I was exploring, as one does, a workshop; an atelier you might say. When I noticed a length of wood leaning against a wall. It appeared to be just a piece of wood; except that it had been marked carefully along one edge, almost like the Ogham I discovered in the Irish National Library, but in wood not stone.

“That's a rule,” said a voice beside me. It was the sort of statement that attracts trouble. I turned and found myself standing next to a Sorter. A Block Shirt, the ones rarely encountered accidentally. They have a way of appearing whenever a thing approaches a category.

“A rule?” I asked. “Obviously.” The Sorter spoke with the confidence of someone whose shelves are all labelled and nothing is misplaced. I examined the wood. It was fifty centimetres long. “Why is it a rule?” “Because it is used for measuring.” I considered this. “Then surely it is a ruler.”

The Sorter sighed, not unlike the man who ironed his map when it failed to agree with reality. Then attempted to iron reality when the map still refused to comply. “No. A ruler and a rule are different things.”

This may have been true. Many things are. Yet something about the answer unsettled me. I looked at the wood. The measurements upon it referred to a standard elsewhere. The standard itself was invisible. The marks derived their meaning from an agreement beyond the stick. The rule, I thought, was not the wood. The rule was that fifty centimetres should be fifty centimetres. The wood merely carried the rule through the world. I mentioned this. The Sorter reversed his sigh. The intake was sharp enough to shave several splinters from one side of the wood. And immediately produced two boxes: RULE. RULER.

I have learned to be cautious whenever boxes appear unexpectedly. “Which is it?” asked the Sorter, with an insistence that seemed to demand I answer. I became suspicious. Why was the Block Shirt pushing me toward a decision? I looked again at the wood. It seemed an oddly narrowing question.

The object was not the standard itself, yet neither was it merely separate from the standard. Without it, the standard remained distant, silent, waiting but unapplied. Through it, the standard acquired presence in the world. More than that, it acquired meaning. Until then, fifty centimetres was simply an agreement. Here it entered the world of tables and doors and awkwardly cut pieces of timber. The standard did not change. Yet somehow, by being applied, it became more fully itself.

I found myself thinking of the fada. The mark above a vowel whose name is not just fada but “an síneadh fada” – the “long” stretch. The transformation was familiar. The description of the thing, becomes the thing. Long becomes fada. Then fada becomes the mark by which longness appears. A quality acquires form. A notion acquires a body. Perhaps measurements did the same. Perhaps a rule, travelling far enough through the world, eventually became ruler-shaped.

The Sorter shook his head. “You must choose.” The wood remained silent. “If it applies the rule,” I said, “it may be a ruler.” “If it embodies the standard,” said the Sorter, “it is a rule.” The wood appeared equally unconcerned by both possibilities. That struck me as significant.

The Sorter inspected forms. The wood inspected nothing. It merely continued being whatever it was. A carrier of a standard. A body for a measurement. A thing through which an abstraction became visible. The Sorter held open the boxes. RULE. RULER.

I held the wood over one box, then the other. The wood offered no guidance. At last I set it down between them and continued on my way. The Sorter called after me that every object must belong somewhere. I did not turn around. Behind me, the marked length of wood remained precisely where I had left it. Between the boxes. And measuring perfectly. And remaining, like so many questions I encounter, unfinished.

✒️ Sigi

I went to the movies with my partner to see the new “Spider-Man: Brand New Day”. Fun movie, btw. More dramatic than what I was expecting. But this is not about the movie itself.

I usually don't like 3D because it gives me a headache, so I was looking at the options on the Cineplex website to get the tickets and I saw “ScreenX” and “Ultra AVX”. I have not been up to date with movie theater technologies, so I just picked the one that had the best time available for us.

And that was the ScreenX one (for some reason this name sounds like a glass cleaner product or something).

ScreenX is described as having:

...270-degree panoramic screen in select scenes that naturally fills your peripheral vision and surrounds you with boundless adventure.

Okay, so it will be like a curved wide screen right?

Wrong.

It was a normal rectangular room, with the main screen located where it usually is, with the side walls having screens as well. So, the lateral screens are situated at almost 90-degrees angle with the big screen. Not really the panoramic view I was expecting.

All of this to say that this experience gave me a major migraine. The “peripheral” screens did not work for me at all. I tried to focus on the main screen anyway, since most of the scene was there, but the glare and brightness of these lateral screens affected me somehow.

I left the movie theater feeling exhausted, with a headache and not wanting to see bright lights. Or the sun, or any lights. I came home and had to lie down in the dark for about an hour to feel better about my vision. I also took Ibuprofen, because it was that bad.

Even after a night's sleep I still had a headache the next day, and I couldn't stare at my computer screen for too long. Even reading was hard because of the headache.

I feel better today, but I'm trying to take computer breaks more frequently at work.

Lesson learned: never go for ScreenX again.

Post 11 of #Blaugust #journal #NoisyMusings

Inbetweeners Part 1- Introduction

This is the beginning of what will most likely be an extensive series looking at a Dungeons and Dragons 5e campaign I've run over the past few years. It started off as more of an experimental, short term project that really spiraled. The series will consist of a few different types of posts:

General Content- This will be general ideas, mechanics or plot details about the campaign, like end of this post.

Spotlights- This will be a spotlight on a particular location, NPC, item, etc.

“Found” Documents- Direct pastes of documents I've used/referenced for the campaign with a brief introduction. These will vary from less than a page to 30+.

We will see how it evolves but that's my general plan for now. I'll try to keep things roughly chronological. The campaign is still ongoing but reaching its end stage, so I'm hoping the post series roughly catches up with the campaign as it is finishing.

Anyway, with that out of the way...

---

My original goal of the campaign was create it as an alternate to another campaign that was running that I was a player in to give the DM a bit of a break. I structured it to try to get around one of the biggest obstacles in running a successful Dungeons and Dragons campaign: player attendance. In the modern era its really difficult to get a group of adults to show up consistently at a weekly, biweekly or even monthly time. Life gets in the way, and as people get older, work, kids, etc only complicate that effort. It becomes like herding cats. So I thought, why try to fight it? Instead, let me design a campaign around player absences.

The original players started the campaign at level one, but anyone who joined later would just start at the average level of players in the group. They could choose any race and any character class that exists in the base game or official extension. For homebrew I accepted it on a case by case basis, just needed to make sure it wasn't to broken or imbalanced. The players just needed to tell me basic character info and then write a short narrative on how their character died. Once I had that, the campaign started with the characters on their way to the afterlife when their souls were plucked and placed into their bodies which had been reconstituted in liminal space. The characters were ressurected, but by a four-dimensional being called the Interloper. Since he is not quite in phase with reality, that means the players were not either. As a result, they could randomly blink out of existence. This explains player absences, players running late, internet issues (we ran the game over Discord), etc diegetically within the context of the game. Also, the characters moved non-linearly. Whereas a normal three dimensional character would go through a door and end up on the other side of that door, the player characters would go through a door and end up somewhere completely different, like on the top of a mountain. This was explained as a bit of four dimensional nature being forced onto three dimensional beings, creating... unexpected results. Anyway, in summary, players could simply blink out of existence. When they reappeared, it was as if no time passed for them at all. They would reappear wherever the bulk of the players were congregated, and if players were equally split up we'd use dice to determine where they show up.

