
Using LLMs for life coaching feels great, but how much do we ACTUALLY benefit from it?
- I Respawn in the Same Place Every Morning
Every day starts in the rubble of broken routines.
- My Globish Identity is Bold and Shallow
The global dialect comes at a price.
- AI is a Charming Consultant
What could we learn from the long history of consultant theatre for the current age of AI enchantment?
- Personal Experience is the new Rare Earth Metals
The abundance of generic data will make personal individual perspective as valuable as rare earth metals
- Futurist ruins are radiating contingency
NEOM seems destined to become Future Detritus
- Systems Build in Calm Are Tested in Storms
Returning from a long journey through the land of wombats and wallabies.
2024
- Franchise storytelling has become cultural fracking
Those sequels, prequels and origin stories keep coming and coming. What's next?
- Streaming is the new Cable, more elegantly commoditized
What might make this new iteration of Grandmas television different to the old one?
- Technology expands access to culture but diminishes its value
Today's obsolete crafts will be rediscovered in a yet-to-be-born movement rejecting a future status quo
- Hollywood is dead, but it may yet be reborn
Make ourselves at home in the ruins of the old industry to build something new.
- Expected Agency shapes Future Thinking
The less somebody considers the future to be changeable, the less likely they are to take action in changing it.
- The Elephant in the Sky
What happens when a tornado movie dodges the biggest storm of our time?
- Smartphones Dream of Stochastic Moons
A close-up of the moon reveals the evolution of photography at a crossroads
2023
- Everything is forever until it is no more
Gradually, then suddenly.
- Superheroes are reactionary poster childs
Superheroes fight for everything to stay the same, it is their villains that try to change the world.
- Cinema is a medium of the collective
Classic cinema has a special power that remains relevant: it unites everybody in front of a shared big screen.
- Energy Blindness Is a Bliss
I visited the Norwegian Petroleum Museum in Stavanger and learned something about Energy Blindness.
- Stop Living & Thinking in Boxes
On working / thinking / being outdoors
- Hot takes are tempting but lead into rabbit holes
Publishing online regularly to think "with the garage door open" is a concept I like a lot, but there are pitfalls.
2022
- A comet impact is a bad metaphor for climate change
A comet apocalypse is a cozy exit strategy.
- Futurism is a nostalgic style, not a progressive movement
Futurism is not a movement anymore, it’s a nostalgic aesthetic