The Price of a Protocol
An AI harness rests on protocols somebody already settled. Knowledge work has none, and settling them costs twice: in labour, and in authority handed over.
Igor Schwarzmann — Writing
Essays, concepts, and notes by Igor Schwarzmann on culture, technology, and AI.
Latest posts
Osti, the Photocopier, and the Question Machine
Massimo Osti's photocopier method as the frame for AI democratizing answers while doing nothing for questions; ends open on the complexity-affordance question.
Introspection Tax
The disproportionate time, space, and attention cost of the self-articulation AI-augmented work demands, and the premium it creates for those who can pay it
What Kind of Complexity Should We Afford Ourselves?
Cowan's More Work for Mother, turned on AI: appliances didn't save labor, they let us choose new complexity. Treat AI as a dishwasher, not a god.
Agency Deficit
Organizations rarely suffer an information deficit. They lack the agency and time to act on what they already know. Applied right, that is where AI adds value.
Sovereignty Is the Ground That Stays Under You
Europe keeps demanding AI sovereignty without naming a game it can win. Stop chasing a frontier champion. Compete for the open, local floor instead.
Lab Renaissance
The return of the small, day-to-day-decoupled team — Lab or Center of Excellence — as the organizational-design answer to AI adoption.
Contact Lenses for a Headband
Agents collapsed the cost of joining data: a half-broken EEG headband experiment, and why noisy sensors now make every archive worth more.
Nostalgia is not the word
Gen Z's appetite for retro is not nostalgia. It is hauntology: longing for a future that was promised and never arrived. The nostalgia is the brands'.
Memory as Medium
The thesis that memory — not content, not messages, not notes — becomes the central primitive for publishing, professional identity, and collaboration in AI-mediated knowledge work
Agentic Memory
How AI agents persist, structure, and manage memory — three philosophical camps, six analytical axes, and twenty-one systems mapped.
The Coordination Agent
What happens when you give a multi-party project an AI team member with persistent memory across every tool and conversation.
Atmosphere
A visualization of reasoning terrain — close to a thousand sessions rendered as a living nebula of colored gas.
Shev
A personal observer agent that watches how I think across conversations — named after Shevek from Le Guin's The Dispossessed.
Brain Dead — How I Built an AI-Operated Knowledge Vault
Architecture, data model, and decisions behind an Obsidian vault where AI agents do most of the writing.