So we have these disparate players brought together by the fact they have died and been resurrected by an unknown far realm entity, the Interloper. The Interloper introduces himself as a disembodied voice in a liminal space called the Grey Room (I'll get more into the Interloper and Grey Room in future posts). They have been brought back to essentially gather data and samples for the Interloper, and in return he will grant them powers, abilities, magical items, really whatever the players want. Since he's a truly alien being, he has no concept of value and as a result players can end up with access to powers and items far beyond what they would normally have access to at that level. The Interloper just wants things that are novel or “interesting” and rewards accordingly. Bringing him a rabbit wouldn't rate very well on interesting, but kidnapping a mage and bringing him/her would be more interesting. Gods and higher beings rank highest on the interesting scale, and sometimes the Interloper would have specific requests. Otherwise the game was mostly a sandbox at the start.

After the intro, the players were free to explore the world through “rooms” and “doors”. A room is a self-contained area that a player cannot leave unless they go through a door. Otherwise they loop back to the other side. So let's say a “room” is a tennis court. If the players try to leave the tennis court, they will appear on the other side. If they go through a “door”, they appear in a completely different room in a different part of the world or even a different plane of existence. So for example, there is a long hallway that when players reach the other side they find themselves on the beach. Doors have a glow so players are aware that something is a door if they can see it, though they were hidden. I'll have a separate post on the door mechanics. Anyway, some rooms are safe and some are incredibly dangerous, and the further out the players go the more intense the rooms get. From there, the game was mostly just the players dungeon crawling across the planes, fighting enemies and finding loot. Eventually, the story progressed beyond that and in the second phase of the campaign, the players left the rooms behind and headed to Sigil. That wasn't the original plan but it evolved over time.

To keep things from feeling too cozy, because players could simply leave a trouble spot, I did create the ever present threat- The Protectors of the Weave. Based in Mechanus, this organization was dedicated to upholding the integrity of reality, which meant banishing or destroying any Far Realm based creatures and undoing their works. Since the players resurrection and means of conveyance itself was Far Realm tainted, they themselves were targets. The more powers they were granted from the Interloper, the more attention they attract. Also, if players cause a lot of trouble in a room and leave, and return days later, the Protectors may have been drawn to their use of Far Realm powers and set up a trap to catch them. In this way, Mechanus and law are the antagonists and the players and Far Realm corruption are the protagonists, an inversion of a classic Dungeons and Dragons plot.

In total there were roughly fifty rooms created for the campaign before the players grew past that phase. I'll post a document with notes on all of them and then do a deep dive on a few of the rooms that there was more detail to/more plot involved. After that, we will broaden out to the game once the players reached Sigil. The plot really broadens from there, with deities and greater powers like the Lady of Pain and Primus directly involved. The power scaling becomes absurd in the later parts of the game, with the players responsible for breaking up the heavens, wiping out several of the lords of hell, and even spawning new over gods. Very anime, but like one of the darker more gritty anime. A lot of content in store, but I think that gives a rough idea of what's ahead.

Koshary's kittens have all scurried off to explore the world, save for Tiger, who has decided to make the garden his domain. Curious, because he was the most avoidant of the lot. Now all of a sudden he's become an immensely affectionate little slut.

Amsterdam-based graphic designer Hans Gremmen has created over 400 books. While making these books, a miscellaneous pile kept growing in his studio: notes, sketches, photos, printed matter, screenshots, ephemera, and other breadcrumbs. ‘In Between’ is an attempt to deconstruct and re-organise this pile. The publication is a scrapbook about a hybrid design practice, but also a plea to consider failure as an option.

I would absolutely love to do something similar. I have an unruly amount of scraps, sketches, notes, process stuff, and photographs that I can absolutely see packaged and preserved in a similar way. Perhaps not in one big phonebook of a publication, but maybe an ongoing zine of sorts. A strange and regular rag that collects this stuff would absolutely work, given that such typically discarded material is likely to continue being a byproduct of the kind of work I do. Problem with that format is that it wouldn't sit on the shelf very well. But if each unit was in the hundred-page-range, you can give it a spine and make it work. A print-on-demand model might be a good option for this sort of thing.

Still, just the time it would take to gather this stuff and package it into a coherent and decent-enough design sounds like enough of a daunting sinkhole that I'm not sure I have the time for.

#journal #radar

Overdoosis, de nogal vage bron van even schimmige Amazon

Ik heb het gehaald ik haalde het weer en toen nog een keer nu heb ik zoveel meer en ik had er niet een nodig die inspanningen waren allemaal stuk voor stuk overbodig.

Life is a lot like jazz, it's best when you improvise.

Jal and Vim Fading Health Keeping Friends The Interloper PC vs Mac Numbers Night Cake Aftermath and Reckoning

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Fading Wonder

The sunflower's glory is beginning to fade.

I noticed it while watching the bees flit back and forth from the hive this morning. I only ever notice them flying south because the sun rises just to the right of the hive and I adore the little dots of light they become as they fly through the morning rays.

My gaze drifting right, I noticed the hedge of either and nine foot tall plants didn't have their usual shock of yellow and green. I thought it was the hazy sunrise at first, but when I walked out, I could see the first hint that in 6 weeks or so, they'll be well on their way way to crumbled husks.

Fall will be here.

Summer's glory is beginning her swan song. The hottest days, the whitest sun. Everything brittle and angry.

The August heat cracked van's windshield nape to navel. It was just a tiny spot, but taking the trash to the curb in the moonlight last night, I noticed a new shape: a six foot long crack going left and right from what was no more than a discoloration.

Yay.

---

Jal and Vim

We have two older friends. Well, we have LOTS of older friends. In fact. as we enter our 50's and 60's with gusto and start to see the NEXT decades of our life begin to crest, I am noticing how ancient many of our lifelong friends have become.

It isn't something that is apparent to me. I still see them much as I do myself, the same robust dummy I always was. I think Neo would have called it RSI: Residual Self Image.

Welcome to the Matrix — where daily life is a glitch.

Jal and Vim are new friends. New is, of course, relative. They moved into Dust Meridian during the pandemic. I didn't pay much attention to them at first. I had my head down keeping the congregation running when we were suddenly confronted with needing to become a fully functional remote family.

And there was no shortage of other jobs to do in those days.

In their 80's, they came from the wide empty spaces of eastern Colorado. Land that no one ever talks about. It's so bleak, Dust Meridian caught their eye because of 'how lush and green it is here'.

Their words, not mine.

Eastern Colorado must be come kind of hellscape, is all I can say. But, they also found the people here to be pretty great. I won't argue that Jal, as we are both people here.

