Dear Aunt Martha, Today would have been your 100th birthday. I hope it finds you singing songs to Jesus with the heavenly choir, like you always said you wanted to. It took us a couple of days after the storm hit to clear the road well enough to get to the house. By then, FEMA had switched from rescue to recovery. The river had gone back to where it belonged, leaving tons of silt and a few bodies behind. We found that young couple from upriver, their dog, and the baby huddled together still inside their expensive new Jeep lodged between the outcroppings at the fishing hole. It wasn’t pretty. Caleb said he thought you died before the storm hit. You were in your chair on the porch with your Bible in your lap and the house had not been prepped for weather. Widows were open, and some rain had blown in, but the old place had not been damaged. Patches was in the middle of your bed with a new litter of kittens. Some civil engineer with a Yankee accent kept walking around the place muttering to himself. When I asked him what was wrong, he went on and on about how great-grandpa had built it to cooperate with nature instead of dominating it and ranted about the hubris of the construction industry. Caleb spit tobacco juice on the ground and said, “Maybe this time you damned flatlanders will learn a thing or two.” Feelings are still running high in the valley 5 years after the hurricane. People grumble that the big tourist towns got most of the help and some are still living in temporary trailers. These old mountains still grab the clouds and squeeze them, reminding too many of what it was like before what we thought would last forever was blown away. It’s raining today, the same steady, hypnotic drizzle that set in before the hurricane came along. Everyone in the neighborhood has a radio tuned to the weather channel now and they get nervous whenever they hear thunder. They finally finished rebuilding the bridge and we can get back and forth into town quicker than taking the detour through Dutch Falls . I quit my job in California and moved into the cabin as soon as the courts said it was legally mine, but it took a while. I haven’t finished unpacking yet. Thank you for remembering me in your will. I was away too long. I didn’t realize how much I had changed until I was buying gas at a convenience store in town. The kid behind the register gave me the side-eye, up and down look before saying, “You ain’t from around here, are ya?” His attitude changed when I told him who my grandparents were. But I’m not so sure if I fit in anymore. I hadn’t seen Caleb since before I left, when I met up with him to get to your place after the storm he said, “You put on shoes and went to town, didn’t ya? I hope ya didn’t get too big for your raising.” Since moving back to the valley I’ve been faced with ingrained attitudes inherited from family about those who are different and unfamiliar. I thought they had been erased until I came back to my “roots.” It hit home. People in these hills remember history. To many post Civil War Reconstruction was yesterday. Family karma is passed down in subtle, social ways, too often unconscious until we take active measures to uncover them. It’s not easy and most folk don’t want to spend the time and energy to do it. I thought leaving would fix things. I had to manufacture anger like most young people do and I don’t think I ever fully separated. Life felt claustrophobic and I was not ready to marry a local boy and start spitting out babies. I wanted more glamour and excitement than that, yet your letters and care packages were my secret comforts. I reminisced about the hills under a pen name and managed to survive college by waiting tables. A PhD, three husbands, and a career teaching never filled the empty spaces in my heart. When I traveled for book tours, spending large amounts of time in cities up north and out west, I resented being treated like an exhibit in a zoo. It sometimes came in hand to have people automatically subtract 30 points from my IQ as soon as I opened my mouth. Most often it came from the “professionals”, the educated social climbers, I encountered. They have asked me whether we wear shoes where I come from and if the movie, Deliverance, was a true story. Some dared ask if I belong to the Ku Klux Klan. Gentrification is coming into these old backwaters much too fast. I was hoping it would take much longer for the tourists to find us. Last time I saw Caleb, he said that his bull had cornered a group of hikers up into some trees at the edge of the pasture. Apparently, they didn’t read the no-trespassing signs. Edith Hartwell caught a SUV with Florida plates parked beside her garden and a couple of strangers helping themselves to the corn and tomatoes. Locals won’t shop at the old store across the valley anymore since the Wilsons sold it to those people from up north. Last I heard they were opening branches in larger towns and selling nostalgia along with the horehound candy, fishing rods, and cast -iron pans. I find myself walking in the space between being a local and an outsider. I became “gentrified” through education and experience and no longer fit into a defined tribe. I think Caleb is still mad at me because I refused to marry him straight out of high school, but it’s good to see that he found a nice wife and sturdy children. Somewhere along the way I became a Zen student and I wonder how my practice will fit into my new lifestyle. Should I turn the farm into a retreat space or monastery? That feels too much like how the Wilson’s treated the old store. Thanks to Zoom, I can continue meeting with Roshi and the sangha as long as a bird doesn’t light onto one of the wires or a squirrel doesn’t short out a transformer. I could ramble on for hours and too many pages, but the sun is going down and I need to feed the chickens. Patches’ progeny are nagging me for their gushy food and I’m hungry. Instead of sitting on the porch with a Bible, I sit in your chair with a sutra or a koan. There’s not much difference between the two. I hope your celestial choir practice goes well and you get a break to peek down over the edge of a cloud once in a while to check on me. Much love, more later. Geneva

A retro-styled wristwatch, a Timex T-80 Digital watch, Pelikan, Waterman and Conklin Fountain Pens.

I've posited elsewhere that I have become something of a “techno curmudgeon” — that is someone who has serious reservations about technology, and therefore has adopted older technology. And yes, that is one possible connection between Fountain Pens and Wristwatches, but there is something else that I feel connects them, and other things that I am interested in.

So, I am not certain if this will be a series of posts or not, but sometimes I think there are things that are connected in non-obvious ways. And, hopefully those connections are worthwhile examining.

Necessities Turned Luxuries

While it is quite a niche item these days, when people think of Fountain Pens, they most likely think of Montblanc. Maybe Pelikan, or possibly Conway Stewart. Wristwatches are a little less niche, but most people are still likely to think of luxury brands: Rolex, Omega, Patek Philippe, possibly Audemars Piguet or Cartier.

But there was a time when these items weren't luxuries, and it wasn't all that long ago. That's what I want to talk about just a bit.

When Fountain Pens Were Essential

Fountain pens were pretty essential items up to around the invention of the ballpoint pen. Brands like Waterman, Parker, and Conklin were some of the most recognized in the world. These weren't the luxury items they would become.

The invention of the ballpoint pen can be traced back to John Loud's 1888 patent. However, the initial design for a ballpoint pen were not commercially successful. The primary idea was that a ball-and-socket would be used to deliver ink to a surface. Loud's primary motivation for this design was to be able to write on rough surfaces that a fountain pen was not capable of handling. However, the design proved too rough to use on paper, and so it wasn't a viable product.

It wouldn't be until Laszlo Biro and his brother Gyrogy were able to perfect the formulation of ink, and make it work with the ball-and-socket mechanism for the modern ballpoint pen to be invented. This was in 1943, which, of course was during World War II. It wasn't until after the war that these pens started to proliferate.

Prior to the invention of the Biro (and later Cristal) pen, fountain pens were the primary writing tool.

When Watches Were Essential

The history of mechanical wristwatches is a little more complicated. It wasn't until the 17th century that the hairspring was invented, which led to the creation of reasonably accurate timekeeping devices in the 18th century. However, aside from some particular uses, the modern wristwatch really didn't become a common item until the 20th century. What about the 19th century? Men mostly carried pocket (or fob) watches, which wristwatches were for women.

However, in the 1970 there was a new type of wristwatch: the quartz wristwatch. First brought to market by Seiko on January 31st, 1969 with the Astron, quartz wristwatches quickly started eroding the mechanical watch market. And about a decade later, quartz digital watches would become a new, futuristic force in wristwatches. This disruption to the market forced many mechanical watchmakers out of business, while those that survived found themselves moving into the luxury category.

Brands like Seiko, Citizen, Casio, Timex and Armitron became some of the biggest names in watches during this period in the United States. And they still are today, although the invention of cellphones and smartwatches has largely supplanted both the mechanical and quartz watch industries.

However, the interesting side to this is quartz and digital watches have not completely moved into the luxury market segment the way mechanical watches have. Many of the brands known for their quartz watches offer a range of items from everyday watches, all the way to luxury watches.

Conclusion

I think it's interesting that the items that were at one time essential, but now are seen as either obsolete or luxury items have been making something of a comeback. Don't get me know, I have no illusion that they will ever return to the prominence they had during the 18th-20th centuries. But, it seems as time and technology marches along in the 21st century there are more people looking back to the past technology, and picking up on the items that were essential and embracing them again.

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Categories: #Essays Tags: #watches, #wristwatches, #FountainPens, #technology, #time License: Copyright Unattributed. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0.

17 July 2026

“The Moon” by David Berman

The Moon

A web of sewer, pipe, and wire connects each house to the others.

In 206 a dog sleeps by the stove where a small gas leak causes him to have visions; visions that are rooted in nothing but gas.

Next door, a man who has decided to buy a car part by part excitedly unpacks a wheel and an ashtray.

He arranges them every which way. It's really beginning to take shape.

Out the garage window he sees a group of ugly children enter the forest. Their mouths look like coin slots.

A neighbor plays keyboards in a local cover band. Preparing for an engagement at the high school prom,

they pack their equipment in silence.

Last night they played the Police Academy Ball and all the officers slow-danced with target range silhouettes.

This year the theme for the prom is the Tetragrammaton.

A yellow Corsair sails through the disco parking lot and swaying palms presage the lot of young libertines.

Inside the car a young lady wears a corsage of bullet-sized rodents. Her date, the handsome cornerback, stretches his talons over the molded steering wheel.

They park and walk into the lush starlit gardens behind the disco just as the band is striking up.

Their keen eyes and ears twitch. The other couples look beautiful tonight. They stroll around listening to the brilliant conversation. The passionate speeches.

Clouds drift across the silverware. There is red larkspur, blue gum, and ivy. A boy kneels before his date.

And the moon, I forgot to mention the moon.

Wassermelone – 10. Juli

Heute hatte ich einen sehr ruhigen Tag, und nach den gestrigen Emotionen war das sehr erleichternd. Unsere Kollegin Constanze hat eine schöne Wassermelone ins Büro mitgebracht und sie mit selbst angebauter Pfefferminze vorbereitet. Das war eine sehr schöne Entdeckung. Ich mag Wassermelonen sehr, aber sie sind etwas kompliziert fürs Essen vorzubereiten. Deswegen fand ich es eine sehr schöne Idee, die geschnittenen Stücke mit frischer Pfefferminze zu mischen, sodass sie noch einen frischen Geruch bekommen.

Der Sommer ist für mich mit einigen traditionellen Sachen verbunden, unter denen die wichtigsten Schwimmen im See, Eis und Wassermelone sind. Das Meer gehört für mich nicht so selbstverständlich zum Sommer wie genug Wassermelone und Schwimmen im See. Und da Schwimmen für mich hier noch nicht so erreichbar ist, esse ich fast täglich Wassermelone! Wenigstens eines der wichtigen Elemente für einen perfekten Sommer ist damit aktiviert.

Fast jeden Tag kaufe ich hier eine kleine Wassermelone und habe im Hotel mein wunderschönes Ritual: im Sessel sitzen und diesen sommerlichen Prozess genießen! Man muss ständig die Wassermelone schneiden und essen und schneiden ... Die Hände sind nass und klebrig, der Bauch voller Flüssigkeit, und das Beste ist, dass diese Freude sogar im Hotelzimmer erreichbar ist! Einen großen Teller und ein Messer haben wir inzwischen auch. Außer Sandwiches und Wassermelone haben wir hier keine weiteren kulinarischen Besonderheiten.

Da ich heute schon so detailliert auf kulinarische Freuden und Herausforderungen eingegangen bin, muss ich noch hinzufügen, dass für einen echten Litauer das Leben ohne normales Brot sehr schwierig ist! Wir haben in Litauen eine ganz bestimmte Brotsorte, die international nicht unbedingt so verbreitet ist. Unser traditionelles Brot ist dunkel und hat einen starken Geruch und Geschmack. Hier kann man in den Läden natürlich auch Brot finden, auch ganz dunkles, aber es riecht nicht so ... Nicht so litauisch.

Wir haben auch ziemlich hohe Anforderungen nicht nur an dunkles, sondern auch an weißes Brot, das ebenfalls schön und frisch riechen muss. Hier in Berlin finde ich meistens geruchloses Brot, und das ist für mich ungefähr dasselbe, als würde ein Mensch ohne Intonation und Emotionen sprechen.

Also vermisse ich das Brot! Aber noch nicht so stark. Besonders im Sommer, wenn es so viele Wassermelonen gibt.

Übrigens muss ich hinzufügen, dass ich auch viele andere essbare Vorteile hier in Deutschland sehr schön finde und zu schätzen weiß. Erstens ist es hier beliebt, dieses halbgebackene Brot zu verkaufen, das man zu Hause selbst fertigbacken kann, und das finde ich sehr schön. Natürlich nicht für jemanden, der im Hotel lebt, aber grundsätzlich muss man sich darüber wirklich freuen.

Außerdem gibt es hier eine große Auswahl an leckeren vegetarischen Produkten, die in Litauen nicht so vielfältig ist. Angefangen bei allen möglichen vegetarischen Würstchen bis hin zu veganem Käse, Lachs und vielem anderen.

Meine Assistenten sind allerdings sehr klug und können diese vegetarischen Produkte sofort unterscheiden. Mindaugas sagte zum Beispiel, dass eine Sorte Würstchen genauso riecht wie die „echten“ Fleischwürstchen. Aber nicht für Begemotas und Pipiras. Ich versuchte, beide mit meinen Leckereien zu verwöhnen, aber sie wollten sie nicht einmal nehmen. Also sind sie beim Essen wohl eher Mindaugas' Freunde.

