Essays & Ideas

A Collection
of Propositions

On money, software, belief, and the fictions we maintain together

These are not positions. They are proposals — structures through which a subject might be examined rather than verdicts about it.

Each essay begins from somewhere and tries to end somewhere further along. Whether it arrives is a matter for the reader. The author may have changed his mind between the first sentence and the last, and probably has since.

The ideas collected here are offered as ideas: worth entertaining, worth testing, worth discarding if the evidence demands it. Agreement is neither sought nor assumed. Disagreement, if it is precise, is welcome.

I On Money & Its Fictions

The Slow Confiscation

Nixon cut the gold anchor in 1971. UK house prices have since risen from 3.2× to 7.2× median wages. The mechanism is monetary expansion. The cost has been paid by those who work, not those who own.
The Deity That Clears

Money passes every structural test for religion: unverifiable shared belief, ritual reinforcement, a priestly class, inexplicable consequences for heretics. The Market is its instrument of judgment. Fiat made the theology explicit.
The Eighth Quantity

Money is a genuine dimension — irreducible, like length or mass. Commercial software treats it as a bare number. The errors that follow are arithmetically invisible and semantically catastrophic. The SI has seven base units. It needs an eighth.

II On Belief & Method

The Piety of Reason

The rationalist's core premise — that the future resembles the past — is an act of faith. In non-linear systems, which is most of the world, it fails. The rationalist and the believer are making the same wager in different costumes.
The Ceremony of Not Knowing

The Agile Manifesto was a reaction dressed as a methodology, written by competent practitioners, consumed by organisations that wanted it to replace the competence it assumed. Scrum is common sense industrialised into ceremony.

III On Software & Its Histories

There Is Nothing New

Virtual machines (IBM, 1967), microservices, event sourcing, reactive systems: each sold as a breakthrough, each decades old. The software industry has been solving the same six problems since the 1960s, and has an extraordinary talent for forgetting.
The Ledger That Forgot Its Name

Event sourcing and CQRS are double-entry bookkeeping in distributed systems vocabulary. Every principle the 2010s literature calls a discovery was codified by Luca Pacioli in 1494. The software industry simply forgot to check.
The Cells That Ate the Program

Alan Kay's OOP meant autonomous message-passing cells, no shared state. The industry built class hierarchies instead. The name survived the translation. The idea did not. Modern languages are quietly dismantling what was built in its place.
The Quiet Colossus

Ada implemented, and got right, nearly everything a computer language needs. Every language now called modern is converging on what Ada solved under government contract forty years ago.
The Mutual Deception

C is not low-level and hasn't been for decades. x86 spent fifty years and billions of transistors maintaining the fiction that it was. Meltdown and Spectre are the direct consequence: the vulnerabilities existed to preserve the illusion.
There Are No Bugs

"Bug" is exculpatory language. The 1947 moth was a joke; the metaphor it installed treats failure as external and unpredictable. Software defects are made, by decisions, within the team. The word covers the causal chain.

IV On Thinking & Working

The Oblique Solution

The solution did not arrive at the desk. It arrived in the shower, on the walk, at the moment of waking. A century of psychology confirms this. The organisational model that ignores it — directed attention equals output — is foundationally wrong.
Just a Quick One

An interruption costs 23 minutes 15 seconds of recovery time (Gloria Mark, UCI, 2005). The "touch base" is grammatically modest and substantively dishonest. Organisations whose output depends on flow have built cultures around its destruction.
The Emperor's New Software

ERP delivers median practice, not best practice — specificity to one customer is restriction for all others. Every implementation failure is the customer's fault: wrong governance, insufficient vanilla adoption. Vanilla was never available.

V On Language & Agreement

The Locality of Glyphs

Code pages were honest: one byte, one character, faults self-announcing. UTF-8's normalisation problem reintroduces the same failure, invisibly. Universalisation imposed full complexity costs on systems that shared none of the original problem.
The Agreement That Wasn't

System drift has no perpetrator. When you observe a computational system, you see a projection of its state — not the state itself. Projection discards information. Two systems that agree today carry no structural promise about tomorrow.

VI On Cost & Consequence

The Debt We Don't Count

Software consumes 4–10% of global electricity. Language and runtime choices have direct climate consequences recorded on no balance sheet. The atmosphere absorbs what no P&L acknowledges.
The Portable Conscience

The carbon footprint was invented by BP's ad agency in 2004 to make climate a matter of individual arithmetic. What happened was that the poorest ended up paying proportionally most whilst having the least capacity to change.

VII On Governance & Its Obligations

The Gardener's Tithe

Income tax levies the act of working. Land value tax levies the unearned increment — value created by the community, accrued to the landowner. The gardener pays on what she makes. The idle landowner pays almost nothing on what he holds.
The High Premise

PParliament, the courts, and the press each place the citizen in their founding documents as their purpose. The citizen is now a premise, not a beneficiary. The institutions are not personally corrupt. They are structurally misaligned.

A Collectionof Propositions

A Collection
of Propositions