A collection of sometimes “deep”, sometimes random thoughts, including the occasional hot-take or pop-culture analysis. This is also a self-experiment in using AI to co-author and improve my writing.
2026
Feb17 | "Good Fortune" | A Postmodern Carnival
In medieval Europe, carnival let the peasants play king for a weekend so they'd never demand to be king for real. Aziz Ansari's Good Fortune is that same trick, digitized for streaming, and available on demand for $4.99. A gig worker gets a venture capitalist's life through literal divine intervention, discovers that yes, money does solve his problems, then chooses to go back sleeping in his car anyway. The film calls this "growth". This essay calls it... something else.
Jan29 | face//shift explained
Developed for an MA course with the design brief "supernatural computery," face//shift is an adaptive mask system that gives users godlike shapeshifting ability - but the AI handles the wisdom. The mask modulates facial micro-expressions in real-time across any social context, reducing friction and optimizing outcomes without requiring user control. Positioned as infrastructure for an accelerated society that has already optimized everything except the face, the product completes a historical arc: supernatural powers become aristocratic privileges before reaching mass access. This post is the full conceptual explainer behind the project.
Jan11 | "The Fantastic Four: First Steps" aka "The Penthouse Saviours"
The Fantastic Four: First Steps reveals a cinematic laboratory for modern technocratic agency and the rise of networked dynasties. This essay explores how the film's superpowers function as metaphors for a "Capitalist Tech Stack," shifting the narrative focus from 20th-century individualism to a model of private-network, high-capacity management. By framing the Baxter Building as a blueprint for the Free Private City, the essay examines an emergent social contract where planetary survival is offloaded to an optimized elite. The movie ultimately traces the transition from traditional governance to the birth of the "Global Manager" in a world of post-politics.
2025
Dec31 | Vibes, Cash & Automation -
How AI is Changing Human Value
Plato once argued that every society relies on a "Noble Lie"—a foundational myth used to sort us into our place in the hierarchy. For decades, our myth was meritocracy, but as artificial intelligence turns high-level reasoning into a commodity, the old metrics of human value are shifting under our feet. We are moving away from a world where "smarts" were the ultimate status symbol and toward a landscape defined by subjective "vibes," exclusive networks, and the luxury of the physical. As reason becomes a cheap commodity and "soul" becomes a gated algorithm, we have to ask: what happens to merit when the only thing left that can’t be simulated is your bank account?
Dec22 | The Western AI Discourse Is Strangely Self-Centered
While Western debates obsess over ethics, originality, and whether AI has a “soul,” most of the world is quietly doing something else: using it. This short essay argues that the AI conversation in Europe and the US is too self-centered, fixated on identity and ideology while largely ignoring global adoption, economic arbitrage, and lived reality outside the West. AI isn’t a new space race we watch from the sidelines, nor is it a culture war or a philosophical purity test. It’s a utility spreading faster than any technology before it, dissolving old advantages and redrawing global competition in real time. The future may not be decided by who builds the most ethical model, but by who actually uses it.
Dec17 | A Game Without Exit -
"Last Samurai Standing" and Procedural Competition
What happens when competition is stripped of narrative, morality, and illusion? Reading Last Samurai Standing as a system rather than a story reveals something colder and more instructive: how rules, incentives, and scarcity shape behavior once survival is on the line. Kodoku does not exaggerate reality. It simplifies it. And in doing so, it exposes dynamics that already structure modern life.
Dec12 | What kind of generation are we actually becoming?
What if what looks like cynicism in today’s youth is actually early literacy? This piece argues that a generation raised inside metrics, rankings, and visibility systems isn’t confused, but hyper-aware. When hierarchies become legible too early, behavior changes. Not because people stop caring, but because they learn the rules before they’re ready to play.
Oct+Nov | Atlas Shrugged Revisited
Sep30 | We Are the Enlightened Monarch of the Universe
(for now)
What if the true measure of humanity isn’t our reach among the stars, but our ability to make the universe aware of itself? From Frederick the Great’s philosopher-king to Nietzsche’s symphony of perspectives, this essay explores the idea that until proven otherwise, humanity is the enlightened monarch of the universe: not by conquest, but by consciousness. The question is whether we carry that crown with care, creativity, and beauty.