Noch eine schöne Sache: Hier in Schöneweide gibt es ein sehr gutes Burger-Café! Oder vielleicht eine Burgerei? Wenn wir eine Wäscherei und eine Bäckerei haben, dann können wir doch auch Burgerei sagen? Auf jeden Fall haben wir am Abend einen Burger mit Halloumi probiert, und der war viel besser als diese geschmacklosen Burger von McDonald's!

Am Wochenende werde ich sehr wenig machen, mich vielleicht nur ein bisschen mit meinem Schreiben beschäftigen und noch mit meinen iMovie-Studien. Und nächste Woche ist unser Büro im Urlaub, aber ich werde trotzdem manchmal hierherkommen, weil das Internet nur hier wirklich gut funktioniert. Im Hotel haben wir damit auch einige Herausforderungen.

Aber dort, wo es gute Burger, eine gute Eismanufaktur und noch dazu funktionierendes Internet gibt, kann ich auch lernen und arbeiten!

You fan my fire. You have access to my love and passion. You flaunt me in front of your peers. You benefit and feed off my energy. You love the idea of me. But when it counts, you bail out. You run away. You don’t have the capacity to match my depth. I find myself frustrated and unfulfilled. A relationship with you is transactional. I look back. It has always been that way.

It’s been a while since I’ve written something of substance I feel like so I guess today is that day. I feel like I’m more and more coming towards the conclusion that I am not really interested in K In the way that I would hope I would be for a partner and I know that my brain can be irrational and I’m kind of feeling a little bit low right now and so I’m not rushing to anything and I’m waiting for my therapy session to talk friends and such, but I feel like she hasn’t even done anything to egregiously wrong, but there’s just enough things that I realize it isn’t really what I’m looking for. I really dislike the fact that I just am not attracted to her in the way that I thought I was if I’m being honest. We went to the waterpark for our first day and I just didn’t really find myself attracted to her. I also thought she was a more confident person on first impression and more extroverted, but as I got to know her a little bit more, I recognize from the things that she said how she does still struggle with insecurities, and generally isn’t that extroverted or social. And I recognize that in my mind it more drifts towards Oh. I can fix that rather than it be something where I feel like wow that’s like admirable and I would like to be more like that. I also feel like she heavily depends on the friend group that she has, and that’s kind of it. She’s also pretty introverted according to her and doesn’t feel like that up with the kind of person that is best for me. I also feel like she is trying hard to get me to like her, which is nice, but at the same time it feels like it’s almost like she feels like I’m out of her league. And I kind of feel that way in someway. And I feel like myself I am settling for someone that is a really bad sign, enough for me to seriously reconsider everything. Especially this early on. I know that I’m also just not really feeling good so everything would be great, but I find myself almost avoiding her texts or dreading them. I find myself thinking about Moore and More how I can reject her or let her down easily with the minimal amount of pain to her. And I find more and more reasons to call it off rather than to continue. I think I will go on a second date, but I really don’t know if I see this as a relationship.

It sucks both because I feel bad for her, because I think she is really cool and personality wise. I think we get along pretty well, but I just can’t help myself from not really feeling attracted to her or being interested in her in that way. And I wish I could, but at the same time I still feel like I’m settling, and I feel like it would be one of those things where I would feel like I am punching down in someway. I just feel like if I have the option to swap lives with her I would never make that choice. And I feel like the fact that I don’t even consider that for a second makes me concerned. And I feel like a shitty person, even though I know that I’m kind of writing this to no one, but it really does feel like I am out of her league. I hate how much I’m stating that, but I guess it’s because I feel like I haven’t yet found the words to convey it in a way that I feel happy with. And I feel really vain and shallow, but I just don’t find myself interested in her, and it feels more like she is someone who wouldn’t really have a separate life aside for me that I would find fascinating. I feel like she meets a lot of the criteria for some of the basics I’m looking for, like kindness, a level of independence, and humor to some extent. But when I think about someone coming along in the future, that really does line up with a lot of the things that I want rather than the necessities, I feel like I would want to be with them rather than my existing partner if I decided to date K. And that is fucked up and not the kind of situation I would want to be in, and the fact that I don’t feel like K is that person to begin with is enough of an indication that I should listen to that. I still want to at least go in a second date and talk with my therapist, of course, but I feel like I’m more and more making up my mind.

Freundinnen & Freunde der Weisheit! Entscheidungen zu treffen ist nicht immer einfach. Oft stellt sich im Nachhinein heraus, dass wir uns geirrt haben. Solche eigenen Fehlentscheidungen nehmen wir jedoch weniger schlimm wahr als solche, die wir aufgrund schlechter Ratschläge von aussen treffen. Wie können wir also „besser” entscheiden?

Eine Studie der Cornell University zeigt, dass Menschen sich tendenziell schlechter fühlen, wenn sie aufgrund von Ratschlägen falsche Entscheidungen treffen, als wenn sie auf eigene Faust eine schlechte Wahl treffen. Die Forscher wollten herausfinden, ob Menschen mehr Reue empfinden, wenn sie falsche Entscheidungen aufgrund externer Ratschläge treffen, oder ob sie sich bei eigenen Fehlentscheidungen eher mit Pech abfinden. Das Ergebnis: Wer auf seinen eigenen Instinkt hört, fühlt sich langfristig besser – selbst wenn die Entscheidung nicht zum gewünschten Ergebnis führt.

Die Studie ergab, dass Menschen, die nach einem schlechten Rat eine ungünstige Entscheidung trafen, häufiger Reue empfanden, während diejenigen, die ohne äusseren Einfluss falsch entschieden, dies eher auf Zufall oder Pech zurückführten. Die Forscher betonen, dass es wichtig sei, den eigenen Überzeugungen zu folgen und Ratschläge kritisch zu hinterfragen. Viele Menschen nehmen an, dass ein Rat von aussen die Verantwortung mindert – tatsächlich fühlen sie sich aber schlechter, wenn sie sich gegen ihr eigenes Bauchgefühl entscheiden.

Die Autoren empfehlen eine dreiteilige Strategie für bessere Entscheidungen: Erstens sollte man die eigene Kompetenz einschätzen und überlegen, ob man in einem bestimmten Bereich über fundiertes Wissen verfügt. Zweitens ist es entscheidend, zu prüfen, ob der Rat von einer kompetenten und gut informierten Person stammt, die die eigene Situation richtig versteht. Drittens sollte man den Wert der Entscheidung selbst hinterfragen – wenn es um Kleinigkeiten geht, lohnt sich ein intensives Abwägen oft nicht. Letztlich stärkt es die eigene Zufriedenheit, die Verantwortung für Entscheidungen selbst zu übernehmen und dabei auf die eigene Intuition zu vertrauen.

Denkanstoss zum Wochenbeginn

„Wer nur redet, bringt sich um das grosse Vergnügen, zu schweigen.“ – W. Somersett Maugham (1874–1965)

ProductivityPorn-Tipp der Woche: Produktives Prokrastinieren

Wenn Du schon prokrastinierst, dann sinnvoll! Nutze diese Zeit für kleinere, weniger anspruchsvolle Aufgaben, anstatt ziellos durch Social Media zu scrollen.

Aus dem Archiv: Die radikale Tugend der Gelassenheit

Kaum ist das Handy entsperrt, prasseln sie auf uns ein: Nachrichten, Meinungen, Bilder, Konflikte. Was als kurzer Blick auf die Uhr begann, endet oft in einem rastlosen Zappen durch Krisen, Konflikte und Konsum. Zwischen Schlagzeilen, Mitteilungen und algorithmisch kuratierten Ablenkungen verliere ich leicht das Gefühl für das, was mir wirklich wichtig ist. Der Tag beginnt im Reizmodus – und nicht selten bleibt er dort. In solchen Momenten spüre ich, wie weit ich von dem entfernt bin, was ich eigentlich suche: einen ruhigen, klaren Blick – kurz: Gelassenheit. Doch was heisst das eigentlich? Und wie kann man sie finden, ohne sich in Gleichgültigkeit zu verlieren?

weiterlesen …

Vielen Dank, dass Du Dir die Zeit genommen hast, diesen Newsletter zu lesen. Ich hoffe, die Inhalte konnten Dich inspirieren und Dir wertvolle Impulse für Dein (digitales) Leben geben. Bleib neugierig und hinterfrage, was Dir begegnet!

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EpicMind – Weisheiten für das digitale Leben „EpicMind“ (kurz für „Epicurean Mindset“) ist mein Blog und Newsletter, der sich den Themen Lernen, Produktivität, Selbstmanagement und Technologie widmet – alles gewürzt mit einer Prise Philosophie.

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Disclaimer Teile dieses Texts wurden mit Deepl Write (Korrektorat und Lektorat) überarbeitet. Für die Recherche in den erwähnten Werken/Quellen und in meinen Notizen wurde NotebookLM von Google verwendet. Das Artikel-Bild wurde mit ChatGPT erstellt und anschliessend nachbearbeitet.

Topic #Newsletter

Hay personas que nacen con muy poco y, aun así, pasan la vida regalando mucho.

Mi abuelita fue una de ellas. Se llamó Pilar Deleón.

Nació en la generación de 1926 en El Salvador, una época en la que la pobreza no era una excepción, sino el paisaje cotidiano. Creció en Santiago Texacuango, entre carencias, con muy pocas oportunidades y sin aprender a leer ni a escribir. Desde los siete años fue abandonada a su suerte en el centro de San Salvador, porque su familia no podía mantenerla a ella y otra hermana en casa. Supongo que así se hacía en ese tiempo, me toca suponer porque ella no podía hablar del tema sin llorar.

La vida no le dio comodidad, pero le enseñó una fortaleza silenciosa. Nunca tuvo grandes bienes. Su riqueza era otra.

Era el plato de comida que siempre aparecía cuando uno llegaba a su casa. Eran los cuentos que parecían infinitos, a pesar de no poder leer. Era el cariño que hacía sentir importante a cualquiera de sus nietos, mis hermanos Claudia y Nelsón. Y, cuando podía, hasta sacaba unas monedas de donde parecía imposible para dárnoslas con una sonrisa.

Hoy, de adulto, entiendo que ese dinero no era poco porque valiera poco. Era enorme porque representaba una parte de todo lo que ella tenía.

La recuerdo sencilla. Sin pretensiones. Sin necesidad de impresionar a nadie. Su vida fue dura, pero nunca permitió que la dureza se convirtiera en amargura. Conservó un corazón generoso hasta el final.

A veces pienso que las personas como ella construyeron este país sin aparecer en los libros de historia. Mujeres que levantaron familias enteras con trabajo, paciencia y un amor que nunca pidió reconocimiento.

Cuando veo esta fotografía no recuerdo la pobreza. Recuerdo la abundancia.

La abundancia de una mesa donde siempre había un espacio para mí.

La abundancia de una infancia llena de cuentos.

La abundancia de un abrazo que hacía sentir que todo iba a estar bien.

Y entiendo que hay personas cuya herencia no se mide en propiedades ni en cuentas bancarias.

Se mide en el tipo de ser humano que ayudaron a formar.

Gracias, abuelita. Porque, sin saber leer un libro, me enseñaste algunas de las lecciones más importantes de la vida.

A veces una canción aparece sin aviso.

No la buscamos. No sabemos todavía qué quiere decirnos. Simplemente comienza a sonar y, de alguna manera, encuentra palabras para algo que nosotros apenas estamos aprendiendo a nombrar.

Eso me pasó con Apocalypse, de Cigarettes After Sex.

La canción comienza con una imagen de destrucción: puentes que se derrumban, ciudades que se convierten en polvo, helicópteros que caen sobre el océano. Todo parece pertenecer al final de una película, a una escena observada desde muy lejos.

Pero quizás no habla del fin del mundo.

Quizás habla del final de un mundo.

Mientras la escuchaba, imaginé a una mujer saliendo de los escombros de una ciudad. No se trata necesariamente de una ciudad real, sino de la vida que conocía: una relación, una época, una versión de sí misma que ya no puede sostenerse.

Todo aquello que alguna vez pareció firme ahora se está deshaciendo.

Hay algo particularmente inquietante en la imagen de alguien que observa y filma la destrucción. Me hizo pensar en la manera en que a veces contemplamos nuestro pasado: repetimos las escenas, volvemos a los mismos recuerdos y tratamos de entender en qué momento comenzó a caer todo.

La ciudad ya desapareció, pero uno continúa mirándola.

Vivir entre las ruinas

El centro emocional de la canción aparece cuando el narrador reconoce que ella lleva demasiado tiempo encerrada y que todavía no puede despedirse.

Me parece que allí está la verdadera dificultad de algunos finales. No siempre basta con que algo termine en la realidad. También tiene que terminar dentro de nosotros.

Podemos alejarnos de un lugar y seguir viviendo mentalmente en él. Podemos aceptar que una relación terminó y continuar conversando con sus fantasmas. Podemos saber que una etapa pasó y, aun así, sentir que una parte de nosotros permanece sentada entre sus ruinas.

Decir adiós no es solamente pronunciar una palabra.

Es aceptar que ya no podemos regresar.

Tal vez por eso la canción no presenta a la mujer como alguien completamente libre. Ella ha logrado salir de algunos escombros, pero todavía lleva consigo aquello que perdió. Su pasado no está intacto, aunque tampoco ha desaparecido por completo.

