High Fantasy Epic Sword Fighter Tournament Round 1, Fight 7

Achilles vs Beowulf

This is the most epic fight yet. Achilles is the undisputed GOAT of Greek mythology. An unstoppable force on the battlefield. If only his mother had dipped that other ankle...

Anyway, if your only familiarity with Achilles is the movie Troy, you don't have the full picture of his ability. Brad Pitt did an excellent job, but his portrayal was too... human. The Homeric version of Achilles is something else entirely.

And then Beowulf. If you haven't read the epic poem, please do. His most notable feature is his absolutely absurd level of strength. He can toss monsters about like a dad wrestling with their young child. Interestingly, both of these characters are fixated on achieving glory so I think this is a pretty solid matchup.

Let's say that the Nordic Gods and Greek Gods have gotten into a debate as to who has the better hero. Or rather, whose top hero could win in a fight. The Nordic Gods resurrect peak Beowulf and the Greek Gods resurrect peak Achilles. They fight in the ruins of a temple.

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The temple had been ruined so long ago that neither warrior recognized the gods whose faces had once adorned its walls. Broken columns lay across a floor of cracked marble, weeds pushed between fallen stones, and half a roof opened the sanctuary to a sky divided unnaturally in two. Thunderclouds rolled across one horizon while brilliant Mediterranean sunlight burned across the other. Somewhere beyond mortal sight, Odin and Zeus watched. The wager had begun simply enough, as wagers among gods often did: which people had produced the greater warrior? The Greeks offered Achilles. The northern gods answered with Beowulf. Death proved no obstacle to either pantheon.

Achilles awakened first, armored as he had been before Troy, shield on his arm and the great Pelian spear in his hand. Beowulf rose across the temple with sword and shield, restored to the tremendous strength of his youth. Neither man seemed particularly impressed when unseen voices explained why they had been returned to life. Beowulf looked toward the divided heavens and laughed. “Gods have strange amusements.” Achilles rolled the spear once in his hand. “They could have chosen worse.” Beowulf studied the younger man across the ruins. He saw speed in the way Achilles shifted his feet and confidence bordering upon arrogance in everything else. Achilles saw an older kind of danger. The Geat was huge even among warriors, thick through the chest and shoulders, and his sword looked almost small in his hand. Neither asked the other's name. The gods had already provided those.

Beowulf advanced. Achilles did not. The Greek's spear struck without warning, shooting toward Beowulf's chest with astonishing speed. Beowulf turned it on his shield and charged through the impact, expecting Achilles to retreat. Instead Achilles slid sideways and struck again, the spearhead slicing across Beowulf's upper arm before he could turn. Beowulf answered with a sweep of his sword that would have taken another man's head from his shoulders. Achilles was already gone. He moved around the broken columns with the impossible quickness for which men had named him, stabbing at Beowulf from angles that forced the larger warrior continually to turn. A second wound appeared along Beowulf's thigh. A third opened his shoulder. None were deep. Achilles was learning. Then Beowulf caught the spear. Achilles thrust toward his throat, and the Geat simply knocked the point aside with his shield and seized the shaft behind the head. Achilles pulled. Beowulf pulled harder. For an instant surprise crossed Achilles' face as he found himself dragged bodily forward. He released the spear a heartbeat before Beowulf's sword came down, and the blade shattered the marble where his leg had been. Achilles rolled, drew his sword and came upright several paces away. Beowulf tossed the Pelian spear aside. “Fast,” he said. Achilles looked from the discarded spear to the enormous man who had torn it out of his hands. “Strong.”

They met in the center of the temple. Now there was no reach to protect Achilles, and Beowulf attacked with the ferocity of the man who had torn Grendel's arm from its socket. Achilles caught the first blow on his shield and was driven backward. He slipped the second and answered with his sword, but Beowulf took the cut across his mail simply to get close enough to smash the rim of his shield into Achilles' chest. Achilles stumbled against a fallen column. Beowulf came after him, sword descending, and Achilles twisted away as the blade struck stone. He slashed Beowulf across the ribs, pivoted behind him and cut again across the back of his leg. Beowulf turned with astonishing speed and caught Achilles by the edge of his armor. For the first time in his life, Achilles discovered what it felt like to be manhandled. Beowulf lifted him and hurled him through the remains of a stone altar. Achilles struck hard enough to scatter broken masonry and disappeared beneath dust. Somewhere above, thunder rolled with unmistakable satisfaction.

Beowulf retrieved his sword and approached the rubble carefully. Achilles exploded from it. His shield struck Beowulf's sword aside, his blade opened the Geat's forearm, and before Beowulf could answer Achilles drove forward and buried the sword beneath his ribs. Beowulf grunted and seized Achilles' sword arm. Achilles tried to withdraw the blade. It did not move. Beowulf smiled through bloody teeth. Achilles abandoned the sword. He drove his shield into Beowulf's wounded side, twisted free of the enormous hand reaching for him and sprinted toward the fallen spear. Beowulf ripped Achilles' sword from his own body and threw it aside. Blood poured down his side now, but he followed. Achilles reached the Pelian spear first and turned just as Beowulf came upon him. The spearpoint drove toward Beowulf's chest. Beowulf knocked it aside. Achilles reversed it, struck him across the face with the butt, then spun away from the answering sword. Beowulf pursued, but something had changed. The wounds were accumulating. His left leg no longer followed the right quite as quickly. His sword arm had begun to slow. Achilles saw all of it.

Beowulf saw that Achilles saw it. He stopped chasing. “Come, Greek.” Achilles stopped as well. Beowulf threw his shield aside. Achilles understood the invitation. It was exactly the kind of invitation that had killed Hector. He came. The spear flashed toward Beowulf's chest. Beowulf twisted aside and continued forward. Achilles stabbed again, opening his shoulder. Beowulf kept coming. A third thrust entered his abdomen. Beowulf roared and drove himself farther down the shaft, trapping the weapon inside his own body as he closed both hands around it. Achilles tried to release the spear, but this time Beowulf had expected that. One bloody hand left the shaft and closed around Achilles' wrist. Beowulf pulled him close. The sword rose. Achilles' shield intercepted it inches from his head. Beowulf struck again. The shield split. Achilles staggered, and Beowulf came after him with the last of his strength. The third blow tore the ruined shield from Achilles' arm. Beowulf raised the sword for the fourth.

Achilles stepped forward. The movement was almost impossibly fast. He abandoned the spear still buried in Beowulf, drew the knife at his belt and drove it upward beneath the Geat's jaw. Beowulf stopped, his sword remaining raised. Achilles held the knife there for a moment, breathing against Beowulf's chest. Then the sword fell from Beowulf's hand. Achilles stepped backward. Beowulf remained standing longer than he should have. Blood covered him from shoulder to thigh, the Pelian spear still protruding from his body. He looked down at Achilles and gave a low, rasping laugh. “Fast.” Achilles nodded. “Strong.” Beowulf fell.

For several moments Achilles stood beside him, battered and bleeding, his shield destroyed and his sword somewhere among the ruins. Then he planted a foot against Beowulf and pulled the spear free. He looked upward toward the impossible sky. “Is that enough?” Thunder answered from one horizon. From the other came laughter.

Winner: Achilles

High Fantasy Epic Sword Fighter Tournament Round 1, Fight 6

Geralt of Rivia vs Conan the Barbarian

Geralt of Rivia is a genetically enhanced, magically imbued monster hunter, aka a Witcher. Conan the Barbarian was enslaved as a child, lost his family, and fought as a gladiator becoming more a force of nature than man. A preternaturally skilled hunter vs a warrior with true brute force of will. We will have them meet in Conan's homeland, Cimmeria, a cold wasteland. Let's see how it goes:

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Cimmeria was cold, gray, and miserable, which Geralt supposed was one point in its favor. Two days earlier he had been outside Novigrad when green light swallowed him and deposited him among mountains that belonged to no map he knew. The curse had been remarkably straightforward: Slay Conan of Cimmeria, and you may return. Geralt had spent two days attempting to prove it a liar before his medallion finally led him into a narrow valley beneath the mountains. The man waiting there was difficult to mistake. Conan stood beside a butchered elk with a broad sword within arm's reach, enormously muscled without the clumsy bulk Geralt associated with men who cultivated strength for show. The Cimmerian looked up as Geralt approached, and something in his expression changed immediately. He had recognized danger. Geralt stopped twenty paces away. “Conan?” The barbarian rose and reached for his sword. “Who asks?” Geralt drew his steel blade and sighed. “Sorry.”

Conan came at him without another word, and Geralt's first thought was that no man that large had any business moving so quickly. The broad sword swept toward his neck with enough force to make blocking foolish, so Geralt slipped outside the stroke and opened Conan's ribs as the Cimmerian passed. It should have broken the attack. Conan merely turned with it, blood already running down his side, and sent the return stroke toward Geralt's head. Geralt ducked beneath the blade and found Conan's knee driving into his chest. The impact threw him backward. He struck the earth, rolled as the sword came down where his skull had been, and came onto one knee with his left hand extended. “Aard.” The Sign caught Conan squarely and hurled him through the air. He struck a pine hard enough to shake water from its branches and dropped among the roots.

Geralt was moving before Conan landed. He had killed things stronger than this man and things faster than him; the trick was never allowing either kind to recover. His sword stabbed downward, but Conan rolled aside, kicked Geralt's knee and somehow came upright in the same movement. The Cimmerian's forehead smashed into Geralt's face, and then one enormous hand closed around his sword wrist. Geralt felt the strength in that grip and abandoned any thought of wrestling free. Instead he opened his left hand between them and summoned Igni. Flame washed across Conan's chest and face. Conan roared and recoiled, his grip loosening for no more than an instant, but an instant was plenty for a witcher. Geralt tore his arm free, stepped inside the barbarian's sword and drove his steel blade beneath Conan's ribs until the point emerged from his back.

Conan did not fall. Geralt had just enough time to realize that before a hand closed around his throat. The Cimmerian pulled himself farther down the sword to reach him, blood pouring from a wound that should already have ended the fight, and Geralt saw no madness in his eyes. Conan knew he was dying. He simply intended to kill Geralt first. Geralt released his sword rather than be dragged closer, but Conan was already raising the broad blade in his other hand. There was no room to dodge and no time to recover the steel sword. Conan struck with everything left in him, the edge descending toward the place where Geralt's neck met his shoulder.

The sword struck Quen instead. Golden light burst between them, and Conan's blade rebounded as though it had struck an invisible wall. Surprise entered the Cimmerian's face for the first time, and Geralt understood that the fight had ended. Conan had already survived telekinetic force, fire, and a sword through his body; he had solved every new problem almost as quickly as Geralt could present it. Given another few seconds, perhaps he would have found some answer to this one too. Geralt did not give him those seconds. His right hand went over his shoulder, the silver sword came free in one smooth motion, and the blade swept through Conan's neck before the barbarian could recover his guard.

Conan's head struck the wet earth. His body remained upright for the smallest fraction of a second, Geralt's steel sword still buried through its abdomen, then collapsed beside it. Geralt stood motionless, silver sword extended, listening to his own breathing and the patter of rain through the trees. The whole encounter could not have lasted much more than twenty seconds. He sheathed the silver sword, planted one boot against Conan's side and pulled the steel blade free, wiping it clean before looking down at the dead Cimmerian. The green light of the curse had already begun forming between the trees. “You deserved better,” Geralt said, and stepped through.

Winner: Geralt of Rivia

Chapter 1: The Thoughts That Get Louder After Everyone Else Is Asleep

There are nights when nothing dramatic is happening in the room, yet your mind feels like it is standing in the middle of a storm. The lights are off. The house is quiet. Everyone else seems to be sleeping. But you are thinking about the world, your family, money, the future, and all the things you cannot control. You tell yourself to stop thinking, but your thoughts keep reaching for one more possibility. That is when a quiet 2 Thessalonians 2 message for people who feel shaken inside can meet you differently, not as a lesson to study, but as a place to put down what you have been carrying.

