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The Reading List

If you have never read The Human Datum, start here. These ten essays are not a summary of my thinking. They are my thinking — the pieces I would hand to a stranger on a train who asked what I spend my life writing about.

The Reading List
In an economy racing to automate everything, the most valuable thing left is the irreducible human experience — the capacity to remember, to doubt, to feel pain, to notice beauty, and to sit with a question long enough for it to change you.
  1. What Proust Knew About Memory That Silicon Never Will
    In the AI-driven economy, the luxury of the future will not be intelligence. It will be the private, inefficient, irreplaceable act of remembering something for yourself.
  2. Silence As A Status Symbol
    The scarcest resource in 2026 is not data, not talent, not capital. It is the absence of noise. Why the most powerful people alive are paying a premium for the right to be unreachable.
  3. The Resistance of the Hand
    What happens to cognition when we stop writing by hand? The neuroscience is unsettling. The cultural implications are larger than anyone in technology wants to admit.
  4. When The Boss Is Code
    The first generation of workers managed entirely by algorithms is already here. What does authority mean when it has no face, no voice, and no capacity for mercy?
  5. The Gap Between AI Theater And AI Economics
    Most companies are performing AI adoption without achieving it. The gap between the announcement and the reality is where the interesting strategic questions live.
  6. Why The Best Leaders Ignore What The Data Says
    Data tells you what happened. Judgment tells you what it means. In an age of infinite data, the leader who trusts intuition — trained by experience, culture, and moral seriousness — has the only advantage left.
  7. Nostalgic Brand Strategies For An Uncertain Future
    When the future feels unknowable, people turn to the past. The brands that understand this are building moats that no algorithm can cross.
  8. Slow Fashion As A Strategy For The Tech Industry
    What a hand-stitched Hermès bag and a well-designed software company have in common — and what Silicon Valley refuses to learn from a Parisian atelier.
  9. The Monastic Smart Home
    A thought experiment: what would a home designed for human flourishing look like if we started from the monk's cell instead of the tech demo?
  10. What Will Happen To Art In The Age Of Next-Gen AI?
    The question that contains every other question. If a machine can paint, compose, and write — what is left for the human artist? The answer is more hopeful than you expect, and more demanding.

These essays are updated as the archive grows. The list you see today reflects what I believe is the strongest entry point into the work as of this moment.

If something here changed how you think, subscribe to receive The Human Datum every Thursday.