Essay No. 01 · Raw materials & AI
The material footprint of AI, the collapse of the cost of reading, and the decade in which both arrive.
The build-out of AI infrastructure is one of the largest material procurements of the decade, into supply chains whose problems have been documented for years and have stayed that way because engaging with them was expensive. The same industry is producing the instrument that ends the era of the unexamined supply chain claim. By default, that capability flows to whoever holds a purchase order. This essay argues that the companies building these models carry a specific responsibility for where it goes instead.
August 20267 partsReadPDF ↓
Essay No. 02 · Grievance & formalisation
What it costs to be heard in a supply chain, and why that is about to change.
A complaint about banana plantations in Ecuador and Costa Rica took two years to travel from two local unions to payments for workers, and the findings were never in dispute. This essay asks what that journey cost, why most grievance mechanisms produce documentation rather than remedy, and why a decade of worker voice tools has shown that trust in custody decides whether anyone speaks. It sets out three kinds of complaint that share one intake and need entirely different custody, argues that the most useful application of cheap analysis is helping producers get the documents that formalisation requires, and proposes that a channel funded by several buyers but owned by none of them is the arrangement that resolves the problem it opens with.
September 20268 partsReadPDF ↓