Every online community faces the same choice: codify or collapse. But the rules that save you from chaos will eventually eat your culture. This essay explores the ethical trap at the heart of online self-governance.
Waiting in line looks mundane, but it encodes deep ethical commitments about fairness, time, and priority. This essay explores what queue cultures around the world reveal about how we think about justice.
Every major platform you use has a recommendation engine at its core — an algorithm that decides what you see, hear, and engage with. These systems aren’t neutral. They encode moral choices as engineering decisions, shaping our attention without our consent. This piece explores the hidden ethics of algorithmic gatekeeping and what transparency would actually require.
Three billion people play video games, and inside their guilds and servers they have built functioning moral systems without anyone writing a rulebook. This essay explores the unwritten ethics of gaming communities, from loot distribution to toxicity, and what they reveal about how ordinary people build moral order from scratch.
