Every delegation is a negotiation. When you hand a task to an AI, you gain capacity, and lose contact with the decisions embedded in the work. That tradeoff is invisible until it compounds. When you hand your data to an AI, you lose something else entirely: the ability to change your mind about who sees it. We study that compounding in agency, in privacy, in the defaults you never chose. We build tools that make the tradeoff visible. We publish what we learn. Liminal Advantage exists in the space between what you can do and what you choose to delegate. The liminal zone where agency is won or lost.
Three lenses. One situation.
Adapted from Snowden's Cynefin 3As
Agency
Who can act, and to what degree? Agency isn't binary. It's distributed, constrained, and constantly renegotiated by the systems you inhabit.
Affordance
What's actually possible right now? Not in theory — in practice. What does the current assemblage of tools, norms, and infrastructure make easy, hard, or invisible?
Assemblage
What patterns of belief, narrative, and practice shape behavior? These aren't categories — they're flows. They can be disrupted.
We don't theorize in isolation. Each tool tests a hypothesis.
Exifuscator
Live"People prefer poisoned metadata over stripped metadata when given the choice."
Affordance shift — makes metadata control a one-tap action. Redistributes agency from platform defaults to the individual.
SheURL
Live"A URL shortener can build a content moat through biographical profiles that outperform commodity redirect services."
Assemblage disruption — every short link carries a woman's name and story, changing the narrative pattern of what a URL means.
6plus1
Beta"Zero-knowledge architecture doesn't reduce journaling compliance."
Agency by design — the system literally cannot read your entries. The architecture IS the privacy guarantee, not a policy.
Muesli
In development"Local-first voice transcription can match cloud quality for meeting notes without sending audio to a server."
Affordance expansion — professional-grade transcription without the surveillance cost.
An ongoing inquiry into what happens to human productive capacity when delegation replaces execution.
"Public Data Is Performative"
Published
"The Imagination Bottleneck"
In progress
- Local by default. Your data processes on your machine.
- Privacy as self-determination. Not compliance. Architecture.
- Agency over convenience. Tools that increase your capacity to act freely.
- Transparent by design. Open source where possible. No dark patterns.
- Experiments over assertions. We ship, measure, and publish what we learn.