I wrote for years before I found out what I was writing about.

Some Assembly Required started the way most newsletters do. One essay at a time, each one finished, sent and forgotten. Culture, creativity, work, AI. Whatever had my attention that week.

Then I stopped reading them one at a time. I put every essay into a database and read the archive as data. It showed me ideas I'd been circling for years without a name, and ones I'd quietly stopped believing without ever saying so. That's what this site is now.

The journal

Every essay lives here in full. The margin notes are a conversation I've been having with myself: where an essay picks up an older one, where it argues with it, and where my thinking has moved. Read them or switch them off. The essays stand on their own.

The Ledger

The Ledger reads the archive back. It tracks which themes are rising and which are fading, and it files every forward-looking claim as a call, a reading or a position, so somebody can hold me to it later. Usually me. It has an obvious flaw: the person producing the data is the person interpreting it. I'd rather show the flaw than hide it.

Who's writing

I'm Christopher Smith. Born in 1964, raised in San Francisco and New York, fifteen years in Singapore. Thirty years in advertising, strategy, writing and film taught me what good work costs. The last few taught me how to build the systems that make it.

Where the other work happens

RockPaperScissors is where I do this for companies. I map how creative work actually moves, rebuild it so AI handles the friction and people keep the judgment, and build the tools the new way runs on. The journal is where I work things out. RockPaperScissors is where I put them to work.

I sit on the board of IAA Singapore and co-chair its AI Executive Advisory Board. I wrote To Question Is to Answer: How to Think Critically and Thrive in the Age of AI.

The site is unfinished on purpose. So am I.