Sometimes the hardest fear is the kind you do not know how to explain. You are not in immediate danger. Nothing terrible happened today. You may even feel embarrassed that you are this unsettled. Still, your chest feels tight and your mind will not rest. You have read enough headlines, watched enough arguments, and heard enough warnings that the future has started to feel personal. You are not only thinking about what is happening in the world. You are wondering what it could eventually mean for your home, your job, the people you love, and the life you are trying to hold together. That is why Christian encouragement for the hidden fear that follows you into the night matters. Sometimes you need more than information. You need somewhere safe to be honest.

Paul’s words in 2 Thessalonians 2 speak directly into this kind of inner shaking. He tells believers not to be quickly shaken in mind or alarmed. I keep coming back to that phrase because it does not shame the person who feels unsettled. It recognizes that a mind can be moved. It can be pushed around by fear, confusion, rumors, and pressure. But it also tells us that being shaken does not have to become our permanent condition.

Maybe you know what this looks like when the day is finally over. You have answered everyone’s questions. You have handled what needed to be handled. You have been the dependable one at work, at home, or in your family. Then you lie down and realize you have been holding yourself together all day. The silence gives your fears room to speak. You wonder whether the economy will get worse, whether your children will be okay, whether someone you love is drifting away, whether your health will hold, or whether you are prepared for whatever comes next.

In those moments, I do not think the answer is to force yourself into a better mood. I do not think faith requires you to pretend you are not scared. Sometimes the most faithful thing you can do is tell God exactly where your mind has gone. Not the polished version you would say in front of other people, but the real version: you are afraid of what you cannot see, tired of feeling responsible for everything, and worn down from imagining the worst. There is relief in becoming honest enough to stop performing calmness.

2 Thessalonians 2 does not promise that believers will understand every confusing event around them. It does something more useful. It reminds them that they do not have to be ruled by confusion. Deception can exist without becoming your identity. Trouble can be real without becoming your master. You can admit that the world is unstable without deciding that God must be unstable too.

That distinction matters late at night because fear likes to erase proportion. A difficult possibility starts feeling inevitable. One frightening headline begins representing the entire future. A problem you cannot solve before morning suddenly feels like something you must solve before you are allowed to sleep. But you are still human, and you are allowed to reach the end of what you can carry today.

There is no spiritual failure in saying, “I cannot hold this tonight.” In fact, surrender often begins there. You stop trying to manage ten imaginary tomorrows and return to the one room you are actually sitting in. You notice the clock and your breathing. You notice that the people you love are still here. You remember that God is not waiting for you to predict the future correctly before He agrees to remain faithful.

This is where standing firm becomes deeply personal. It may mean turning the phone facedown even though part of you wants one more update. It may mean refusing to search for reassurance until two in the morning. It may mean opening your Bible without demanding that every question be answered. It may mean whispering one simple prayer because you do not have the energy for anything more. God is not measuring the beauty of your prayer; He is meeting you in the truth of it.

Paul later reminds these believers that they are loved by the Lord, and I think that belongs beside the warning not to be shaken. When your mind is tired, you can start believing that God must be disappointed in you for struggling. But tiredness does not cancel love. Fear does not erase belonging. An unsettled night does not move you outside the reach of grace.

You may not wake tomorrow with every concern resolved. The world may still be noisy, and your personal questions may still be waiting. But tonight does not have to become a courtroom where you put your faith on trial because you are afraid. You can simply be a tired person talking honestly to God, and sometimes that is where steadiness starts.

Chapter 2: The Morning After the Fear

Morning has a way of making some fears look different. You wake up, see a thin line of light around the curtains, and realize the world did not end while you were sleeping. The problem you were worried about may still be there. The headlines may still be difficult. The unanswered message may still be unanswered. But you are here, and the fear that felt enormous at 1:30 in the morning has lost some of its power in daylight.

That does not mean the fear was fake. It means fear changes shape when we stop feeding it.

Imagine walking into the kitchen and seeing the same unpaid bill you were thinking about the night before. The amount has not changed. Your bank account has not changed. But now you can make coffee, sit down, look at the numbers, and decide what the next step actually is. Maybe you need to move money, call someone, change a plan, or ask for help. Faith does not make the bill disappear. It helps you face the real problem instead of suffering every possible consequence before anything has happened.

That is one of the things I hear in Paul’s instruction to stand firm. Standing firm is not emotional numbness. It is refusing to let fear push you into a life of imagined emergencies. It is returning to what is true, what is in front of you, and what God is asking of you today.

There is also something deeply freeing in remembering that you are loved before you are steady. You do not have to calm yourself perfectly before you are welcome with God. You do not have to prove that your faith is strong enough by pretending you never get overwhelmed. You can come to Him tired, uncertain, and still asking the same question you asked last night.

Then you can take one faithful step.

Make the call. Eat breakfast. Go to work. Sit with the person who needs you. Pray for the part of the world that has been weighing on your heart. Turn off the noise when it stops helping. Tell the truth. Do what is yours to do and leave what is not yours with God.

The world may remain unstable. Your life may still contain uncertainty. But you do not have to become unstable with it.

Sometimes peace is not the feeling that nothing bad can happen. Sometimes it is the quieter confidence that whatever happens, you will not be alone in it.

Your friend, Douglas Vandergraph

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There is a particular kind of betrayal in being charged more for staying. It runs against every instinct a customer brings to a long relationship with a shop, a bank, an insurer. You assume, reasonably, that years of repeat business buy you something: goodwill, a better deal, the warmth of being a known quantity. The opposite is closer to the truth. In a growing number of markets, the longer you remain a customer, the more a pricing system has learned about you, and the higher the figure it concludes you will tolerate. Loyalty is not rewarded. It is metered, modelled and monetised. The system reads your steadfastness as a signal of your inability to leave, and prices the difference.

This is the strange logic at the heart of what regulators have started calling surveillance pricing, and it is worth pausing on how counter-intuitive it is. Surge pricing, the kind that lifts a taxi fare when it rains, at least responds to something visible and shared. Everyone standing on the same wet pavement faces the same multiplier. Surveillance pricing does something else entirely. It responds to you: to your browsing history, your device, your postcode, your past purchases, the financial circumstances it has inferred about you and, crucially, to how trapped you appear to be. By 2026 this is no longer a thought experiment kept warm in economics seminars. It is law in three American states, the subject of formal orders from the United States Federal Trade Commission to eight companies, and the documented practice of firms from grocery delivery platforms to airlines. The question it forces is not whether the technology works. It plainly does. The question is what happens to the idea of a fair public price, the same number for anyone who wants the same thing, when that idea quietly stops being true.

The Difference Between a Crowd and a Person

The vocabulary matters here, because the industry has a strong interest in blurring it. Dynamic pricing is old, familiar and broadly understood. Airlines have flexed fares with demand since deregulation. Hotels lift rates around conferences. Energy tariffs move with wholesale markets. What unites these practices is that the price, however much it jumps, is a fact about the market at a given moment. It is aimed at a condition, not a customer. Two strangers booking the same seat at the same second see the same number.

Surveillance pricing breaks that symmetry. It is the calculation turned inward, away from the conditions of supply and demand and towards the individual standing in front of the screen. The Federal Trade Commission, in the issue spotlight it published in January 2025, drew the line precisely: instead of a price being a static feature of a product, the same product could carry a different price for different people based on consumer data, behaviours, location, time and purchase channel. The agency described an opaque market of third-party intermediaries that use advanced algorithms, artificial intelligence and personal information to categorise individuals and set a targeted price for each. The signals it documented were granular to the point of intimacy: not merely what you bought, but the movement of your cursor across a page, the products you placed in a basket and then abandoned. One example named in the FTC's findings was a cosmetics company tailoring promotions to a customer's skin type and skin tone.

The distinction is not pedantry. It is the whole moral architecture of the thing. A dynamic price is a message the market sends to everyone. A surveillance price is a private message addressed to you alone, written from a profile you cannot read, by a system that knows things about you that you have not agreed to share and may not even know about yourself. The crowd has become a person, and the person has become a target.

The Loyalty Penalty, and Why Britain Saw It First

If you want to understand surveillance pricing before the algorithms arrived, look at British insurance. For years the home and motor insurance markets ran on a practice the industry euphemistically called price walking, and which everyone else called the loyalty penalty. The mechanism was simple and cynical. Insurers offered cheap, often loss-making premiums to new customers to win them, then ratcheted the price upward at each annual renewal, year after year, betting that inertia, busyness or simple trust would stop the customer from shopping around. The longer you stayed, the more you paid, not because your risk had risen but because your loyalty had been identified as exploitable.

The scale of it was extraordinary. In September 2018, Citizens Advice lodged a super-complaint with the Competition and Markets Authority arguing that across five essential markets, mobile, broadband, home insurance, mortgages and savings, British consumers were losing around 4.1 billion pounds a year to the loyalty penalty. That worked out at roughly 877 pounds per affected household, equal to about three per cent of the average household's annual spending. Eight in ten people, the charity found, were paying a significantly higher price in at least one of those markets simply for staying with their existing supplier. The CMA accepted the substance of the complaint when it responded that December.

The Financial Conduct Authority went furthest in the insurance sector. Its market study concluded that six million existing customers would have saved 1.2 billion pounds in a single year had they paid the average price for their actual risk rather than the inflated renewal figure their loyalty had earned them. From January 2022 the FCA banned the practice outright, requiring insurers to offer renewing customers a price no higher than they would quote a new customer for the equivalent policy. It was, in effect, a legal insistence that loyalty must not be priced as a weakness.

What makes this history so relevant is that it was the analogue rehearsal for the digital performance now underway. Price walking was the loyalty penalty done crudely, by hand, with renewal letters and call-centre scripts. It worked because insurers could make a rough guess about who was unlikely to switch. Surveillance pricing is the same instinct supercharged. Where the old insurer guessed at your inertia from your renewal record, the modern pricing engine infers it from hundreds of signals in real time, and applies the penalty not once a year but at the moment of every transaction. The loyalty penalty was never really about insurance. It was about the seller's ability to read a customer's captivity and charge for it, and that ability has grown beyond all recognition. Even the FCA's ban proved porous. Research by the consumer group Which? in 2024, two years after the rules took effect, found that only around one in five car insurance customers had thought to test their renewal quote against what their own insurer would offer them as a new customer, and that just over half of those who did were quoted less for identical cover. Nor was the leakage always accidental: Direct Line Group, having misapplied the new rules, agreed to hand back an estimated 30 million pounds to renewing customers it had overcharged. The penalty, banned in one form, leaks back in others.

The Oldest Dream, Finally Buildable

Economists have a clinical name for the destination all of this is travelling towards. They call it first-degree, or perfect, price discrimination: the seller's fantasy of charging every buyer the exact maximum they are willing to pay, capturing for the company every last scrap of value that, under a single posted price, would have stayed in the customer's pocket. The theory has sat in textbooks for a century. What it always lacked was a mechanism, because individual human beings are historically rather good at concealing their personal ceiling. The single posted price, the same number on the same shelf for everyone, emerged in part because sellers simply could not do better. It was a technological limit that hardened, over time, into something we mistook for a moral norm.

That limit has now dissolved. Lina Khan, who chaired the FTC from 2021 to 2025, put the shift plainly. The idea of charging every individual person according to their individual willingness to pay, she said, had for the most part been a thought experiment. Through the enormous quantity of behavioural and individualised data that brokers and other firms now collect, she went on, the environment had changed: technologically it had become much more possible to serve every individual person an individual price based on everything they knew about you. Her framing of the consequence is the one that has stuck to the debate. We are moving, she warned, from a transparent market with public prices to an opaque world in which we are alone against secret algorithms.

