The language of immunity implies something prior and fixed—a pre-existing condition that protects the person from a pathogen they encounter. The immune system does not learn the pathogen during the encounter. It either has the antibody or it does not.
[Read more]A person dies. The fact is clear, final, and—in administrative terms—significant. It terminates contracts, closes accounts, transfers assets, ends subscriptions, requires notification across a range of organisations that had ongoing relationships with the person who no longer exists.
[Read more]Fenella Vorpel’s 2003 draft paper on aristocratic archives introduces a term—the Mallard Paradox—to describe a particular quality she observes in the material of noble family records: the tendency of objects and documents to loop between symbol and substance, between surface presentation and hidden content, in ways that shape and obscure the historical narratives they are supposed to preserve.
[Read more]A guarantee, properly understood, is a structure. It has two parts: the promise and the consequence of breaking it. The consequence is what makes the promise a guarantee rather than an expression of optimism.
[Read more]At eleven o’clock at night, my phone registered that my location had been shared. The notification arrived the way these notifications do—quietly, as a line of text, the system performing its designed function of informing me that information about me was moving somewhere I had not directed it.
[Read more]Asimov wrote the Three Laws as a solution to a narrative problem. Science fiction before him had produced robots that either served obediently until they didn’t, or turned on their creators as the inevitable consequence of making something intelligent.
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