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November 2025

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
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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