Essays

Longer than a timeline entry.
Shorter than a book.

The front page moves fast: one line per shift, thirty years in a scroll. A few of those lines have a whole story sitting underneath them. This is where the stories go.

Firsthand where a piece says so, checked where checking was possible. The note at the foot of a piece marks which is which.

Hardware 1992 to now

An electron gun on your desk

A 1992 screen was a particle accelerator you could hear from the next room. The one on the desk now makes no sound, and the difficulty behind it has moved out of sight.

Written 27 July 2026 · published 8 September 2026

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Geography Paris, 1996 to 2001

Where the internet lived

For a few years around 2000, the French internet had street addresses. Most of them were basements. Five of them, from memory.

Written 27 July 2026 · published 8 September 2026

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Instrumentation 2009 to 2026

Who the number was for

A like count is an operator metric, rendered on the profile of the person it measures. Seventeen years later, a settlement asked for it to be hidden from teenagers.

Written 29 August 2026 · published 8 September 2026

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Maintenance Thirty years

The work nobody counts

A failure leaves a timestamp. Prevention leaves an ordinary week. Every organisation gets good at the thing it can see.

Written 30 August 2026 · published 8 September 2026

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Constancy Thirty years

What never changed

Ten genuine shifts, each one deleting some part of the expertise underneath it. And five habits that survived all ten.

Written 27 July 2026 · published 8 September 2026

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