IA, Not AI
Two philosophies forked from the same machine in 1962 — one automates the human away, one amplifies the human. There is a test that tells them apart, and the industry is failing it on purpose.
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It's Not a Chatbot, It's a Hopper
Everyone says agent. Everyone says chat. Both frames quietly insist there's a someone on the other end of the line. There isn't — and pretending there is is a category error with consequences.
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Same Diagnosis, Opposite Side
The big platforms already agree with us: the model is a commodity, the value is your data. That's exactly why they give the model away. We split, completely, on the cure — their servers, or yours.
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The Model Is a Commodity; Your Data Is Not
The model was never the scarce thing — it's becoming a utility, like electricity. The scarce thing is your context, your history, your relationships. The whole fight is over who owns that layer.
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Custody, Not Trust
Open weights answer the wrong question. The guarantee that matters isn't “we promise not to look.” It's “there is nothing here to look at.” A promise can be broken, bought, or subpoenaed. A fact about where the data lives cannot.
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Consent Is Load-Bearing
An agent that can act on your behalf has to answer to you — at the moment it acts. The always-listening assistant that acts on what it overhears isn't a helper. It's a parasite. The cure is a design decision.
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The Exit
Doctorow named the decay we all feel: platforms are good to users, then abuse them, then die. The answer isn't a kinder platform. A platform that can trap you will decay. The way out is to not be trapped.
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The Centralization Lie
The claim that your data must sit in the middle, on someone else's server, is a business model dressed up as a law of nature.
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The Abacus and the GPS
Some tools make you smarter and leave the gain behind when they're gone. Others make you dependent and leave nothing at all. Which kind we build for the mind is the whole game.
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Tools for Thought
A lost tradition of software built to make thinking better — not to do the thinking for you. It runs from Engelbart through Ted Nelson to Rheingold, and it's worth recovering now, on purpose.
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PARCitecture
Engelbart to Xerox PARC to the desktop you still use every day — and why reclaiming that paradigm is the work of the sovereign era.
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Provenance, Not Deixis
“I,” “here,” “now” do not survive the trip across a network. Every claim should carry who it came from.
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The Social Network You Own
A book of faces where the graph and the relationships belong to you, not to a platform — and what that quietly makes possible.
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A Europe Is Buildable
The social theory of intelligence as an engineering program, not a slogan — a civilization of minds, not one lonely genius.
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Why Publish Unfinished
The finished artifact is a flattering lie about how thinking actually works. Publishing before the ink is dry isn't carelessness — it's a method, and here the method is the message.
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The Social Theory of Intelligence
Everybody's trying to make a Newton. The saner ambition is a Europe. The real quarrel in artificial intelligence isn't about model size — it's a quarrel about what intelligence even is.
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Own Your AI, or Be Owned
Every tool we lean on either leaves us sharper when it's gone or quietly hollows us out. Most AI is being built to hollow us out — and that choice is an engineering decision, not a slogan.
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In Praise of Anonymous, Communal Creation
Nobody knows who designed Chartres, and that is not a loss — it is the point. A case for the anonymous cathedral over the author-cult.
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Cards
The Tetrads — single ideas run through McLuhan’s four laws, printed one to a card.