analects noun, pl

/ˈan.ə.lɛkts/

a collection of ideas, extracts, or teachings.

Digital Architecture

stuff On our digital personhood

show:

analects under the categories btrmt. believes in, as set out in the manifesto

analects organised according to the fundamental questions of philosophy

sequences of articles gathered around a more focused idea

  • ai-shaped stuff 13 Jun 2026 [article] We keep waiting for AI to get good enough. That’s backwards. The bottleneck is human: work that isn’t AI-shaped, verification we’re bad at,...
  • there are no levels 1 May 2026 [article] Ideas that stick are shaped to be interesting, not true. Some of these are weaponised; snuck by our faculties of reason. AI uses them in spa...
  • it's not social media, life is just worse 18 Apr 2026 [audio + edited transcript] Social media isn’t the disease. It’s the symptom you can see. The sad kids on TikTok are there because they’re sad, not sad because they’re...
  • hydraulic despotism 21 Feb 2026 [audio + edited transcript] You’re not coerced by malice. You’re coerced by convenience. Control the flow, control the people: the most discredited theory in political...
  • hydraulic despotism 1 Dec 2025 [article] Control the water, control the people. Today’s water is energy, social media, infrastructure. We’re coerced through convenience, not malice....
  • ai hallucination is just man-guessing 1 Nov 2025 [article] Human reasoning isn’t flawed, it’s a social tool we use in the wrong places. It’s about sharing and evaluating intuitive claims, not generat...
  • ai is never human-like 14 Mar 2025 [article] AI has human-like output, but a very different environment and different values for than environment, and until all three align, they will n...
  • it's not social media, life is just worse 2 Aug 2024 [article] Social media use probably isn’t the problem. Social media use is probably just the most obvious manifestation of lots of problems. And in fa...
  • ai isn't that scary 22 Jun 2024 [article] AI alarmism thrives on speculative, worst-case scenarios, but our understanding of AI’s fundamentally alien nature and the complex forms of...
  • malcolm gladwell shit 14 Feb 2023 [article] The most successful facts about the world are the ones that subvert our weakly held beliefs. They look like they’re about improvement, but t...
  • everything is choice architecture 12 Jan 2023 [article] Nudging doesn’t work because people aren’t thinking hard enough. Everything is choice architecture, so look to the way you build things in t...
  • amusing ourselves to death 21 Sep 2021 [article] Since the invention of the telegraph, information has become increasingly atomized, incoherent, and irrelevant. Our media technology encoura...
  • server 101: a digital foundation 27 Feb 2021 [article]
  • server 102: access everywhere 27 Feb 2021 [article]
  • the predictability of humans 15 Sep 2020 [article] The human animal is an animal first—responding adaptively to the environment around it. Humans are only unpredictable because we’re obsessed...
  • what use is the cloud 9 Sep 2020 [article]
  • creating a digital home for our digital selves 6 Sep 2020 [article]
One email a month: the new essays, lectures, and marginalia.

No spam, once a month, unsubscribe any time.

One email a month. No fuss. Get the newsletter.