Se ha convertido en una especie de habitación oscura.

Cruzar mientras sube el agua

Más adelante aparece otra imagen: dos personas tratando de atravesar los ríos mientras el agua comienza a subir.

La escena cambia. Ya no se trata únicamente de observar una ciudad destruida. Ahora hay que moverse.

El agua llega hasta las rodillas. Los recuerdos, el miedo y el dolor amenazan con inmovilizarlo todo. Y en medio de eso, alguien propone cruzar juntos.

Esta parte me parece importante porque el narrador no intenta borrar el pasado de ella. Tampoco le exige que sane de inmediato. No le dice que olvide, que supere o que deje de sentir.

Solamente permanece cerca.

Hay procesos que nadie puede atravesar por nosotros, pero que no tendríamos que atravesar completamente solos. Otra persona no puede reconstruir la ciudad que perdimos, pero puede caminar a nuestro lado mientras buscamos tierra firme.

A veces eso es lo único posible.

Y también es mucho.

Otro lugar donde comenzar

Hacia el final, el narrador promete acercarse cuando ella esté sola y acompañarla cuando se sienta abatida.

No es una promesa de rescate. Al menos yo no la escucho así.

Es una promesa de presencia.

Él no puede cambiar lo que ocurrió ni levantar de nuevo los edificios que cayeron. No puede despedirse en nombre de ella. Pero puede convertirse en otro lugar desde el cual comenzar.

Eso fue lo que más me quedó de la canción.

En ocasiones creemos que empezar de nuevo significa borrar todo lo anterior. Sin embargo, quizá un comienzo nuevo no exige olvidar las ruinas. Quizá consiste en dejar de vivir dentro de ellas.

Salir no significa negar que la ciudad existió.

Significa aceptar que ya no es nuestro hogar.

Hay canciones que llegan solamente para acompañar una tarde. Otras llegan con una precisión extraña y encuentran algo que estaba sucediendo dentro de nosotros sin que lo hubiéramos comprendido por completo.

Apocalypse me hizo pensar en esos momentos en que una parte de la vida se derrumba y todavía no sabemos qué construiremos después. En el tiempo que toma despedirse. En las personas que no nos sacan de las ruinas, pero se quedan cerca mientras aprendemos a caminar entre ellas.

Tal vez por eso algunas canciones sorprenden tanto.

Porque aparecen sin aviso y, durante unos minutos, parecen conocer exactamente el lugar del que estamos tratando de salir.

Suscríbete para recibir las próximas por correo.

What Happens After the Evidence Becomes Personal

A write.as Companion to The Argument for Jesus Christ

There is a moment when the questions stop hiding behind history. The complete case developed in The Argument for Jesus Christ examines the documents, the crucifixion, the burial, the empty tomb, the resurrection appearances, the earliest Christian proclamation, and the explanations offered by believers and skeptics. It asks what most reasonably happened to Jesus of Nazareth after Rome killed Him.

The perspective-shifting implications were explored in the Ghost companion The Resurrection Is Not the Ending You Think It Is, which reframed resurrection as the beginning of new creation rather than an escape from this world. This write.as companion moves somewhere quieter. It enters the private place where a person can find the evidence persuasive and still resist what the conclusion asks of the heart.

Sometimes the deepest barrier to Jesus is not a missing historical answer. It is the fear of being known, corrected, forgiven, or changed. We may say we are waiting for certainty when part of us is waiting for a version of Christianity that will leave our protected life untouched.

Chapter One

When the Question Moves Closer

It is possible to study Jesus without allowing Him to come near.

You can learn the dates.

You can compare the Gospels.

You can examine the differences among the resurrection narratives.

You can read Paul’s letters and recognize that the resurrection proclamation appeared early.

You can consider Peter, James, Mary Magdalene, the Twelve, the larger group, and Paul.

You can decide that conspiracy does not fit.

You can decide survival is historically weak.

You can acknowledge that visions may explain some experiences but struggle to explain the complete pattern without additional assumptions.

You can conclude that resurrection is the most unified explanation if God is allowed to act.

Then you can quietly return to living as though nothing has changed.

That possibility has always unsettled me more than simple unbelief.

Unbelief can be direct.

“I do not think this happened.”

That is a clear position.

But there is another response that sounds like belief while functioning like distance.

“I think Jesus probably rose, but I am not ready to let that conclusion reach this part of my life.”

We rarely say the sentence so plainly.

We continue studying instead.

We ask another question.

We find another debate.

We move from the historical evidence to the manuscript tradition, from the manuscript tradition to church history, from church history to suffering, from suffering to other religions, from other religions to the failures of Christians.

Every subject matters.

Every subject deserves honest thought.

Yet investigation can become a hallway with no door at the end. We keep walking because walking feels safer than arriving.

The resurrection is dangerous because it brings Jesus out of the category of the dead.

A dead teacher can be admired selectively.

We can quote the sayings that comfort us.

We can reinterpret the ones that confront us.

We can place Him beside other wise voices and decide what portions remain useful.

A living Lord does not fit that arrangement.

If Jesus rose, He is not waiting for us to decide how much of Him belongs in our philosophy.

He is asking how much of us belongs to Him.

That is the moment the question moves closer.

It is no longer only, “Did Jesus rise?”

It becomes, “What am I protecting from the risen Jesus?”

Chapter Two

The Part of Me That Wants One More Sign

There is a reasonable desire for evidence.

Christianity makes public claims.

Jesus was crucified under a known Roman governor.

His followers said He was raised.

Paul wrote within the first Christian generation.

The movement placed named people near the origin of its testimony.

These claims should be investigated.

Faith should not be demanded through intimidation, family pressure, or fear.

There is also a way of asking for evidence that no evidence can satisfy.

The standard moves each time it is approached.

If the tomb was empty, perhaps the body was moved.

If the disciples were sincere, perhaps they hallucinated.

If one hallucination cannot explain every claimant, perhaps several different psychological events occurred.

If the belief arose early, perhaps legend developed rapidly.

If the earliest devotion to Jesus was already high, perhaps Jewish followers were capable of extraordinary theological innovation.

Every response remains possible.

History rarely removes every possible alternative.

At some point, the demand for one more sign may no longer be a demand for intellectual honesty.

It may become a request for permission not to decide.

I understand that request.

A final sign would remove responsibility.

If Jesus appeared visibly in the room, if heaven opened, if every doubt vanished, then surrender would feel inevitable. We would not have to choose trust under uncertainty.

But even the Gospels do not describe evidence functioning that way.

People see and misunderstand.

They hear and resist.

They witness unusual acts and assign hostile explanations.

Evidence reveals.

It does not always compel love.

This means the desire for certainty can hide another desire.

I want Jesus to make belief unavoidable so I will not have to admit that trust is involved.

Trust feels vulnerable.

It requires placing weight upon someone outside my control.

I cannot reduce Jesus to a conclusion I own.

The historical case may bring me to the edge, but I must still decide whether He is trustworthy.

That decision is not irrational.

It is the point at which reason becomes personal.

Chapter Three

The Fear That He Will Take Something

People sometimes resist Jesus because they believe Christianity is false.

Others resist because they fear it may be true.

If Jesus is Lord, something will have to change.

Perhaps not everything at once.

Perhaps not in the way a fearful imagination predicts.

But allegiance is never merely decorative.

Jesus may touch the resentment that has become a source of energy.

He may touch the ambition that has become identity.

He may touch the secret habit we call private because private sounds less serious than hidden.

He may touch the political loyalty through which we decide who deserves compassion.

He may touch the relationship we know is built upon dishonesty.

He may touch the money we treat as proof that we are safe.

He may touch the religious identity through which we feel superior to people outside our group.

We can call these concerns intellectual objections.

Sometimes they are.

Sometimes the heart has recognized the cost before the mind is willing to name it.

The fear is not always that Jesus will make life worse.

The fear is that He will take away the things we use to manage life without Him.

Control.

Approval.

Predictability.

The right to remain angry.

The right to define ourselves entirely.

The right to keep one locked room.

The earliest disciples left work, family expectations, and familiar assumptions to follow Jesus. They did not understand the full cost when they began.

Peter thought he was ready for anything and discovered he was not ready for a servant Messiah who refused the kind of victory Peter expected.

The disciples did not merely struggle to understand what Jesus taught.

They struggled because His way threatened the way they imagined safety.

We do too.

We may say we want Jesus to save us.

We are less certain about allowing Him to dismantle the forms of self-salvation we already trust.

Chapter Four

The Identity Built Around Being Right

Some of us protect ourselves through correctness.

We want the right theology.

The right interpretation.

The right political judgment.

The right historical conclusion.

The right moral position.

Truth matters.

Ideas have consequences.

A belief can heal or destroy.

The problem begins when being correct becomes the way we prove we are worthy.

Then disagreement feels like danger.

Correction feels like humiliation.

Apology feels like death.

We do not merely defend a position.

We defend the identity that position has created.

Christian environments can intensify this.

A person learns that being spiritually safe means possessing correct answers. Uncertainty becomes suspicious. Questions become signs of rebellion. Leaders display confidence even when they are unsure because authority has been built around never appearing wrong.

The resurrection should destroy this fear.

Peter was wrong repeatedly.

He misunderstood Jesus’ mission.

He resisted the prediction of suffering.

He overestimated his courage.

He denied knowing Jesus.

Then the risen Jesus restored him.

Peter’s future did not depend upon proving he had always been correct.

It depended upon grace.

Paul had built his life around religious zeal. He believed he was defending God while persecuting the people who proclaimed Jesus.

His conversion required more than adding a new fact.

He had to accept that his sincerity had not protected him from being wrong.

That may be one of the most painful forms of repentance.

It is easier to admit we behaved badly than to admit the worldview through which we justified the behavior was mistaken.

The resurrection gave Paul a future beyond that collapse.

It can do the same for us.

If identity rests in Jesus, we can be corrected without being erased.

We can change our minds.

We can say, “I defended that position, and I was wrong.”

We can say, “I used Scripture carelessly.”

We can say, “I treated someone unfairly because I was more interested in winning than understanding.”

This is not weakness.

It is evidence that being right has stopped functioning as our savior.

Chapter Five

The Anger I Do Not Want Healed

Some pain becomes anger.

Some anger becomes protection.

Some protection becomes identity.

At first, resentment feels like strength.

It gives form to injury.

It keeps the story clear.

Someone hurt me.

I know who was wrong.

I will not allow myself to become vulnerable again.

There is wisdom in recognizing danger. Forgiveness does not require returning to an unsafe person. Boundaries are not hatred. Justice is not revenge.

But resentment can continue long after protection has been established.

It becomes a private relationship with the person who caused harm.

We rehearse the conversation.

We imagine the apology.

We imagine refusing the apology.

We imagine the moment everyone finally recognizes that we were right.

The offender remains present inside us because anger keeps building a room for that person.

Jesus’ command to forgive can feel offensive here.

It may sound like another religious person telling the wounded to make life easier for the one who caused the wound.

That is not Christian forgiveness.

Forgiveness does not say the harm was acceptable.

It does not remove consequences.

It does not restore trust automatically.

It does not prevent legal action.

It does not require silence.

Forgiveness means the wound will not be allowed to transform us permanently into a person ruled by the offender.

It releases final vengeance to God.

That release can feel like losing the only power we have left.

This is why part of us may not want to be healed.

Healing threatens the identity built around injury.

Who will I be if I am no longer the person carrying this anger?

What will motivate me?

How will I honor what happened?

Resurrection offers a future in which the wound remains part of the story without remaining the ruler of the story.

The risen Jesus bears wounds.

They identify Him.

They do not imprison Him.

Perhaps forgiveness begins there.

Not with forgetting.

Not with returning.

With allowing God to create a life larger than what another person did.

Chapter Six

The Shame That Pretends to Be Humility

Shame can sound humble.

“I know what kind of person I am.”

“God may forgive others, but not me.”

“I deserve to remain outside.”

The words appear to take sin seriously.

They may actually place our judgment above God’s mercy.

If Jesus offers forgiveness and I insist that my guilt is too great, I am not only confessing failure.

I am declaring that I understand the reach of grace better than He does.

This does not mean every feeling of guilt should disappear immediately. Conscience can carry truth. Wrongdoing may have consequences that continue for years.

Grace does not erase responsibility.

It makes responsibility possible without despair.

A person hiding beneath shame cannot repair much. Energy is spent protecting secrecy, managing appearance, or punishing the self.

Repentance turns outward.

What truth must be told?

Who was harmed?

What can be restored?

What consequence must be accepted?

What pattern must end?

Peter could not unspeak his denial.

Paul could not restore every life affected by persecution.

Their past remained real.

Grace gave them a future in which the past could be confessed without becoming the only true thing about them.

Shame says, “You are what you did.”

Grace says, “What you did must be named, but Jesus has the authority to name you beyond it.”

That can be harder to receive than condemnation.

Condemnation allows us to remain focused on ourselves.

Grace turns attention toward the one who forgives and the life that forgiveness makes possible.

We may prefer self-punishment because it leaves us in control.

Receiving mercy requires admitting we cannot pay the debt through suffering.

The resurrection declares that Jesus’ mercy is not a beautiful idea spoken by a dead teacher.

The one who forgave sinners lives.

His verdict remains available.

Chapter Seven

The Church I Cannot Trust

For some people, resistance to Jesus is tangled with the church.

