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Villains plan. Heroes react.
What product teams should borrow from the people who want to take over the world.
This essay did not start in a product review. It started with the smoke.
Every dry season the same places burn. This year the fire came early to Kalimantan, the haze crossed the strait into three neighboring countries, schools moved their hours, and by late August the air in one provincial capital was rated at the level the index reserves for emergencies. The official explanation leads with El Nino. The unofficial explanation is that the same places burn, and afterwards, in the places that burned, something is usually planted.
Read enough of this and you stop seeing a country where things go wrong and start seeing a set of plans that go right. Palm oil that keeps expanding into peat that keeps catching fire. Floods that arrive where the forest used to be. Corruption cases that, read slowly, describe supply chains: who signs, who looks away, who is paid, in what order. Arrangements between people who were supposed to be checking each other. None of it looks like chaos. All of it looks systematic, each with a plan of its own. I read the news the way you watch a heist film. Disgusted, and against my will, impressed.