The first public glimpse of the dream came in September 2000, when an Amazon shopper noticed that deleting the cookies from his browser dropped the price of a DVD. The company had been varying prices according to what it could infer about each customer, and in some cases loyal returning buyers were quoted more than newcomers. The backlash was fierce, Amazon retreated, calling it a random test, and the industry drew a careful lesson. Not that personalised pricing was wrong, but that it must never again be visible. For two decades the dream advanced quietly, dressed in the respectable language of demand and yield, until the data and the machine learning matured enough to make the old fantasy operational.

A TV That Costs More in the Car Park

The clearest way to feel surveillance pricing is to watch a price move not because the market shifted, but because you did. In 2019 investigative journalists at the Minneapolis television station KARE 11 documented exactly this on the Target retailer's app. A Samsung 55-inch smart television was listed at 499.99 dollars when a shopper browsed it from home. When the same shopper drove into the car park of a Target store, the app's price for the identical set leapt to 599.99 dollars. The variable was not supply, demand or time of day. It was geolocation: the app could tell the customer was now physically present, less likely to walk away empty-handed, and it priced that captivity at a hundred dollars. The television was not a fluke. Reporters picked ten products at random, from toys to bottled water to vacuum cleaners, and four of them rose in price once they were inside the shop: an Apple Watch band by two dollars, a Shark vacuum cleaner by forty, a Graco child car seat by seventy-two and a Dyson vacuum cleaner by a hundred and forty-eight. The spread is the instructive part. A system that moves a watch strap by two dollars and a vacuum cleaner by a hundred and forty-eight is not applying a blunt in-store surcharge; it is judging, item by item, what the fact of your presence is worth. Target adjusted the app after the investigation, but the episode remains a near-perfect demonstration of the mechanism, because the only thing that changed about the customer was how committed they appeared.

The principle scales far beyond a single retailer's app. The same season the FTC published its findings, the practice was visibly spreading into one of the most price-sensitive markets there is: air travel. In July 2025, the airline Delta confirmed it was expanding the use of artificial intelligence to set fares, working with an Israeli startup called Fetcherr, with the stated ambition of using AI to price a fifth of its domestic network by the end of the year. Three United States senators, Mark Warner, Ruben Gallego and Richard Blumenthal, wrote to the airline demanding answers. Their letter, dated 22 July 2025, warned of prices tailored to an individual consumer's willingness to pay, and cited Fetcherr's chief executive describing the company's use of all the data it could get its hands on. The senators borrowed Khan's most vivid illustration of the danger: a system that charges a higher fare because it knows the traveller just had a death in the family and needs to fly across the country at any cost. Pricing, in other words, calibrated not to the seat but to the customer's pain point, the precise moment of maximum desperation. Delta denied that it used personal data to set individual fares, insisting the AI forecast demand and market conditions rather than identifying any one passenger's willingness to pay. The denial is instructive, and we will return to it, because the more telling fact is not whether Delta is doing it today but that the infrastructure to do it now exists and is being marketed as a route to extraordinary profit.

Who Actually Said Yes

Strip the practice to its foundation and the question that will not go away is one of consent. Somewhere in the architecture of surveillance pricing there is supposed to be a moment at which the customer agreed to be priced as an individual, to have their financial circumstances inferred and held against them, to be charged according to a secret model of who they are. Find that moment. It does not exist.

What exists instead is a chain of consents to other things entirely. You agreed, in some buried clause, to let an app use your location, ostensibly to find your nearest store. You agreed to cookies so the site would remember your basket. You agreed to a loyalty card so you could collect points. You agreed to terms of service no one reads, in exchange for a service you actually wanted. At no point in any of this did a screen ask whether you would consent to those signals being fused into an estimate of your maximum tolerable price, and at no point would a rational person have said yes if it had. The Federal Trade Commission, examining the third-party intermediaries that build these systems, found a market drawing on data both volunteered by consumers and, more troublingly, inferred about them from first and third-party sources. Inference is the crucial word. You cannot meaningfully consent to a conclusion drawn about you that you never disclosed and may not even know is true.

This is what consumer advocates and privacy lawyers mean when they describe surveillance pricing as a black box. The customer cannot see what data the company holds, cannot see how the price was reached, and cannot see what other shoppers are paying for the same item at the same moment. The ordinary apparatus of fairness, the ability to know the reason for a decision and to contest it, simply never engages, because the reason is locked inside a proprietary model and the decision arrives disguised as a fact of nature. A price, to the person looking at it, appears to be something the world has handed down. It does not look like a profile, an accusation or a bet. But that, increasingly, is what it is.

The asymmetry is total. The seller knows the product's cost, the price it is showing you, the prices it is showing everyone else, the model that produced your figure and the data that fed the model. You know one number. You cannot tell whether personalisation is even happening, because a personalised price and a public one look identical: both are simply digits on a screen. The market was supposed to be an information system, aggregating dispersed knowledge into a public signal that let strangers coordinate their behaviour. Surveillance pricing inverts that function. It turns the price from a signal the market sends to you into a signal the seller secretly extracts from you, while you carry on reading the number as though it still carried its old, shared meaning.

What the Models Choose to Notice

There is a comforting story the industry tells about all this, and it deserves a fair hearing before it is dismantled. In theory, the argument runs, the ability to price each customer individually can expand a market rather than merely milk it. A seller who can identify price-sensitive buyers can profitably offer them a discount that brings them into the market, while charging more to those who can comfortably pay. On a whiteboard this looks almost progressive, a kind of automated means-testing that funds cheaper goods for the poor out of the wallets of the rich.

The world runs the logic in reverse. The signals a machine-learning system finds most useful for estimating willingness to pay are, with grim reliability, the same signals that track vulnerability and constraint. A shopper in an area with no rival supermarket within reach has fewer alternatives, and an algorithm can learn to read that absence of competition and charge for it. A household ordering nappies and repeat prescription items has predictable, inelastic demand, and inelasticity is precisely what a pricing model is built to detect and exploit. The customer with limited mobility, least able to drive between shops to compare, is the one least able to escape and therefore, on the model's own cold accounting, the one most worth charging extra. The system does not optimise for fairness. It optimises for revenue. The people with the least room to push back are exactly the people from whom there is most to extract.

A price built from inferred willingness to pay is, in the end, a price built from a model of who you are, and the characteristics that feed such a model are chosen for their predictive power, not their moral acceptability. If income predicts what you will pay, the model uses income, and if it can infer your income from your postcode, your phone and the brands you buy, it is charging you according to your wealth without ever asking your salary. If household size predicts inelastic demand for essentials, the model uses household size, which can mean that a larger and often poorer family faces systematically higher prices on the very goods it cannot do without. Some of these are characteristics that anti-discrimination law has spent a century learning to treat as illegitimate grounds for differential treatment. None is one that an ordinary shopper would knowingly hand over as a reason to be charged more for milk. And here the loyalty penalty completes its circle, for the most predictive signal of all is your own history. The longer the relationship, the richer the profile, the more confident the model becomes about exactly how much you will bear. Devotion, fed into the machine, comes out as leverage.

The Year the Law Began to Notice

For most of this story the law was simply absent. There is still no comprehensive federal statute in the United States governing surveillance pricing, and enforcement has leaned on the general prohibition of unfair or deceptive practices in Section 5 of the FTC Act, an authority written long before anyone imagined a retailer inferring your income from your shopping habits. That gap has begun to narrow at its edges rather than its centre. On 14 April 2026 the Commission issued an advance notice of proposed rulemaking on unfair and deceptive fee practices in online food and grocery delivery, taking comments until 18 May, and among its questions was whether platforms tell customers when the price in front of them has been personalised; the agency has also signalled work towards a policy statement on when failing to disclose the use of personal data to set an individual price becomes a Section 5 problem. That is rulemaking about disclosure in a single sector, not a prohibition, and it leaves the federal position roughly where it has always been.

The states moved faster, and the first of them moved earlier than the headlines of 2026 suggest. New York's Algorithmic Pricing Disclosure Act took effect on 10 November 2025, obliging a seller that uses personal data to set a price to say so, clearly and at the moment of the price, in a notice reading THIS PRICE WAS SET BY AN ALGORITHM USING YOUR PERSONAL DATA, with civil penalties of up to a thousand dollars for each violation. The same Act bars the use of protected-class data where the effect is a price different from the one offered to others, and Attorney General Letitia James issued a public warning to New Yorkers as it came into force. What changed in 2026, then, was not that the law noticed surveillance pricing for the first time. It was what the law began to ask of it: the move from compelling a seller to confess the practice to forbidding the practice outright. And the centre of gravity is the food on your table.

Maryland moved first on prohibition. On 28 April 2026, Governor Wes Moore signed House Bill 895, the Protection From Predatory Pricing Act, the first law in the country to restrict surveillance pricing in the grocery sector. It takes effect on 1 October 2026. The statute prohibits food retailers above a certain size and third-party delivery services from using a consumer's personal data to set individualised prices, and pairs this with a rule requiring that displayed prices remain fixed for at least one business day, a direct check on the prospect of electronic shelf labels being used to surge the price of essentials minute by minute. Violations are treated as unfair or deceptive trade practices, carrying civil penalties of up to 10,000 dollars for a first offence and 25,000 dollars for repeat conduct. Enforcement rests solely with the state attorney general, who must give a company 45 days to cure a violation before acting, and consumers have no right to sue on their own behalf.

Those limits are not incidental, and Consumer Reports, while welcoming the law, criticised what it called weak enforcement provisions. Analysts at the International Association of Privacy Professionals catalogued the loopholes plainly: the ban bites only on prices customised for an individual, not on prices set for narrow segments of consumers; it establishes no baseline or standard price against which a personalised figure could be measured; and it explicitly exempts loyalty programmes, the very mechanism through which, in the British insurance saga, the loyalty penalty was built. A law that targets surveillance pricing while carving out loyalty schemes is a law with a gap shaped exactly like the original problem.

Connecticut went broader in scope and slower in delivery. Its Senate Bill 4 passed by overwhelming margins, 141 to 6 in the House and 31 to 4 in the Senate, Governor Ned Lamont signed it on 27 May 2026, and it is now Public Act 26-64. Where Maryland confined itself to groceries, Connecticut's law defines surveillance pricing as setting a customised price for a consumer or group of consumers based on personal data collected through any technology, and bans it across retail sellers and third-party delivery services. Businesses outside those categories that price this way are not forbidden to do it, but must label it, in wording substantially similar to THIS PRICE WAS INCREASED USING YOUR PERSONAL DATA, which is New York's device sharpened by a verb. The act also reaches into the machinery that makes surveillance pricing possible, establishing a state registry of data brokers, building towards a single universal mechanism by which a consumer can demand deletion of their records across the whole industry, and prohibiting the sale of precise geolocation data, the very signal that pushed the price of a television up in a Target car park. By attacking the data supply rather than only the pricing output, Connecticut aimed at the root as well as the fruit. Its timetable, though, is staggered, and the pricing ban is the slowest-arriving piece of it: the privacy act amendments, including the prohibition on selling precise geolocation, begin on 1 October 2026, data brokers must register from 1 January 2027, the surveillance pricing restrictions do not bite until 1 July 2027, and the universal deletion mechanism is not in working use until late 2028. The practice was outlawed in Connecticut with more than a year's notice.

