The Crumple Zone

Home
Notes
Ethotechnics
Archive
About
You Don’t Have the Right
We are living through a divergence between rights and remedies. If a system is "95% accurate" but concentrates errors on the vulnerable, fairness…
 • Kanav Jain
How to Design for Cognitive Scarcity
Stop designing for the idealized "Hero User." Learn how to build resilient interfaces that work when your user is stressed, tired, and operating on 15…
 • Kanav Jain
Optimizing the User
Resilience is a subsidy we pay to cover the cost of structural failure
 • Kanav Jain
The Post-User Web
The interface is dying because the “User” is obsolete. On the post-user web, AI agents, friction economics, and the rise of adversarial infrastructure.
 • Kanav Jain
We're On It! The Age of Abundant Acknowledgement
Across healthcare, bureaucracy, and customer service, systems increasingly avoid decisions while appearing responsive. This essay argues that modern…
 • Kanav Jain
Get updates in your inbox.
Pending: The political economy of waiting
The loading screen is a weapon. "Pending" is a governing strategy of attrition designed to make you carry the weight of the process until you give up.
 • Kanav Jain
Credibility/standing as an access-control system
We keep describing our institutional crisis as one of 'belief' or 'truth.' But in practice, the bottleneck is 'standing.' An essay on why 'we hear you…
 • Kanav Jain
Toothless Ethics: Why Principles Don’t Stop Machines
A guide to the difference between moral language and structural constraint
 • Kanav Jain
Assume Maximum Awareness
Stop assuming leadership is ignorant. "Tragic Institutionalism" argues that institutional harm is priced in, and your burnout is the fuel.
 • Kanav Jain
The Worldview with a Gun
From Chicago to Gaza, AI is turning "threat scores" into self-fulfilling prophecies. A critique of epistemic laundering and the automation of state…
 • Kanav Jain
Institutional Apoptosis
We build institutions for every crisis, then forget to give them an off-switch. This piece argues for “institutional apoptosis”: designing governments…
 • Kanav Jain
Recommendations
View all 9
The Autistic Burnout’s Substack
The Autistic Burnout’s Substack
The Autistic Burnout Project
Devon Price
Devon Price
Devon
disinfo.zone
disinfo.zone
disinfo.zone
The Healthiest Goldfish
The Healthiest Goldfish
Sandro Galea
feministkilljoys
feministkilljoys
Sara Ahmed
The Crumple Zone
Exploring how technology, AI, and institutions can be designed to behave humanely and embed accountability in high-stakes systems like healthcare and finance
The Capture of “Maintenance”
We must reclaim the maintenance that keeps people alive rather than the one that keeps systems standing.
 • 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…
 • 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…
 • 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…
 • Kanav Jain
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…
 • 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…
 • 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.
 • 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…
 • Kanav Jain
Get updates in your inbox.
© 2026 Substack Inc · Privacy ∙ Terms ∙ Collection notice
Start your SubstackGet the app
Substack is the home for great culture