Current project — Investigation in progress

The Machine Age

An in-depth investigation into how automated systems are reshaping work, power, and privacy — reported town by town, shift by shift, contract by contract.

Factory aisle with conveyors — The road kit: every system has an address, and addresses have to be visited.

Towns on the map

200+

Interviews planned

2027

Publication target

What the project is

The Machine Age is a multi-year reporting project on automation's second wave: not the factory robots of the last decade, but the quieter systems now scheduling shifts, screening hires, scoring tenants, and routing care. The technology is newer; the questions are older than the steam engine.

Each chapter centres on one place — a warehouse county, a hospital network, a port city — and follows the system from procurement memo to human consequence.

Behind every automated decision there is still a room where someone signed a contract. I go to the room.

What's included

The project so far

Long-form chapters pairing documents with on-the-ground narrative.
A public records library: every contract cited, published in full.
Portraits of the fixers — the workers adapting systems from below.
A closing essay on what democratic oversight could actually look like.

Method

Slow by design. Months per chapter, records before interviews, and a standing rule: no system is described without visiting the building where its decisions land. Companies and agencies get full right of reply, printed verbatim where it matters.

Man writing in a notebook at a desk — Transcripts become chapters at this desk — slowly, and twice-checked.

Follow along

Field notes appear quarterly in the column; the book follows in 2027. Editors interested in excerpts, or readers with a tip from inside one of these systems, are warmly invited to write.

Tips and excerpts

Work inside one of these systems? Or want first refusal on a chapter? Write in confidence.

Get in touch