essays & op-eds
Writing
Selected essays and op-eds on technology, war, and the American future.
-
2025
The New Control Society
How ambient computation and predictive infrastructure are quietly swapping discipline for control — and what that does to the meaning of freedom.
-
2025
Technology for the American Family
A policy agenda for bending technology toward family life instead of letting it dissolve the household.
-
2024
How to Free Elon Musk's SpaceX From Federal Red Tape
Why NEPA reviews and FAA permitting throttle American spaceflight — and a concrete path to unblock it.
-
2023
Technological Stagnation Is a Choice
The Great Stagnation is not fate but the product of institutions that quietly stopped trying to build.
-
2023
Common Sense on AI
A pragmatic middle path between AI doom and AI denial, written for the people who actually have to make policy.
-
2023
How Gamers Eclipsed Spies as an Intelligence Threat
War-game forums and Discord leaks now spill classified secrets faster than any foreign intelligence service.
-
2022
Reality: A Post-Mortem
An eight-part inquiry into how the modern media ecology dissolved any shared sense of the real.
-
2022
Why Conservatism Failed
Conservatism lost because it set out to conserve markets, and markets dissolved the very things — family, place, tradition — it meant to protect.
-
2022
You Are Already in the Metaverse
The metaverse isn't a coming destination; media has already replaced the shared world with a more compelling, more profitable copy.
-
2022
With Finland and Sweden in NATO, the U.S. Can Finally Pivot to the Pacific
Nordic accession lets Washington hand European security to Europe and pivot in earnest toward the Pacific.
-
2020
Why Speech Platforms Can Never Escape Politics
Content moderation is inescapably political, because governing speech is itself an act of governance — there is no neutral ground.
-
2019
How Tech Utopia Fostered Tyranny
Silicon Valley's faith in frictionless connection built, almost by accident, the architecture of a new soft tyranny.