Trotzendorff

Algorithmic Monocultures: AI’s Overlooked Diversity Problem

Until recent­ly, com­pa­nies at least had to make the same mis­takes inde­pen­dent­ly. One orga­ni­za­tion might over­val­ue pres­ti­gious uni­ver­si­ties. Anoth­er might mis­take con­fi­dence for com­pe­tence. A third might qui­et­ly screen out uncon­ven­tion­al careers. Their judg­ments were often flawed. But they were flawed in dif­fer­ent ways.

We Are Entering the Age of Plausibility Overload

We all knew AI would even­tu­al­ly gen­er­ate fake cita­tions. That was almost the bor­ing part. The more inter­est­ing ques­tion is why so many of them passed through sys­tems designed to eval­u­ate knowl­edge in the first place.

The Most Dangerous Thing About AI Might Be How Much Effort It Still Feels Like

The first time I spent an entire after­noon work­ing with AI, I closed my lap­top with that strange­ly sat­is­fy­ing feel­ing of hav­ing done hard intel­lec­tu­al work. My brain felt cooked. I had com­pared mod­els, refined prompts, rewrit­ten out­puts, test­ed work­flows, chased bet­ter phras­ing, dis­card­ed entire approach­es. It felt intense. Dense. Productive.

He Was Done — I Still Had to Tell Him It Wasn’t Enough

His legs were shak­ing before he even went down into the next squat. He stood in front of me at the wall ball sta­tion with that look peo­ple get when they are no longer real­ly decid­ing any­thing. They are just try­ing to keep the body mov­ing for one more rep, then one more, then some­how anoth­er. He picked up the ball, dropped down, came...

You’re Not Your Job. Fine. Now What?

It usu­al­ly hap­pens in a very ordi­nary moment. Some­one asks what you do. At din­ner. On a train. Between two meet­ings. You answer almost auto­mat­i­cal­ly, but not quite. There is always that tiny pause before the sen­tence lands. »I’m a lawyer.« »I’m in health care.« »I’m a car­pen­ter.« »I work in mar­ket­ing.« It sounds like a small dif­fer­ence. It isn’t. Because in that moment,...

Welcome to the Hiring Simulator — the Strategy Game Nobody Enjoys

There’s this sto­ry we keep telling about the job mar­ket: it’s tough out there. Fine. I can live with that. And I’m say­ing this as some­one cur­rent­ly in it — reori­ent­ing on the way to my next role. I’m hav­ing con­ver­sa­tions, doing calls, send­ing appli­ca­tions, wait­ing, look­ing close­ly at what’s out there. And there’s this slight­ly sur­re­al expe­ri­ence of try­ing to meet a sys­tem...

When Silence Becomes Signal

A few weeks ago, I post­ed on LinkedIn that my cur­rent role is com­ing to an end and that I’m explor­ing what’s next. The response was gen­er­ous. Mes­sages. Com­ments. Encour­age­ment. The kind of dig­i­tal warmth that makes you believe plat­forms can still be rela­tion­al spaces. And then, as always, the curve flat­tened. Which is nor­mal. Atten­tion spikes and fades. That’s how feeds work.

Not AI Is the Threat — People Are

»I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best under­stood as fears about cap­i­tal­ism.« When I read that line from Ted Chi­ang recent­ly, it land­ed because it pulls the mask off the mon­ster. A lot of what we call »fear of AI« is real­ly fear of incen­tives: who funds the sys­tems, who deploys them, who ben­e­fits when they scale, and who gets...

You Want to Start Running? 10+1 Very Personal Tips for Beginners

A while ago, a friend of mine told me she want­ed to start run­ning – and asked if I had any tips. That got me think­ing: wait, didn’t I write some­thing about that ages ago? And yes, I did. Ten years ago, to be exact. Back then, I had just gone through the ups and downs of learn­ing how to run – the excite­ment, the...

The Pace of Presence

In Octo­ber last year, when my Achilles ten­don had final­ly made its opin­ion known, I found myself in a park in Cologne. I was­n’t run­ning. I was jog­ging, slow­ly, with my eyes cov­ered and one hand light­ly rest­ing on the arm of some­one guid­ing me. We were part of a work­shop for sight­ed run­ning guides—learn­ing how to help blind and visu­al­ly impaired run­ners move...