The machine stops.
The machine stops.
Peace Under Construction There are banners all over Cuautla saying that peace is under construction. Or something like that. By now some have faded and torn so badly that it is hard to remember exactly what they said. Plan Cuautla…
Economics and Real Things 1. A Conversation About a Happy World The conversation happened in the comments section of some social network. It could have been almost any of them. The original post does not matter much, because these discussions…
Obey or Be Disconnected A few weeks ago I wrote that the new mobile-line registration system was not really a policy against crime. It was a policy against anonymity. I still retained, however, what was probably a naive form of…
What Mexico’s justice system takes in, and what it gives back. A Personal Starting Point This text does not come from abstraction alone. Like many people in Mexico, I learned early that crime is not an exceptional event reserved for…
Disclosure Without Consensus Introduction — The Gorilla in the Basketball Game There is a well-known psychological experiment in which participants are asked to watch a short video of people passing basketballs to one another. Their task is simple: count the…
Mexico’s Mobile Phone Registry and the Myth of Security The man in front of you at the OXXO counter is holding his phone and his INE.The clerk squints at the screen. The system freezes. Someone sighs. A form asks for…
How contemporary political and media discourse redefines violence Prologue: The Adjective Before the Act There is a form of violence that leaves no bodies, no ruins, no photographs difficult to look at. It requires no weapons and no uniforms. It…
On moral signaling and the inevitable reappearance of naked power Introduction — When Power Stops Pretending For a long time, modern societies have lived inside a useful fiction. Power, we are told, is procedural.It flows through institutions, treaties, courts, norms,…
Notes on Intuition, Language, and Power Chapter I — The Unease Before the Argument I don’t remember the first time I disagreed, but I remember the first time something felt wrong in a way disagreement doesn’t usually feel. It wasn’t…
On letters, interfaces, and the disappearance of deliberate thought or why everything still works but nobody uses It The Quiet Retirement of a Technology Early in the morning, a short news item appeared on Mexican cable television: Denmark has ended…