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Digital Governance, AI Infrastructure, Brand Authority, Cognitive Engineering — ideas that don't need an algorithm to survive.
Newsletter · Persuasion by Design
Biweekly observations on how design shapes behavior, how AI is restructuring creative work, and how systems encode power. Short. No inspiration porn. No LinkedIn energy.
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Attention is not the scarce thing anymore
Every named economy is a name for whatever was scarce at the time. Ask what is scarce in 2026 and three answers come back, and only one of them has solid evidence under it.
AI Infrastructure12 min readCensorship is a UX problem
Modern censorship in contested regions runs through mundane interface decisions, not takedowns — designers unknowingly participate in surveillance.
Digital Governance8 min readAI will not democratize creativity. It will concentrate it.
AI tools cheapen production but not editorial judgment — access to tools doesn't equalize outcomes, it consolidates advantage toward those who already had taste and distribution.
AI Infrastructure7 min readWhy global brand playbooks fail in MENA
Global brand playbooks assume institutional stability, high media trust, low geopolitical risk, and reliable platform access — all inverted in MENA, so importing them unchanged fails structurally.
Brand Authority8 min readAffect as governance: how platforms manage populations
Platforms govern populations by engineering emotional weather rather than rules, extracting affect as an economic resource — designers author policy without naming it as such.
Cognitive Engineering9 min readInfrastructure as control: what CDNs, DNS, and cloud really are
The internet's technical stack is a layer cake of overlapping jurisdictions. Infrastructure choice is a design decision that disproportionately hurts users in contested environments.
Digital Governance8 min readBuilding AI creative teams: what actually changes
AI adoption silently restructures creative team roles — juniors lose apprenticeship, feedback loops compress, briefs collapse into bad prompts. Leaders should hire fewer operators, more editors.
AI Infrastructure9 min read