Jal is a mother of two, who married Vim 55 years ago after her first marriage fell apart. Vim still looks at her like a fresh apple-blossom. It's really sweet.

He is a farmer from farmers. Which is probably why they have chicken tchotchkes everywhere. A chicken sign greets you in the front yard. A chicken doormat welcomes you to the roost. The kitchen is rife with chicken this and chicken that.

He made his living as a farm hand for decades while he raised his family and sent them into the world. Quiet and sweet, he is a very hard worker. Vim is like many men I know: uncertain of their power and ability. This is one part humility and one part lacking self confidence.

I love his willingness to engage when he's not in the limelight though. Vim is a ditch-digger. Ditch-diggers are my favorite kind of people. They'll work at the worst tasks endlessly as long as they can do it in the shadows. This is as compared to a peacock who loves to strut around the stage. Getting those guys to get into the trenches is, eh... not a fun task.

Ditch-diggers can be trained to put on the head-dress and do the stage dance, but their heart and motive is always in the ditch. The unseen forces that move things forward. My dad is like that. He'd rather grind in the shadows that be the center of attention. My best friends are like this.

I respect the hell out of that.

I like to think I'm a ditch-digger. But, I'm not ignorant to how well I wear those shiny feathers.

Jal, is the opposite of Vim. She's brash, direct, and seems fearless. This, I have learned, is a veneer. I meet two kinds of personalities who are this way. One is arrogant and barely tolerable, the other suffers from deep lack of self-esteem and puts on the mask of certainty to hide trauma, low self-worth and that they secretly hate themselves.

Trauma it sounds like has shaped her. The tell-tale between the two types of extrovert personalities is the deep valley of humility that the latter kind exhibits.

I love this kind of personality. You always know what's on their mind and the communication is robust and direct. My wife has a harder time with the directness. She tends to see plans within plans when others speak and so when there's no secondary or tertiary meaning to what the woman says, it confuses Ng.

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Fading Health

Well into their 80's now, Jal and Vim told us that her recent heart attack was much worst than they publicly admitted.

“The doctor's called it a widow-maker.” Jal told us over ceviche Saturday night.

No one wants to see their mate's health fail, but when you learn that she wasn't just seriously ill, that she should most likely be dead, it doesn't just take the wind out of your sails, it pulls them down, folds them and drops them in the fire.

So, the name of the game for our friends is NO-STRESS!

Not hard, we just avoid difficult topics like their 61 year-old-son's recent marriage to a slightly crazy woman. And any conflict in our own lives.

I find that my current reading of 'The Body Keeps the Score' is handy for skimming how early trauma can manifest at any time, meaning avoiding difficult topics isn't just keeping someone comfortable, it is preventing the the body from unleashing the flood of hormones that come when we are stressed.

We spent an hour talking about hummingbirds. How their fountain brings the most wonderful wildlife. The skunk that wanted to live under the shed. Their first television. How she became an accountant. How they met. The way she learned about the Bible and how infant-baptism was a key hook for her.

Conversation with well-experienced people is shockingly easy.

Especially when you have good conversationalists involved.

“We don't like to have just anyone over. Not everyone is a stress-free conversation.” Jal says.

And I know what she means. It takes some skill to trade speaking roles, not talk too long, add to the index of what's being said and know when to shift topics.

Good conversation is as much fun as any game ever was. Only there's no scoreboard or goal other than to just enjoy each other moment-to-moment.

I don't know how long we'll have Jal. I hope it's forever. She's a good soul and he energy, even diminished is invigorating. I wish I had more people like her in our life, and when we lose her, she won't be replaceable.

Good souls never are. They just leave dotted outlines in your soul where they used to be.

---

Keeping Friends

We had a robust conversation yesterday at worship about friendships. How to keep them especially.

A google search says most people have about 4 close friends. Makes me think of 'King of the Hill', the Mike Judge animated television show that ran for 15 seasons about twenty years ago. Want to know what life is like in Texas? King of the Hill nailed it. My dad was Hank Hill, the eponymous lead character of the show. He had 4 close friends.

Checks out.

Dunbar's theory says the human mind can only handle about 150 meaningful relationships. I make a note to add this to my list of things I'd like to learn more about.

If there's true wealth, I think it is the number of people who will answer the phone when you call. Not because they need you or expect something from you, but because they like to hear your voice. They miss whatever adventure you are on. Wanting to be a part of your life. And yes, they'll show up if you need a helping hand and take yours if offered.

True friends aren't just missed. They are remembered. Unforgettable even if they are truly gone. Which means they never really are. True friends live in our hearts.

But, they ain't perfect.

Because WE aren't perfect. In fact, some of us are pretty damned imperfect. But like ink drawings, we are what we are and our friends learn to love the shape of our indelibility. They don't want to change us, just love who and what we are.

But those flaws create conflict. And the hour-long conversation in the congregation was al about how Bible principles can help us put up with one another when we're at our worse.

There's a copy of a poetry collection on my desk: 'Please love me at my worst' by Michaela Angemeer.

You cannot use Someone else's map to find yourself

and

And when the shore seems out of reach don't forget that you can always float a while

It's very mushy stuff. it is romantic love Angemeer writes. Eros.

This is NOT the kind of love we are applying to our friendships. It is what the Bible refers to as agape, or principled love. Meaning: you do the right thing because it's the right thing, not necessarily because you feel like doing it.

Got a friend who's a dummy or aggravating or offensive (or YOU are that person)? Patience, kindness, humility and compassion smooth over the challenging parts in the short term. And over time, we learn that those things weren't as bad as we thought. In fact, we can learn to love the person not just in spite of those 'flaws' but because of them. We begin to see them as God does, for their potential, not necessarily because of their current state.

The illustration of an engine was used. Engine's need oil or they burn up. Our friendships need the oil of God's word or they to will seize.

It's such a terrific illustration because engines have incredibly tight tolerances and it takes a shockingly small amount of oil to keep them running for hundreds of thousands of miles. For instance, the main crankshaft of an engine may have a space half the width of a human hair that allows oil to wash between two pieces of metal spinning thousands of times per minute.

Just a little bit of God's word, His principles, can keep our relationships running smoothly for decades.

But, let that run out and the friction can destroy a perfectly functioning machine in moments.

i have not always been the best friend. It is one of my many regrets. But, my hope continues to be that those failed relationships will teach me something about myself and how to be a better one in the future.

We are all, after all, works in progress.

Me? I'm at that ugly sketch stage where you can start to see the forms and role your eyes and think 'I thought this guy was an artist'.

I have potential. I bet you do to.

---

The four loves mentioned in the Bible:

Philea: Familial love Eros: Romantic love Storge: Brotherly love Agape: Principled love

English is such an inadequate language for such a deep topic.