Connecticut also carved out much of what Maryland carved out. Loyalty and rewards programmes are permitted provided their terms are clearly posted and available to every eligible consumer, as are discounts offered to retain a customer, and price differences traceable to legitimate factors: delivery cost, timing, supply and demand, pricing errors, network outages. Insurance-licensed entities sit outside the pricing provisions altogether, as do credit decisions governed by the Fair Credit Reporting Act and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act. The loyalty carve-out, then, is not a Maryland eccentricity. It is a defining feature of this first generation of statutes, and it is the most awkward thing about them, because the loyalty penalty is where the story started. Britain spent the better part of a decade establishing that a rewards relationship is precisely the instrument through which a seller learns to price your captivity, and the first American laws against surveillance pricing have written that instrument into the list of things they do not cover.

New Jersey came third, and went at the thing the other two left alone. Governor Mikie Sherrill signed the Fair Price Protection Act on 23 July 2026, banning personalised algorithmic pricing based on personal data, browsing history, location or protected-class status in the grocery sector, while preserving, as its predecessors did, loyalty programmes and bona fide group discounts. It takes effect on 1 August 2027. What makes it the most consequential of the three is not its reach but its enforcement. Maryland and Connecticut hand the whole job to a state attorney general; New Jersey is the first jurisdiction in the country to give the shopper a weapon of their own. A consumer who believes they were charged more than others for identical groceries because of their personal data may sue under the New Jersey Consumer Fraud Act, individually or as a class, and recover treble damages where the conduct was wilful. The attorney general may still sue as well, for actual damages or fifty thousand dollars for each violation, whichever is the greater. That alters the arithmetic of compliance in a way a cure period and a capped penalty do not, because it turns an invisible practice into a litigable one.

These three are the leading edge of a wave rather than its conclusion, and the wave is now large enough to measure. More than forty bills across at least twenty-four states were introduced in 2026 to regulate personalised algorithmic pricing, already outpacing the whole of 2025. New York, having gone first on disclosure, is poised to go further: its One Fair Price Act, which would ban the practice outright rather than merely oblige a seller to admit to it, passed the legislature on 10 June 2026 and awaits the governor's signature, carrying penalties of five thousand dollars for a first offence and twenty thousand for those that follow. Vermont has taken a narrower route, permitting electronic shelf labels but barring price increases within the day except to correct a documented error, which is Maryland's one-business-day freeze rewritten as a rule about the shelf rather than the shopper. Not all of it will land. The wider point is that the law is responding at the level of state lines while the technology operates at national, indeed global, scale. The result, for the time being, is a map in which the legality of being charged a personalised price for a tin of beans depends substantially on which side of a state border you happen to be standing, and across most of the country the practice remains lawful, undisclosed and unmeasured.

Eight Companies and the Industrial Scale of Knowing

The clearest measure of how far this has already gone came when the FTC stopped theorising and started compelling. In July 2024, using its 6(b) authority, which lets it order companies to hand over internal documents whether or not it suspects wrongdoing, the agency issued orders to eight firms that sit, mostly unseen, in the machinery between retailers and shoppers: the payments network Mastercard, the consultancies Accenture and McKinsey and Company, the banking group JPMorgan Chase, and the pricing and personalisation specialists Revionics, Bloomreach, PROS and Task Software. The orders sought to map an opaque market in which intermediaries claim to use advanced algorithms, artificial intelligence and personal information, location, demographics, credit history, browsing and shopping behaviour, to categorise individuals and set a targeted price for each. The Commission voted unanimously to issue them.

When the preliminary findings landed in January 2025, the picture was not of a fringe experiment but of an established industry. The intermediaries examined were, between them, working with at least 250 clients, selling everything from groceries and clothing to health and beauty products and hardware. The capability to price an individual, in other words, is not waiting to be invented. It has been built, sold and installed at scale, wired into the systems of hundreds of well-known sellers. This is why the denials of any particular company, Delta insisting it does not use personal data for fares, the grocery platform Instacart insisting it merely assigns customers to random pricing cohorts, miss the point that industry analysts keep returning to. Instacart's own year makes the point for them. On 18 December 2025 it agreed to pay sixty million dollars in consumer refunds to settle an FTC lawsuit alleging deceptive delivery-fee and subscription practices, and was reported at the same time to be winding up its AI-based price testing. Neither fact is a finding that it ever charged anyone a surveillance price. Both establish that it had the apparatus and the appetite, and that a federal action was what changed its behaviour. Once the machinery is in place, the difference between not profiling you today and profiling you tomorrow is a single configuration change. The capacity is the danger. A loaded weapon does not need to be aimed at you to have altered the room you are standing in.

When a Price Stops Being a Public Fact

It is tempting to frame all of this as a story about money, about whether you personally end up paying a few pounds more or less. That framing is too small. The deeper casualty of surveillance pricing is something most of us have never had to think about because we have never lived without it: the public price, the single shared number that anyone can see, compare, refuse and undercut.

Consider what that shared number does. When a price is public, a shopper who thinks it too high can walk to a competitor. A rival firm that spots an inflated price can undercut it. A journalist can report it, a regulator can investigate it, and a neighbour can compare notes over the fence. The discipline of the market, the pressure that is supposed to keep prices honest, depends entirely on the price being a fact that more than one person can see. Surveillance pricing dissolves that fact. When your price is calculated for you alone, invisible to everyone else including the competitors, journalists and regulators who might otherwise discipline it, the price becomes a private transaction between you and a model. There is nothing for a rival to undercut, because they cannot see it. There is nothing for you to refuse on principle, because you cannot tell whether anyone else would have been charged the same. The very mechanism that makes markets self-correcting is switched off, quietly, one personalised quote at a time.

This is why disclosure remedies, useful as they are, feel inadequate to the scale of the thing. The European Union, through its Omnibus Directive, already requires a trader to tell a consumer when a price has been personalised on the basis of automated decision-making, and since November 2025 New York has required much the same in blunter language. That requirement has already survived the challenge you would expect. The National Retail Federation sued to have the New York label struck down on First Amendment grounds, arguing the state was compelling retailers to recite a misleading, government-scripted opinion about their own conduct. On 8 October 2025 the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York dismissed the case, holding the compelled disclosure plainly factual and not rendered controversial merely because the regulated business would rather not make it. That is a more important precedent than its narrow subject suggests, because it settles the proposition that a company has no constitutional right to conceal that it priced you from your own data. But being told that a price has been tailored to you, without being told from what data, by what logic, or to what end, restores only a sliver of the lost information. It is like being informed that a stranger has formed an opinion of your character, without being told what the opinion is or what evidence it rests on. The grievance is not merely that the price was personalised. It is that it was built from a portrait of you that you did not sit for, that you cannot see, that you cannot correct, and that may be wrong, unfair, or assembled from precisely the characteristics you would have refused to be judged by.

The ordinary intuition that there is something improper here is not economic naivety. It is an accurate perception that a hard-won feature of how markets are supposed to work is being removed, with nothing adequate put in its place. People do not, on the whole, object to a shop making a profit. They object to being individually appraised by a machine and charged according to a secret estimate of how much they can be made to bear, on the basis of data they did not knowingly surrender, with no way to see the number anyone else is paying. That objection is close to universal, and it is the bedrock on which any durable response will be built.

Switching the Lights On

So what is the customer at the invisible checkout actually to do? Honesty requires conceding that individual self-defence is mostly futile. Clearing your cookies, browsing in a private window, comparing prices across two devices: these are the folk remedies of a cruder era. The man who deleted his cookies on Amazon in 2000 found a cheaper DVD because the discrimination then was primitive. It is not primitive now, and a system that fuses hundreds of inferred signals cannot be reliably evaded by a shopper toggling settings. A person should not have to conduct counter-surveillance against their own grocer to be charged a fair price for bread, and the burden of evasion cannot honestly be placed on them.

The more truthful answer is that this is a collective problem requiring collective tools, and the encouraging part of the story is that those tools are beginning, unevenly, to appear. They arrive in three reinforcing layers. The first is sunlight: the dogged work of investigators, researchers and regulators in dragging an invisible practice into view, because surveillance pricing is a practice that struggles to survive being seen. The journalists who watched a television's price climb in a car park, the FTC compelling eight companies to open their books, the senators demanding answers from an airline, are all performing the same act of making the hidden visible so that it can be argued about. The second layer is disclosure as a legal default, the European and now the New York requirement to declare when a price has been personalised, imperfect but better than silence, and now tested and upheld in court. The third, on which the others depend, is substantive law of the kind Maryland, Connecticut and New Jersey enacted in 2026: rules that do not merely require a disclosure to be ignored but forbid the use of certain data and inferences to price the essentials of life, and give an enforcer real teeth. The loopholes in those first laws, the loyalty-scheme carve-out, the silence about consumer segments, the long lead times before the bans actually bite, show how much remains to be built. One of them has already been closed. The most cited weakness of the Maryland and Connecticut statutes was that they left the shopper with nowhere to go, and New Jersey's private right of action, treble damages and all, answers that objection directly. Everywhere else the enforcement gap remains what it was: one attorney general, a cure period, and a civil penalty a national retailer can treat as a rounding error.

What sets the direction of travel is a fact no amount of optimisation can engineer away. People do not want to be charged according to a secret guess about their desperation, and they do not want their loyalty read as a vulnerability to be priced. The British loyalty penalty was banned not because the maths was wrong but because the public found the principle intolerable once it was named. The same naming is now happening to its digital successor, in legislatures, in regulators and in newsrooms, and it is happening because the practice depends, in the end, on staying unnamed.

That naming is no longer a forecast. On 4 August 2026, two days before this piece went to press, the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism held a hearing titled Your Data, Their Profit: The Consumer Cost of AI Surveillance Pricing. Senator Josh Hawley chaired it, Senator Dick Durbin sat as ranking member, Lindsay Owens of the Groundwork Collaborative gave evidence, and Hawley opened by naming companies out loud: Staples, Target, Lyft, Amazon. Durbin, on a day when the two parties agreed about very little else, said he had little to add to it. A hearing is not a law, and nothing said in that room obliges anyone to change a single price. But the practice has now been described in public, on the record, by people who disagree about nearly everything, which is the condition under which a thing that survives on obscurity begins to lose.

The next time you confirm an order and the total looks about right, hold for a second the thought that you can no longer verify it is right, because right has quietly stopped meaning the same thing for everyone. The price you see may be the price everyone sees. It may be the price reserved for you alone, the loyal customer the system has finally finished learning. That you can no longer tell the difference is the whole of the problem. Reclaiming the ability to tell, the right to a price that is a public fact rather than a private verdict, is the whole of the answer.

