About — Our Plain Sight

Our Plain Sight helps you see the quiet machinery being used to divide us — and gives you the small, human countermeasures to take your attention back.

Subscribe if this sounds like you

You've felt it. The conversation with someone you love that turned sharp for no reason you could name. The position you argued passionately and didn't fully hold. The app you closed feeling worse than when you opened it. The thing you shared in a flash of outrage — and an hour later realized you hadn't really read.

That feeling is data. It's pointing at something real, documented, and named.

Our Plain Sight gives you the names. Every week, I take one piece of the machinery that quietly engineers our attention and our divisions — and I show you how it works, what the evidence actually says, and the small, human move that takes your choice back. No doom. No partisanship. No helplessness. Just the patterns, named, so they lose their power.

If you're the kind of person who reads something and immediately wants to talk about it — to push back, add to it, or say yes, exactly, and also — you're already who this is for.

What you'll get

A name for what you've been feeling. Fractionation, the outrage engine, the perception gap, the engineered pause — the documented mechanisms behind the friction, explained in plain language with no jargon barrier.
Evidence, walked through — not name-dropped. When research illuminates how we're being influenced, I show you the study, the number, and what it means for your Tuesday. Honest about what's proven and what isn't.
Small countermeasures that actually work. The antidotes are smaller and more human than the problem: a pause, a better question, a real conversation. Backed by the science, sized for a real life.
Free tools, not just essays. I'm a software engineer. Sometimes I build the thing instead of describing it — like Ragebait Lens, a free, open-source tool that names the manipulation in a feed. More are coming.
A conversation, not a megaphone. I read and reply. I quote, credit, and circulate other people's good thinking. This is our plain sight, not mine.

Roughly two pieces a week. Free to subscribe.

Who's writing this

My name is Sabir. I'm a software engineer — I build apps, tools, and the kinds of recommendation systems and feed algorithms that quietly pre-empt our decisions before we consciously make them.

And I still fell for all of it. Harder than I'd like to admit.

That gap — between knowing how a system works and being immune to it — is what started this. If knowing the mechanism didn't protect me, then this isn't really a technical problem. It's a human one. And the question that pulled me in kept being the same one: Why? Why does this content exist? Why does it make me feel this way? Why am I the target right now? Who benefits from my reaction?

That one word — asked slowly, before reacting, before sharing — is the practice this whole newsletter is built around. It's not a cure. It's a pause. And the pause is where choice re-enters the picture.

What I write about

Four loose categories the writing moves through — a living map, not a cage:

Academia — longer, evidence-grounded pieces. When psychology, behavioral science, or rhetoric reveals something real about how we're influenced, I walk through it carefully and make it accessible.
Contrarian — pieces that complicate comfortable narratives in both directions. Not contrarian for sport — contrarian because easy agreement is often where thinking stops.
Fiction — sometimes a truth lands better sideways. Made-up stories that mean something true.
Personal Dives — first-person essays where the analysis and the confession arrive at the same time.

They blur and link. The spine is always the same question: Why?

Why "Our"

The name is deliberate. Our Plain Sight — because this is a shared space, not a broadcast. I'm one person with a particular background and a particular set of blind spots, writing about systems that are hard to see from inside them. The project gets better the more people are actually in it.

The disconnect patterns we examine work, in part, by keeping us siloed — isolated in our own feeds, never bumping into the careful thinking happening two tabs over. This space is meant to be the opposite of that. Not an echo chamber with good aesthetics — an actual conversation.

If you've written something relevant, or read someone who has, send it. I'll read it, credit it, and put the good ones in front of the people here.

Start here

Subscribe so you don't miss what comes next — not because the list needs your name on it, but because the conversation is better when more careful, curious people are part of it.

Then reply to any email. I read all of them.

Let's keep asking why.

Our Plain Sight is written by Sabir Foux. New pieces publish roughly twice a week.