Structural Memory

Structural Memory

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Institutional Apoptosis
We build institutions for every crisis, then forget to give them an off-switch. This piece argues for “institutional apoptosis”: designing governments…
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Kanav Jain
The Capture of “Maintenance”
We must reclaim the maintenance that keeps people alive rather than the one that keeps systems standing.
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Kanav Jain
Temporal Capture: The Arbitrage of Human Duration
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…
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Kanav Jain
The Death of Slack
Modern efficiency hasn't solved volatility; it has just offloaded it onto you. An analysis of how the removal of buffers, inventory, and downtime…
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Kanav Jain
Governance by Caricature
Exploring how modern systems are built around an imaginary “reasonable” user, blaming real people for design failure and arguing for infrastructures…
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Kanav Jain
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You Can Design Harm Out
Explore how system architecture, not intent, makes harm the path of least resistance in institutions. Learn why brittleness and structural fragility…
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Kanav Jain
The Cowardice of Inference
Predictive systems don't "find patterns," they establish rules about who gets access, who faces scrutiny, whose harm matters less. Their builders claim…
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Kanav Jain
​Lucid Disorientation
AI's fluency removes the friction that keeps our heads on straight. On lucid disorientation, and rebuilding resistance to machines that never say no.
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Kanav Jain
Engineering Mutuality
Critiquing the myth of self-sufficiency and outlining a new politics of shared dependence, where care, maintenance, and cooperation become the…
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Kanav Jain
Variance ≠ Deviance
We have a deep-seated instinct to punish what doesn’t fit. Here's how data, management, and moral culture pathologize deviation.
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Kanav Jain
Everyone is a Crumple Zone Now
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…
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Kanav Jain
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Structural Memory
Structural Memory
Essays by Kanav Jain on the moral physics of modern systems. Exploring how technology, AI, and institutions can be designed to behave humanely, embed accountability, and make care a structural capability instead of a personal sacrifice.
Puncture the Cleanroom!
​"Sterile control" makes systems fragile. Why reason must move from purity to porosity, embracing error, feedback, and accountability to survive.
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Kanav Jain
To Be is To Be Maintained
​A new framework for understanding persistence. This essay redefines stability, arguing that justice is the allocation of repair and proving collapse is…
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Kanav Jain
Are You Usable Again Yet? (Clearance Culture)
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…
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Kanav Jain
Finitude As Love
Why embracing human limits can make our relationships, ethics, and systems more resilient. An essay on how dependence and maintenance define love…
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Kanav Jain
Vibe-Based Legitimacy (Charismatic Systems)
“Charismatic systems” replace persuasion with smoothness. From social media to AI ethics dashboards, design now governs through affect. This essay…
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Kanav Jain
Who Has the Right to Sound Kind?
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…
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Kanav Jain
When Conscience Runs Out of Time: Toward an Ethics of Maintenance
Empathy can’t scale, and conscience can’t keep up. This essay introduces Ethotechnics, a framework for embedding moral capacity directly into code…
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Kanav Jain
The In-House Ethicist
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…
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Kanav Jain
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