Add Shortcut — since May 2024
Essays on the end of scarcity, and what follows.
Two years of pieces tracking what happens to markets, institutions, and meaning as human labor stops being the default unit of work. The pieces below are the spine — the thesis of Unsal Partners is downstream of the argument they make.
Anchor essays
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Apr 2026 Portfolio
Lord of the Rings
Five smart rings on one body, five different reports about the same night. The wearable health industry as a small, beautifully designed panopticon — and the structural collapse waiting on the other side of commodity sensors, public algorithms, and AI-built software. The piece also names the second AI-only company in the portfolio.
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Mar 2026 Philosophy
The Vixen Chronicles
Caretaking as a model problem. An eighteen-year-old dog, a sleeping city, and the asymmetry between a system that builds representations of a subject and a subject who simply inhabits the outcome. A preview of what it feels like to live inside sufficiently capable systems.
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Sep 2025 Thesis
Scarcity Is Dead
The discipline of economics was built around scarcity as the organizing constraint. When the marginal cost of cognition approaches zero, the ground under that frame shifts. An attempt to say, without overclaiming, what replaces it.
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Aug 2025 Thesis
The Dignity Paradox
If work has been the main vehicle for dignity, and most work is about to be done by machines, what keeps the vehicle moving. Not a policy piece. A harder problem about where agency goes when labor stops being the way we get it.
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Jul 2025 Philosophy
Lacrimosa.exe — Turing’s Grace Test
A reframing of the Turing test. Not whether a machine can pass for human, but whether it can earn something closer to grace. The test is stricter than people think and most of the current systems would not pass it.
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Apr 2025 Framework
Bandwidth Economics
Institutions behave the way they do because they are lossy compressions running on a fixed cognitive budget. Raise the budget and the compressions change. Policy, corporate form, education — almost every macro story reads differently under this frame.
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Jan 2025 Framework
End of -isms
Why the -ism grammar of the twentieth century — capitalism, socialism, liberalism — collapses under bandwidth constraints, and what the replacement looks like when cognition is no longer the scarce input.
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May 2024 Origin
Arm Up Against AI Job Destruction
The opening move, written before white-collar displacement was common discourse. A Silicon Valley lawyer who said GPT-4 already outperformed his $200K first-year associates, a home x-ray the model diagnosed correctly, and a practical case for where work would still live a few years out.