Answerable Infrastructure
Software that treats some edits not as updates, but as acts an institution may one day have to justify.
Answerable infrastructure is a thread about software that has become load-bearing for institutions: spreadsheets, document systems, collaboration tools, ledgers, permissions models, and archives that quietly record rules, define authority, preserve memory, and settle disputes.
The central design question is how software should behave when it is no longer just helping people get work done, but becoming part of the material through which a group governs itself.
River
- Explanation for Whom? Hospitable Interpretability for Machine LearningessayA feature-attribution plot can be faithful and still answer the wrong question. Interpretability needs hospitable records that mark which why-question each artifact answers and keep divergent readings attached to the same decision.
- The Spreadsheet Was the ConstitutionessaySoftware picks up constitutional weight long before the by-laws catch up. It is where the rules live, and the first place anyone looks when a decision has to be defended.