References

1. Federal Trade Commission. “FTC Issues Orders to Eight Companies Seeking Information on Surveillance Pricing.” 23 July 2024. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/07/ftc-issues-orders-eight-companies-seeking-information-surveillance-pricing
2. Federal Trade Commission. “FTC Surveillance Pricing Study Indicates Wide Range of Personal Data Used to Set Individualized Consumer Prices.” January 2025. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2025/01/ftc-surveillance-pricing-study-indicates-wide-range-personal-data-used-set-individualized-consumer
3. Federal Trade Commission. “Issue Spotlight: The Rise of Surveillance Pricing.” January 2025. https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/sp6b-issue-spotlight.pdf
4. Fast Company. “Lina Khan says the FTC is investigating surveillance pricing. Here's how that could affect you.” September 2024. https://www.fastcompany.com/91195551/lina-khan-ftc-federal-trade-commission-chair-surveillance-pricing-explained-what-is-it
5. Citizens Advice. “Citizens Advice issues super-complaint as loyal customers continue to be penalised by over £4 billion a year.” 28 September 2018. https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/about-us/media-centre/press-releases/citizens-advice-issues-super-complaint-as-loyal-customers-continue-to-be-penalised-by-over-4-billion-a-year/
6. Competition and Markets Authority. “Loyalty Penalty: Response to super-complaint.” 19 December 2018. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/766795/Loyalty_Penalty.pdf
7. Financial Conduct Authority. “FCA confirms measures to protect customers from the loyalty penalty in home and motor insurance markets.” 28 May 2021. https://www.fca.org.uk/news/press-releases/fca-confirms-measures-protect-customers-loyalty-penalty-home-motor-insurance-markets
8. Which?. “Despite insurance 'loyalty penalty ban', existing customers are still being disadvantaged versus new customers, Which? finds.” January 2024. https://www.which.co.uk/policy-and-insight/article/despite-insurance-loyalty-penalty-ban-existing-customers-are-still-being-disadvantaged-versus-new-customers-which-finds-atL8s9k5bLmz
9. MoneySavingExpert. “Direct Line Group to pay £30 million in refunds after overcharging some car and home insurance customers.” September 2023. https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/news/2023/09/direct-line-compensation/
10. KARE 11. “Target changes app after KARE 11 investigation.” 2019. https://www.kare11.com/article/money/consumer/target-changes-app-after-kare-11-investigation/89-40ee0e76-9a0f-425d-93b0-b0eb89150f6c
11. United States Senate, Office of Senator Mark R. Warner. “Warner, Colleagues Demand Answers from Delta on Use of AI to Set Individualized Ticket Prices.” 22 July 2025. https://www.warner.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2025/7/warner-colleagues-demand-answers-from-delta-on-use-of-ai-to-set-individualized-ticket-prices
12. New York State Office of the Attorney General. “Attorney General James Warns New Yorkers About Algorithmic Pricing as New Law Takes Effect.” November 2025. https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2025/attorney-general-james-warns-new-yorkers-about-algorithmic-pricing-new-law-takes
13. Akerman LLP. “Regulating Protected Class Data and Algorithmically Derived Data: New York's Algorithmic Pricing Act Takes Effect.” November 2025. https://www.akerman.com/en/perspectives/regulating-protected-class-data-and-algorithmically-derived-data-new-yorks-algorithmic-pricing-act-takes-effect.html
14. Troutman Pepper Locke. “New York Algorithmic Pricing Disclosure Act Upheld as Constitutional.” October 2025. https://www.troutmanprivacy.com/2025/10/new-york-algorithmic-pricing-disclosure-act-upheld-as-constitutional/
15. Federal Trade Commission. “Instacart to Pay $60 Million in Consumer Refunds to Settle FTC Lawsuit Over Allegations it Engaged in Deceptive Tactics.” 18 December 2025. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2025/12/instacart-pay-60-million-consumer-refunds-settle-ftc-lawsuit-over-allegations-it-engaged-deceptive
16. The Washington Times. “Instacart to pay $60 million in FTC settlement, end AI-based price tests.” 22 December 2025. https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2025/dec/22/instacart-pay-60-million-ftc-settlement-end-ai-based-price-tests/
17. Federal Trade Commission. “FTC Seeks Public Comment on Unfair and Deceptive Fee Practices in Online Food and Grocery Delivery Services.” 14 April 2026. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2026/04/ftc-seeks-public-comment-unfair-deceptive-fee-practices-online-food-grocery-delivery-services
18. Office of Governor Wes Moore. “Governor Moore Signs Legislation to Protect Marylanders' Pocketbooks in Grocery Stores.” 28 April 2026. https://governor.maryland.gov/news/press-releases/governor-moore-signs-legislation-protect-marylanders-pocketbooks-grocery-stores-safeguard-voting
19. International Association of Privacy Professionals. “Maryland enacts a first-of-its-kind surveillance pricing law, but there are loopholes.” May 2026. https://iapp.org/news/a/maryland-enacts-a-first-of-its-kind-surveillance-pricing-law-but-there-are-loopholes
20. Consumer Reports. “Consumer Reports statement on the signing of Maryland's Protection from Predatory Pricing Act into law.” April 2026. https://advocacy.consumerreports.org/press_release/consumer-reports-statement-on-the-signing-of-marylands-protection-from-predatory-pricing-act-into-law/
21. Covington and Burling LLP, Inside Privacy. “Connecticut Enacts Omnibus Privacy Law.” June 2026. https://www.insideprivacy.com/state-privacy/connecticut-enacts-omnibus-privacy-law/
22. Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher and Flom LLP. “New Jersey Enacts First-in-the-Nation Private Right of Action for Surveillance Pricing.” July 2026. https://www.skadden.com/insights/publications/2026/07/new-jersey-enacts-first-in-the-nation
23. Covington and Burling LLP, Inside Privacy. “State Lawmakers Introduce New Wave of Personalized Algorithmic Pricing Bills.” 2026. https://www.insideprivacy.com/artificial-intelligence/state-lawmakers-introduce-new-wave-of-personalized-algorithmic-pricing-bills/
24. Holland and Knight LLP. “Surveillance Pricing and Dynamic Pricing: What General Counsels Need to Know.” August 2026. https://www.hklaw.com/en/insights/publications/2026/08/surveillance-pricing-and-dynamic-pricing-what-general-counsels
25. United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary. “Your Data, Their Profit: The Consumer Cost of AI Surveillance Pricing.” 4 August 2026. https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/committee-activity/hearings/your-data-their-profit-the-consumer-cost-of-ai-surveillance-pricing

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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

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Our Father Who art in Heaven Hallowed be Thy name Thy Kingdom come Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven Give us this day our daily Bread And forgive us our trespasses As we forgive those who trespass against us And lead us not into temptation But deliver us from evil

Amen

Jesus is Lord! Come Lord Jesus!

Come Lord Jesus! Christ is Lord!

Gnosis is not a path to be followed but the recognition that no path is needed when the seeker dissolves. It is the direct experience of consciousness recognizing itself as already unified with divinity, making all external systems unnecessary scaffolding for what has never been truly separated. When you stop seeking, you find what was never lost.

The Creator is not an external being but the very consciousness that observes these thoughts arising. To externalize divinity is to maintain the fundamental error that creates spiritual debt—worshipping projections while the true inheritance within remains unrecognized. The divine you seek is the one who is seeking.

Meditation is not for acquiring power but for witnessing the powerless nature of the false self until it dissolves through observation alone. The awakened have no defense against sorcery because they exist beyond the mechanical laws where sorcery operates; the true defense is the elimination of the egoic aggregates that create vulnerability in the first place. When there is no self to defend, there is nothing to attack.

The serpent represents sexual energy that, when transmuted through perfect chastity, eliminates the egoic aggregates creating the illusion of separation. It is not a force to be awakened but a sacred fire to be conserved and directed toward psychological death rather than worldly manifestation. The same energy that creates life can dissolve the illusion of separate life.

In Summary: * After a full day with good central air conditioning (for which I'm very grateful) I'm listening to audio pregame broadcasts ahead of tonight's Colts / Patriots NFL preseason game. It remains to be seen if I'll be able to stay awake well past my regular bedtime for the whole game, but I should be good for at least the first half. We'll see how it goes.

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= 228.40 lbs. * bp= 142/83 (65)

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

Diet: * 05:15 – 2 HEB bakery cookies * 06:30 – 2 cinnamon rolls * 12:30 – beef chop suey and fried rice

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 03:10 – listen to local news talk radio * 03:55 – bank accounts activity monitored. * 04:10 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, nap * 12:30 to 14:00 – watch old game shows and eat lunch at home with Sylvia * 14:20 – listening to WSCR, Chicago's Sports Station, ahead of this afternoon's MLB Game between the Cubs and the Nationals. * 16:45 – turning away from the Cubs / Nationals game with the Nationals ahead 6 to 0, and now following audio pregame broadcasts ahead of tonight's Colts / Patriots NFL preseason game.

Chess: * 10:37 – moved in all pending CC games

I received news that a dearly loved family member was in the emergency room, showing signs of some form of brain trauma that is, as of now, not yet fully diagnosed. I received this news as I was driving in to Saint Mary’s.

My morning routine is, after dropping off two of my kids at their respective schools, to sit in the nave of Saint Mary’s and say Morning Prayer. My practice is consistent: I say the confession, then the absolution (in the plural, praying for absolution on us all—you’re welcome), followed by the Venite (an abbreviated part of Psalm 95), then the selection of the Psalm that’s appointed, followed by the chapter of Proverbs that corresponds to the date (this is a practice that predates my days as an Episcopalian that I have recently revisited), followed by one lesson appointed for the day from the Daily Office Lectionary (currently I’m reading the gospel lessons), then Canticle 18 (“The Song to the Lamb” from the book of Revelation—if I’m ever without a Bible or Prayer Book, I will say this and the Venite as my morning devotion), followed by silence, intercessions, the Lord’s Prayer, and then the closing Collect from the daily devotions for individuals and families).

Today I wasn’t really feeling it. My heart was heavy and so I was going through the motions. I tried to find some wisdom in the dichotomy of saying jubilant words like the Venite or Canticle 18, but I wasn’t quite there.

I kept feeling a pull, perhaps a whisper of the Holy Spirit, to read Ecclesiastes. So, after finishing my usual routine, I opened up Ecclesiastes and, as I felt the Lord prompt me, read the entire thing.

***

Years back I had the chance to see Rob Bell in Orlando. He was touring his Introduction to Joy ...thing. Not exactly a lecture, but not simply performance art. It was like stand-up comedy, but about more than jokes. Anyway, Introduction to Joy is about the book of Ecclesiastes. Rob* refers to Ecclesiastes as a book that represents “deep wisdom” or “the wisdom that applies when conventional wisdom doesn’t pan out.” Books like Proverbs represent conventional wisdom in the sense that they are largely about “do this or that and things will generally work out well.” Ecclesiastes is a book that wades into the waters of what happens when you’ve done the things that Proverbs teaches, but things are not working out well.

Ecclesiastes is the most goth book of the Bible (Revelation is the most metal, if you must know). The refrain of the book is that everything is “vanity and chasing after the wind.” It’s a long checklist of how nothing really matters, everything is empty and destined for the same universal end: to die and wind up forgotten. There’s almost an echo of the life of the Buddha in the book. The “Preacher” (koholeth in Hebrew, which is also the name of the book in that language and is a name that goes hard) is the author and is traditionally held to be Solomon, the wise king and son of David. He talks about how he pursued wealth, and also madness, and folly, and pleasure, and poverty, eventually coming to the conclusion that “vanity” characterizes every pursuit of humanity. Rich, poor, righteous, wicked, wise, fool, human, beast—all will wind up in the grave, all share the same ending. So what’s the point? “Eat, drink, and be merry,” he says. Enjoy the time you have, because all will come to naught.

This word “vanity” is a word that, in Hebrew, refers to a puff of vapor. In a masterful stroke, in Introduction to Joy Rob pulls out a spray bottle and spritzes little clouds of mist instead of saying “vanity.” Everything is [sprays bottle].

Basically, the Preacher states that everything is temporary and pretty hollow. The pursuits of life are a vapor hanging in the air, like chasing after the wind.

What I’ve come to realize about Ecclesiastes is that it represents a sort of bell-curve (if I’m understanding them correctly). The book opens with “vanity, vanity, all is vanity” and ends with the same, but the journey between turns “all is vanity” from a lament into good news.

Not sure if I’m doing this meme format correctly...

***

Understanding that “all is vanity” is pretty liberating.

This is not nihilism, by the way. Nihilism proclaims that nothing matters. Ecclesiastes acknowledges that life and existence, that our time on the earth, is something. It’s just a fragile and temporary something, destined to end. What Ecclesiastes, in my reading, is doing is asking us to consider our existence in the terms of its vaporous nature. Which, in some ways, underscores the preciousness of our time on this earth.