That is not irrational.

We learn about Jesus through people.

When those people lie, control, abuse, humiliate, or protect themselves, the name of Jesus becomes attached to the harm.

A child cannot always separate God from the adult who claims to speak for God.

A member cannot easily distinguish Christ’s authority from the leader who demands unquestioning obedience.

A victim cannot simply return to trust because another Christian says the offender was imperfect.

Some failures are not ordinary imperfection.

They are betrayals of power.

A church can become skilled at preserving its public witness while destroying the people whose stories threaten that witness.

The resurrection should make this impossible to defend.

If Jesus lives, the church does not need to protect Him through dishonesty.

If Jesus lives, the collapse of one ministry does not collapse the kingdom.

If Jesus lives, removing a harmful leader does not remove God’s presence.

Institutions hide truth when they act as though their survival is more important than obedience.

That is practical unbelief.

It is fear that resurrection is not enough.

A person wounded by church may need to leave a community.

That decision can be necessary.

Leaving a harmful church is not the same as leaving Jesus.

Questioning a pastor is not the same as questioning God.

Refusing manipulation is not rebellion against Christ.

The risen Jesus stands above every institution using His name.

He can be approached outside the room where harm occurred.

This does not mean community becomes unnecessary. Christian faith is relational and communal.

It means community must be safe enough for truth.

A trustworthy church does not require members to pretend leaders are flawless.

It welcomes questions.

It protects children.

It believes victims seriously enough to investigate.

It applies accountability to powerful people.

It allows repentance without confusing repentance with automatic restoration to authority.

The risen Jesus is not threatened by truth.

Any church terrified of truth should ask what it actually believes about resurrection.

Chapter Eight

The Need to Be Seen as Good

There is a difference between wanting to do good and needing to be seen as good.

The first can produce service.

The second produces performance.

Religious life offers many opportunities for performance because goodness can become public.

A person can speak about compassion while remaining unkind at home.

A leader can preach humility while arranging every room around personal importance.

A Christian can share messages about forgiveness while maintaining private contempt.

The image becomes easier to manage than the heart.

Jesus repeatedly confronted this division.

He warned against giving, praying, and fasting for public recognition.

He exposed people who appeared righteous outwardly while remaining corrupt inwardly.

His concern was not that public acts are always false. Good works can encourage others.

The concern was the audience we are truly serving.

Resurrection makes image management unnecessary.

If Jesus is alive, He already knows.

The hidden motive is not hidden.

Neither is the quiet act of faithfulness no one applauds.

This is both frightening and freeing.

Frightening because there is no private darkness where we remain unseen.

Freeing because we no longer have to prove ourselves continually to people.

The person who knows we failed is the person who offers grace.

The person who sees the unnoticed service is the one whose judgment finally matters.

We can stop arranging every act around recognition.

We can become honest without controlling how honest confession affects our image.

The need to be seen as good slowly gives way to the desire to become truthful.

That change is resurrection-shaped.

The false image loses life.

The real person steps into light.

Chapter Nine

The Life I Planned Without Him

Many people do not reject Jesus angrily.

They simply have plans.

A career.

A relationship.

A place to live.

A version of success.

A schedule for happiness.

Jesus may be welcome as support for those plans.

He can provide peace, encouragement, moral guidance, and protection.

The conflict begins when His direction differs from ours.

We may say we seek God’s will while quietly asking Him to endorse the life already chosen.

Prayer becomes a request for divine approval.

When approval does not come, we assume God is silent.

The idea of surrender can sound passive, as though Christians should stop planning, avoid ambition, and wait for supernatural instructions.

That is not necessary.

Human beings were created to think, cultivate, build, and make decisions.

The question is whether plans remain open to the authority of Jesus.

Can the career be surrendered if advancement requires dishonesty?

Can the relationship be questioned if love has become possession?

Can the dream be released if it depends upon exploiting others?

Can success be redefined if the risen Jesus calls greatness service?

Sometimes we fear surrender because we imagine God delights in taking what we love.

The cross reveals a God who gives Himself.

That does not mean discipleship costs nothing.

Jesus may lead us away from things we wanted.

But the purpose is not arbitrary deprivation.

It is freedom from lives built around false gods.

A plan becomes a god when losing it means losing the reason to live.

Resurrection says no created plan deserves that power.

The future belongs to Jesus even when our preferred future ends.

Chapter Ten

The Silence I Interpret as Absence

Prayer becomes difficult when nothing happens.

At first, a person asks confidently.

Then repeatedly.

Then carefully.

Eventually the prayer becomes smaller, perhaps because disappointment feels easier when expectation is restrained.

Silence begins to acquire meaning.

God does not care.

God is not there.

I am being punished.

My faith is inadequate.

The resurrection does not provide a simple explanation for unanswered prayer.

Jesus was raised, yet Paul still suffered.

The apostles still died.

Churches still struggled.

The new creation had begun, but it was not complete.

Prayer is not control over that tension.

It is relationship within it.

There are moments when God’s silence remains unbearable.

Christian language should not make the pain smaller.

We do not know why one person is healed and another is not.

We do not know why one family experiences reconciliation and another continues grieving.

We do not know why clarity comes to one seeker while another remains uncertain.

The resurrection changes one conclusion.

Silence cannot prove final abandonment.

The disciples lived through a period in which Jesus was dead and no visible answer had come.

They did not know the silence was temporary.

We should be careful not to turn this into a promise that every earthly situation will reverse soon.

Some do not.

The resurrection reaches beyond the earthly timeline.

Its promise is not that every silence will end with the answer we want.

Its promise is that God’s final word over creation has been revealed through Jesus.

Life.

Vindication.

Restoration.

The silence remains painful.

It is no longer empty of all hope.

Chapter Eleven

The Private Fear of Death

Death can remain abstract for years.

Then a diagnosis arrives.

A friend dies unexpectedly.

A parent weakens.

A person notices changes in the body that cannot be reversed.

The resurrection moves from doctrine to fear.

Do I truly believe this?

What will it feel like to die?

Will I remain myself?

Will I see the people I love?

What if I was wrong?

Faith does not always remove these questions.

Jesus faced death with anguish.

Christian courage is not emotional numbness.

The resurrection gives fear somewhere to stand.

Christian hope does not rest upon the idea that human consciousness is naturally indestructible. It rests upon God’s power and faithfulness.

The one who created can raise.

The one who remembers Jesus’ body can remember ours.

The one who did not surrender Jesus to decay will not abandon creation permanently.

This is not scientific description.

The mechanism remains beyond us.

Resurrection is not made plausible by explaining how it fits within ordinary biology.

It is made possible by God.

The historical case for Jesus provides the reason to trust that this is not wishful thinking alone.

The claim began with a specific death, a specific burial, and specific people who believed they encountered the dead man alive.

Christian hope is attached to history before it reaches our graves.

Fear may remain.

The risen Jesus does not require us to pretend.

He asks us to entrust the fear to Him.

Chapter Twelve

The Small Acts That Reveal the Real Verdict

We may imagine that following Jesus requires one dramatic decision.

Sometimes it does.

More often, allegiance becomes visible through small acts no one will remember.

Telling the truth when the lie would be easier.

Refusing to repeat a story that damages someone.

Listening without redirecting the conversation toward ourselves.

Admitting uncertainty.

Apologizing without explaining away the harm.

Protecting a person who cannot benefit us.

Releasing the need to humiliate an opponent.

These acts appear ordinary because resurrection often enters quietly.

A seed enters the ground quietly.

Bread is broken quietly.

A name is spoken in a garden.

A meal is shared beside water.

The new creation does not always announce itself through spectacle.

It appears whenever death’s patterns lose authority.

A lie dies and truth begins.

Pride dies and service begins.

Secrecy dies and confession begins.

Contempt dies and recognition begins.

Resentment loosens and mercy becomes possible.

These acts do not earn salvation.

They reveal trust.

They show what we believe possesses the final word.

If reputation possesses the final word, we hide.

If power possesses the final word, we dominate.

If resentment possesses the final word, we punish.

If Jesus possesses the final word, we can choose another way even when the old way feels safer.

Chapter Thirteen

The Prayer I Can Pray Before I Am Ready

Some people believe they must resolve every question before approaching Jesus.

But prayer can begin within uncertainty.

Not performance.

Not pretending.

A truthful prayer.

Jesus, I think You may be alive, but I am afraid of what that means.

I want evidence, but I also want control.

I want forgiveness, but I do not want to name everything.

I want healing, but I have made an identity from the wound.

I want to trust You, but people using Your name taught me to be afraid.

Meet me in the truth.

Protect me from self-deception.

Protect me from manipulation.

Show me what I am resisting.

Give me enough courage for the next honest step.

A prayer like this does not force an emotional experience.

No voice may come.

No sign may appear.

The next step may be ordinary.

Reading a Gospel slowly.

Speaking with a trustworthy person.

Telling the truth about a hidden pattern.

Returning to a question previously avoided.

Seeking professional help for a wound prayer alone has not resolved.

Faith does not compete with therapy, medicine, history, or careful thought.

If Jesus is Lord of truth, every genuine path toward truth belongs beneath His authority.

The prayer matters because it opens the protected room.

It tells Jesus we are willing to be met there.

Chapter Fourteen

What Surrender Is Not

Surrender has been abused in religious settings.

People have been told to surrender questions.

Surrender boundaries.

Surrender legal rights.

Surrender judgment to a leader.

Surrender personal safety.

That is not the surrender Jesus asks.

Jesus does not require us to hand conscience to another human being.

He does not demand that victims remain available to offenders.

He does not ask believers to accept every claim made by someone with religious authority.

Christian surrender is directed toward Jesus.

Because it is directed toward Jesus, it can require resistance to human power.

A person may need to say no to a church.

No to a manipulative family member.

No to an employer demanding dishonesty.

No to a political movement treating cruelty as strength.

No to an internal voice that confuses shame with holiness.

Surrender to Jesus is not passivity.

It is reordered allegiance.

No human relationship is permitted to occupy His place.

This can make a person more courageous, not less.

The one who no longer needs human approval can tell the truth.

The one who believes death is not final can accept a cost.

The one whose identity rests in grace can admit failure.

Surrender does not destroy personhood.

It frees personhood from false masters.

Chapter Fifteen

The Place Where Belief Becomes Trust

Belief can remain a conclusion.

Trust places weight upon the conclusion.

I may believe a bridge is structurally sound.

Trust begins when I walk onto it.

The analogy is imperfect because Jesus is a person, not a structure.

Still, the distinction matters.

A person can accept every central claim about Jesus and continue relying upon something else for actual security.

Money.

Control.

Approval.

Certainty.

Anger.

Religious performance.

Trust becomes visible when those supports are challenged.

Will I tell the truth if truth costs approval?

Will I obey if obedience interrupts the plan?

Will I receive grace when shame feels more familiar?

Will I release final vengeance?

Will I remain open to Jesus after Christians failed me?

These questions are not answered once.

Trust is practiced repeatedly.

Peter trusted, failed, returned, and continued learning.

Paul trusted and still faced conflict, weakness, uncertainty, and suffering.

Christian faith is not one uninterrupted emotional state.

It is a direction maintained through return.

We wander.

We confess.

We return.

The risen Jesus remains.

Conclusion

The Door I Was Guarding

The argument for Jesus Christ can take us a long way.

It can establish that Jesus existed.

It can place Him within first-century Judaism.

It can show that Rome crucified Him.

It can demonstrate that the resurrection proclamation arose early.

It can establish that Peter, James, Paul, and groups of followers sincerely believed Jesus appeared.

It can examine the probable empty tomb.

It can compare survival, conspiracy, visions, relocation, legend, and resurrection.

It can conclude that resurrection best explains the whole pattern if God is allowed to act.

Then the argument reaches a door.

The door is not another historical problem.

It is the private place we guard.

Behind it may be fear.

Control.

Shame.

Anger.

Disappointment.

A life plan.

A church wound.

A hidden habit.

A need to be right.

A fear of death.

Jesus does not force the door.

He also does not pretend it is unimportant.

The evidence may have brought us close enough to hear the question.

Why are you still resisting Me?

The answer may not be unbelief.

It may be that we understand enough to know surrender will be real.

Christianity does not offer a risen Jesus who leaves every protected thing untouched.

It offers mercy strong enough to enter what we have hidden.

Truth gentle enough to expose without destroying.

Authority that serves rather than controls.

Life that does not deny the grave but passes through it.

The quiet resistance inside us does not surprise Jesus.

Peter resisted.

Thomas questioned.

James stood outside.

Paul opposed.

The risen Christ met each one differently.

He can meet us without requiring that we imitate their experiences.

No visible appearance may come.

The historical testimony remains.

The invitation remains.

The next step may be smaller than expected.

Open the door.

Tell the truth.

Pray without pretending.

Read His words without rushing to defend yourself.

Let the question become personal.

The argument for Jesus Christ is ultimately not an argument that God wants to win against us.

It is the argument that God has come near to bring us home.

The cross reveals how fiercely we resist that nearness.

The resurrection reveals that our resistance did not become His final word.

Jesus Christ was crucified.

Jesus Christ was raised.

Jesus Christ is Lord.

The quiet place where I still resist Him may be the very place where He is waiting to begin something new.

