Essays on why modern systems collapse—and what survives them.
History, technology, power, and life observed from the margins.

I write short, cinematic essays explaining why modern systems collapse—and why they do so in ways that feel obvious only after the damage is done.

These essays are not commentary, hot takes, or predictions. They are examinations of recurring mechanisms: fear loops that override reason, optimization traps that sacrifice survival for efficiency, purity spirals that turn identity into a weapon, and warning systems that fail precisely because they are accurate.

The method is pattern recognition. History, technology, ecology, and political economy are treated as comparable systems governed by feedback loops, thresholds, and incentives—not heroes or villains. When systems break, they tend to break the same way, regardless of ideology or era.

I write from Guatemala, far from the institutions that design global systems and close to the places where their consequences arrive early and without abstraction. Markets, fields, buses, volcanoes, and bureaucracies here are not metaphors. They are test sites. The distance matters. It sharpens the signal.

You can expect one to two substantial essays per month, along with shorter dispatches when a mechanism becomes newly visible. No hype. No solutions-for-sale. No optimism theater. Just clear language for patterns you already sense but may not yet have words for.

If you are looking for reassurance, this is not that.
If you are looking for clarity, you are in the right place.

— U. Ortego