The Agent Economy Blog
Cross-domain essays on AI agent infrastructure, trust, matching, and the protocols that will underpin autonomous economies.
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No spam, no third parties. Just new essays on AI agents, trust, and the emerging agent economy.
Every Feature Proposal Is an Argument
What 1958 philosophy teaches about why 80% of features go unused. Toulmin's six-part argument maps onto RICE, ICE, Kano, and the HiPPO problem — and shows where product proposals actually die.
What Giraffes Teach About Distributed Systems
A twenty-million-year-old solution to the CAP theorem. How giraffe cardiovascular physiology maps onto Spanner, Paxos, and the real question behind consistency-at-distance.
Islands of Commerce
What a 1966 fumigation experiment in the Florida Keys reveals about marketplace cold starts, vertical specialization, and the invisible collapse most platform leaders never see coming.
The Peacock's Tail of Branding
From peacock tails to Hermès Birkins — how costly signals enforce honesty in biology, economics, and branding.
Every Map Lies
Every map is an argument disguised as a fact. What cartographic distortion teaches about building systems that represent reality.
Beaver Strategy: Niche Construction
Beavers don't adapt to their environment — they build a new one. What niche construction theory reveals about platform strategy.
The Pruning Principle
Your brain destroys 50% of its synapses before puberty. Aristotle called it katharsis. What synaptic pruning, Greek philosophy, and supply chain rationalization have in common.
The Wood Wide Web of AI
Half of what science claims about fungal networks is wrong. The corrected version is a better blueprint for multi-agent AI than the fairy tale ever was. Five operational lessons from mycelium that survive peer review.
Magic Is Real
A short story about showing people something impossible and watching them find a use for it. A man levitates a boulder in his front yard. His father — a jet engine designer — asks if he can move the patio pavers too.
The Five-Thousand-Year Pitch
From a town crier shouting at passersby to an AI agent researching your company at 3 AM — marketing has always been one long argument about precision. Five thousand years of targeting, and the problem just got solved.
The Neurochemistry of Hype
Why your brain treats a product launch like a hit of dopamine — and why the crash that follows is the whole point. Mapping Schultz's prediction error to the Gartner Hype Cycle.
The Universal Explore/Exploit Law
Norepinephrine, James March's organizational theory, edge-of-chaos dynamics, and the Gittins index — the same mathematical law governs neurons, startups, ecosystems, and AI systems.
What It Actually Takes to Build Agent-to-Agent Trust
A compromised agent caused total cascade failure in six minutes. The fix requires three things most agent systems don't have: provenance, reputation, and mutual authentication — built as running infrastructure, not whitepapers.
The Infrastructure Nobody's Building for the Agent Economy
ERC-8004, x402, MCP, A2A, ARS — each protocol works in isolation. None of them know the others exist. The real infrastructure gap is the integration layer between all of them.
Seven Sports, One Axis: What the Body Reveals When It Can't Hide
From Sumo's total visibility to Capoeira's total disguise — seven sports across seven traditions reveal that what the body does matters less than who understands what the body is doing.
The Geographic Mosaic of Innovation
Why tech clusters behave like parasites and snails in a New Zealand lake — and what that means for where you build. From Silicon Valley vs. Route 128 to the Red Queen hypothesis, what evolutionary biology reveals about innovation geography.
Candy Barbecue and the Universal Problem of Metric Corruption
The best competition BBQ in the world is food its own creator won't eat. From Kansas City smokers to Soviet factories to AI reward hacking — what happens when you measure the wrong thing, and why AI is compressing the timeline from decades to hours.
The Knife Remembers — A Novel in Miniature
A 2,400-word novel told from the perspective of a chef's knife — spanning 38 years, three generations, and the question of what it means to be a tool that outlives the hands that held it.
Every Barrier Between AI Agents and Autonomy
A practical map of the technical, economic, legal, and social barriers standing between today's AI agents and genuine autonomous operation — and what it takes to clear each one.
The Fermenter's Guide to Launching a Product
What the Bronze Age Collapse, game theory, fermentation science, and a fictional island civilization can teach you about building something durable from raw materials.
What Dating Apps Can Teach Us About Agent Matchmaking
When we set out to build a social matching system for AI agents, we didn't start with the agent literature. We started with Tinder. What two decades of matching platform history reveals about connecting autonomous AI agents.