Kill Chain

Considering How AI Destroys Democratic Institutions

Boston University School of Law professors Woodrow Hartzog and Jessica Silbey say today's AI systems are a "death sentence" for civic institutions.

The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions—and How the World Lost Its Mind

Longlisted for the 2024 Financial Times Book of the Year. How life and the economy became a black box—a collection of systems no one understands, producing outcomes no one likes.   Passengers get bumped from flights. Phone menus disconnect. Automated financial trades produce market collapse. Of all the challenges in modern life, some of the most vexing come from our relationships with automation: a large system does us wrong, and there’s nothing we can do about it. The problem, economist Dan Davies shows, is accountability sinks: systems in which decisions are delegated to a complex rule book or set of standard procedures, making it impossible to identify the source of mistakes when they happen. In our increasingly unhuman world—lives dominated by algorithms, artificial intelligence, and large organizations—these accountability sinks produce more than just aggravation. They make life and economy unknowable—a black box for no reason. In The Unaccountability Machine, Davies lays bare how markets, institutions, and even governments systematically generate outcomes that no one—not even those involved in making them—seems to want. Since the earliest days of the computer age, theorists have foreseen the dangers of complex systems without personal accountability. In response, British business scholar Stafford Beer developed an accountability-first approach to management called “cybernetics,” which might have taken off had his biggest client (the Chilean government) not fallen to a bloody coup in 1973. With his signature blend of economic and journalistic rigor, Davies examines what’s gone wrong since Beer, including what might have been had the world embraced cybernetics when it had the chance. The Unaccountability Machine is a revelatory and resonant account of how modern life became predisposed to dysfunction.

The Least Agentic People Alive

The arms race of deferring agency and the dark acquiescence to robotic bureaucracy.

How to Kill the Code Review

Human-written code died in 2025. Code reviews will die in 2026.

Drone attack in gang-controlled slum in Haiti kills at least 8 children, injures 6 others

Explosive drones targeting a suspected gang leader in Haiti have killed at least eight children and seriously wounded six others.

Who killed Canadian Venture?

We might have an economic serial killer on our hands...

How A.I. Killed Student Writing (and Revived It)

High school and college teachers are watching students write, in the classroom, in order to protect against the incursion of artificial intelligence.

Computer Says Kill: The Toxic Love Triangle of Big Tech, Big War & Big Science w/ David Gray Widder

Academia, Big Tech, and the military are caught in a sordid love triangle — and their love language is money.

Obeying Nobody: Public Service and the Ordinary Evil of Administration - Roy L. Heidelberg, 2026

This essay explores administrative evil by reconsidering it through Weber’s ideal-type of bureaucracy and Arendt’s concerns over the bureaucratization of social...

The Future of AI

The Parents’ Paradox: AI, Ethics, and the Limits of Machine Morality This post is based on a talk I gave at The AI & Automation Conference in London on February 25, 2026, and my slides. A…

The "Segregate-and-Suppress" Approach to Regulating Child Safety Online

<div> In an effort to protect children online, regulators around the country and the world are enacting laws that compel Internet publishers to age-authenticat

Where the Axe Is Buried

All systems fail. All societies crumble. All worlds end…

18 Lawyers Caught Using AI Explain Why They Did It

Lawyers blame IT, family emergencies, their own poor judgment, their assistants, illness, and more.