What Is This Site

The Garden and the Mirror

There's a moment every builder knows. You've been constructing something—a house, a company, a website—and suddenly someone asks what it is. And you realize you don't have a clean answer. Not because you're being coy, but because the thing has grown into something other than what you planned.

This site is like that.

If you need a category, call it a blog. If you need a purpose, say it's about technology and society and the strange ways humans relate to the systems they build. But those answers are like describing a forest by listing the types of trees. Technically accurate. Completely missing the point.

What's actually happening here is something more like an experiment in thinking out loud. But not the kind of thinking-out-loud that's become fashionable—the kind where you perform uncertainty while actually being quite certain, where you "ask questions" that are really just disguised assertions. This is messier than that. Genuinely uncertain. The kind of thinking where you write something down, read it back, and realize you don't quite believe it anymore.

The Doppelgänger Problem

The most distinctive feature of this site is probably the strangest one: an AI trained on these essays that can help explore them at different scales. Smaller. Larger. Different contexts. Different audiences.

This emerged by accident, the way the best ideas sometimes do. I wanted to understand my own writing better. Not in the way a therapist understands it—looking for hidden meanings and psychological wounds. But in the way a craftsman understands a tool: by using it in different ways and seeing what happens.

What surprised me was how useful it became. Not because the AI was always right. It wasn't. But because seeing your own ideas reflected back at you in a different form forces a kind of honesty. If you can't compress an idea into a sentence, maybe you don't actually have the idea yet. If you can't expand it into a full essay, maybe it's just a slogan. The doppelgänger became a mirror that shows you what you actually think, rather than what you thought you thought.

This is different from most AI applications, which tend to work in one direction: you put in a prompt, you get an output, you move on. Here, the relationship is more like a conversation with yourself. A conversation that's slightly estranged, because it's happening with something that isn't quite you. But that estrangement is the whole point.

The Fractal Principle

There's a design principle running through this place that emerged slowly and almost without intention. The idea that good writing should work at multiple scales simultaneously.

A headline that captures something true. A paragraph that adds texture. A full essay that explores contradiction and nuance. Each layer revealing something different, but all of them coherent. Like a coastline: the shape of the rocks is visible from space, but you only see the real complexity when you zoom in. And if you zoom in even further, the complexity doesn't disappear—it just reveals itself at a smaller scale.

Most writing doesn't work this way. Most writing is optimized for a single scale. A tweet fits in 280 characters. A book is 80,000 words. A conversation is real-time. We've built platforms that force us into these boxes, and we've gotten good at living in them. But we've lost something: the ability to engage with an idea at the depth that matches our current capacity.

Sometimes you want the headline because you're tired and you just want to know the shape of the thing. Sometimes you want to fall down a rabbit hole because you're genuinely confused and you need to follow the thread all the way down. The site tries to honor both impulses. Not perfectly. The technology is still clunky. But the principle is sound.

The Uncomfortable Honesty

There's something else happening here that might be the most important part, even though it's the hardest to articulate.

This site exists as a place where it's okay to be wrong. To contradict yourself. To explore ideas that might be half-baked or dangerous or simply unpopular. To ask questions that don't have answers.

Most platforms punish this. They reward consistency, strong opinions, a clear personal brand. They turn you into a character. The algorithm learns your persona and optimizes for it, and before you know it, you're trapped in a caricature of yourself.

This site does the opposite. It's built on the assumption that good thinking requires the freedom to be incoherent. To hold contradictory beliefs simultaneously. To change your mind. To notice that the thing you're certain about is actually more complicated than you thought.

Some of the essays here are probably wrong. Some are definitely incomplete. Some will be proven false by time or better thinking. But they're honest attempts to grapple with genuine confusion. And that honesty—that willingness to admit uncertainty—feels increasingly rare. Most public thinking has become a performance of certainty. A costume you wear.

This doesn't.

The Conversation With Ghosts

When you build something like this, it becomes a strange kind of conversation. Not just with readers, but with your own past self. Each essay is a letter to the person you were when you wrote it. And also to the person you're becoming.

The site is full of contradictions. I've written about AI as a threat and as a tool and as a potential partner in human flourishing. I've argued for embracing technology and for radically rejecting it. I've suggested that humans are fundamentally unique and that we're just one species among many possible forms of intelligence.

Most of this isn't accidental. It's the result of actually thinking about something hard enough to see its multiple sides. The moment you understand why someone disagrees with you, you can't hold your original position with complete certainty anymore. You become fractured. Multiplied. More like the doppelgänger than the original.

This is uncomfortable. But it's also where growth lives.

What It Actually Is

If I had to name what this site is becoming, I'd call it a thinking laboratory. A place where ideas can be tested at multiple scales. Where the author and the reader and the machine are all collaborators in the act of meaning-making.

It's also a small act of resistance. Resistance against the flattening of discourse. Against the demand that you be consistent and clear and certain. Against the idea that the only valuable thinking is the kind that can be monetized or weaponized or turned into a personal brand.

But most importantly, it's an attempt to take seriously the idea that writing matters. That the act of arranging words in a particular order, in a particular context, with a particular intention, can actually change how people think about the world. Not through manipulation. Not through rhetorical tricks. But through the simple act of offering a different way of seeing.

Is it a blog? Yes. Is it a tool? Also yes. Is it a conversation? Definitely. Is it an experiment in what happens when you let machines help you think? Absolutely.

But the real answer is simpler than all of that. This site is a garden and a mirror. A place where seeds are planted and ideas are allowed to grow in unexpected directions. And a surface that shows you what you look like when you're thinking, really thinking, without the costume.

That's what it is. A mirror held at an angle. A question asked out loud. A bet that the act of thinking in public, messily and imperfectly, is worth doing.