Welcome
I publish a newsletter on Substack, but this place is my long-term home, a living archive for my essays, notes, projects, and all else. It is refreshing to write on owned land—outside the Internet serfdoms of optimized minutes—where I can now think more clearly, without metrics, and in longer horizons, decades and even centuries. I'm currently reading Montaigne, who humbly dedicates his first volume of Essais to his post-death kin. Similarly, I imagine a QR code on my gravestone will point here. If I accomplish nothing else in life or die tomorrow in a freak accident, at least my descendants (along with strangers in a cemetery) might uncover the obsessively-detailed mundanities of a great-grandfather. Outside myself, that is my audience. I just need to figure out 100-year domain hosting, which is currently offered by Wordpress for $38,000 (they've had zero takers).
Links
- I wrote a textbook on a pattern language for essays;
- I build editing software that analyzes your craft and gives feedback;
- I hosted a $10,000 prize for the best essay of 2025;
- I assembled the finalists into The Best Internet Essays 2025;
- I run Essay Club, a community for studying and publishing essays.
Bio
I was educated as an architect (2010-2014), worked as a VR technologist until the pandemic (2015-2020), and have since been obsessively focused on the essay: reading, writing, editing, teaching, codifying, researching, and anthologizing. In 2024 I won an O'Shaughnessy Fellowship to develop Essay Architecture, a pattern language for writing composition, which includes editing software and a textbook. I'm working towards becoming an independent writer/teacher/scholar of the essay, and building a technology-forward institute to help preserve writing through the age of AI. Here's v1 of the manifesto.
Website
Everything on this site lives as local markdown files on my computer. I use Obsidian to write and edit, and with a single command it pushes public. The whole site was built with Claude Code, and I wrote a guide on how to do it.
AI Policy
I don't use AI to write my sentences, because the slow challenge of discovering, structuring, and crafting my ideas is the entire point. If you ever find AI writing on this site, it's either quoted or disclosed. However I do use AI to generate or render cover art; I used to hand draw art for each essay, and that became a time-sink that bottlenecked the writing process. Any creative process has multiple branches, and it's a personal decision on what to automate, augment, and keep manual. I'm a prose purist, but find AI helpful in augmenting editing and research, and indispensable in automating the systems and infrastructure for self-publishing. Check out my post on the ethics of AI in writing.
Favorite Problems
- What are the virtues to live by and how do you internalize them?
- Can we codify the patterns behind essay composition into software?
- Can we create a quality algorithm to curate an Internet drowning in slop?
- How should someone born today be educated in the weird future ahead?
- What changes from a dictionary/thesaurus with a better architecture?
- How can AI unlock a personal corpus of millions of words?
- What new architectures for social media would prevent self-censorship?
- What forms of techno-activism are possible now that anyone can code?
- What is consciousness and what if machines attain it?
- What is the new social contract if humans lose their economic value?
- How do you design a 21st-century government that is incorruptible?
- What civic technologies can prevent the damage from exponential tech?
- Is there a biological basis for the afterlife in DMT, and ofc, what's it like?