Writing
Writing
I have written two books and I keep writing essays. One book goes straight at the AI question. The other tells my years in security as fiction, which turned out to be the only honest way to write them, and the essays are where I think something through before I am certain enough to put it in a book.
Books
The Split Problem
Why we cannot tell if AI is conscious
A governance book that takes philosophy seriously enough to get the foundations right, built on one diagnostic instrument: the difference between saying a system processes information in consciousness-like ways and claiming it possesses consciousness.
When we say an AI system is conscious we could mean two entirely different things, and nearly everyone confuses them. The adjective describes what a system does, that it processes information in consciousness-like ways. The noun claims what a system is, that it possesses consciousness. That confusion is not academic. It is shaping governance frameworks, distorting risk assessments, derailing regulatory conversations, and creating liability exposure that boards and senior executives are not equipped to evaluate.
The book introduces one diagnostic instrument, the adjective/noun test, and applies it across eighteen chapters and ten operational domains, among them cybersecurity governance, corporate liability, labour policy, financial regulation, education, clinical care, military procurement and intellectual property. Each domain chapter ends with a framework a decision-maker can extract and use.
Quill House Press / 2026
The Hacker's Letters
A fictional memoir
A hacker who once strung encrypted tunnels across collapsing borders sets down the whole confession, in letters to the brother he could never face.
Once he was an operator, a hacker who strung encrypted tunnels across collapsing borders, restoring the signals that kept forgotten people alive. He told himself the network was neutral, that morality could be measured in uptime. Then a lifeline he built in the ruins of Region Nine was traced through the very packets meant to protect it, and two families paid for his certainty with their lives.
Fourteen years later he keeps the same room he has always kept: three walls painted almost black, the blinds closed, screens glowing in the dark. He built it to hide from a single question, who are you, and from the answer he has never been able to give. Now, in letters to the brother he could never face, he sets down the whole confession: the missions, the fractured marriage, the mentor who taught him that trust was never mathematics, and the slow discovery that when machines do all our verifying for us, presence becomes the last uncompressible thing.
It is a fictional memoir about faith and surveillance, guilt and continuity. About what it means to keep transmitting into the dark when no reply is coming, and to believe that some signals refuse deletion.
Quill House Press / 2026
Essays
The essays are on Substack and they stay there. I write about AI governance, security leadership and the regulatory ground both of them now stand on, and I write when a question comes up in the work rather than to a schedule.
Next step
Book a call
A thirty minute call to establish what you are exposed to and whether an engagement is worth running.