Silos Keep the Cows Fed

Whenever I hear people complain about the problem of silos at work, I think about my grandfather. He lived and worked his whole life on a dairy farm, with multiple silos on his property. And he would point out:

Silos keep the cows fed through the winter.

This a surprisingly good metaphor. Silos exist for a reason: without them, your feedstock will get eaten by wild animals and rot in the elements. They protect what need to be protected. To feed the cattle, you need to open the silo, shovel out some feed, and spread it around.

The problem isn’t the silo—the problem is if you never open it up and share around.

The most common approach I see to try and solve the problem of silos at work is to look for a structural solution that will eliminate silos. That won’t work. By definition, structures separate and enclose things. That’s the essential nature of a structure. All structures create silos, which means you can’t eliminate silos through structural changes. The best you can hope to accomplish with a structural solution is to change your silos. (And it’s important to think about which silos you’d prefer as you plan your structure.)

Structure can’t solve the problem of silos. To find a solution, we need to consider the farmer: Open it up and share around.

The solution is process.

Create work flows, expectations, performance standards that center and prioritize collaboration across and between parts of the organization. You can’t eliminate silos at work but you can learn to work with them, and even leverage them to your benefit.

Silos are a fact of life, they’re inevitable in any organization that has a structure. Process is how you deal with them.

GenAI & Cheat Codes

Microsoft recently aired an ad for their Copilot AI service in which an individual uses it to copy the work of a musician they like to “create” similar music. (There’s a whole subtext of racism in this ad which I won’t address here.) It’s incredibly disturbing: they’re literally selling AI as a tool to steal other people’s work. It’s probably the most honest ad for AI I’ve seen. It makes it abundantly clear that generative AI really is for people who want the accomplishments without having to do the work to earn them. It’s infuriatingly self-entitled.

The best artists I’ve ever known—the most talented, most accomplished, most dedicated—don’t care that much about success: They love doing the work. The work is the reward. The work itself is the source of joy and satisfaction, not the final product. You can’t create great things if you’re not willing to put in the time and effort.

Also: Good luck getting your lucky break in a work flooded by AI slop. It’s hard enough to get your work noticed in normal circumstances, and so much of success is down the whether you’re lucky enough to get your big break at all. Everyone’s just going to end up buried now. GenAI makes it far less likely for anyone to find success.

I find myself thinking a lot lately about the history of cheat codes in games. I think this may be key to understanding the motives of people who are building and pushing AI.
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Tech Future

I recently attended a presentation by Dr. Ruha Benjamin about technology and the future. She discussed how almost all of our depictions of technology over the past decades present it as either a thing that will destroy us or a thing that will save us. She calls these visions “techno-dystopia” and “techno-utopia”.

Both are wrong. Both suggest that technology is something that develops independently of human choice, that it’s a thing that happens to us and out of our control.

That’s definitely wrong! People build technology. People’s choices guide technology. However it turns out, it will be because it serves the desires of the people who built it.

This discussion really helped me clarify what bothers me most about how we depict and try to understand technology in our world:

Both visions deny human agency.

Both visions are built on the same belief: That technology is needed because human beings lack the necessary capabilities to do for ourselves. A belief that we can’t build a better world, or solve our problems, or save ourselves. A belief that we need tech to do it for us.

This is belief is both wrong and deeply contemptuous. Both visions underestimate, undervalue, and undermine human capability in equal measure. I refuse to accept that. I don’t believe it.

We don’t need technology to rule us or uplift us. It’s a tool. That’s all. We are fully capable of building the world and the future we want for ourselves.

The bigger question is this: The people building our technology are building it to serve their own ends. These people are desperate for the rest of us to believe that we need technology to solve our problems and save the world.

Why do you think that is?

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The Music of Protest

Some years ago, I was in my car with my music on shuffle, and NIN’s “Head Like A Hole” came up. It struck me how entirely relevant and appropriate that song still is today. And I wondered: What’s the angry protest music that kids listen to today? Who are the pissed off bands raging against the status quo?

I try to keep up with the new music scene, but I couldn’t think of anything. I asked around people I know who have kids and they told me there mostly isn’t any. They say their kids don’t listen to protest bands the way earlier generations did.

That thought makes me immeasurably sad. It really bothers me to think there’s no new protest music being made by and for young kids today. I mean, NIN is still awesome and the anger is still powerful, but new generations deserve better than to borrow the music of their parents and grandparents.

Or so I thought. I think now that I’m wrong about this.

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Tilly Norwood & AI Art

There’s been some discourse lately about Tilly Norwood, the AI generated actress, along with discussion of Gal Gadot’s AI movie. Given my open public stance opposing LLMs and my desire to be an intentional AI Luddite (to the extent that’s possible) I’m surprised to discover that my reaction to all this is…

I’m not too worried about it.

To be clear, AI performers, along with generated design elements, pose a significant threat to paying gigs for human beings. This has the potential to prevent many talented people from making a living. That’s a real problem and we should not support it.

But Tilly and her ilk will never pose a meaningful threat to the art and craft of acting. Acting, in its essence, is a method for human beings to explore our own nature. AI doesn’t change that in the least.