---

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Interloper

After our meeting for worship, I'm feeling mixed feelings on the kind of friend I am and where I've failed in my friendships when another friend (friend, friend, friend, friend, write it enough looks so strange) admits he's struggling to accept a personality associated with the congregation. I understand, because I struggle to accept her too.

However, it's not that i cannot accept her, I have and do. But that doesn't mean I want to be around her. She's a full blown narcissist and manipulator. Which is a terrible combination for my wife. I've experienced the woman pull my wife out of a meeting, drive across town to deliver ice cream because the interloper wasn't feeling good and needed a pick-me-up.

Frequently, if we find ourselves out for a meal with Interloper, she finds a mark to buy her meal. Or she sends it back and then asks for the manager to comp it because something was wrong. Or buys, wears an expensive garment and then returns it after a function.

I've known this woman for forty years. I watched her marry my best friend. Then ruin her marriage to him with a string of men.

I know. I know. I can't hold a persons past against them. I can't freeze them there. However, I counter that it isn't freezing a person in the past if they continue to practice those actions which abuse and current relationships.

If I only show up when I want something from you, am I really your friend? Or are you just an asset? A convenience?

My conclusion was: some personalities require a PHD in acceptance.

If you have to keep someone at arms length to protect your psyche, your sanity and your family, that isn't 'not accepting them'. It is protecting yourself.

I fact, one could argue that by being a stranger, you are showing love. Love to them to yourself and to those you are charged with protecting.

Someday, Interloper will be safe to be around. I hope. And then those safeguards of distance can come down.

---

PC vs Mac (This is really about my ego)

New computers and hardware in our house of worship.

the mind is a strange place. I have neither the energy nor the desire to be involved in replacing the hardware in our congregation. I actively choose to not be involved. But for some reason it's bugging me to see these guys wild-west things instead of following published protocols for equipment selection and setup.

WHY am I like this? I don't need the stress. I CAN'T have the stress. But I still find it aggravating to watch my fellows just make it up as they go.

Breath breath breathe.

Not my monkey. Not my circus.

This is mostly related to the argument that 'all our problems are this apple computer! We can't update the OS and so we can't fix the problem.'

The problem is and was a failing mixer. I knew this two years ago and it continues to be the problem today.

This to shall pass. Which is an idiotic thing to write because 'this' isn't even an issue. Maybe it's related to pride? Being 'the guy' for so long was more ego-stroking than i realized?

The ego-keeper. Maybe that should be my moniker. Big fat giant ego. I'm surprised my hats still fit.

---

Numbers Night

We spent a couple of hours watching an old tv show called 'Numbers'. It isn't intended as a comedy, but the writing is SO ridiculous.

The premise: Arnie is a math genius who teaches at a university. His brother works for the FBI. The FBI agent calls his brother Arnie to use complex math equations to solve crimes.

Think: Good Will Hunting meets Men in Black.

Those are both great. But so are chocolate cake and sauerkraut.

I spent the time filling sketchbook pages and making pithy remarks on the absurdity of using Brownian motion to solve why a criminal would talk a hostage at FBI headquarters and then extrapolate what his next target will be.

What is so comical is how absolutely serious the show takes itself. HIGH on the high drama. And each episode ends with a 'HEAT' level shootout. Heat as in the 1995 Michael Mann-directed Pachino/Deniro crime thriller famous for its 10m concluding gunfight. Thousands of rounds are fired.

Honestly, a more accurate comparison would be 1988's Naked Gun.

Dumb.

I turn on Psyche. Funny, crime-based and anything but serious.

---

Cake

I stopped eating cake several years ago. It was a big choice: I LOVE chocolate cake. It is a food that simply can do no wrong.

Well, it seems that my sabbatical from eating the stuff has created a bit of a problem. I can no longer eat the stuff!

Ng brought home a slice of the choicest, softest, most moist chocolate cake in the universe. and it was delicious. We shared it and licked the frosting out of the container like children.

We laughed and giggled and talked about how much we loved cake and why didn't we eat it more often.

An hour later, after coming out of a sugar coma and taking something to settle my stomach, I admitted that I think I may have to permanently break up with chocolate cake.

It wasn't just a tummy ache either. I was in a FOUL mood. Only after having some fantastic grilled chicken, did the protein and fat offset whatever assault my body and mind were under.

Too bad. Maybe homemade cake will be different. Commercial oils just wreak havoc on my biome!

---

Aftermath

So, dear reader, youre all caught up on my adventures. Last week saw the end of my month-long grueling project. I fully expect a call from my client today, shocked at how I can bill him so many hours in such a short period of time. Three hundred hours in 4 weeks.

So it took 5 days to start to feel human again. Friday was billing and vegging. Saturday was Vegging. Sunday we finally started to do human things, like go to worship.

Today... today will be marveling at the heat. Scheduling a windsheild replacement. Preparing for the the weeks's activity. Planning some time on the road. I think a beach trip would be a good reward for weeks of hard work.

Write draw and live.

But first, it's 10am. I've been writing for hours.

Breakfast time.

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Jal and Vim Fading Health Keeping Friends The Interloper PC vs Mac Numbers Night Cake Aftermath

Re Redenatie

Het had een oorzaak er zaten zelfs passend gevolgen bij het was de missing link tussen jou en mij. Ik zit hier nog maar waar ben jij?

Ex Existentialisme

Zo net was ik er maar als jij dit leest ben ik er geweest ...

Ik denk dus jij bestaat ; Imagine's Lament

Ik denk er aan dus het bestaat het is opgekomen maar het lijkt er op dat het niet meer gaat het is als een contact zonder stop het ging er over maar nooit er op nu ik er aan denk is het erg onduidelijk wat het hier doet is het hier voor goed waardoor het ene andere niet wordt ontmoet ik wou dat er wat beters bij me was opgekomen iets dat de rest niet klem zet dan blijft hangen in dit vervalste net vastplakt tussen jou en mij maar het eertijds ontwikkelde vrij en eenvoudig was blijven stromen

Des millions de vies, animales et végétales, balayées ; Des milliers de vies humaines, prématurément ôtées.

C’est l’été de la mort.

Il n’y a pas si longtemps, l’été rimait avec insouciance, repos, légèreté. Nous en sortons désormais fatigués, stressés et inquiets.