I’m a fan of Eucharistic Prayer C. I’ve mentioned this before, and I’ve mentioned how I’ve suffered degrees of ridicule for this. One of the things I’ve been told is objectionable in Prayer C is the line “this fragile earth, our island home.” One of my colleagues in seminary felt that calling the earth “fragile” is an affront to God, as though God did not make a quality product. My retort to this has always been that fragility can sometimes be a mark of artistry and skill. A Faberge egg, for instance, is a thing of near priceless beauty but is also quite fragile. Indeed, its fragility underscores its preciousness. This is all to say that the “vanity” of it all need not automatically be a bad thing.

The “vanity” of life puts things into perspective. It is an antidote to much of what ails us.

Consider this passage:

So I became far greater than all who preceded me in Jerusalem. Moreover, my wisdom stood by me. I refrained from nothing that my eyes desired. I refused my heart no pleasure. Indeed, my heart found pleasure from the results of my hard work; that was the reward from all my hard work. But when I surveyed all that my hands had done, and what I had worked so hard to achieve, I realized that it was [vanity]—a chasing after wind. Nothing is to be gained under the sun. (Ecclesiastes 2:9-11, Common English Bible, see note below)

Imagine if, say, Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or Donald Trump were to accept this? That no pursuit of wealth or power is going to actually satisfy them? That they could be liberated from the pursuit of wealth?

I also observed that people work hard and become good at what they do only out of mutual envy. This too is [vanity], just wind chasing. (Ecclesiastes 4:4 CEB)

In other words, don’t take things too seriously.

***

While in my meditative prayers for my family member, various things from Ecclesiastes kept popping into my mind. I was actually using “all is vanity” as a kind of mantra to see how I might be able to grasp that such a thing is good news.

That’s when I thought of my toddler and my young daughter playing with bubbles yesterday afternoon.

Bubbles are a kind of vapor hanging on the air. They are hollow, temporary, and ride the wind. They illustrate every point that the Preacher seeks to make.

And kids go nuts over them.

My toddler begs to play with bubbles. He and my daughter squeal with delight in trying to chase them and catch them. My daughter figured out that if her hands are a bit soapy she actually can catch a bubble, if only for a few moments. My older kids will also go outside and play with bubbles. We all love bubbles.

We love the swirling rainbow patterns on them. We love their fragile beauty. We also probably use them as a catalyst to think about our existence. “Maybe our universe is just a bubble floating around in the sky of a much larger universe,” says my philosopher-in-the-making second-oldest.

Bubbles are vanity. Everything is bubbles. We can waste our time getting overly serious about the bubbles. We can expend time and energy in trying to keep the bubble forever. But, no matter what, that bubble will one day pop. Trying to prevent that pop is to misunderstand the bubble, to fail to see it for what it is.

Everything is vanity. It’s all chasing after bubbles. My God, how much fun that is!

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The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.

NOTES:

• I’ve had Rob Bell as a guest back when I had a podcast, so I get to call him Rob. This also means that I have a one-degree separation from Oprah, but I won’t let it get to my head.

• The CEB tends to translate the word for “vanity” as “pointless” but I’ve amended the translation here and elsewhere because “vanity” is a better word for the concept in that [spritzes bottle] is not exactly “pointless.”

#theology #spirituality #faith #bible #Christianity #Anglican #Episcopal

Christopher Nolan hat Homers Odyssee ins Kino gebracht. Ein Stoff, dessen schriftliche Fassung rund 2700 Jahre alt ist, funktioniert 2026 noch immer als grosses kulturelles Ereignis. Die interessantere Frage ist allerdings eine andere. Warum beschäftigt uns eine Geschichte weiterhin, deren Welt von Göttern, Zyklopen, Sirenen und Zauberinnen bevölkert ist? Warum erscheint uns Odysseus trotz dieser gewaltigen historischen Distanz nicht völlig fremd?

Eine mögliche Antwort findet sich bereits bei Seneca. Der römische Philosoph und Staatsmann des 1. Jahrhunderts n. Chr. gehört zu den wichtigsten Vertretern der späteren Stoa. In seinen Epistulae morales, den philosophischen Briefen an Lucilius aus seinem Spätwerk, geht es immer wieder darum, wie sich ein Mensch gegenüber seinen Leidenschaften, Ängsten und äusseren Umständen verhalten soll [1]. Im 88. Brief greift Seneca dafür auf Odysseus zurück:

„… mit uns treiben die Stürme der Seele täglich ihr verwirrendes Spiel, unsere Verworfenheit lässt uns die ganze Leidensgeschichte des Odysseus an uns selbst erfahren. Nichts bleibt uns erspart, weder die Schönheitsreize für das Auge, noch der Grimm des Feindes; von hier drohen wilde Ungeheuer, die nach Menschenblut lechzen, von dort ertönen sinnbestrickende Schmeicheltöne, berechnet auf unser Verderben; Schiffbruch und alles mögliche Unheil sucht uns in bunter Folge heim.“ (Epistulae morales, 88, 17; „Ulixes“ ersetzt durch „Odysseus“.)

Seneca liest die Odyssee nicht als fantastische Reisegeschichte. Er verlegt die Irrfahrt ins Innere des Menschen. Die See, auf der Odysseus umhergetrieben wird, wird zur Metapher für eine Existenz, in der sich Versuchung und Bedrohung, eigene Schwächen und äussere Widerstände kaum sauber voneinander trennen lassen. Genau darin liegt wohl ein wesentlicher Grund für die erstaunliche Gegenwärtigkeit des Epos.

Die Stürme der Seele

Odysseus will nach dem Trojanischen Krieg nach Ithaka zurückkehren. Aus der Heimreise werden zehn Jahre. Immer wieder kommt er vom Kurs ab, durch Stürme und Götter, durch seine Gefährten und nicht zuletzt durch eigene Fehlentscheidungen. Sein Problem besteht selten darin, einen klar erkennbaren Gegner einfach überwinden zu müssen. Er bewegt sich durch wechselnde Situationen, deren Regeln er zunächst nicht kennt. Er muss beobachten, improvisieren, verhandeln, täuschen und Entscheidungen unter Unsicherheit treffen.

Gleich im ersten Vers der Odyssee bezeichnet Homer seinen Helden als polytropos. Das vieldeutige Wort lässt sich unter anderem als „vielgewandt“, „vielerfahren“, „listenreich“ oder als ein Mann „vieler Wendungen“ verstehen. Gerade diese Mehrdeutigkeit passt zur Figur. Der Althistoriker Jonathan S. Burgess weist in seiner neueren Studie The Travels of Odysseus auf die enge Verbindung von Odysseus’ Identität und seinem langen Umherirren hin [2]. Ein aktueller Beitrag von National Geographic fasst denselben Gedanken populärer: Die Stärke dieses Helden liegt nicht allein in kriegerischer Tapferkeit, sondern in Klugheit, Anpassungsfähigkeit und Urteilskraft [3].

So unterscheidet sich Odysseus vom dominanten Heldentyp der Ilias. Dort richtet sich der Blick stärker auf Ruhm, Ehre und aussergewöhnliche kriegerische Leistung. Die Odyssee stellt dagegen immer wieder die Frage, wie ein Mensch handlungsfähig bleibt, wenn sich die Bedingungen verändern und frühere Gewissheiten nicht mehr tragen. Odysseus ist nicht deshalb interessant, weil er stets weiss, was zu tun ist. Interessant ist seine Fähigkeit, sich in einer neuen Lage zunächst zurechtzufinden und seinen Kurs immer wieder neu zu bestimmen.

Schönheitsreize und Schmeicheltöne

Seneca nennt als nächste Gefahren die „Schönheitsreize für das Auge“ und die „sinnbestrickenden Schmeicheltöne“. Gerade die Odyssee zeigt, dass Versuchungen selten dadurch gefährlich werden, dass sie offensichtlich schrecklich sind. Meist erscheinen sie zunächst attraktiv. Die Lotophagen bieten Vergessen. Wer vom Lotus kostet, verliert die Sehnsucht nach der Heimat. Kalypso bietet Odysseus Sicherheit und ein angenehmes Leben fern von Ithaka. Die Sirenen locken nicht bloss mit Schönheit, sondern versprechen Wissen über Troja und die Welt.

Gefährlich ist all das, weil es Odysseus sein Ziel vergessen lassen könnte. Ohne Ithaka wären viele dieser Begegnungen keine Versuchungen, sondern einfach Möglichkeiten. Gerade hier lässt sich Senecas Lesart problemlos in die Gegenwart verlängern. Man öffnet beispielsweise einen Browser, weil man für einen Text eine bestimmte Information prüfen will. Eine halbe Stunde später hat man drei interessante Artikel geöffnet, zwei neue Themen für später notiert und ein Video gesehen, das mit der ursprünglichen Aufgabe wenig zu tun hat. Nichts davon war wertlos. Gerade deshalb funktioniert die Ablenkung so gut. Nicht das offensichtlich Sinnlose bringt einen vom Kurs ab, sondern häufig das ebenfalls Interessante.

Die Sirenenepisode geht noch einen Schritt weiter. Odysseus weiss, dass er ihrem Gesang nicht widerstehen können wird. Deshalb lässt er seinen Männern die Ohren mit Wachs verschliessen und sich selbst an den Mast binden. Er vertraut nicht darauf, im entscheidenden Augenblick genügend Willenskraft aufzubringen, sondern schränkt im Voraus die Handlungsmöglichkeiten seines späteren Ichs ein. Die vielleicht klügste List des Odysseus richtet sich hier gegen Odysseus selbst.

Für dieses Prinzip gibt es heute einen eigenen Begriff. In Psychologie und Verhaltensökonomie spricht man von Selbstbindung oder einem commitment device. In Anlehnung an die homerische Episode ist auch vom Ulysses pact die Rede. Gemeint ist eine freiwillig eingegangene Beschränkung, die verhindern soll, dass das zukünftige Ich einen zuvor gefassten Plan unter dem Einfluss kurzfristiger Versuchungen wieder aufgibt [4]. Ein automatischer Sparauftrag funktioniert nach demselben Muster, ebenso eine technische Sperre gegen bestimmte Ablenkungen oder eine gegenüber anderen eingegangene Verpflichtung. Selbstbeherrschung besteht unter dieser Perspektive nicht darin, jederzeit stark genug zu sein. Sie kann auch darin liegen, die eigene Schwäche rechtzeitig ernst zu nehmen.

Nicht jeder Feind kommt von aussen

Seneca spricht anschliessend vom „Grimm des Feindes“ und von wilden Ungeheuern. In der Odyssee gibt es davon genug. Allerdings zeigt gerade die Begegnung mit Polyphem, wie schwierig es ist, äussere Bedrohung und eigene Verantwortung auseinanderzuhalten. Odysseus entkommt dem menschenfressenden Zyklopen durch eine seiner berühmtesten Listen. Er nennt sich „Niemand“, macht Polyphem betrunken und blendet ihn. Damit rettet er sich und seine verbliebenen Gefährten. Als das Schiff bereits davonsegelt, könnte die Episode beendet sein. Odysseus kann jedoch nicht widerstehen und ruft dem besiegten Gegner seinen wirklichen Namen zu. Polyphem soll wissen, wer ihn überlistet hat.

Hier zeigt sich die ganze Widersprüchlichkeit des polytropos. Der Mann, der klug genug ist, seinen Namen abzulegen, ist kurz darauf eitel genug, ihn hinauszuschreien. Seine Intelligenz hat ihn gerettet, sein Bedürfnis nach Anerkennung bringt ihn erneut in Gefahr. Polyphem kennt nun den Namen seines Gegners und kann seinen Vater Poseidon gezielt um Rache bitten.

