History
12 entries- Aug 2Essay The Small God of the Internet
It was a small announcement on an innocuous page about “spring cleaning”. The herald, some guy with the kind of name that promised he was all yours. Four sentences you only find because you were …
5 min - Jul 19Essay What do platforms really do?
In 1986, David S. Landes wrote the essay, ‘What Do Bosses Really Do?’. He argues that the historical role of the ‘boss’ was an essential function for organizing production and connecting producers to …
3 min - Jul 12EssayWorld Machines Royalty, Administration, and Antimemetics
I was all of 15 when defenestration was forever implanted in my mind. It means to throw someone out the window. It happened in Prague, 1618. Some important people were defenestrated, fell 70 feet, …
4 min - Jun 20EssayWorld Machines Financial Instruments and the Ottoman Empire’s Decline (16th–19th Centuries): A Comparative Analysis
This essay was explored with ChatGPT o3 as a curiosity while reading Islamic Gunpowder Empires by Douglas E. Streusand as part of the Contraptions Book Club Introduction # The decline of the Ottoman …
25 min - May 21Note
Finished chapter 1 of Shadows at Noon. A very dense 83 pages. I can see why Joya Chatterji won the Wolfson History Prize. Reading with a pencil, not a single page is unannotated!