C’est la mort de l’été.

los gepolst

jij bent zo eentje waarvoor sturen zijn gemaakt borden werden ontwikkeld geboden en wetten moesten worden geregeld verhalen verzonnen voor zingeving jij hebt stekkers nodig om te denken dat je werkt echt hier bent om iets te doen knopjes indrukken, aan hendels trekken kijken naar verbeelding een voorstelling voor oog en oor jij hebt stopcontacten nodig camera beelden microfoons en de gebruikelijke poederdosis voor jou zijn er apparaten, automaten, worden namen pas echt als ze op plastic zitten geplakt en je ze in kunt schrijven bij een kamer je hebt handelingen nodig voor jou moest alles worden omgezet en aan altijd aanzetten is het leven pas echt als het wordt opgemerkt gezien via de middelen waarvan jij afhankelijk bent anders ga je dood als je niet wordt gezien terwijl je iets doet al is het maar kijken naar anderen op een speciaal daar voor gefabriceerd zeteltje je hebt letters nodig voor je lijf instrumenten moeten je omringen anders leef je waarschijnlijk niet jij bent er zo eentje met externe behoeften waaraan anderen moeten voldoen voor jou aan het werk gaan naar je stem luisteren via 1001 via's op grote afstand tussen jou en hun waarvoor wegen moeten worden geasfalteerd, regelmatig hersteld remmen, rem- en stoplichten werden opgetuigd in de voertuigen die je nodig hebt om sneller dan je zelf kan ergens te komen om op knopjes te drukken jij moet een steel in handen hebben een stuk gereedschap een bijl of een boor je moet iets hebben met voorschriften bijwerkingen verplicht gesteld anders heeft het allemaal geen nut jij met je instrumentarium, orkestratie van de omgeving, altijd op een podium acteren om waar ook te kunnen zijn je hebt tubes nodig en kwasten middelen voor zelf expressie boven op anderen je hebt wedstrijden nodig stem rondes om het ego te strelen je eigen belang rijk kunstzinnige successen voor het behalen zodat je heel even tevreden kunt zijn slapen in je nep omgeving zelf ingevuld met spul om naar te kijken zodat je kunt denken dat je ergens bent je hebt lijnen nodig kabels masten torens en natuurlij k namen voor iedereen en alles zodat je kunt zeggen dat alles echt zo is daar voor jou om te benoemen daar bij jou en je machine waardoor je hier bent terecht gekomen in die stroom van rotzooi die nodig is voor jou levenswil of wat daar meer min dan meer voor door gaat

👋

There were nettles and I was running at the edge of the maize field, between the taller maize and the forest. There I could’ve disappeared, but I didn’t

I Emerged instead on the road and finally made it back home to my family including the cats

And yes of course I am thankful

I never pictured I would have any of this

There’s no place on earth I’d rather be and no life I’d rather live either

I didn’t picture anything, to be fair, but still

having all I got fills me with gratitude

And my neutral facial expression: a smile.

I had one of those days today where I just didn’t really want to get up off the couch. I had already gone to the gym, but I got pretty bad Tennis elbow and so I ended up taking it kind of easy and I was supposed to hang out with a friend for the first time in a while, but she flaked again. I just didn’t really have any motivation to do anything.

Ampersound creates audiovisual non-fiction stories with a particular emphasis on the power of sound. Founded by George Lavender, the company develops all of its material by collaborating with actual human creatives, a quality that became central to the company's graphic identity, which I had the pleasure of designing.

Kamilia is a boutique perfume and jewelry brand named in honor of the client’s mother. From its inception, the design process sought to establish a visual identity that would convey the brand’s deeply personal origins while communicating the refined craftsmanship behind its products.

And here's a little tease of my collab with Dominic Boyer for Elon Mag:

It would seem that being exposed to all those dumb toy ads in comicbooks all my life would eventually come in handy after all.

“He who does not read, at 70 years will have lived only one life, his own! He who reads, will have lived 5000 years: He was there when Cain killed Abel, when Renzo married Lucia, when Leopardi admired infinity... Because 'Reading is backward immortality.'” – Umberto Eco

#work #design #quote

A pug flying an aeroplane. That was the image, generated with an off-the-shelf model by a photographer who posts under the handle Horshack, and in September 2025 he persuaded a Nikon Z6III to certify it as a photograph.

The method was not sophisticated. He encoded the synthetic image into Nikon's raw NEF container, then used the camera's multiple exposure mode to graft it onto the skeleton of a legitimate capture. The camera, running firmware version 2.00 released on 27 August 2025, duly wrapped the result in a cryptographic manifest conforming to the specification published by the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity. Anyone inspecting the file would have found a valid signature attesting that a real Nikon camera had recorded the scene. Nikon confirmed the fault on 4 September, suspended its Authenticity Service, and later notified users that every certificate it had issued would be revoked. Early adopters who had spent the fortnight signing their work found their proofs retrospectively voided.

The more instructive part came next. Horshack pointed out that Nikon could not fully fix this alone, because the default behaviour of the widely used C2PA validation tools is not to check whether a signing certificate has been revoked. The revocation-checking code exists in the software development kit; it is simply not switched on by default. He filed a GitHub issue asking that the reference command-line tool change that. Until it does, a revoked certificate and a valid one look identical to most software that inspects them.

Hold that sequence in mind, because it contains the whole argument in miniature. Manufacturing a convincing fake cost one person an afternoon and no money. Certifying that something is real required a camera manufacturer, a firmware pipeline, a certificate authority, an industry consortium, a specification, a conformance programme and a public trust list — and it failed anyway, in a way only the consortium could repair.

This is the asymmetry that will define the next decade of the internet, and almost every optimistic account of the “trust economy” walks straight past it.

The Statistic Everyone Cites Cannot Prove Its Own Provenance

Writing in Modern Diplomacy on 16 August 2026, Yang Xite, a research fellow at ANBOUND, set out the case with unusual clarity. “Information used to be scarce, and access to it was a source of power,” he wrote. “Today, the problem is almost the opposite; there is too much information floating online.” His conclusion: “As the cost of producing information approaches zero, the value of finding, checking, filtering, and trusting information rises. The scarce resource is no longer content itself. It is confidence in the content.” And therefore: “In a market where consumers and businesses are increasingly exposed to fraud, proof of authenticity can itself become a product.”

That is correct as far as it goes. The trouble starts with the number recruited to support it.

You will have seen the claim that ninety per cent of online content will be AI-generated by 2026. It appears in policy briefings, keynotes and vendor decks, usually attributed to Europol, whose 2022 report Facing reality? Law enforcement and the challenge of deepfakes states that “experts estimate that as much as 90% of online content may be synthetically generated by 2026”.

In January 2023, Jesse Walker at Reason traced the chain. Europol's “experts” resolve to a single citation: Nina Schick's 2020 book Deepfakes: The Coming Infocalypse. Schick's source was one named individual — Victor Riparbelli, chief executive of Synthesia, a company that sells synthetic video. What Riparbelli said was that synthetic video may account for up to ninety per cent of all video content in as little as three to five years. A forecast about one medium, made by a vendor with a direct commercial interest in that medium's growth, generalised into a claim about the entire internet, laundered through a book into a police agency report and from there into the newspaper of record.

The most widely cited datum about information pollution is itself a specimen of information pollution. It is not a measurement. It never was.

The measurements that do exist tell a duller, more useful story. In October 2025 the search analytics firm Graphite published an analysis by Gregory Druck, Jose Luis Paredes, Bevin Benson and Ethan Smith covering forty-three thousand English-language URLs drawn from CommonCrawl between January 2020 and May 2025. They reported their error rates: a 4.2 per cent false positive rate against pre-ChatGPT articles, and a 0.6 per cent false negative rate against known GPT-4o output. AI-written articles overtook human-written ones in November 2024 and stood at just over half the sample by May 2025. Crucially, the proportion has been broadly stable for about a year. The wave crested; it did not keep rising toward ninety.