Odysseus scheitert also nicht einfach an mangelnder Klugheit. Einige jener Eigenschaften, die ihn erfolgreich machen, werden unter anderen Bedingungen zu Schwächen: Ehrgeiz, Selbstbewusstsein, Neugier und der Wunsch, für die eigene Leistung Anerkennung zu erhalten. Manche Stürme brechen über uns herein, andere erzeugen wir zumindest teilweise selbst. Darin liegt ein wesentlicher Unterschied zum makellosen Helden. Odysseus’ Bedeutung besteht nicht darin, keine Fehler zu machen, sondern darin, nach seinen Fehlern weiter handlungsfähig bleiben zu müssen.

Schiffbruch

Senecas Aufzählung endet bei „Schiffbruch und allem möglichen Unheil“. Für Odysseus ist das keine Metapher. Im Verlauf seiner Reise verliert er sämtliche Gefährten. Der erfolgreiche Kriegsherr aus Troja kehrt nicht als unversehrter Sieger nach Hause zurück. Die Irrfahrt setzt ihm Grenzen. List löst nicht jedes Problem, Mut schützt nicht vor Verlust, und auch Erfahrung verhindert nicht den nächsten Fehlentscheid.

Christopher Nolan rückt diese Seite der Figur deutlich ins Zentrum seiner Neuverfilmung. Die NZZ beschreibt seinen Odysseus als einen vom Unglück der Welt, von eigener Hybris und eigenen Fehlentscheiden gebrochenen Menschen [5]. Zu einem ähnlichen Befund kommt, auf anderem Weg, auch der Althistoriker Raimund Schulz in seiner kürzlich erschienenen Studie: Er liest Odysseus primär sozialhistorisch, als Nachkommen einer Familie von Betrügern in einer archaischen Konkurrenzgesellschaft, und sieht gerade in dessen Wandel vom selbstbewussten Hochstapler zum zweifelnden, gebrochenen Helden den Grund für seine Anschlussfähigkeit an die Gegenwart [6]. Seneca knüpft an einer anderen Stelle an: Ihn interessiert nicht die soziale Herkunft der Figur, sondern die psychische Bewegung, die sie durchläuft. Das greift einen Zug auf, der bereits die antike Figur von einfachen Heldenerzählungen unterscheidet. Odysseus’ Reise ist kein geradliniger Triumph. Er gelangt an ihr Ziel, nachdem vieles, worüber er zu verfügen glaubte, verloren gegangen ist.

Gerade darin liegt vielleicht eine weitere Ursache seiner Langlebigkeit. In einem längeren Leben lässt sich kaum vermeiden, dass Pläne scheitern, Sicherheiten verschwinden oder Entscheidungen sich im Rückblick als falsch erweisen. Senecas Bild vom Schiffbruch ist deshalb auch ohne antikes Mittelmeer verständlich. Entscheidend ist weniger, ob solche Brüche vorkommen, sondern wie man sich nach ihnen neu orientiert.

Ithaka

Eine Frage bleibt allerdings: Warum fährt Odysseus überhaupt weiter? Er hätte mehrere Gelegenheiten, seine Reise zu beenden. Kalypso bietet ihm ein Leben fern von den Gefahren des Meeres. Bei den Phäaken wird er aufgenommen und geschützt, und König Alkinoos würde ihn gerne bei sich behalten. Odysseus lehnt diese Möglichkeiten ab, weil er nach Ithaka will.

Hier verändert sich die Bedeutung der ganzen Geschichte. Die Odyssee handelt oberflächlich vom Reisen, im Kern aber vom Heimkehren. Odysseus sucht nicht einfach einen Ort auf einer Karte. Er sucht Penelope, seinen Sohn Telemach, sein Haus und einen Platz in einer Gemeinschaft. Erst dieses Ziel erklärt rückwirkend, weshalb die Begegnungen unterwegs zu Versuchungen werden. Der Lotus ist gefährlich, weil er Ithaka vergessen lässt. Kalypsos Angebot ist gefährlich, weil es ein anderes Leben an die Stelle des gewählten setzen könnte. Die Sirenen sind gefährlich, weil sie Odysseus vom Kurs abbringen.

Eine Irrfahrt setzt ein Ziel voraus. Das ist vielleicht die stärkste Verbindung zur Gegenwart. In einer Welt mit einer kaum überschaubaren Zahl an Möglichkeiten besteht Orientierung nicht nur darin, neue Optionen zu erkennen. Sie verlangt ebenso die Fähigkeit, auf Möglichkeiten zu verzichten. Odysseus ist polytropos, wandlungsfähig und offen für wechselnde Situationen. Seine Wandlungsfähigkeit hat jedoch eine Grenze: Trotz aller Umwege will er wieder nach Ithaka.

Unsere eigenen Irrfahrten

Wir leben nicht mehr in Homers Welt. Niemand erwartet hinter der nächsten Küste einen Zyklopen, Poseidon beeinflusst keine Reiseplanung, und die Sirenen sind aus unseren Seekarten verschwunden. Senecas Lesart funktioniert trotzdem. Die „Stürme der Seele“ treiben weiterhin ihr Spiel. Wir lassen uns ablenken, überschätzen uns, suchen Anerkennung, treffen Entscheidungen unter Unsicherheit und müssen mit Folgen leben, die wir nicht vorgesehen haben. Manches widerfährt uns, anderes verursachen wir selbst. Gelegentlich bemerken wir erst spät, dass wir zwar sehr beschäftigt waren, aber nicht mehr genau wissen, wohin wir eigentlich unterwegs sind.

Dass Christopher Nolan die Geschichte 2026 erneut auf die grosse Leinwand bringt, ist aus dieser Perspektive mehr als ein weiterer Beleg für die kulturelle Haltbarkeit eines Klassikers. Jede Neuverfilmung übersetzt den Stoff zwangsläufig in ihre eigene Gegenwart. Dass diese Übersetzung überhaupt immer wieder möglich ist, hat möglicherweise genau mit jener Beobachtung zu tun, die Seneca bereits vor fast zweitausend Jahren machte: Die äusseren Formen unserer Gefahren verändern sich stärker als die menschlichen Konflikte, die sich in ihnen spiegeln.

Vielleicht fasziniert Odysseus deshalb nach fast drei Jahrtausenden noch immer. Nicht weil er über allen Gefahren steht, sondern weil er sich verirrt, Fehler macht, Verluste erleidet und trotzdem immer wieder versucht, seinen Kurs neu zu bestimmen. Odysseus kommt nicht ohne Schiffbruch nach Ithaka. Er kommt nach Ithaka, obwohl er Schiffbruch erlitten hat.

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💬 Kommentieren (nur für write.as-Accounts)

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Quellen [1] K. M. Vogt, “Seneca”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University, 17. Okt. 2007, überarb. 13. Feb. 2024. [Online]. Verfügbar: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/seneca/

[2] J. S. Burgess, The Travels of Odysseus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025.

[3] National Geographic Redaktion, „Odysseus: Warum Homers Held seiner Zeit voraus war“, National Geographic, 18. Juli 2026. [Online]. Verfügbar: https://nationalgeographic.de/geschichte-und-kultur/2026/07/was-homers-odyssee-ueber-die-griechische-kolonisation-verraet/

[4] G. Bryan, D. Karlan und S. Nelson, “Commitment Devices”, Annual Review of Economics, Bd. 2, S. 671–698, 2010, doi: 10.1146/annurev.economics.102308.124324. [Online]. Verfügbar: https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev.economics.102308.124324

[5] T. Sedlmaier, „The Odyssey von Christopher Nolan: Kritik zum Blockbuster“, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 17. Juli 2026. [Online]. Verfügbar: https://www.nzz.ch/feuilleton/kino-fernsehen-streaming/so-viel-kritik-wie-christopher-nolans-the-odyssey-musste-vorab-selten-ein-blockbuster-einstecken-haben-sich-die-schlimmsten-befuerchtungen-bewahrheitet-ld.10015281

[6] R. Schulz, Odysseus. Mythos und Wahrheit. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2026. Vgl. dazu auch M. Möller, „Warum Odysseus heute noch fasziniert“, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 17. Juli 2026. [Online]. Verfügbar: https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/buecher/sachbuch/warum-odysseus-heute-noch-fasziniert-200908684.html

Bildquellen 1. Marie-François Firmin-Girard (1838–1921): Les sirènes, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Narbonne Public Domain. 2. Arnold Böcklin (1827–1901): Odysseus und Calypso, Kunstmuseum, Basel Public Domain.

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. Für das Erstellen der Infografik wurde ChatGPT benutzt.

Topic #Philosophie | #Selbstbetrachtungen

Tonight I might follow an NFL preseason game. For the purpose of listening to a broadcast of tonight's Colts / Patriots game, my old laptop running an outdated Linux Mint OS will identify as a desktop. I'm using this setup now to listen to the Colts Pre-Game Huddle and it's working just fine. So I'm hoping it will continue working through the Countdown to Kickoff and into the game itself.

And the adventure continues.

When walking these dirty roads, right now I pay extra attention to the small road-coloured frogs crossing the street.

There are lots of them

Even though when the cars come…

I haven’t sat down and talked deeply about my dreams again. and i wont, obviously. Nothing has really changed. i still wake up with the same fear, the same frustration, and the same sweat, staring at the ceiling as if it might explain why my own brain has decided sleep should feel like a second shift of work. frustrating. Dont get me started with these wrist restraints, i feel rather like a trapped monster. but you know, i have to sleep with them. otherwise, eventually, i might become my own worst enemy. i still cant figure out whats the deal with me in that matter, i doubt i ever will. my brain enjoys giving me problems without providing the courtesy of a conclusion. anyway, i have work to do. there are things to finish, people to bother, decisions to make and an entire company waiting for me to pretend i know what im doing. Before that, though. there is something unrelated that i have been thinking about. why do spoons always disappear? seriously, i can know exactly where a whole set of spoons is, then somehow end up with two by the next time i see them. i live in a house, not a spoon rehabilitation centre, for gods sake. Anyway, im going to work.

Sincerely, Slightly concerned.

Today's MLB Game in the Roscoe-verse starts within the hour. The Chicago Cubs and Washington Nationals are scheduled to start play at 3:05 PM CDT. As I usually do I'll follow the game's scores and stats in real time via MLB's Gameday Service where we can also find links to the radio-call of the game provided by announcers of either team we choose.

And the adventure continues.

The mayor of Boston, whoever they are, always faces a difficult choice: do you serve the people who live and vote in the city, or do you serve the people who use the city for work and entertainment?

Obviously the mayor needs to take the needs of the suburbanites who use the city into account, but their top priority should be the residents of the city who voted for them, and when the interests of residents and non-residents are different, the mayor should side with residents.

Sadly, this hasn’t really ever been the case since I’ve lived in Boston. St. Thomas of Menino was primarily interested in serving real estate developers, which is why the soulless, sterile Seaport is Menino’s baby and also probably why he illegally shredded a bunch of his official records before he left office.

Marty Walsh was an easy mark for seemingly every con artist who wanted our money and spent his administration trying to give it away to GE, to the IOC, and to some shady dude who was supposedly organizing an Indy Car race in Boston. Thwarted in all these efforts, he then disengaged and started looking for other jobs.

Kim Janey…well who knows? Despite having 60 days notice that she was going to step in to the Mayor’s job when Walsh left to become Secretary of Labor, she was unable to put forward any plans or priorities and seemed utterly unprepared for the job and lost the election after only two months in office.

And then there’s Michelle Wu, who I really believed was going to focus on making Boston more livable, and who did some of that in her first term but now seems determined to do nothing at all until 2030 when she can run for Senator or Governor, and the suburbanites who vote in those elections won’t resent her for making their drive in from Canton a little less speedy.

