The Crumple Zone

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Don’t Let Reassurance Do Engineering's Job
​Why “we care” substitutes for obligation—and how delay gets disguised as kindness.
 • Kanav Jain
​If Every User Is a Potential Threat...
People are not becoming inherently dishonest, lazy, or cynical. They are becoming game-theoretically optimal for the environment they have been placed…
 • Kanav Jain
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
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The interface is dying because the “User” is obsolete.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
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
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
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
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