The Affective Blind Spot: How Support Systems Fail When Incentives Eclipse Care (opens in new tab)

When a support system breaks, its real incentives show. A field report on affective blindness, governance, and why bots escalate hostility but never harm. There is a moment in every system where its true nature reveals itself—not in its marketing copy, not in its onboarding flow, but in the instant something breaks and a human being reaches for help. That moment arrived for me this week on Handshake, a platform explicitly designed for students and alumni. A fraudulent employer slipped through...