“System of Systems”
summary
Design systems inherit history and incentives: mortgages originate as a death-pledge system used to trade enslaved people; plantation ledgers become timetracking, tasking and managerial tools still echoed in modern product analytics; companies like Aetna and New York Life trace wealth to that trade; S&P 500 CEOs average $14.5M (287:1 worker ratio). A concrete bug: Tiny Faces uses the Facebook API mapping where gender true/false omits nonbinary (null) so libraries produce only men/women. Start by chasing the money that benefits from your components, audit gender fields and dropdown ordering, and remove exclusionary atoms while organizing workplace power (unionize, follow marginalized creators).
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chapters (27)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:17Hedra Helix
- 3:15Invasive species
- 11:24death pledge Mortgage
- 12:42Slavery of the South
- 13:06Civil War was not about slavery
- 13:34Slavery of the North
- 15:51undocumented wealth
- 16:052019
- 17:40Thomas Affleck
- 18:03Cotton Plantation Record & Account Book
- 18:52Reorgs Timed meals Breastfeeding
- 19:17The Farmers' Record & Account Book
- 19:56Employee of the Month
- 20:30Tools of exploitation
- 20:45Riche$t Richie Riche$ Richer
- 24:02Intent does not erase impact.
- 24:18Building Socially-Inclusive Design Systems
- 25:38Positive feedback loop
- 26:03Our society hates transgender and nonbinary people.
- 26:27Trans Black women
- 27:40Tech multiplies building hate at scale.
- 27:59Sequoiadendron giganteum
- 30:57We must cut off the sunlight to the vitriolic vines of hate.
- 31:531619 PROJECT
- 32:31an invitation to reframe how the country discusses the role and history of its Black citizens
- 34:25Learn from our fallen ancestors.








