Home

Patrick

I think most systems — political, technical, economic — are worse than they need to be, not because anyone involved is acting in bad faith, but because nobody went back to check whether the incentive still points at the outcome it was built for. This site is where that conviction gets tested against something specific: an essay, a business idea, a piece of software, one at a time.

Fix the underlying problems, not just the symptoms.

Recent essays

• Notes toward a second enlightenment

  A working list of the systems worth rebuilding from first principles, and the one idea that connects all of them.

• One login for a country

  Sweden and Spain solved digital identity with the same intent and opposite architectures — and the difference tells you where the real work in government happens.

• The arithmetic of a fake majority

  Party discipline turns a legislature into a machine for hiding what people actually believe.

Recent projects

• House calls for the analog generationidea

  A small, unglamorous business idea: on-demand tech support for people the tech industry stopped designing for.

• Reading a nation's group chatexploring

  Flashback is a technically ugly forum that happens to hold one of the most honest running transcripts of what Sweden actually thinks.

• This site is the pitchin progress

  Why the résumé for a systems thinker should be a working system, not a document describing one.