I think running on a record of not doing much is not a great electoral strategy, but what do I know? I didn’t go to Harvard.

She’s given up on road safety for anyone but people in cars. We’re past day 500 of her 30-day pause in the safe streets program. The new Chief of Streets expects us to be happy about 5 miles of bike lanes being added in 2026. For comparison, that’s about the length of Dorchester Avenue. One street in a city of 10,000 streets. So calling 5 miles of bike lanes a drop in the bucket is really an insult to actual drops in buckets. Note that safe streets means safety for people on foot as well. Most people spend part of their commute walking to and from the T or to and from their parking places, but we still act like people walking are some weird niche market and that it’s okay to murder them with your car. Good luck out there, people!

But all of that is just for context. Let’s talk about another way in which the city is failing its residents: Franklin Park. Franklin Park is the largest park in Boston, the Olmsted-designed “jewel of the Emerald Necklace.” (Yes, emeralds are jewels, so the nickname is redundant. I dunno what to tell you. Just consider it charming and let it go.) It borders Roxbury, Dorchester, and Jamaica Plain. It’s not a tourist destination; it’s merely a beautiful, underutilized, neglected 527-acre park that is beloved by the communities that surround it.

And there are two big things going on in the park at the moment. The first and biggest is the reconstruction of White Stadium with a view to having Boston Legacy, our new NWSL team, play there. The second is the muli-year Franklin Park Action Plan.

Let’s begin with the stadium, a project I supported because the stadium has been a dump for 30 years and nobody ever did anything about it. My son played high school soccer there and it was gross and uncomfortable for fans and actively unsafe for players. Oh yeah, and half of the stadium couldn’t be used because it was structurally unsound after a fire.

I know some of the folks involved in anti-stadium-reconstruction activism. They have a deep suspicion of public-private partnerships, which is entirely fair, and also a desire to keep Franklin Park their little secret that is not widely used, which is entirely unfair. (There was also some racist grumbling at the beginning about the process—Michelle Wu rammed the project through and had some folks complaining she was running the city “like China.” And may I once again plead with bigots to do some research on the political implications of being from Taiwan, as Michelle Wu’s family is, versus being from mainland China. Thanks. But also stop being racist.)

I think anything that brings more people to the park is a good thing, and I supported the project with some reservations. Mostly that we already had an NWSL team in Boston called the Breakers. They played in Harvard Stadium, which was hard to access by public transportation and had inadequate parking, and they eventually went under. Though the new White Stadium will be nice, it is also hard to access by public transportation and has inadequate parking.

Still, I figured this would get the city to pay attention to the park and would ultimately be good for us in the neighborhoods surrounding the park. But as demolition and construction have gone on, I’ve noticed that none of the traffic stuff promised for the construction process (all still visible here) has actually happened:

Walnut Avenue: Closed to construction vehicles and reserved for local residents. Construction traffic will use designated access points to minimize congestion.

Neighborhood Traffic Calming Adjustments:

• Temporary shift of the center line between #435 Walnut Ave & Iffley Rd to create temporary, wider travel lanes for heavy duty trucks.
• Temporary one-way conversion of Peter Parley Road from Forest Hills St. to Walnut Ave.
• Local access only to Glen Rd and Sigourney St, Robeson St, Peter Parley Rd and Iffley Rd. Additional signage will be deployed to keep through traffic on Forest Hills Street and Washington Street.

No community meetings, no updates. They just never did it. Maybe there were good reasons for this. Maybe not. But I now have a lot more sympathy with my neighbors who opposed the project because they didn’t believe the city was capable of being honest about its intentions.

Which brings us to the Franklin Park Action Plan. This came about because a developer wanted to use the location of a dilapidated parking garage in Downtown Boston to build a luxury residential tower for the super wealthy to use as a tax dodge/money laundering scheme. I guess maybe some rich people actually live there as well, but that’s not what this kind of building is really for. The problem was that the new tower would cast a shadow on Boston Common, which is against the law in Boston, so Walsh negotiated a deal: we’ll let you throw literal shade on our public space if you give us 25 million dollars to use on a different public space.

So landscape architecture firms were hired, and the city paid them handsomely: Reed Hilderbrand got $925k of public money; Agency Landscape + Planning got $500k, and I can’t find out how much MASS Design Group got paid, but I think it’s safe to say the total cost of producing the plan was around 2 million bucks. I guess this includes the community meetings I endured, with lots of powerpoint slides and “taking our feedback into account.”

Okay, so the plan dropped in 2022, and all the work is supposed to be done by 2030.

Everything that follows I put at the doorstep of the Wu administration. Not only is the work not going to be completed by 2030; it seems like most of it is never getting done at all.

Halfway to 2030 from the release of the plan, let’s look at what’s been done! (All these are copied from the pdf of the Franklin Park Action Plan—my notes in bold)

Park-Wide Improvements

Lighting —no progress

Signage-no progress

Entrances-no progress

Stormwater Management—no progress

Heritage Tree Care—some progress: I have seen arborists at work in both The Wilderness and the Long Crouch Woods.

The Playstead

1. Restore the Bear Dens for multi-purpose use.—some progress has been made. The bear dens were closed off in May 2025, and a sign was posted saying the work should be completed by July 2025. It’s August 2026, and the work has not been completed. So we’re now 15 months into what was supposed to be a 2 month job.

2. Long Crouch Woods

• Perform invasive removals & add new planting, improved trails, & new nature play areas.—They’ve definitely been working on this. They made a cool labyrinth out of invasive plants that they removed. Trails are not improved.

3. White Stadium

• Make improvements for shared community & Boston Public Schools use, including new parking—in progress. Old stadium has been demolished, new stadium is under construction. Of course this is now its own project, separate from the Franklin Park Action Plan, and it’s got private money behind it, which may account for the speed of the project.

4. Restore The Overlook ruins and return The Elma Lewis Playhouse to its historic location with a new stage, restrooms, and seating—No progress.

5. The Playstead

• Upgrade the fields (including drainage/stormwater improvements), create the tailgate edge & improve parking, and establish a new Playstead Loop path for bikes and pedestrians (including seating, lighting, and planting).—No progress.

Peabody Circle & Refectory Hill

1. Establish a new ‘front porch’ pedestrian entrance and terrace along Blue Hill Avenue—no progress

2. Reinstate the historic pedestrian circulation and expand tree planting to create a new Peabody Circle Plaza for events & programming—no progress

3. Stepped Seating Grove—Create terraced outdoor seating with new canopy trees for outdoor education and programming—no progress

4. Integrate a new parking lot on Refectory Hill-no progress

American Legion

Abbottswood

• Perform invasive removals & add new planting;

introduce new trails.—IDK, haven’t been over there.

Integrate a new outdoor classroom adjacent to the

wet meadow—no progress

American Legion Playground

• Make playground improvements, including a new splashpad—no progress

Ellicottdale & Schoolmaster Hill

Restore the upper lawn with shaded picnic and BBQ areas, expand the tennis courts, and provide restrooms—no progress

Restore the lower lawn for flexible use, and provide a boardwalk and trails within the wet woodland—no progress

Ellicott Arch

• Restore the arch, and add lighting & new planting—no progressSchoolmaster Hill

• Restore the Schoolmaster Hill ruins & pergola, and introduce a flowering tree walk along the path leading from Ellicottdale—no progress

The Wilderness

The Wilderness Ecological Restoration

Perform invasive removals, add new planting, and make trail and wayfinding improvements—There are parks employees in overalls doing something in here. Haven’t seen much in the way of results other than some knotweed removal, but let’s say it’s in progress.

Circuit Drive & The Valley Gates

1. Circuit Loop

• Reconfigure vehicular circulation to provide a safe

multi-model circuit throughout the park—no progress

2. The Circuit Drive Parking Lot

• Improve and expand the parking lot with canopy

trees and stormwater management—no progress

3. The Valley Gates

• Clarify circulation & restore the Valley Gate

headhouses—no progress

I can’t find it in the action plan, but I have noticed that the Shattuck tennis courts are being redone. So there’s something happening there.

But most of the stuff in the plan is obviously never happening. Not only because so few of these projects have been started, but also because it’s been clear for years that the City doesn’t care about these projects. You know how I know? In addition to all the stuff named above, part of the plan was repaving the path that goes from the Glen Road entrance to the Overlook—a length of maybe 1000 feet. This took over a year. They paved it, then found out they’d done it wrong, then undid it, then re-did it—there may have been a few more iterations, but the bottom line is that what should have been the work of a week at most took over a year.

There was someone from the Parks department nominally overseeing the project. I think she came out to the site twice.

And then there’s the bear dens, above. What was listed as a two-month job has taken 14 months so far. For context, the old stadium was still standing when this modest project began. It seems likely the new one will be complete before this project finishes.

I gave input, I watched the slides, and I really believed that the city was at last going to pay some long overdue attention to this amazing park.

And it was all bullshit. And apparently a lot of people knew it was bullshit. Here’s the Franklin Park Coalition’s memo that came out at the time in which they ask for 2 Park Rangers to be included in the budget, though it would be much better to set that money on fire because at least then it could briefly provide some warmth and therefore be more useful than park rangers. They estimate that the cost of the stuff included in the action plan is 100 million dollars and ask for the city to earmark 20 million dollars per year to make sure the plan is going to happen.

I did not hear anything from the Franklin Park Coalition about how this plan was pie in the sky bullshit at the time. I haven’t seen any of the local media following up on the progress of the Franklin Park Action Plan. And the city seems to just be hoping the whole thing blows over, which seems like a pretty safe bet at this point.

Boston has a lot of problems, and I’m not suggesting that this is the most important one. It’s just a perfect example of how, yet again, we don’t have a city government that cares about improving the lives of Bostonians.

Here’s my frustration: it seems like every day I read the news and see that Mayor Mamdani in New York is working, in small and big ways, to improve the lives of people who live in his city. When I was knocking doors for Michelle Wu’s campaign, I thought she’d do the same for Boston.

But, as the absolutely pathetic progress on the Franklin Park Action Plan shows, our mayor has other priorities. Franklin Park abuts Dorchester and Roxbury, real neighborhoods where hundreds of thousands of Bostonians live, but what’s that against the opinion of the people who really matter? You know, the ones with money.

I am allowed to grieve what I wanted, without dishonoring what I felt.

A very very short read. I don't share Brown's pessimism about AI, but this story dates back to 1954 (!) and is a fun read.

Dwan Ev ceremoniously soldered the final connection with gold. The eyes of a dozen television cameras watched him and the subether bore throughout the universe a dozen pictures of what he was doing.

He straightened and nodded to Dwar Reyn, then moved to a position beside the switch that would complete the contact when he threw it. The switch that would connect, all at once, all of the monster computing machines of all the populated planets in the universe — ninety-six billion planets — into the supercircuit that would connect them all into one supercalculator, one cybernetics machine that would combine all the knowledge of all the galaxies.

Dwar Reyn spoke briefly to the watching and listening trillions. Then after a moment's silence he said, “Now, Dwar Ev.”

Dwar Ev threw the switch. There was a mighty hum, the surge of power from ninety-six billion planets. Lights flashed and quieted along the miles-long panel.

Dwar Ev stepped back and drew a deep breath. “The honor of asking the first question is yours, Dwar Reyn.”

“Thank you,” said Dwar Reyn. “It shall be a question which no single cybernetics machine has been able to answer.”

He turned to face the machine. “Is there a God?”

The mighty voice answered without hesitation, without the clicking of a single relay.

“Yes, now there is a God.”

Sudden fear flashed on the face of Dwar Ev. He leaped to grab the switch.

A bolt of lightning from the cloudless sky struck him down and fused the switch shut.

#brown

Drawing: Julia Royer (copyright 2026)