Code to Story

or: Field notes from the space between analog and digital

In my day job, I’m a physician in public health and a specialist in medical informatics. In German, I write non-fiction under my real name, and in fiction, I go by the pen name of Jo Koren - a name that lets me wander more freely across imagined futures and layered systems.

This Substack is an attempt to build a bridge between the two: writing in English, somewhere between documentation and dreaming. It’s where research blurs into narrative, and where essays begin to sound like stories.

What to expect

• Essays: on the systems we design, inherit, resist; on the emotional consequences of infrastructure; on the hauntological afterlives of technologies we thought were finished; on narrative as technology.

• Fragments: short field notes, metaphors, and observations you can use to notice your own interaction with systems differently.

If you’re here…

You might be working in tech, health, design, writing. Or somewhere in between, with too many tabs open. Maybe you’re dreaming systems into being, or trying to survive the ones already built.

Either way: welcome.

This Substack will help you see how the systems around you shape your thinking, your work, and your sense of agency - often without you noticing.

This is a place for quiet rebellion, for thinking sideways and remembering what the interface was never built to hold: attention, emotion, ambiguity, human contradiction.