Seminars
The twelve-week teaching schedule: what happens in each seminar, what to prepare, and what leaves the room.
The internal collection and URL stay sessions. Set the visible singular and plural names once in src/site-config.ts and use the language your course deserves everywhere readers see it.
What would it mean to lose a capability
Losing a capability is not the same as losing its records, and the distinction is the whole course.
Week 1 · 22 February 2027
The knowledge that isn't written
Polanyi, and Collins' TEA laser: nobody built one from the published papers, it took contact with a lab where one already worked.
Week 2 · 1 March 2027
Records without capability
Documentation is a description of a practice, not a substitute for it. Completeness is not sufficiency.
Week 3 · 8 March 2027
FOGBANK
A production line stopped, the paperwork survived, and the material could not be remade. An impurity nobody had recorded turned out to be doing work.
Week 4 · 15 March 2027
The F-1 engine
NASA held the drawings and still reverse-engineered its own engines from museum hardware. What was missing had never been on paper.
Week 5 · 22 March 2027
Loss by design
Braverman and Zuboff: deskilling is often a decision, not an accident. Some capabilities are given away on purpose.
Week 6 · 29 March 2027
Skill decay under automation
Bainbridge's ironies: the more reliable the automation, the more the operator's skill decays, exactly where it is needed.
Week 7 · 5 April 2027
Buying it back
Reinstatement has a price, and the US Naval Academy's return to celestial navigation is a rare chance to read the invoice.
Week 8 · 12 April 2027
Contested losses
Damascus steel and Stradivari varnish are claims, not facts. How to assess an assertion that something was lost at all.
Week 9 · 19 April 2027
Detection
Every case so far was diagnosed in retrospect. What would evidence of a loss in progress look like?
Week 10 · 26 April 2027
The live case
Generative models and knowledge work, read through weeks 1–10. The framework is the argument; the course does not supply the verdict.
Week 11 · 3 May 2027
Seminar
Student cases, and revision.
Week 12 · 10 May 2027