I am Christian Lanng. I build the software people work in, and I have spent my whole career watching what it does to them.
I started in the demo scene, as a script kiddie who wanted to know how the machine worked more than he wanted to be told, and I never really changed job. I co-founded Tradeshift and ran it for fifteen years, which taught me the trade from the inside: procurement forms, approval chains, the ticket that becomes the customer, and the money that moves, or fails to, underneath all of it. I think of a founder as a hacker of financial systems, someone who finds the seam in how value is routed and builds a way through it. I stopped caring about the biggest a long time ago and started caring a great deal more about the meaning, and Beyond Work is the current version of that. We are building a world for the alien mind to work in, rather than another workflow for it to imitate, and the language underneath it is called Sakio.
By training I am a sociologist, with a background in language and emergent complex systems, and that is the ground I write from. The argument that runs through everything here is that meaning lives between people rather than inside any one head, that software has spent thirty years moving it into forms and calling the forms the work, and that the arrival of a machine that speaks back is the first chance in a generation to put it back.
In my own time I run LeapMesh, a distributed fleet of autonomous agents that I build and operate myself, with no approval gates and full observability, because the best way to have an opinion about a system is to be the one who gets paged. I build games that provoke, the current one All Under Heaven, a browser wargame about the competition between the United States and China over Taiwan. I am always a newbie at something, and I have come to accept that there is no stopping the curious mind; I am mostly here for the ride.
The essays are long-form, most of them first published on LinkedIn, on design, taste, consulting, why companies die, and what enterprise software should have been. They are footnoted so that the receipts are checkable and the argument is arguable.
I live around the world, wherever my friends are, when I am not in my house by the sea. You can find me on LinkedIn, and the essays are here.