Essays
The Depth Test — Why Most Sovereignty Claims Fail Structurally
Sovereignty is being asserted more loudly now than at any point in thirty years, and the word is doing almost no structural work. Four questions test whether a claim reaches a layer deep enough to hold, applied to two governments that held comparable positions and made opposite choices.
Opaque Surprises — Where Scenario Planning Falls Short
Scenario planning earned its reputation as one of the twentieth century’s most effective tools for decision-making under uncertainty. Is it still fit for purpose in the age of frontier AI? The essay that names the third kind of surprise.
The Trilemma Test — A Pre-Scenario Diagnostic for Structural Constraints
There is a step scenario planning usually skips: checking whether a system’s own stated objectives are actually compatible before building scenarios around them. Built from a 2008 development-planning exercise in Burundi and tested forward against artificial intelligence, the essay names that step the Trilemma Test.
The Dynamic Markets Model — What Kind of Market Each Stage of a Technology Becomes
Market structure is usually treated as fixed, decided once by an industry’s own economics. This essay argues it is instead a function of diffusion stage, checked stage by stage against three decades of documented history: the fixed internet, cloud infrastructure, and the smartphone industry.
Buying the Past — The Acquisition Risk Nobody’s Diligence Examines
Roughly two hundred billion dollars of the most famous acquisition writedowns share one checkable signature: the acquirer paid growth prices for a position in an industry layer already past its peak.
The Ungoverned Void — Why No Board Owns the Risk in Circular AI Financing
Vendor financing in the late nineties was approved deal by deal, by boards that examined each one on its merits. The systemic exposure that accumulated crossed every board’s boundary and sat inside none of them. Twenty-five years on, the instruments are far better and aimed at the same boundary.
Bounded From Below — Four places a future disappears, and what to do first
Five scenarios for data center spending to 2050, and every one of them goes up. Four places a future disappears from a scenario set before anyone can plan for it, read against three exercises a quarter-century apart, and a four-part boundary test to run before the model exists.
The Two Clocks — Why Zero-Sum Behavior Is Usually Correct
Fighting over share is normally read as a failure of character, and the implied remedy is cooperation. Usually it is a correct reading of a real constraint. When the physical clock outlasts the decision-maker’s clock, share is the only variable there is — and the same lead time that produces the fight produces the glut that ends it.