This year I started introducing my ideas to the world. Criticizing something requires discipline, lest you end up ranting, which I strive to steer clear of. Offering ideas and alternatives (essentially building toward replacing flawed foundations) is intrinsically harder. The very moment you offer solutions for any complex topic, corner cases and information gaps surface. If you happen to have what hip-hop calls “haters,” they will cherry-pick accordingly.
That is expected.
By offering well-founded critiques and solutions to a problem, you invite counterarguments, well-meant or not. In more cases than not, however, you help to challenge dominant risk narratives that persist without empirical validation. Bringing topics front and center creates the conditions for synthesis. Ignoring structural risk at the intersection of governance and security creates latent failure points. In today’s world, this is not only an exercise in intellectual complacency but it materially increases organizational risk. My aims are twofold: to make my position clear, especially to those engaging with my work, and to initiate dialogue, even if only within my immediate network.
If this casts me as “the villain” in circles that prioritize optics, protect the status quo at all costs, or reduce scientific disciplines to performative rituals, so be it. After all, every great story needs one.
I discovered 1988’s Miracle Mile this year. The premise of this film is simple: a man receives a wrong phone call warning him that nuclear war is imminent and Los Angeles will be annihilated in less than 70 minutes. He then attempts to save his loved one.
What makes the film compelling is that it dismantles a classic Tinseltown trope: that well-meaning individuals can escape systemic collapse through sheer virtue or effort. In reality, competent and well-meaning individuals often fail within misaligned systems.
In my more tightly argued pieces, the distinction between dysfunctional systems and the well-meaning individuals within them is ever-present (and if you find yourself inside such a system, I understand your tension). I’m stating it explicitly here.
Pieces in the pipeline can appear as full-blown essays or smaller, sequential pieces. Format should follow substance. I am not a “content creator” so the typical “optimize engagement” tactics do not apply. I also plan to move away from the current hosting platform. That might affect SEO. Impact is irrelevant.
I also like to use analogies and pop culture references. Both carry inherent risk. Pop culture references can become dated and prose lives or dies by its analogies and, yes, this is highly subjective. An example of competent material with a great analogy (for me) is Threats: What Every Engineer Should Learn From Star Wars. It is solid work but not groundbreaking, elevated by a particularly pedagogical analogy. An example of great material but with a weak analogy is Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. It contains strongly argued ideas but its pedagogical framing is less effective. In one experimental piece, I used Marshall amplification (in Greek) to critique failed product positioning (a force that has killed more technically superior products than almost any other factor in history).
The stage for 2026 is now set.
Athanasios Kostopoulos 