I am Michael Gale - Lachlan and Indy's dad. That is the whole introduction, and it is the one I am most comfortable with.
There are other titles available. I have collected a fair number over the years and still hold a few, but I have never been easy with leading on them. A person introduced by their titles arrives pre-explained - and most of what this site argues is that nobody should. The roles will turn up in these pages where they carry weight. They do not need to stand at the front door.
My life has moved through boardrooms, triathlon seasons (a love, not a label), disability systems, school governance, family care, public bureaucracy, and the private work of trying to understand why people become who they become.
The Human Algorithm is where those threads meet.
Why this project
I have lived inside enough systems - corporate, financial, educational, medical, bureaucratic - to know them from several angles at once: as someone who operated them, someone who survived them, someone who benefited from them, and someone who has watched them fail the people I love most.
My son is a high-support, non-speaking autistic child. Walking beside him through the disability and education systems of this country has been the most demanding education of my life. It taught me, more thoroughly than any book, that the explanations we are offered for human struggle are usually too small - and that the smallness is not an accident. Individual explanations are cheaper than structural ones.
My own late autism diagnosis reframed forty-odd years of history in a single afternoon. Things I had filed under personal failure turned out to be the predictable output of a particular nervous system meeting particular environments. That experience is not the project. But it is part of why the project exists: I know, from the inside, what it is to mistake a patterned outcome for a personal defect.
Where the work points
This work is grounded in lived experience, but it aims outward - toward systems, responsibility, institutions, and repair. I am not interested in confession for its own sake, and this is not a recovery story. The personal material appears here only when it carries weight the abstract argument cannot.
I am not building an audience for its own sake either. I am trying to build a durable intellectual and civic base: a place to think in public, write submissions worth reading, support advocacy worth doing, and develop an argument over years rather than news cycles.
If something here is useful to your family, your institution, or your thinking, that is the point of putting it in public.