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Companionist

A collection of 74 issues

The Infrastructure Hypothesis, Part II

Leakage and the Work of Brokers What the Hypothesis Misses The first movement proposed that our information infrastructure is fractured in ways that prevent crisis analysis from converting to action. But this hypothesis contains a silent assumption: that the incompatibility is total. It isn't. Sometimes ideas do cross

Oh! You Petty Thing

Everyone's a Thief When Everything's Stolen There's a bassline that tells you everything about how culture gets stolen and resold: D to F, bouncing on that minor third, then leaping to G♯—the tritone, the devil's interval—before snapping back to D.

The Infrastructure Hypothesis

Examining Why Nothing Changes We notice something missing from the articles we read about crises: calls to action. Not just absent—systematically absent. The diagnosis is intricate, the stakes presented as existential, the moral clarity apparent. Then nothing. The reader closes the tab, scrolls to the next story, and continues.

Drunk in the Ditch, Looking Upwards

A Meditation on Belief, Craft, and the Reactor Core I was thinking about Oasis's debut LP. It was an unapologetically extroverted rock record, a 180-degree flip from the illegible shoegaze that Creation had been known for. A slouching electric rock LP that didn't strut or

The Calamine Chat

A Three-Part Meditation on Not Buying a New Bass Guitar Part I: The Conversation The itch begins a few weeks before my birthday. Nancy's been playing her Fender Player Mustang bass for about a year now — short scale, flatwound strings, P/J pickup array. It's

We Are the Reactor

Strafing Our Own Hydroponic Garden... Because We Can The first essay dreamed of gardens—hydroponic pockets of meaning cultivated under artificial light, night jobs tended in the margins of the extractive day. But what if there are no margins left? What if the garden was always inside the reactor? Every

We Can’t Enjoy the Garden for the Weeds

A defense of companionism: human intention + machine capability in the hydroponic gardens The online “authenticity” debate—the endless argument over whether content was written by a person or a machine—has become the cultural equivalent of rearranging deck chairs after the cruise ship of information architecture struck the iceberg of

Haruspicy Is Murder: From Twin Peaks to the Man Amplifier

Or: The Silly Human Race and Its Uncertain Machineries of Certainty Someone on social media recently wished they could "put all of Twin Peaks into a blender and have a random number generator pick a scene as a form of divination." The wish is funny because it'

What We've Been Doing in the Shadows

A field guide for practitioners learning to collaborate with LLMs in the real world If you've ever dropped container logs into ChatGPT at midnight, or asked an LLM to analyze Terraform diffs so you could see what really changed, or had it skim a PDF you didn'

The Great AI Triple-Talk

When Everyone's an Expert and Nobody Knows Anything Artificial intelligence is either transforming everything, about to collapse in a spectacular bubble, or desperately needs better change management. Depending on which expert you ask, AI is simultaneously the solution to enterprise productivity, a massive speculative delusion, and a workflow