On Systems and Curiosity
Why the same mind that builds software is drawn to history, memory, and music — and why these are not separate interests but one.
There is a particular kind of person who cannot stay inside a single field. Not from restlessness, but because the questions keep pointing elsewhere. You set out to understand a database and end up reading about how Venetian merchants kept their books; you study how a melody resolves and notice the same shape in how an institution earns trust.
The lens, not the subject
The unifying object of study is never the subject itself — not the software, not the company, not the painting — but the system beneath it: the parts, the relations, the incentives, and the feedback that make the whole behave the way it does.
A system is whatever you can describe by its parts and the rules that bind them. By that definition, a memory is a system. A nation is a system. A piece of music is a system unfolding in time.
Once you adopt this lens, the boundaries between disciplines start to look administrative rather than real. This Library exists to follow those crossings wherever they lead.
What belongs here
Essays, research, notes, reviews, and the occasional lecture. Long enough to develop an idea, personal enough to be worth signing. Replace this placeholder with the first real piece.