Graphite also noted something that cuts against the panic: these articles largely do not surface in Google or ChatGPT results. NewsGuard, tracking the sharper end of the phenomenon, had identified 3,749 AI content farm sites across sixteen languages as of 23 June 2026, more than double its count a year earlier. A real and growing problem. Not ninety per cent of the internet.

This matters beyond pedantry. Build a verification regime on the premise that nearly everything is fake and you will build something that treats unverified as guilty by default. Which is exactly what is being built.

What the Economics Paper Actually Says Is Worse

The arXiv paper usually invoked alongside the ninety per cent figure does not contain it. “The Economics of Information Pollution in the Age of AI: General Equilibrium, Welfare, and Policy Design”, submitted by Yukun Zhang and Tianyang Zhang on 17 September 2025 and revised on 4 January 2026, is a theoretical model rather than an empirical survey. It contains no census of what fraction of the web is synthetic.

What it does contain is a sharper claim. The authors argue that large language models represent “a fundamental shock to the economics of information production” because they collapse the marginal cost of generation asymmetrically — driving the cost of low-quality synthetic content towards zero while leaving high-quality production costly. Formally, AI substitutes for labour in low-quality output but complements it in high-quality creation. From this they derive a unique “Polluted Information Equilibrium”, and attribute its inefficiency to a threefold market failure: a production externality, a platform governance failure, and an information commons externality.

That framework explains something a raw percentage cannot. The problem is not the volume of synthetic content. It is that the cost gap between producing a plausible lie and producing a verified truth has widened, and every actor's incentives now point downhill. Zhang and Zhang propose an Information Pollution Index and an adaptive governance regime keyed to real-time readings — a proposal presupposing an instrument nobody operates.

“AI, Digital Platforms, and the New Systemic Risk” by Philipp Hacker, Lilian Edwards and Atoosa Kasirzadeh, submitted on 22 September 2025 and revised on 23 May 2026, comes at the same territory from the governance side. Drawing on finance, complex systems theory, climate science and cybersecurity, the authors argue that recent European legislation invokes systemic risk while relying on narrow or ambiguous characterisations of it. The Digital Services Act, they find, identifies systemic risk better than the more recent AI Act, and harms such as discrimination at scale and systematic hallucinations “may not fall under current legal definitions, given the AI Act's focus on frontier model capabilities”.

Put the two together and the diagnosis is precise. Generation has become cheap in a way structurally biased towards the low-quality end, and the legal instruments built to respond target frontier model capabilities rather than population-level degradation of the information commons. Neither paper says ninety per cent of the internet is fake. Both say something more troubling: the machinery for noticing and pricing the damage does not exist.

Seeing Stopped Being Enough Somewhere Around Last March

The abstraction becomes concrete fastest in medicine, where the readers are the most highly trained image analysts in the world.

On 24 March 2026, Radiology published a study led by Mickael Tordjman, a post-doctoral fellow at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, testing whether radiologists could distinguish synthetic X-rays from real ones. Seventeen radiologists at twelve centres across six countries assessed 264 radiographs, half authentic and half generated, using both a general-purpose commercial model and RoentGen, a diffusion model built at Stanford for chest radiography.

When the radiologists did not know the study's true purpose, only forty-one per cent spontaneously flagged the synthetic images. Told explicitly that the dataset was half fake, their mean accuracy reached seventy-five per cent, with individual performance ranging from fifty-eight to ninety-two per cent. Experience made no difference: the researchers found no correlation between years in practice and detection accuracy.

Read that again. Specialists, forewarned, missed roughly a quarter of fabricated medical images. The clinical implications are obvious — fraudulent insurance claims, manufactured litigation evidence, falsified trial data — but the epistemic implication is larger. A chest X-ray was, until recently, close to a paradigm case of self-authenticating evidence. It is not any more, and no amount of professional training closes the gap.

The financial sector has the loss figures. On 7 April 2026 the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center published its 2025 report: 20.9 billion dollars in reported losses, up twenty-six per cent from 16.6 billion, across 1,008,597 complaints — the first time annual complaints have exceeded one million in the centre's twenty-five year history. People aged sixty and over filed 201,266 complaints and accounted for roughly 7.7 billion dollars of the losses. For the first time, the report carried a section on AI-facilitated fraud: more than twenty-two thousand complaints and nearly 893 million dollars.

The archetypal case remains the engineering firm Arup, whose Hong Kong finance employee authorised fifteen transfers totalling roughly 25.6 million dollars in a single day after a video conference in which every executive on the call was a deepfake assembled from publicly available footage. Hong Kong police disclosed the incident in February 2024; Arup confirmed itself as the victim in May. Deloitte's Center for Financial Services, in an analysis published on 29 May 2024 by Satish Lalchand, Val Srinivas, Brendan Maggiore and Joshua Henderson, projected that generative AI could push United States fraud losses to forty billion dollars by 2027, from 12.3 billion in 2023. That last figure is a projection and should be read as one. The IC3 numbers are not.

Detection Is the Losing Side of an Arms Race It Cannot Leave

The instinctive response is to build a detector. The evidence says this will not work, and the best evidence is a benchmark designed specifically to test the claim.

Deepfake-Eval-2024, assembled by Nuria Alina Chandra, Oren Etzioni and eleven colleagues and first posted in March 2025, collected deepfakes actually circulating in the wild during 2024 — forty-five hours of video, 56.5 hours of audio and 1,975 images, drawn from eighty-eight different websites in fifty-two languages. The team then ran state-of-the-art open-source detectors against it.

Performance collapsed. Against the academic benchmarks on which these models report their headline accuracy, the area under the curve fell by fifty per cent for video, forty-eight per cent for audio and forty-five per cent for images. Commercial detectors and fine-tuned models did better, but still did not match human forensic analysts. The authors' conclusion is blunt: academic benchmarks are out of date and unrepresentative of real-world deepfakes.

This is not a temporary engineering shortfall. Detection is structurally the trailing party. A detector is trained on generators that already exist, and any published detector becomes a differentiable objective for the next generation to optimise against. Compression, re-encoding, screenshotting and platform transcoding degrade exactly the statistical residue detectors look for. Every step of ordinary internet distribution is, incidentally, an evasion technique.

Which means the question cannot be answered by looking harder at the artefact. You have to ask where it came from. And the moment you do, you have changed the subject from what is true to who is vouching — and created a market.

Provenance Changes the Question From What Is True to Who Signed

The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity is the serious attempt at that change. Its output, Content Credentials, is a cryptographically signed manifest travelling with a file, recording what device or software produced it and what edits were applied. The specification reached version 2.4 in April 2026 and is progressing through ISO as standard 22144, still an unpublished draft.

