About

Rodney Zadeh

I was born in Iran and left as a child, during the revolution. A country can rewrite its own terms overnight. My family was still living under the old ones when the new ones took effect.

We landed in Los Angeles. I've been here since.

I don't tell that story for color. It's the reason I read systems the way I do — looking for the clause nobody read, the term that gets enforced later, the part where the arrangement you thought you were in turns out to be a different arrangement entirely. I learned early that the document and the reality are two different things, and that the gap between them is where everything happens.

Camus gave that gap a name. The absurd, in his sense, is the distance between our demand that the world make sense and the world's refusal to say anything back — not a mood but a permanent condition, and the only interesting question is what an honest person does inside it. His answer was neither resignation nor a leap. It was revolt: refuse to pretend the terms are just, and go on living under them anyway, with your eyes open. Frankl, from a worse vantage point, arrived somewhere adjacent — everything can be taken except the choice of what to make of what remains.

I hold my beliefs the same way I hold that. Read the sources yourself, in your own hands, and arrive at your own reading rather than an inherited one. Anything I can't get to on my own I don't really have.

How I read

The three questions on the front page are a procedure, not a knack. Here is what each one is actually asking.

What does it assume? Every system encodes a belief about the people inside it — what they want, what they'll tolerate, what they'll never bother to check. That belief is almost never stated and almost always load-bearing.

Where does it put its costs? Nothing is free. Anything that feels frictionless has moved its friction somewhere else, onto someone else, usually later. Find where it landed and you know who the system is actually for. Buber drew the line this question is really testing: there are two ways to stand toward anything, meeting it or using it, and a person can be converted from the first into the second by design — without malice, purely as an engineering consequence. Most of what I write about is that conversion happening at scale, to people who consented by clicking something.

What did its makers decline to account for? Not what they got wrong, but what they chose not to measure. Weizenbaum drew that line in 1976 and it hasn't moved since: the question was never what a machine can be made to do, but what it ought to be asked to do. The first is a problem of calculation. The second requires judgment, and judgment is exactly what gets quietly deleted from the spec.

What I won't do

Pick a side before the evidence does. Some questions stay open, and the honest move is to say so and show why. Sometimes the disagreement is itself the finding — when serious people read the same data and reach opposite conclusions, that tells you something about the data, and about who's holding it.

Only catalogue what's broken. For every system I take apart I keep track of one that got its incentives right. Criticism that can't name a working alternative isn't analysis, it's a mood.

Stop at the argument. Dostoevsky's underground man refuses to be a piano key and then does nothing with the refusal for a hundred pages. That's the failure mode of every critic who reads well and builds nothing. A claim about how something works is worth no more than the attempt to make it work. So I build. Hardware, software, and the reasoning beneath both.

What this site is

The reading, written down. Some of it is contracts, some is interfaces, most of it is incentives running quietly under things you used this morning without noticing.

I write about the terms — who wrote them, who's bound by them, and who never got to read them.

If something here is wrong, tell me. That's the only way I find out.