Library
Books and field guides
Everything I publish in long form, in one place: the books, on who owns memory and what that decides about the future, and the field guides, free architecture monographs for people who build systems in government and regulated industries.
Books
Who Owns Memory
Who Owns Memory Owns the Future: Power, Knowledge, and Imagination from Fire to Mars
Paperback and KindleAmazon EbookGoogle PlayEnglish edition · 114 pages · 2026
Essay · English
Every civilisation has been shaped by who controlled its memory: the fire that kept a story alive, the scribe, the printing press, the database, the model. This short book follows that thread from the first hearth to the plans for Mars and asks the question that sits under every current debate about data, AI and sovereignty: whoever owns memory decides what can be imagined next. Written from thirty years inside the systems that remember on our behalf, it is an argument for taking that ownership seriously before someone else does.
The Italian Original
Chi possiede la memoria possiede il futuro: Potere, conoscenza e immaginazione dal fuoco a Marte
PaperbackAmazon EbookKindleItalian edition · 98 pages · 2026
Saggio · Italiano
The book was written in Italian first, and this is that text: the same journey from fire to Mars, in the language it was thought in. Readers who move between the two editions will notice that a few arguments land differently in Italian, where the vocabulary of memory and power carries a longer history. For Italian readers this is the edition to start with; the English one is a translation, not a rewrite.
Field guides · Real-World Architectures
One Citizen, Dozens of Systems
Volume 1 · 37 pages · Free
Field guide · Vol. 1
Banks, insurers and public administrations hold the same person in dozens of systems that rarely agree, and every attempt to reconcile them at query time eventually collapses under its own joins. This guide shows how to build a Single View that survives production: an entity-centric model, explicit rules for which source wins, and the governance that makes the result trustworthy rather than merely complete. The hard part, it argues, is not storage but trust.
Documents That Remember
Document Management: Metadata-Driven Search over Documents and Records
Read onlineField guide Free downloadPDFVolume 2 · Free
Field guide · Vol. 2
Most organisations do not have a document problem; they have a metadata problem. Contracts, case files and records pile up in repositories that can store anything and find almost nothing, while retention rules and legal holds are enforced by hand, if at all. This guide describes a document platform where search is driven by governed metadata, retention and legal hold are properties of the record rather than afterthoughts, and the archive stays answerable to auditors and citizens alike.