Sep29 | AI is Germany on Steroids
AI isn’t the same everywhere — it bends to the culture it enters. In Germany, where life already runs on rules and structure, AI risks amplifying what’s already there, pushing efficiency to the edge of sterility. In warmer, more improvisational cultures, the same technology might act as a stabilizer, softening chaos instead of deepening it. AI isn’t just code; it’s cultural chemistry — and its impact depends on the soil it lands in.
Sep18 | “Just Go West, Bro”
America was built on a simple promise: just go west. From Columbus to California, from railroads to Silicon Valley, expansion wasn’t just policy — it was destiny. But what happens when the map runs out? The horizon didn’t vanish; it mutated. Land became screens, screens became psyches, and now the gaze turns skyward toward Mars. The myth of the empty frontier still drives America — but each new conquest reveals more about its costs, and about the hollowness waiting at the edge of expansion.
Sep17 | Did Islam predict the algorithmic age?
Social scoring angels, predictive omniscience, exponential rewards — Islam may have been running the world’s first operating system long before Silicon Valley. Our digital lives don’t just look religious, they feel like Qur’anic déjà vu. The question isn’t whether Islam predicted algorithms, but whether technology is simply catching up to theology.
Sep15 | VR MMA is the closest you’ll get to F1
…even closer than in the sim rig. Strap on the headset and suddenly you’ve got visor-vision, lap-like rhythm, and enough sweat to remind you this isn’t just a game. No Ferrari contract required — just Wi-Fi, a headset, and the willingness to push until you hit flow. It’s not about mimicking the car, but about matching the intensity. A strange detour - maybe - but one that might land surprisingly close to the real thing.
Sep14 | The Abrahamic Script Beneath a Post-Religious West
Western life feels like a straight road: school, career, milestones, retirement. That linear script comes from the desert, where survival was absolute and mistakes unforgivable. Out of that soil grew the Abrahamic religions, carrying with them a worldview of one path, one judgment, one redemption. Western culture absorbed this logic so deeply that even its secular offspring—capitalism and technology—still run on it. The problem is most of us don’t live in deserts, but in forests and valleys, where time is cyclical and renewal is natural. That mismatch explains why modern life feels so alienating at times—and why the way forward may not be directed forward at all.
Sep12 | "Britney 2007" Revisited
Everyone remembers the photo: shaved head, green umbrella, flashing cameras. But what if Britney’s 2007 ‘meltdown’ wasn’t just tabloid fodder, but an archetypal moment — a pharaoh revealed in a gas station parking lot, a goddess dethroned in slapstick? In revisiting the chaos, we find less scandal and more myth — comedy, tragedy, and modern divinity colliding in a single swing of an umbrella.
Sep11 | "Ex Machina" Revisited
+++ spoilers ahead +++
Rewatching Ex Machina in 2025 feels less like revisiting a sci-fi film than watching a prophecy unfold. The movie’s twist on the Turing Test—connection with machines even when you know they’re machines—has already become our everyday reality with AI chatbots. Ava doesn’t just escape; she embodies Nietzsche’s Übermensch, stepping out of Plato’s cave and into sunlight as something beyond human. And in a Baudrillardian inversion, the robots often seem more alive than the humans around them. What Garland left us with isn’t just speculation—it’s a mirror tilted forward, reflecting where we already stand.
Sep10 | The Farmer and the 5G Tower
The king has his throne of gold, the farmer his chair of white plastic. One rules with banquet and bloodline; the other with sweat and silence. But when a 5G tower rises in the valley, their words travel through the same air, their voices carried on the same signal. And in that hum, the hierarchy begins to crack. A short story about the liberating potential of high technology in a classist society.
Apr14 | Karl Lagerfeld: The Original Prompt Designer?
In 2008, Karl Lagerfeld shared a vision of creativity that feels tailor-made for today’s AI era, emphasizing bold ideas and technical mastery over hands-on execution. His approach—sketching concepts and guiding others to bring them to life—mirrors how modern AI prompt designers craft visions for machines to realize. Decades ahead of his time, Lagerfeld’s philosophy reveals the timeless essence of design in a world blending human genius with artificial intelligence.
Apr13 | From Turtlenecks to iPhones:
How Steve Jobs Redefined Fashion
Steve Jobs’ iconic turtleneck - custom-made by Issey Miyake - was more than a style choice—it sparked a fusion of high tech and high fashion. From the iPhone’s rise as a luxury icon to modern brands like Coperni crafting tech-inspired designs, Jobs’ obsession with design reshaped both worlds. His legacy proves that beauty and technological innovation can speak the same language.