The Crumple Zone

The Crumple Zone is a newsletter about the people who absorb impact when systems fail.

In cars, crumple zones are designed to deform so passengers survive. In institutions, that role gets played by nurses, moderators, support staff, caregivers—anyone whose body or time quietly takes the hit so systems can keep running.

Here you’ll find:

• How maintenance extraction works: the invisible labor of compensating for brittle systems

• How volatocracy keeps organizations stable by keeping people unstable

• Why wellness and resilience talk so often deepen burnout instead of reducing it

• What refusal pathways and stoppable systems could look like in practice

I’m Kanav Jain—a former healthcare tech product leader turned independent researcher. I develop Ethotechnics, a maintenance-centered approach to technology governance, and write from the position of people treated as their organization’s shock absorbers.

If you’ve ever felt like you’re the safety feature in someone else’s system, this is for you.

Subscribe to The Crumple Zone for occasional essays that name what’s happening and offer frameworks to think and act differently.

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→ Reach out if you’re building or studying systems that touch people’s lives