What this site is. Roughly.

Keep, donate, Piper. Three piles on the floor of my mother's bedroom, every handbag she owned in front of me and each one needing a decision. Grief, it turns out, comes with (a lot of) admin. I pick one up, worn leather, vintage, about twenty years older than I am.

This is perfect for a young adult in sixteen years.

So, my niece is inheriting it, whether she wants it or not. It's already survived fifty years, it can survive her. It's a long-range bet, but she climbs everything and pushes her wagon around like a woman with somewhere to be, so I'm calling it.

I open it to check the lining and, just like the last bag, it isn't empty. A business card from a restaurant, soft at the corners from years of atrophy. I don't know the place and that's the part that gets me. Not the card, but the evening behind it. A table she liked enough to keep the proof. A story I never heard. I add it to a Google Maps list for future me and reach for the next bag.

That's more or less the editorial policy of this site.

Calamity is not a special event. It's the ambient condition. It's a privacy guarantee that turns out to root in one vendor's signature. A pager going off at 3am because us-east-1 fell over. An election decided by voters who only ever had the illusion of choice. A probate court in a language you're still learning. Different scales, same shape: a mess arrives, it's bigger than you, and your first instinct is to stand in the doorway staring at the pile.

The pile has no opinion about where you start. The trick (and it isn't one) is to pick something up, turn it over, and decide what to do with it.

Hardware-rooted trust, my focus at Meta for seven years, is often mistaken for a search for certainty. It's the opposite. Every chain of trust has risks and gaps and always will, so the discipline is ultimately three questions: what does the landscape look like, which gaps can actually cost you and hurt your users, and what are you building toward while you live with the rest.

This site is those three questions pointed at different problems. Technology, political economy, my own life, and occasionally things I've made up, because invented messes not only hold still, but help navigate the real ones.

Calamity, considered. Pick up a thread.