Your friend,

Douglas Vandergraph

Explore the complete Douglas Vandergraph Master Index: https://douglasvandergraph.com/douglas-vandergraph-master-index/

Watch Douglas Vandergraph’s faith-based videos on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@douglasvandergraph

In a low-rise office in an industrial corner of Nairobi, a man in his thirties sat in front of a screen for nine hours a day, five days a week, reading the worst things human beings write about one another. The descriptions arrived as fragments of text, stripped of context, scrolling past in their thousands: child sexual abuse, bestiality, torture, suicide, incest, murder rendered in clinical detail. His job was to read each one, decide what category of horror it belonged to, and label it. Not to remove it from the world, but to teach a machine to recognise it, so that the machine would learn never to produce anything like it.

His name is Richard Mathenge, and he was a team leader at an outsourcing firm called Sama, working on a contract for a then-obscure San Francisco company called OpenAI. The model he was helping to train would, within months, become ChatGPT, the fastest-growing consumer application in history and the centrepiece of a technology now valued in the hundreds of billions of dollars. For this work, Mathenge and his colleagues took home somewhere between $1.32 and $2 an hour. When a Time magazine investigation surfaced the arrangement in January 2023, the company's spokespeople described the labour as essential, even noble. The data labellers themselves described recurring nightmares, fractured relationships, and a trauma that followed them home.

Mathenge would later be named to Time's first list of the hundred most influential people in artificial intelligence, sharing the page with Sam Altman, the chief executive of the company whose product his labour helped to make safe. The juxtaposition is almost too neat. The man at the top of the value chain and the man at the bottom of it, recognised in the same breath, separated by an ocean and an income gap measured in orders of magnitude. One is celebrated as a founder of the future. The other was, until very recently, not acknowledged as a builder at all.

This is the story the AI industry does not tell about itself. The large language models and image generators now reshaping white-collar work across the wealthy world did not emerge fully formed from clusters of graphics cards. They were taught, painstakingly and at enormous human cost, by hundreds of thousands of people in Kenya, the Philippines, India, and Venezuela, working under gig contracts that offered no benefits, no security, and no claim whatsoever to the products their labour made possible. And now, in one of the more brutal ironies of the present moment, the industry has begun to automate the very tasks those workers performed, displacing the people who trained the machines with the machines they trained. They were never called builders. They are being made redundant before the public has even registered that they exist.

The Hidden Production Line

To understand what these workers actually do, it helps to abandon the prevailing mythology of artificial intelligence as something that learns on its own. Modern AI systems are statistical engines trained on vast quantities of data, and that data, to be useful, must be organised, labelled, filtered, and rated by human beings. The work falls into roughly three categories, each invisible in a different way.

The first is data annotation: the labelling of raw information so that a machine can learn to interpret it. A worker might draw boxes around pedestrians and traffic lights in thousands of street images to train a self-driving system, or transcribe audio, or tag the objects in a photograph, or mark which sentences in a paragraph express a particular sentiment. It is repetitive, exacting, and mind-numbingly granular. The anthropologist Mary L. Gray and the computer scientist Siddharth Suri, in their 2019 book Ghost Work, gave this hidden labour its enduring name. Ghost work, they wrote, is work performed by a human but experienced by the customer as the seamless output of an automated process. The whole commercial proposition of AI depends on the human hand remaining unseen.

The second category is reinforcement learning from human feedback, or RLHF, the technique that turned raw language models into the fluent, agreeable conversational systems the public now uses. The mechanics are deceptively simple. A model generates several possible responses to a prompt; a human worker reads them and rates which is best, which is more accurate, which is less likely to cause offence. Multiplied across millions of comparisons, this human judgement is what teaches a model to sound helpful, to refuse harmful requests, to behave. Every well-mannered chatbot is, in this sense, a monument to the aggregated preferences of low-paid raters, most of whom will never be named.

The third category is content moderation, the work Mathenge and his colleagues performed, and it is the most psychologically corrosive of the three. To build a filter that keeps an AI system from generating descriptions of child abuse or graphic violence, the system must first be shown what those things look like, tagged by humans who absorb the material so the machine does not have to. The labour is a kind of sacrificial buffer. The worker reads the unreadable so that the user never will.

The geography of this work is not accidental. The industry gravitated towards places where wages are low, education is high, English is widely spoken, and economic desperation makes a dollar an hour seem, if not generous, at least survivable. Kenya became a hub for content moderation and labelling through firms such as Sama. India and the Philippines supplied enormous volumes of annotation and moderation labour. And Venezuela, after the collapse of its oil-dependent economy, became one of the largest sources of data workers on the planet.

The Venezuelan case is the starkest illustration of how the supply chain feeds on crisis. As MIT Technology Review documented in 2022, when Venezuela's economy imploded after the 2014 oil price crash, with hyperinflation reducing monthly salaries to a few dollars, a population of educated, internet-connected people suddenly found themselves available for piecework at almost any price. Platforms such as Appen and Remotasks, which acted as intermediaries for Silicon Valley giants, rushed in. Researchers including Julian Posada have detailed how Venezuela came to host one of the largest data-work populations in the world, with workers labelling images for self-driving cars and rating AI outputs from their homes, competing in real time against labellers across the globe for tasks that might pay a few cents each. Rest of World reported that even older Venezuelans, pushed out of formal employment by age discrimination and inflation, turned to annotation work to survive. The catastrophe did not merely coincide with the AI boom. It was, in a precise economic sense, an input to it.

The Cost of Reading the Unreadable

The phrase “content moderation” sounds bureaucratic, almost gentle, which is part of how the harm stays hidden. The reality is documented now in clinical language, in court filings, in psychiatric diagnoses.

In December 2024, lawyers acting for former Facebook content moderators in Kenya filed medical evidence with the Nairobi employment and labour relations court. Of 144 moderators who underwent psychological assessment, out of 185 involved in the legal claim, 81 per cent were classified as suffering from severe post-traumatic stress disorder, according to reporting by CNN. The diagnoses were made by Dr Ian Kanyanya, head of mental health services at Kenyatta National Hospital. These were people who had spent their working days viewing what the filings describe as necrophilia, child sexual abuse, terrorism, and graphic violence, hour after hour, with productivity targets that left little room to look away.

The harm does not end when the contract does. The Sama work for OpenAI was terminated in February 2022, some eight months ahead of schedule, when the traumatic nature of the material became untenable. But the workers who had performed it carried the consequences forward. Speaking to Slate in 2023, Mathenge described continuing to suffer from the explicit content he had been required to read long after the project closed, the images lodged in memory with no mechanism for their removal. The Time investigation found that the wellness counselling offered to workers was thin and that the demands of the job left little room to make use of even what was provided. The trauma was, in effect, an externality: a cost generated by the work, borne entirely by the worker, and absorbed nowhere on the balance sheet of the companies that benefited from it.

The Kenyan moderators became, almost by accident, the front line of a global reckoning. In 2022, a former Sama employee named Daniel Motaung launched what his lawyers at the British legal non-profit Foxglove called a world-first case against Meta and Sama. Motaung alleged that the work had inflicted serious psychological harm, that the pay was inadequate, and that when he attempted to organise his colleagues into a trade union, he was fired for it. Meta argued that it could not be sued in Kenya, since the moderators were formally employed by Sama, its outsourcing contractor. The Kenyan courts disagreed. In 2023 and again in 2024, the country's courts ruled that the cases could proceed to trial, rejecting Meta's appeals. It was a significant crack in the legal architecture that the technology industry had relied upon: the assumption that outsourcing the labour also outsourced the liability.

Out of this struggle came something the industry had not anticipated. In May 2023, around 150 workers from several outsourcing firms voted to form the African Content Moderators Union, the first organisation of its kind on the continent, a cross-company effort to win better conditions for the people performing this work. Mathenge, the OpenAI team leader, was among its organisers. Having been recognised by Time as one of the most influential figures in AI, he used the platform not to celebrate the technology but to demand that its human foundations be treated with dignity. He and other former ChatGPT moderators went on to petition the Kenyan parliament, calling for an investigation into OpenAI and Sama and for regulation of the outsourcing industry.

The psychological toll is not a side effect of poorly managed work. It is structural. The journalist Karen Hao, whose 2025 book Empire of AI traces these supply chains in detail, found that the trauma rippled outward from the workers into their families and communities, a slow contamination that no severance package was ever designed to address, because severance packages were rarely offered at all. Hao's central argument is that the AI industry functions as a kind of empire, extracting value, labour, and raw material from the Global South to enrich a small constellation of companies in the Global North, much as the colonial empires of the past extracted rubber, minerals, and bodies. The content moderators of Nairobi are, in this framing, not an unfortunate footnote to the AI revolution. They are its colonial subjects.

The Architecture of Invisibility

Why is this labour absent from the public conversation about AI? The answer is not simple neglect. The invisibility is engineered, sustained by a set of structural mechanisms that operate together to keep the human contribution out of view, off the balance sheet, and outside the conversation about who owns what.

The first mechanism is the outsourcing chain itself. A worker in Nairobi is rarely employed by OpenAI or Meta. They are employed by Sama, or by a labour broker contracted by Sama, who is in turn contracted by the technology company. Each link in the chain creates legal and moral distance. The company at the top can truthfully say it does not employ the worker at the bottom; the worker at the bottom has no contractual relationship with the company whose product they are building. When Meta argued in the Kenyan courts that it could not be held responsible because the moderators worked for Sama, it was deploying this distance as a legal shield. The whole structure is designed so that responsibility evaporates somewhere in the middle.

The second mechanism is the gig contract. These are not jobs in the traditional sense. They are tasks, parcelled out through platforms, paid by the piece, with no guaranteed hours and no benefits. Gray and Suri described in Ghost Work how this arrangement strips workers of nearly every protection associated with employment: no health cover, no job security, dismissal at any moment for any reason or none. Work appears unpredictably and vanishes the same way. When a project ends, or when workers organise, the tasks simply stop arriving. There is no factory gate to picket, no employer to confront, only a platform that has gone quiet.

The third and most consequential mechanism concerns intellectual property and value. The workers who train a model acquire no stake in it. Their labour is embedded in the model's weights as surely as an engineer's design is embedded in a bridge, but the legal framework treats their contribution as a service rendered and paid for, terminating all further claim. The model becomes the property of the company. Its value, which may run into hundreds of billions of dollars, accrues entirely upward. This is the asymmetry that the researcher Milagros Miceli, who leads the Data Workers' Inquiry at the Distributed AI Research Institute founded by Timnit Gebru, has spent years documenting. The Data Workers' Inquiry is a participatory research project spanning multiple countries, built on the principle that the people who do this labour are the foremost experts on it and should be the ones to describe it. Its findings are consistent across continents: the workers understand precisely how essential they are, and precisely how little of the resulting wealth flows back to them.

The pattern repeats wherever investigators look. A guide published by the Global Investigative Journalism Network in January 2026, drawing together the reporting of numerous outlets into labour abuses across the data annotation industry, maps the same recurring features from one country to the next: opaque subcontracting, wages pinned at or below local minimums, abrupt terminations, and a near-total absence of mechanisms by which workers might contest any of it. What the reporting it gathers makes plain is that these conditions are not the failings of a few bad operators but the standard operating logic of a global supply chain, reproduced across jurisdictions precisely because the model is profitable and the workers are interchangeable. The abuse is not a bug in the system. It is the system functioning as designed.

There is a deeper conceptual sleight of hand at work, too. The dominant narrative of artificial intelligence is one of machines that learn by themselves, that improve through training as though training were a natural process rather than a human one. This framing is not merely inaccurate; it is convenient. If the machine learns on its own, then no one is owed anything for teaching it. The erasure of the human labeller is the precondition for the myth of the autonomous machine. Every time a technology executive describes a model as having “learned” some capability, the millions of human judgements that produced that capability are quietly written out of the sentence.

The Industry Eats Its Own Foundations

This brings us to the cruellest turn in the story, and the one that gives the present moment its peculiar moral weight. The industry that was built on this hidden human labour has begun, methodically, to automate it away.

The logic is internal to the technology. Once a language model is sufficiently capable, it can be turned upon the very tasks that humans once performed to create it. A model can be used as a judge to rate the outputs of another model, the so-called LLM-as-judge technique, replacing the human raters whose comparisons taught the first generation of systems. A model can generate synthetic training data, fabricating examples that once had to be labelled by hand. Industry accounts of the field describe a layered workflow that has rapidly become standard: automated annotators handle the first pass of labelling, synthetic generators fill the rare-case gaps, and human beings are pushed to the narrow margin of borderline and policy-sensitive cases. The vast middle of the labelling economy, the repetitive volume work that sustained tens of thousands of livelihoods, is being absorbed by the machines themselves.

A paper presented to the arXiv preprint server in May 2026 by the researchers Robert Wolfe and Aayushi Dangol, catalogued as arXiv:2605.03295, mapped the ideology of this transition. Examining the public communications of five data annotation companies and their executives, the authors found that the industry increasingly frames human expertise as economically inefficient, something to be liberated, reformed, or replaced by cheaper AI-driven approaches that promise a superior return on investment. The market for what the paper calls “cheap expertise” is being reorganised around the premise that the human contribution, having served its purpose, is now a cost to be minimised. The brief that prompted this article frames the same finding in blunter terms: the industry is automating its own lowest-tier annotation tasks, which means the workers who trained the models are now being displaced by them.