The steering committee is the tell. It comprises Adobe, Amazon, the BBC, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Publicis Groupe, Sony, TikTok and Truepic — the world's largest advertising conglomerate, the dominant mobile and desktop platform vendors, the two largest generative model providers, three major distribution platforms, one public service broadcaster and one verification vendor. A reasonable roster for building an interoperable standard. Also a list of the organisations that will decide what counts as authentic.

Before assessing who should hold that power, be precise about what the technology proves. It proves that a manifest was signed by a key traceable to a listed certificate, and that the file has not changed since. It does not prove the manifest's assertions are true. Photograph an AI-generated image displayed on a screen using a C2PA-enabled Leica and you get a cryptographically impeccable credential attesting that a real camera captured a real scene, which it did — the scene was a monitor. Nor does provenance say anything about context: an authentic photograph from one conflict, correctly signed, remains authentic when captioned as coming from another.

The independent security assessment is worse than the conceptual critique. On 27 April 2026, Enis Golaszewski, Neal Krawetz, Alan T. Sherman, Edward Zieglar and seven colleagues published what they describe as the first comprehensive independent security analysis of C2PA, including the first formal-methods analysis of its core protocols. Their finding: “the current C2PA specifications fail to achieve their claimed security goals”. Their recommendation is stark. C2PA “should not yet be relied upon for high-stakes uses such as financial disclosures, journalism, or legal evidence” — a fairly comprehensive list of the uses for which it is being promoted.

The Certificate Authority Is the Chokepoint

Here the asymmetry stops being conceptual and becomes an access-control list.

To emit a Content Credential validators will trust, you need a signing certificate from a certification authority on the C2PA Trust List. To obtain one, your product must have passed the C2PA Conformance Program, which assesses it against the specification, a certificate policy and a set of security requirements. The interim trust list that held the ecosystem together in its early years was frozen on 1 January 2026; the formal programme replacing it opened in mid-2025 and remains in early enrolment.

Consider what this means in practice. SSL.com, a conformant certification authority, introduced a free tier in June 2026 offering one Level 1 claim signing certificate valid for a year plus ten thousand trusted timestamps. Generous — except that applicants must present “a valid C2PA conformance record ID”. The certificate is free; eligibility to hold one is not something an individual can obtain at all. Conformance is a process applied to products and organisations, with legal agreements, security assessments and identity validation attached. A freelance photographer in Nairobi cannot pass it. A witness with a phone cannot pass it.

The World Privacy Forum, in a technical review published on 3 September 2025 by Kate Kaye and Pam Dixon, put the governance objection with precision: “the criteria used for inclusion on these lists, or who the arbiters deciding which entities are considered known, and by extension, trustworthy have not been made public”. The same review noted that C2PA's own harms modelling documentation concedes that “loss of control over personal information and enforced suppression of speech are possible through use of C2PA”, and that identity specifications were moved out of the core standard into a separate working group in January 2024, with identity claims aggregators now bridging government and commercial identity systems into provenance workflows.

So the architecture, stated plainly: generating a convincing fake requires a consumer graphics card or a free web account. Generating a credential that a verifier will honour requires membership of, or accreditation by, a consortium whose selection criteria are not published. One of those capabilities has been democratised. The other has been enclosed.

Every Platform Reads the Evidence and Then Deletes It

Even for the accredited, the infrastructure does not currently deliver.

In October 2025 the Washington Post ran a test that ought to be better known. Reporters produced an AI-generated video carrying Content Credentials and uploaded it to eight major social platforms. Only YouTube surfaced any warning, and that disclosure sat inside a description attached to the clip rather than on the video itself. No platform preserved the Content Credentials data in a form users could access.

The mechanism is mundane. Platforms re-encode nearly every image and video at upload — for file size, for format normalisation, and to strip EXIF data that routinely contains GPS coordinates and device identifiers. Metadata not deliberately carried through the transcode does not survive it. Some platforms do read the manifest before discarding it: TikTok began reading C2PA data in 2024 and applies its own “AI-generated” labels on that basis, adding an invisible watermark in November 2025 precisely because, in its own account, C2PA metadata can be removed when content is re-uploaded or edited.

That is the settled state of affairs. The provenance record is read by the platform, used for the platform's own labelling decision, and deleted from the file that everyone actually sees. Users receive a conclusion, not evidence. Whether to believe the label is a question about the platform, which is where we started.

The proposed remedy is “durable” credentials — soft bindings such as invisible watermarks and perceptual fingerprints that allow a stripped manifest to be recovered from a cloud registry. C2PA's own FAQ describes the approach. It also relocates verification from the file in your hand to a lookup against a database somebody else operates, and makes every verification a queryable event. Google's SynthID, embedded by default across Gemini, Imagen, Lyria and Veo, had marked more than one hundred billion images and videos by Google's own account in May 2026, along with roughly sixty thousand years of audio. Detection has until now run through Google's detector portal and the Gemini app. At the same announcement Google said SynthID detection and C2PA verification were being built into Google Search and into Chrome, so that a reader can right-click an image, or circle it on a phone, and ask whether it was generated with AI. On the same day OpenAI began attaching Google's watermark, alongside a C2PA manifest, to images produced through ChatGPT and its API; ElevenLabs, Kakao and Nvidia announced adoption too.

Verification offered at the point of reading is a real improvement on everything described above. It also changes nothing about the transcode. The credential still does not survive the upload; what the reader consults instead is not the file but a query, and the largest rival model provider has just adopted the same company's mark. The watermark is Google's, the detector is Google's, and the answer to “is this real” is a request to Google.

Brussels Set a Deadline and It Lands on the Compliant

Two weeks ago, on 2 August 2026, Article 50 of the EU AI Act became enforceable. Providers of systems generating synthetic audio, image, video or text must now mark outputs with “effective, reliable, robust and interoperable machine-readable marks”. Deployers of deepfakes must disclose them with a visible or audible label a person can understand without any detection tool — a hidden machine-readable mark does not satisfy the deployer obligation. Systems already on the market have until 2 December 2026 to comply with the marking requirement, and content generated before 2 August 2026 needs no retrospective labelling. Non-compliance carries fines of up to fifteen million euros or three per cent of worldwide annual turnover, whichever is higher.

This survived a serious attempt to slow the whole regime. The Digital Omnibus on AI, Regulation (EU) 2026/1744, entered into force on 27 July 2026 and deferred the high-risk obligations under Annex III to 2 December 2027 and those for product-embedded systems to 2 August 2028. It did not delay Article 50. Spain has gone further, creating a dedicated supervisory agency, AESIA, and legislating penalties of up to thirty-five million euros or seven per cent of global turnover for failure to label.

Now apply the asymmetry. Article 50 binds providers placing systems on the EU market and deployers operating within its jurisdiction — companies with legal departments, European entities and revenue worth three per cent of. It binds OpenAI, Google, Adobe and Meta. It does not bind an open-weight model running on a laptop in a jurisdiction with no equivalent statute, which is where a growing share of genuinely harmful material is produced. The fraudsters who took 893 million dollars from Americans last year were not weighing their exposure to European administrative fines.

