Structural Memory

Structural Memory

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politics

​Decriminalize Variance
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
Human as Crumple Zone?
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
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?
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
Charismatic Systems: Legitimacy After the Human
“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
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
The Pyrrhic Condition
Hospitals, platforms, universities, and economies all improve the metrics that define success while quietly eroding the conditions that make those…
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Kanav Jain
Per What? The Denominator Is the Doctrine
The moral geometry of measurement, and how to read the metrics that lie without lying.
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Kanav Jain
Stop Preaching. Start Engineering.
We’ve measured morality by character for too long. The Architecture of Goodness argues that ethics must be designed, not preached, replacing heroism…
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Kanav Jain
We need to need fewer heroes
When a society, an institution, or even a piece of software continually produces heroes, it offers clear evidence of a broken architecture.
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Kanav Jain
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