The timing of this transition cannot be separated from the wave of capital that flooded the sector in 2025. The defining event was Meta's deal with Scale AI, the data-labelling company that had built its business by paying people across the world to annotate training data. In June 2025, Meta agreed to invest $14.3 billion for a 49 per cent stake in Scale, a transaction that valued the firm at over $29 billion and brought its 28-year-old founder, Alexandr Wang, into Meta as its chief AI officer. The deal was a vivid statement of what the market values. The infrastructure of human labelling had become worth tens of billions of dollars, and that value was crystallised in the person of a founder and a corporate balance sheet. None of it flowed to the labellers. The same companies that profited from arranging the work now have every commercial incentive to automate it, and the capital to do so.

The displacement this section describes is no longer a hypothetical inference from workflow diagrams. In April 2026, Sama, the very outsourcing firm that had run the OpenAI moderation work in Nairobi, issued formal redundancy notices to 1,108 workers at its Nairobi delivery centre. The layoffs followed Meta's decision to terminate its content and data-annotation contract with Sama, and they came after the firm had already pivoted away from content moderation to refocus its business on AI data labelling. It is a compact illustration of the whole argument. The same company named at the top of this article, the one that supplied the labour that made ChatGPT usable, has now shed more than a thousand workers as a client relationship collapsed and the work reorganised itself around the automated labelling that the industry now prefers. The loop closes on the people who were at the centre of it.

Consider, then, the full shape of what has happened. A worker in Nairobi or Caracas or Manila spends years teaching a model to recognise harmful content, to rate good answers above bad ones, to behave like something worth trusting. The model improves to the point where it can perform those judgements itself. The worker is no longer needed. There is no severance, because there was never employment. There is no retraining, because there was never an obligation. There is no acknowledgement that their labour is embedded in a product worth a fortune, because the entire legal and narrative architecture was constructed to deny precisely that. The people who built artificial intelligence are among the first to be made redundant by it, and they were never recognised as having built anything at all.

What the Conversation Leaves Out

Step back, and a question emerges that is larger than any single supply chain. The public debate about artificial intelligence has settled into a familiar frame: benefits versus harms. On one side, the promise of productivity, scientific discovery, abundance. On the other, the fears of job displacement, misinformation, existential risk. It is a debate conducted almost entirely in the future tense, and almost entirely about the wealthy world.

The story of the data workers reveals what this frame leaves out. The displacement is not a future risk; it has already happened, to the workers least equipped to absorb it and least likely to be counted in the statistics. When commentators warn that AI will displace workers, they generally mean knowledge workers in the Global North: lawyers, coders, copywriters, illustrators. They rarely mean the Kenyan moderator or the Venezuelan labeller, whose displacement is already underway and who possessed none of the cushions, the savings, the safety nets, the alternative prospects that make displacement survivable. The benefits-versus-harms debate is conducted on behalf of people who stand to lose something they currently have. It has remarkably little to say about people who built the entire edifice and were never permitted to own a brick of it.

The frame also obscures the question of distribution. To ask whether AI is, on balance, good or bad is to assume a single ledger on which gains and losses can be netted against one another. But the gains and the losses fall on different people. The productivity accrues to shareholders and consumers in wealthy economies. The trauma, the precarity, and now the redundancy accrue to data workers in the Global South. A technology can be enormously beneficial in aggregate and profoundly unjust in its distribution, and the aggregate framing is designed, whether by intent or by habit, to make the injustice disappear into an average. Karen Hao's image of empire is useful precisely because empires, too, generated immense aggregate wealth while distributing it with savage inequality.

And the frame leaves out the matter of acknowledgement itself, which is not merely sentimental. To recognise these workers as builders would be to admit that they have a claim, and claims have consequences. They might imply ownership, or royalties, or a share of the value, or at the very least the protections owed to employees. The refusal to acknowledge is therefore not an oversight but a defence. The conversation about AI's benefits and harms leaves out its builders because including them would change the answer to the question of who owes what to whom. It is easier to debate whether the machine is good or bad than to ask who paid for it with their mental health and their labour, and what they are owed in return.

There is something the workers themselves understood before any of the commentators did. They knew they were building something. The petitions to the Kenyan parliament, the formation of the African Content Moderators Union, the lawsuits, the testimony gathered by the Data Workers' Inquiry: all of it is the work of people insisting on a fact the industry preferred to suppress, that they are not bystanders to artificial intelligence but its authors. The conversation that leaves them out is not merely incomplete. It is, in a precise sense, a conversation about a product without any mention of the people who made it.

Toward Recognition

If the diagnosis is structural invisibility, the responses now emerging are attempts to make the labour visible, and to attach consequences to that visibility. None is a complete remedy. Together they sketch the outline of what a fairer arrangement might look like.

The first and most direct is organisation. The African Content Moderators Union demonstrated that workers separated by employer, geography, and the architecture of outsourcing can nonetheless find one another and act collectively. Unionisation cuts against the central design feature of ghost work, its atomisation, by reconstituting the workforce that the gig model was built to dissolve. The Kenyan lawsuits, supported by Foxglove, have pursued the same goal through the courts, establishing the precedent that a technology company cannot necessarily hide behind its outsourcing contractors. If that principle holds, the legal distance on which the whole structure depends begins to collapse.

The second response is the establishment of standards and the public ranking of companies against them. The Fairwork project, based at the Oxford Internet Institute and the Berlin Social Science Centre, assesses platforms against five principles: fair pay, fair conditions, fair contracts, fair management, and fair representation. Its investigations of cloudwork and microwork platforms, including Scale AI and Amazon Mechanical Turk, found that in most cases researchers could find no evidence that companies ensured workers earned even their local minimum wage, and that a substantial share of workers reported completing tasks for which they were never paid. By scoring companies publicly, Fairwork attempts to convert invisibility into reputational pressure, to make poor labour standards a liability rather than a hidden efficiency. From this work flows the proposal for something like fair-trade certification for data, a label that would allow buyers of AI systems, and eventually their users, to distinguish products built on decently paid labour from those built on exploitation.

The third response is regulatory, and it is the least developed. The Kenyan parliament's consideration of the moderators' petition, the slow construction of legal precedent through the courts, and the broader push to extend labour protections along the AI supply chain all point towards a future in which states assert that work performed within their borders is subject to their laws, regardless of how many corporate layers separate the worker from the ultimate beneficiary. The challenge is jurisdictional: the work is global, the value flows across borders, and no single regulator commands the whole chain. But the principle that liability cannot be outsourced, established in the Kenyan courts, is the seed of a more ambitious regulatory architecture.

The fourth response is conceptual, and the most radical. It is the argument, advanced by the technologist Jaron Lanier and the economist Glen Weyl under the banner of data dignity, that data should be understood as labour. If the information people produce, and by extension the judgements that workers contribute to training a model, are forms of labour rather than free raw material, then their extraction without fair compensation is a species of exploitation, and those who provide them are owed a share of the value they create. Lanier and Weyl proposed intermediary institutions, data trusts of a kind, that might negotiate on behalf of data providers against the concentrated power of the technology companies. Applied to the data workers of Nairobi and Caracas, the data-as-labour argument arrives at a conclusion the industry has spent years avoiding: that the people who trained the models have a legitimate claim on the wealth those models generate, not as charity, but as a matter of right.

None of these responses, on its own, dismantles the asymmetry. A union can win better conditions but cannot easily reach across borders to the company at the top of the chain. A certification scheme depends on buyers who care. Regulation runs into the limits of jurisdiction. The data-as-labour argument remains, for now, largely theoretical. But each represents a refusal to accept the central premise on which the invisibility was built, the premise that this labour does not count, that the people who perform it are not builders, and that the value they create belongs to someone else by natural law.

The image of Richard Mathenge on the Time 100 list, beside the founders and the executives, is worth returning to. It was meant, perhaps, as a gesture of inclusion, a recognition that the people at the bottom of the chain belong in the story of artificial intelligence. But it also exposes the gap it was meant to bridge. Mathenge earned that recognition not by building the technology, which he did, but by fighting to be acknowledged for it, which the technology's beneficiaries never required of themselves. He had to organise a union, file a petition, and testify to his own trauma in order to be seen. The founders were simply seen.

The machines that are now displacing workers across the wealthy world learned to do so from people who were displaced first, who taught them, and who were never thanked. If the conversation about artificial intelligence continues to take place as though those people did not exist, it will not merely be incomplete. It will be repeating, in the register of public discourse, the same erasure that the outsourcing contracts and the gig platforms and the myth of the autonomous machine were built to perform. The first task of an honest reckoning with AI is to name its builders. They have already named themselves. The question is whether the rest of the conversation is willing to listen.

References

1. Perrigo, Billy. “Exclusive: OpenAI Used Kenyan Workers on Less Than $2 Per Hour to Make ChatGPT Less Toxic.” Time, 18 January 2023. https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/
2. Gray, Mary L., and Siddharth Suri. Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019. https://ghostwork.info/
3. Hao, Karen. Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI. Penguin Press, 2025. https://restofworld.org/2025/karen-hao-empire-of-ai-book/
4. Williams, Adrienne, Milagros Miceli, and Timnit Gebru. “The Exploited Labor Behind Artificial Intelligence.” Noema Magazine, 13 October 2022. https://www.noemamag.com/the-exploited-labor-behind-artificial-intelligence/
5. “How the AI Industry Profits from Catastrophe.” MIT Technology Review, 20 April 2022. https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/20/1050392/ai-industry-appen-scale-data-labels/
6. “Amid Economic Collapse, Older Venezuelans Turn to Gig Work.” Rest of World, 2024. https://restofworld.org/2024/venezuela-online-gig-work/
7. “Facebook Inflicted 'Lifelong Trauma' on Content Moderators in Kenya, Campaigners Say, as More Than 140 Are Diagnosed with PTSD.” CNN Business, 22 December 2024. https://edition.cnn.com/2024/12/22/business/facebook-content-moderators-kenya-ptsd-intl
8. Foxglove. “Daniel Motaung Launches World-First Case to Force Facebook to Finally Put Content Moderators' Health and Wellbeing Ahead of Cash.” 10 May 2022. https://www.foxglove.org.uk/2022/05/10/motaung-facebook-world-first/
9. Foxglove. “Big Win in Kenya! 185 Former Facebook Content Moderators to Take Their Case Against Mass Firing to Trial After Courts Slap Down Meta Appeal.” 23 September 2024. https://www.foxglove.org.uk/2024/09/23/facebook-content-moderators-kenya-meta-appeal/
10. “150 African Workers for AI Companies Vote to Unionize.” Time, 1 May 2023. https://time.com/6275995/chatgpt-facebook-african-workers-union/
11. “Richard Mathenge: The 100 Most Influential People in AI 2023.” Time, 7 September 2023. https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/6308980/richard-mathenge/
12. “A ChatGPT Contractor Who Trained the A.I. in Kenya Says He's Still Traumatized.” Slate, May 2023. https://slate.com/technology/2023/05/openai-chatgpt-training-kenya-traumatic.html
13. Distributed AI Research Institute. “Data Workers' Inquiry.” DAIR, led by Milagros Miceli. https://dair-institute.org/projects/data-workers-inquiry/
14. Fairwork / Oxford Internet Institute. “Fairwork Cloudwork Ratings: Labour Standards in the Cloudwork Economy.” University of Oxford and WZB Berlin Social Science Centre. https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/research/projects/fairwork-for-ai/
15. Wolfe, Robert, and Aayushi Dangol. “Cheap Expertise: Mapping and Challenging Industry Perspectives in the Expert Data Gig Economy.” arXiv:2605.03295, May 2026 (forthcoming, CHIWORK 2026). https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.03295
16. “Scale AI Founder Wang Announces Exit for Meta as Part of $14.3 Billion Deal.” CNBC, 12 June 2025. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/12/scale-ai-founder-wang-announces-exit-for-meta-part-of-14-billion-deal.html
17. Lanier, Jaron, and E. Glen Weyl. “Should We Treat Data as Labor? Moving Beyond 'Free'.” American Economic Association Papers and Proceedings, 2018. https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/pandp.20181003
18. “Tips to Investigate AI Labor Abuses in the Global South.” Global Investigative Journalism Network, 15 January 2026. https://gijn.org/stories/investigating-ai-labor-abuses-global-south/
19. Posada, Julian. “Embedded Reproduction in Platform Data Work.” Information, Communication & Society, 2022. https://posada.website/publication/embedded-reproduction-in-platform-data-work/
20. “Former Meta Contractor Sama to Lay Off More Than 1,000 Workers in Kenya.” TechCabal / Associated Press, 16 April 2026. https://techcabal.com/2026/04/16/sama-lay-off-kenyan-workers-meta/

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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

Listen to the free weekly SmarterArticles Podcast

I missed another day. and yes, you can complain if you want, write me a strongly worded letter. I’ll probably be asleep when it arrives anyway. Nothing important happened. i slept, spent time with myself. i dont hate my own company, actually. most days, its tolerable. noises insist on giving daily presentations, my thoughts keep interrupting them, and somehow nobody wins. and i guess thats how it always will be. I could’ve texted her more. she was asleep most of the time anyway, then she went to her friends house. i guess. its not like she didnt have a life before i existed. and maybe i was upset, maybe i wasnt. doesnt really matter, im not going to tell her that. she doesnt need another problem to carry around, and im already doing a great job carrying enough for the both of us, or at least i hope i am. Ive been thinking too much again. and thats usually what happens when its quiet, and im stuck with my own thoughts. my head remembers everything it shouldnt and forgets everything useful. i remember the past too well. I think about it constantly, the present i survive it. but the future. its when it gets all messy and confusing. i can think about her. i can think about us. sometimes i even think about a kid. funny, i know. i keep imagining I’d raise him better than i was raised. that maybe loving someone that much would finally convince me im not the kind of person i spend every day accusing myself of being, and maybe it’ll stop me from thinking about my past. but then the picture disappears, not in a dramatic way, but just slowly. gone. like someone erased the rest of the page before i got there. every single time, its like my brain refuses to picture anything beyond a certain point. There’s just fog. empty space. like the future is a place my thoughts arent allowed to visit. and maybe thats normal. and my brain just has terrible reception, or maybe its trying to tell me something. every future i build falls apart the second i put myself in it, like some part of me can’t imagine a world where i actually make it there. i guess even my imagination has low expectations for me.