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My Real Fear of AI

At a previous library job, I helped host a series of technology drop-in sessions: a couple hours for people to bring in their devices and get help figuring out how to use them, walking them through their frustrations and pinch points.

Often after I had shown someone how to do something, they would ask me how I knew how to do that. Most of the time, I didn’t. I just poked around until I figured it out. This is really the core skill of using modern technology: the willingness to figure it out. (Also, a base knowledge of how to poke around safely.)

Sometimes it’s hard to figure out how to make your tech do what you want. Sometimes it’s not obvious or intuitive where certain functions live. Sometimes you have to click through way too many options until you find what you’re looking for. Sometimes, it takes longer than you want it to.

The number one thing we tried to teach folk was persistence in the face of frustration.

Which highlights my biggest fear about AI and how it’s being deployed in our society:
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Thoughts on T’ai Chi Ch’uan

Originally posted April 15, 2026

UPDATED April 29, 2026

I recently attended a three day silent t’ai chi ch’uan retreat. I spent much of my time there thinking about my practice and what I want to get out of it. One night, I sat down and wrote this before I went to bed.

I practice Yang style t’ai chi: specifically the short form developed by Professor Cheng Man-ch’ing. Yang style seeks relaxation, the release of tension, strength through softness and expansion. This type of strength is referred to as sung. Most martial arts—from Shaolin gung fu to Western-style boxing—use the opposite type of strength: contraction, hardness, tension. This is called li. Yang style only seeks sung, never li.

There are other styles of t’ai chi, most of which are notably older than Yang style. Chen style, for instance, has been practiced for centuries and remains the most popular style in China (Yang is the most popular in the West).

Musician Lou Reed practiced Chen style t’ai chi for decades and he wrote a book about his experience. I read it last year. The way he describes his style is markedly different than how we describe Yang. He talks about balancing softness with hardness, expansion with contraction, relaxation with tension, slow with fast, sung with li, and the ability to move from one to the other. This is so different from Yang practice, in which all tension is released and none allowed to build up, that it’s difficult to think of these as both being t’ai chi.

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In Praise of Simplicity

Back in high school, I knew a very gifted electric bassist. He started out by playing along to the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Bootsy Collins, he got himself Louis Johnson’s video instruction series. By the time we graduated, he was starting to get through Jaco Pastorius tunes. Incredible technical virtuosity!

In our early 30’s, he got recruited into a bar band. All his bass lines were simple walking quarter notes on the root, maybe an occasional eighth note run for decoration. As simple as simple could be. Simple enough I could learn to play it.

He told me it’s the music he’s most proud of, that it’s the best music he’d ever made. It was the first time that his ego completely disappeared and the only thing he cared about was serving the songs. The songs needed simple, so he gave them something simple.

Another musician I know had almost the exact same evolution: started out mastering the most complicated techniques, developed incredible virtuosity on their instrument, and then decided one day to just start playing simple. I asked them why:

“I got bored with complicated,” they answered.

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Neurodivergence & Personal Identity

Recently, someone dear to me received an adult diagnosis of ADHD, and stated that they think I have it, too. No one had ever suggested that before. I fully disagreed with them.

I’ve known a lot of people with ADHD over the years. Theater and the arts tend to attract people who are very different from the “norm,” and that includes more neurodivergent folk than many other professions. The same is true of libraries, I think. Most of the women I’ve dated in my life have had ADHD. I’ve never seen much of myself in these people I’ve known. I’ve witnessed many of them struggle to function in the world, but that’s never been much of a challenge for me.

I have hyperfixation, but that doesn’t constitute a diagnosis of ADHD on its own. I have a long history of not doing things I don’t want to do, but that’s as much my innate contrarianism as anything else.

I recently read this excellent article:

“A Generation Got Told to ‘Just Try Harder.’ The Neuroscience Just Said ‘That Was Never Going to Work.'”
by Ross Grossman, February 4, 2026

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Book Review: Platform Decay by Martha Wells

Cover of the book Platform Decay by Martha Wells — *Platform Decay*
by Martha Wells
Tor, 2026

This review was first published by Booklist on March 1, 2026.

**STARRED REVIEW** The newest Murderbot novel (after System Collapse, 2023) has our titular (not really an anti) hero aided by Three, the newest rogue SecUnit, on a stealth mission in a planetary ring habitat to retrieve members of Mensah’s family, who’ve been kidnapped by the Barish Estranza Corporation in retaliation for her role on the plague planet. Along the way, an unexpected ally complicates the mission, and somehow the corporate mercs seem to know they’re coming. The plot starts off in the middle of the action and doesn’t let up until the very end. It’s an incredibly satisfying ride, and one of the funniest installments in the series: After their false memory issues, Murderbot installed an “emotion check” subroutine and it’s a perfect vehicle for the sarcastic, cynical humor readers crave. Perhaps most intriguing is a small side plot that teases a change with potentially huge implications. Wells returns to form with this one, offering a setting and cast that feels smaller and more intimate, more like her earlier novellas. At the same time, she sets up exciting possibilities for where this universe could go next. The family dynamic adds real poignancy, providing one of the most emotionally resonant Murderbot tales yet.

HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: The success of the Apple TV series only adds to Murderbot’s popularity, and readers have patiently waited several years for the next installment in the series.