I dont know, i just know every road i picture myself walking has a dead end with my name on it, or fog. Anyway enough of that. its not like staring at a foggy road suddenly makes it longer. i missed two days. congratulations to everyone who bet on me being inconsistent. go get yourself a little trophy. you earned it for predicting something painfully obvious.

Sincerely, A future without me

Amanda Pica and Scott Richards (plus others) 217 pages Hollow Oak Press (2023)

Read this if you like: Storytelling cycles, urban fantasy, paranormal mystery

tl;dr summary: High school friends who were members of a magical club reconvene twenty years later and get caught up in a new mystery. 

See the book on Bookshop

The format of Wordsmith is one that I adore. It's a collection of stories that are linked together by a contiguous narrative running between them. In that narrative, protagonist Kat was part of a group in high school called the Wordsmiths. When they got together, they could tell each other stories that would come to life and seem completely real to the people in the room. They disbanded after one of their members died, and haven't been back together for over 20 years, but have reassembled for one last story cycle after their old teacher's death. The short stories interspersed between the narrative sections are the ones that the group members tell each other during this last story cycle. 

From the jump, this concept pulled me in on multiple levels. The idea of people who can create living stories is a fun one on its own, then layering in the background mystery of what happened to Cassie (the member whose death broke them up all those years ago) adds more intrigue. And Kat has her own personal challenges she's coping with on top of that. Her father is suffering from dementia, and her one-time friends don't seem particularly happy to have been pulled back together. In fact, she's barely spoken to them over the last twenty years, and though some of them seem ready to pick things back up where they left off, she feels like the others are in their own little clique that she's now on the outside of. 

That's a lot of great tension established early on, and by and large it's managed very well over the course of the narrative to keep it moving forward. The balance of the main narrative sections with the interjecting short stories was also very nicely done. There are a couple of places where things in the main storyline are getting pretty tense, or Kat and her allies seem to be edging closer to solving the mystery, and a story is interjected, creating a kind of cliff-hanger-ey feel. The insertion of other storytelling voices is also a nice little palate cleanser. Other authors were brought in to write each story, which also helps to give each character's story its own cadence and feel, reinforcing the in-book conceit that they're all told by different people. 

The only thing introduced toward the beginning that I feel gets a bit neglected in the course of the book is Kat's relationship with her father. Memory and the loss of it ends up becoming a thematic thread that runs through the main narrative, so it feels like there's potential for resonance there between that background thread and the main plot that doesn't get fully utilized. 

From a worldbuilding standpoint, I found the mechanism by which the Wordsmiths enter and leave their immersive stories intriguing. Each story needs to be tethered to an object, which they then break when they get to the end of the tale. This will also only work within one specific room on the high school property, a small cement room connected to the stadium, and they all have to be assembled for the magic to function. I appreciate that these rules aren't over-explained. That's always a tricky balance to strike with this kind of magical world. Here, the fact that it's left a bit mysterious helps to maintain the mystique, and it makes sense for the characters, anyway, since they don't fully understand why the storytelling happens the way it does, either. I was a bit curious about the location specifically, and what was special about that place that allowed this magical storytelling to happen there, but wondering about that didn't detract in any way from me enjoying the story. 

I also have to give a shout-out to the individual stories, because they were all very enjoyable to read in their own right. My favorite, I think, was “Can't Be Afraid of the Dark”, which follows a kid who finds a bogeyman under his bed, one that has a very inconvenient fear. A close second is “Pink”, which is what I would say is the darkest story in the book, and exists in a kind of atmospheric horror space. It's well-placed, too, close to the end and during a very tense point in the main narrative where going into a more spine-tingling direction feels like it keeps the right energy through the break in the primary plot action. 

I'm sure there were a lot of extra logistical things that the authors and editor had to do to make a collection like this come together. But you can't tell from reading it, and that's maybe what impressed me the most about it. The work of 10 different writers comes together here into one cohesive whole, and one that is a very entertaining read from start to finish. 

 

See similar posts:

#BookReviews #StoryCollection #Fantasy

In Summary: * A quiet Sunday winds down. When I went to bed last night I had plans to do more yard work today, but those plans did not take shape. The prudence of giving my body a rest day following two consecutive working days seemed more important. So I took a rest day.

Tomorrow will be laundry day, and I may try to squeeze in a little yard work then, too.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night.

Health Metrics: * bw= 229.06 lbs. * bp= 134/78 (67)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, wall push-ups, BP breathing exercises, pilates

Diet: * 05:55 – 1 banana * 07:00 – pizza * 09:07 – fresh pineapple chunks * 11:30 – bowl of lugau (rice and chicked * 14:20 – garden salad and 2 boiled eggs * 16:40 – 1 fresh apple * 17:45 – 1 dish of ice cream

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 05:10 – bank accounts activity monitored. * 05:25 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, nap * 11:00 – watching old episodes of The Adventures of Superman * 12:00 – tuning in the pregame show for this afternoon's Rangers vs Braves MLB game. * 15:27 – and the Braves win this one, 8 to 5. * 15:38 – tuned into an Indoor Football League game, San Antonio Gunslingers vs Arizona Rattlers on PRIME * 18:20 – and the Rattlers win this game, 64 to 42.

Chess: * 08:30 – moved in all pending CC games

Marco Robinson has repeatedly promoted investment schemes promising ownership, equity and high returns, yet every documented venture has ended in total loss for investors. This investigation examines the Start Over share offer and the Naked Diablo Airlines pitch, two opportunities marketed as accessible investments but built on structures that could never deliver the ownership being sold.

See main article Marco Robinson — The Man, The Myth, The ‘Legacy of Lies’.

Click to expand Table of Contents (10 Sections)

• 1. Naked Restaurant Group Ltd: What the Liquidator Found
• 2. Naked Diablo Coffee: A Franchise Without a Business
• 3. The Legal Consequences of Selling Shares That Cannot Exist
• 4. The Naked Diablo Airlines Equity Pitch
• 5. What Investors Were Actually Being Offered
  • 5.1 Start Over
  • 5.2 Naked Diablo Airlines
  • 5.3 The Underlying Reality
• 6. If You Paid Money, What Remedies Exist
• 7. Finale: The Cost of Belief

1. Naked Restaurant Group Ltd: What the Liquidator Found

For years, Robinson has presented the “Naked” brand as a kind of entrepreneurial universe — Naked Dollars, Naked CEO, Naked Restaurant, Naked Diablo Airlines — each one pitched as a thriving venture ready for global expansion. The restaurant in Kuala Lumpur was real enough, but the UK company he created in 2019, Naked Restaurant Group Ltd, was a paper company, not a restaurant. It never operated a restaurant, never franchised anything, never traded, and never generated revenue. Yet money moved through it.

On 8 May 2019, Robinson publicly announced a global franchise opportunity for the Naked Restaurant, complete with promises of “$2 million annual revenue,” property ownership, and cashflow from a $5,000 entry point. Forty‑nine days later, on 26 June 2019, a UK company called Naked Restaurant Group Ltd was incorporated. The timing is hard to ignore. The company never opened a restaurant, never franchised anything, and never produced the revenue he was publicly claiming. It existed on paper, and then it collapsed.

When the company finally collapsed and entered voluntary liquidation, the liquidator began the statutory investigation required under UK insolvency law. What they found cuts through years of marketing language and reveals something much simpler: the company had no assets, no operations, and a director who had withdrawn money that wasn’t his to take.

The liquidator’s report states plainly that Robinson had an overdrawn director’s loan account of £51,827.85. In other words, he had taken over fifty thousand pounds out of a company that had no trading activity and no legitimate means of lending money to its director. The liquidator pursued repayment. Robinson agreed to a settlement: £19,000 upfront, with the remaining £32,827.85 to be repaid in instalments.

He immediately defaulted.

The report notes that the missed payment rendered the full balance “immediately due and payable,” and that solicitors had been instructed to pursue recovery. It also confirms that the liquidator submitted a conduct report to the Secretary of State — something required only when a director’s behaviour raises concerns about their fitness to manage a company.

This is not investor testimony. It is not rumour. It is not interpretation. It is a formal insolvency finding, documented by an independent professional bound by statutory duties. And it sits in stark contrast to the public claims Robinson was making at the same time: Instagram posts promising a global franchise and a McDonald’s‑style expansion model available from “only $5,000.”

The UK company behind those claims had no restaurant, no franchise, no revenue, and no assets. What it did have was a director withdrawing money, a liquidation, and a defaulted repayment agreement.

Putting aside how hare‑brained the idea of franchising a single, local, one‑off premises in Kula Lumpar for $5,000 is, in the wider pattern of Robinson’s past ventures — Wealth Creation Ltd, The New Rich List, Naked Dollars, Oakglade House — Naked Restaurant Group Ltd is not an outlier. It is another branded entity created to front an idea that never materialised, leaving behind debts, unanswered questions, and a statutory paper trail that tells a very different story from the one presented publicly.

2. Naked Diablo Coffee: A Franchise Without a Business

If the Naked Restaurant franchise pitch was questionable, Naked Diablo Coffee is a franchise built out of nothing at all. It isn’t a restaurant repackaged, or a dissolved company revived, or a brand with a distant past. It’s a franchise built on nothing more than AI‑generated images and Instagram hype. There is no shop, no pilot site, no trading entity, no menu, no premises, and no business. The entire “brand” exists only as digital mock‑ups posted online.

On 10 April 2026, Robinson announced that he and Rob Fitzpatrick were “opening NAKED DIABLO COFFEE SHOPS,” inviting followers to comment “NAKED” to join a waitlist to buy a franchise. It was presented with the same confidence and theatricality as his other ventures — a global roll‑out, a ready‑to‑buy franchise, a business opportunity waiting for early adopters. But unlike the Kuala Lumpur restaurant, which at least existed in the real world, Naked Diablo Coffee has no physical presence at all.

This is where the legal reality becomes unavoidable. In the UK, franchising isn’t an unregulated free‑for‑all; it sits within the broader framework of misrepresentation law, consumer protection, and business‑opportunity regulation. The British Franchise Association’s own code — the standard the industry is expected to follow — requires a franchisor to operate a proven pilot site before recruiting franchisees. A franchise must be a functioning business with a track record, audited financials, and a disclosure document that sets out how it operates. Naked Diablo Coffee currently has none of this. It isn’t a start‑up café preparing to open its first location; it is a concept with no trading history, no premises, and no evidence of viability. Yet Robinson is publicly inviting people to join a waitlist to buy into it, stepping directly into the territory of misleading commercial practice under the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008.

The moment he invited people to “get on the waitlist to buy,” he also crossed into investment‑solicitation territory. In the UK, offering an investment — even informally, even on Instagram — brings you into the orbit of FCA regulation. You cannot solicit investment from the public unless you are authorised or fall within a narrow exemption. Naked Diablo Coffee is not authorised, does not qualify for an exemption, and does not exist as a business. The pitch was legally impossible.

The pitch also mirrored the pattern seen in other ventures. A brand name is created, imagery is produced, a global expansion is announced, and the public is invited to invest or buy in before any underlying business exists. The difference here is that Naked Diablo Coffee didn’t even have a shell company behind it. There is no UK entity to examine, no filings to review, no accounts to compare. It is pure promotion — a franchise offer without a franchise, a business opportunity without a business.

In the context of wider investigation, Naked Diablo Coffee is important not because of what it is, but because of what it isn’t. It shows the same behaviour as the Naked Restaurant Group timeline, but in an even more distilled form. A public pitch appears. A promise of a franchise follows. There is no underlying business. And yet the invitation to “get on the waitlist to buy” is made with complete confidence, as if the legal requirements of franchising simply don't apply.

3. The Start Over Equity Pitch

See — When # IPO Means “Imaginary Public Offering”.

The deeper problem with Robinson’s Start Over equity pitch is not simply that the companies behind the business were too small to justify a $2 million valuation. It is that they were structurally incapable of issuing shares to the public at all. A private limited company in the UK cannot make a public offer of shares. It cannot solicit investment from retail consumers. And it cannot describe itself as preparing for an IPO unless it is already operating within the regulatory framework that governs public listings. Online CEO Ltd, Brand Story Publishing Ltd, and Start Over Movement Holdings Ltd were all private companies with fixed share structures, no authorised share classes for external investors, and no legal mechanism through which followers could ever have become “shareholders.”

This matters because when a company is legally incapable of issuing the shares being sold, the shares do not exist. And when the shares do not exist, the corporate veil — the ring‑fence that normally protects directors from personal liability — does not apply. Any money taken under the pretence of an equity sale would not be a corporate transaction; it would be a personal misrepresentation by the individual making the offer. In such circumstances, the director becomes personally liable for the return of funds, because the transaction was never capable of being fulfilled by the company in the first place.

The law is explicit about this. Under the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000, an unauthorised person who makes a financial promotion — especially one involving the sale of securities that cannot legally be issued — exposes themselves to both civil and criminal consequences. If a hypothetical investor paid money for Start Over “equity,” they would not have received shares, because no shares existed to be issued. They would not have become a shareholder, because the corporate structure did not allow it. And they would not have been participating in a legitimate investment round, because no such round was legally possible. Their recourse would be through the very regulations designed to protect consumers from unauthorised investment schemes: the rules on unlawful financial promotions, the remedies available when a transaction is induced by a promise that could never be fulfilled, and the personal liability that arises when a director solicits funds for a security that does not exist.

The practical route for any hypothetical investor to recover their money is straightforward, and the specifics are set out in section “6. If You Paid Money, What Remedies Exist”. In short, the UK’s Money Claim Online system provides a simple way to pursue repayment when money has been taken for a financial instrument that could never legally exist.

The core point is simple: money paid for something that was impossible to issue is recoverable.

4. The Naked Diablo Airlines Equity Pitch

Naked Diablo Airlines follows the same pattern as Start Over, but with even clearer evidence of an unauthorised, unlawful public offer.

Naked Diablo Airlines is structured with 40% held by Marco Robinson, 40% by Rob Fitzpatrick and the remaining 20% by Wyatt’s X Aviation company. Its entire share capital is already issued. There are no unissued shares, no authorised share classes and no mechanism through which members of the public could ever acquire equity. The structure is closed. Despite this, both men publicly invited followers to “own a piece” of the airline.

The investment pitches appeared on 30 June 2026 across two platforms. In a YouTube interview, Fitzpatrick stated that if “10,000 people pay £1,000 each,” they would raise £10 million. This is a direct description of a mass‑market public fundraising effort aimed at retail investors. On the same day, Robinson posted an Instagram video — filmed beside Fitzpatrick — telling followers they could “own a piece” of the airline from £1,000. The two men were jointly promoting an equity raise to the public for a private company that had no equity available to sell.

This takes the pitch directly into POATR territory. Under the Public Offers and Admissions to Trading Regulations, any public offer above £5 million triggers the full regime unless a narrow exemption applies. Fitzpatrick’s £10 million target places the offer well beyond that threshold. A raise of that size cannot be marketed to retail investors without FCA approval, authorised disclosure and a compliant structure. Naked Diablo Airlines has none of these. The promotional activity therefore constitutes an unlawful public offer of securities.

The misrepresentation is clear and documented. Both the Instagram pitch and the YouTube interview were published on 30 June 2026. On Instagram, Robinson told viewers that he and Fitzpatrick had already invested £10 million into the airline — presenting the venture as funded, credible and de‑risked. In the YouTube interview released the same day, Fitzpatrick explained that the £10 million was actually a fundraising target, achievable only if “10,000 people pay £1,000 each.” The two statements directly contradict each other. One describes a fully funded airline; the other describes a public raise. POATR treats such contradictions as material because they shape investor perception. Presenting a raise as both completed and simultaneously open to the public is a classic inducement pattern, encouraging retail investors to commit money on the basis of inconsistent and misleading claims.

Robinson has publicly stated that Phil Wyatt is “onboard” with the airline. Wyatt is not merely an adviser; he is a 20% stakeholder through X Aviation, and his involvement is therefore part of the representation being made to potential investors. Private companies are not legally required to disclose past convictions, civil judgments or director bans, but information of that nature would plainly form part of a reasonable investor’s assessment of a public investment pitch if it were known. In that regard, it is a matter of public record that Marco Robinson has a criminal conviction for fraud in the UAE and a UK civil judgment for fraudulent misrepresentation; that Robert Fitzpatrick received an eleven‑year director ban after a High Court judge branded one of his ventures “a swindle on the public”; and that Phil Wyatt was described as “dishonest” by a High Court judge for his role in draining Goldtrail of funds, for which he received a £1.4 million fine. When individuals with this history present themselves as founders and stakeholders in a public investment pitch, omissions of such material facts can contribute to misleading impressions and inducement, particularly when the offer is directed at retail investors. And the use of a fabricated honorific such as “Sir” is not an omission at all; it is an affirmative misrepresentation that enhances the perceived credibility of the promoter and therefore forms part of the inducement itself.

The regulatory position is straightforward. Naked Diablo Airlines has no equity available for public sale. The promotional material invited retail investors to buy into a £10 million raise that the company was structurally incapable of delivering. And the contradictory statements about the £10 million — claimed as both already invested and simultaneously being sought from the public — form a clear pattern of misrepresentation and inducement within an unlawful public offer.

As with Start Over, anyone who paid money believing they were acquiring equity that did not exist would be entitled to seek a refund, and if the founders refuse, a simple claim through the Money Claim Online process provides a practical remedy (6. If You Paid Money, What Remedies Exist).

5. What Investors Were Actually Being Offered

Across both ventures — Start Over and Naked Diablo Airlines — followers were invited to own a share of a business. But once the underlying structures are examined, neither offer provided anything that could be owned, valued, transferred, or recognised as an investment in any meaningful sense.

5.1 Start Over

Start Over Movement Holdings Ltd has only one class of shares: 100 ordinary shares, all owned by Marco Robinson. No additional share classes exist, no authorised but unissued shares exist, and no filings were ever made to create any instrument capable of being allotted to followers.

Against that backdrop, the “share” offered to followers was not a share at all. It was not a security, not an asset, not something that could be sold or transferred, and not something that conferred any rights. It had no voting power, no dividend entitlement, no ownership interest and no contractual footing. Its real‑world value is simply the amount paid for it, because nothing was ever issued that could be owned or realised. The investor receives nothing except the representation that they were acquiring equity — a representation the company was structurally incapable of fulfilling.

5.2 Naked Diablo Airlines

Naked Diablo Airlines is similarly closed. Its entire share capital is already issued: 40% to Robinson, 40% to Fitzpatrick and 20% to Phil Wyatt’s X Aviation. No unissued shares exist. No secondary class exists. No mechanism exists through which new investors could acquire ownership.

Despite this, followers were told they could “own a piece” of the airline from £1,000. Fitzpatrick described a £10 million raise based on “10,000 people paying £1,000 each,” while Robinson, on the same day, claimed that £10 million had already been invested, while Fitzpatrick beside him, nodded in agreement. The pitch presented itself as an equity opportunity, but no equity existed to be sold, and no instrument was ever identified that could have been issued.

5.3 The Underlying Reality

In both cases, followers were invited to transfer money for an undefined ‘interest’ in companies that had no mechanism capable of creating ownership, and the promotions were not merely unauthorised, but unauthorisable. The structures behind the offers made it legally impossible for any share, loan note, revenue interest or contractual right to exist. What was being promoted was not an investment product but the idea of one, and UK law treats that distinction as material: an inducement to invest in a security that cannot legally be issued is an unlawful financial promotion from the moment it is communicated.

In addition the promotional material also omitted the basic risk warnings and investor‑categorisation statements that any reasonable retail investor would expect when being asked to commit money to a venture. Followers were being invited to pay into something described as an investment, but without any of the disclosures that allow an investor to understand what they are buying or what risks they are taking.

Across both ventures, the underlying reality is the same: investors were not being offered equity, rights or any definable security. They were being asked to contribute money to ventures that had no structure capable of issuing what they claimed to be selling. With no unissued equity, no investment instrument and no documentation describing any rights, investors were not receiving a share, a security or any ownership interest in any recognisable form.

In practical terms, the only thing they received was the act of having paid money.

6. If You Paid Money, What Remedies Exist

For anyone who paid money in the belief they were acquiring equity that did not exist, the remedy is straightforward. If the founders will not return the funds voluntarily or “buy back” the so‑called shares, a simple claim through Money Claim Online provides a practical route to recovery. The claim is based on having paid for something that was never capable of being issued, and the absence of any genuine investment product does not weaken that position; it strengthens it.

This is the quiet, unavoidable legal reality beneath the IPO performance. The offer was never capable of being honoured, and the law is explicit about what happens when an individual solicits investment for a security that cannot legally be issued. The liability does not sit with the company. It sits with the person who made the promise.

The route for such a hypothetical investor seeking remedy is surprisingly simple. Civil litigation does not require a high‑cost law firm or a complex commercial suit. The three film writers who pursued Robinson in earlier disputes demonstrated that county‑court action can be effective, and that the UK's Money Claim Online system (MCOL) allows individuals to file claims directly, without legal representation, at a fraction of the cost of traditional litigation. MCOL is designed for straightforward monetary claims: money paid, promise made, obligation breached. It does not require specialist knowledge, and it does not require the claimant to navigate the complexities of financial regulation. If someone hypothetically paid for Start Over “equity,” MCOL would be the natural venue for recovery, because the claim would be simple: the director offered a financial instrument he could not legally issue, took money for it, and failed to deliver something that never existed.

For an overseas investor, or even UK investor outside England or Wales, the route would be no different. MCOL allows claimants outside the UK to file civil actions against UK‑based defendants, provided they can supply a service address within England or Wales. That address does not need to belong to a solicitor or legal representative; it can be a friend’s address, an authorised agent, or even a rented PO Box that accepts legal correspondence. Once an appropriate UK service address within the correct UK jurisdiction is in place, MCOL allows the claimant to file and pursue a straightforward monetary claim remotely, without needing to appear in person or instruct a high‑cost law firm. Most MCOL claims settle or conclude on paper, but if a hearing is listed, the claimant can request that it be conducted by telephone or video link — a routine accommodation for overseas parties, and one that can be requested early to avoid any expectation of physical attendance. The system exists to make simple debt‑recovery actions accessible, and it is routinely used by individuals both inside and outside the UK. So, hypothetically, if someone overseas paid for Start Over or Naked Diablo Airlines “equity” that could never legally exist, MCOL would allow them to file a claim directly against Robinson at minimal cost.

A claimant doesn’t need to argue financial law or set out complex breaches. MCOL is designed for simple monetary claims and allows claims up to £100,000. The evidence is basic: proof of payment, proof of what was offered, and a short explanation that the promised “equity” or “shares” never existed and could not legally exist. That is enough to frame a straightforward claim for repayment — money taken for something that was impossible to issue.

Note that while MCOL accepts claims up to £100,000, claims above £10,000 may be allocated to tracks where the losing party can be ordered to pay the other side’s legal costs. Under £10,000, the Small Claims Track’s “no costs” rule usually applies.

MCOL works cleanly in an open‑and‑shut scenario like the “equity” pitch, where the product could not legally exist. Even so, anyone who believes they bought a “share” should still look at their own documents — contracts, emails, messages — to see what was actually promised. Robinson’s Instagram ads use the language of equity, shares, and profit‑participation, which would be false advertising if the underlying product wasn’t that. But in any dispute, the court looks at the actual documents because what matters is the formal promise, not the marketing language. Note: This is an explanation of how the system works, not legal advice.

Reporting the public share announcements to the UK’s financial regulator — the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) — is still the correct way to ensure the unlawful offers are stopped, and this applies whether the person making the report is in the UK or overseas. The FCA can assist in recovering losses in regulated schemes, but not where the offer itself is unlawful and no investment product ever existed. In those circumstances, the regulator’s role is limited to addressing the unlawful promotion, not individual recovery. Unless the founders agree to return the money, civil action remains the only direct remedy available to an investor.

In some circumstances, unlawful public offers can lead to criminal proceedings, and criminal courts do have powers to order compensation. Whether that occurs depends entirely on the authorities and whether they consider the nature of the offer, and the money taken, serious enough to warrant prosecution. It is a possible route to recovery, but it is not one an investor can initiate themselves; it sits wholly at the discretion of the authorities.

7. Finale: The Cost of Belief

Across all of this, it is important to recognise that none of this is new territory for the men behind Naked Diablo Airlines.

Marco Robinson has previously promoted an unlawful investment scheme — Naked Dollars — in which every investor’s capital was wiped out and which ultimately led to his criminal conviction for fraud in the UAE. Wealth Creation Ltd, another of Robinson’s ventures, publicly claimed to have raised USD $100 million in crowdfunding, yet its filings showed no such assets, and investors again lost their money.

Robert Fitzpatrick has a long, documented history of misrepresentation and financial abuse through his involvement in multiple pyramid schemes, culminating in a High Court judge branding one of his ventures “a swindle on the public” and imposing an eleven‑year director ban.

And Phil Wyatt has already been found by the High Court to have “dishonestly assisted” the director of Goldtrail in draining company funds, resulting in a £1.4 million penalty and demonstrating a clear disregard for the interests of customers and shareholders.

These are the individuals now presenting themselves as the founders and stewards of Naked Diablo Airlines, inviting retail investors to trust them with fresh capital.

As the investment manuals put it, you can lose all your money, and when the product doesn’t exist, you’ll get exactly what you paid for.

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DISCLAIMER: This material is an investigative analysis based on publicly available information. It is not legal advice, does not constitute professional guidance, and should not be relied upon as a basis for litigation or regulatory action. Any discussion of legal processes, remedies, or hypothetical investor recourse is illustrative only. Readers considering legal steps must seek advice from a qualified solicitor or regulated professional.

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For more on Marco Robinson (and Robert Fitzpatrick) see Marco Robinson — The Man, The Myth, The ‘Legacy of Lies’

For more on Robert Fitzpatrick see Robert Fitzpatrick: From High Court “Swindle” to Billion‑Dollar Pretender

For more on Naked Diablo Airlines see Naked Diablo: How To Build An Airline Without Building An Airline

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