The predictable effect is that compliant, well-resourced, largely benign generation becomes marked, while non-compliant, adversarial generation stays unmarked. Over time that inverts the signal. If the honest are labelled and the dishonest are not, then “unmarked” ceases to mean “probably human” and starts to mean “outside the regime” — a category containing both the criminal and the ordinary person with a phone and no accreditation.

Hacker, Edwards and Kasirzadeh anticipated the structural version of this. Their framework identifies four levels of AI-related systemic risk and warns that the AI Act's orientation towards frontier model capabilities leaves population-level harms outside its definitions. Marking obligations regulate the emitter. The pollution they were meant to address is a property of the commons.

Ten Dollars a Title Is What Being Believed Now Costs

The optimistic version of the trust economy holds that a premium will emerge on genuinely human work. It is worth looking at what such a premium looks like once someone actually builds one.

The Authors Guild operates a certification called Human Authored. A book qualifies if its text was written by one or more humans, with an exception for spelling and grammar tools; using AI for research, brainstorming or indexing does not disqualify a title. The programme opened to Guild members in 2025 and, as of March 2026, to any author published in the United States. Certification costs ten dollars per title for non-members and requires identity verification through a third-party service. Both the fee and the identity check are waived for Guild members.

Two features deserve attention. First, the Guild does not vet manuscripts for AI content before certifying them, and says so, on the reasonable grounds that no reliable detection method exists. Enforcement rests on self-certification, a licensing agreement and community reporting. What is certified is not that a human wrote the book. It is that an identified person has made a contractual assertion and is exposed to consequences if it is false. That is accountability, which is genuinely valuable — and a different product from truth.

Second, look at the price structure. Ten dollars and an identity check for outsiders; free and no identity check for members. That is a small, benign, entirely defensible example of exactly the mechanism at issue. Membership confers the presumption of good faith. Non-membership must purchase it, and surrender identifying data to do so.

Scale that logic to every claim anyone makes online and the phrase “authenticity premium” reveals what it describes. A premium is a price. Someone pays it and someone collects it. Yang Xite's suggestion that “people with established reputations, professional track records, and a history of making reliable judgments may become more valuable precisely because they are accountable for what they say” is almost certainly right, and not obviously good news. It describes a market in which credibility accrues to those who already have standing, and everyone else must buy accreditation from an intermediary or be discounted. A premium on being believed is, in distributional terms, a tax on being doubted. It falls hardest on those least able to pay it and with the weakest prior reputation to trade on — which is to say, most people.

Proof of Personhood Turns Out to Be a Subscription Business

The same shape appears in identity infrastructure, at greater scale and with fewer safeguards.

World, the network built by Tools for Humanity and co-founded by Sam Altman, verifies humanness by scanning irises with a device called the Orb, issuing a World ID that lets a person prove uniqueness without revealing identity. By April 2026, nearly eighteen million people had verified at an Orb. During 2026 the company has pivoted towards enterprise, expanding verification points into retail and introducing fees for applications that check a user's humanity, while keeping verification free for the end user. Reported partners include Tinder and Reddit.

Read that business model carefully. Users supply biometrics free of charge; relying parties pay for the right to trust them. The asset being monetised is the population of verified humans, and the revenue accrues to whoever operates the verification layer. This is not a criticism of the cryptography, which is thoughtful. It is an observation about who ends up holding the register of real people, and on what terms.

The public-sector alternative is further along than most people realise and less far along than its deadline requires. Under the revised eIDAS regulation, all twenty-seven EU member states must make a European Digital Identity Wallet available to citizens by 24 December 2026. Denmark's AltID went into production on 3 June 2026, the first member-state wallet to go live, and passed 230,000 downloads within seven weeks, though it is not yet certified; France Identité and Italy's IT-Wallet are live national services on the same track, and Germany has said its state-issued wallet will arrive on 2 January 2027, after the deadline. Across the twenty-seven the rollout is uneven: fewer than half the member states are on track, the Netherlands among others has signalled it will not meet the deadline, and Bulgaria has not begun work on a state wallet at all. A wallet issued by a state is a materially better arrangement than one issued by a venture-funded company, and it is arriving late into a vacuum commercial providers are filling now.

Meanwhile the enforcement apparatus for synthetic commercial speech is thin. The Federal Trade Commission's rule on consumer reviews and testimonials took effect on 21 October 2024, expressly covering AI-generated reviews, with civil penalties per violation running to tens of thousands of dollars. In December 2025 the agency sent warning letters, later posted publicly, and in January 2026 established a dedicated AI enforcement unit. Set that against NewsGuard's 3,749 content farms and the scale problem answers itself. Enforcement is retail; generation is wholesale.

Absence of Proof Is Becoming Proof of Absence

Everything above converges on a single failure mode, and the World Privacy Forum named it before it arrived.

Provenance systems classify. Content carrying a valid signature is marked as such; content without one is rendered “unknown” or “invalid”. In an interface, on a phone, glanced at for a second and a half, those categories collapse into one: not verified, therefore suspect.

Consider who is systematically unverified. A protester filming police conduct on a five-year-old handset with no provenance capability. A whistleblower who must strip metadata to survive. A journalist in an authoritarian state for whom a cryptographic link between a file and a device is a targeting package. A photographer in a country with no conformant certificate authority. The World Privacy Forum found precisely this risk: that the trust model penalises creators lacking C2PA adoption and disadvantages marginalised and at-risk communities — the very groups the technology's designers set out to protect.

There is a second-order effect. When authenticity becomes a live question, real evidence loses force. The liar's dividend — dismissing genuine recordings as fabricated — is available to anyone whose accuser lacks a certificate, and that accuser is usually the one with less money. Provenance infrastructure does not merely fail to help such people. It hands their opponents a rhetorical instrument: where are the credentials?

Nor is the burden evenly distributed geographically. The conformance programme, the certificate authorities, the steering committee and the standards process are concentrated in the United States, western Europe and Japan. The trust list is the operative boundary of the verifiable internet, and it was drawn by eleven organisations, none accountable to an electorate, according to criteria that have not been published.

What Would Actually Redistribute the Burden

None of this argues for abandoning provenance. Content Credentials are useful, and a signed chain of custody from a wire agency's camera to a newspaper's front page beats nothing. The argument is that provenance as currently constituted transfers the cost of doubt onto the people least able to bear it, and that this is a design choice rather than a law of nature.

Four changes would alter the distribution.

Make absence neutral by design. Interfaces should be prohibited from rendering unsigned content as suspect. The presence of a credential is information; its absence is not. This is a user-experience rule with constitutional weight, and the cheapest intervention available.

Open the trust list. If the conformance criteria and the identity of the arbiters remain unpublished, a private consortium is exercising a public function without accountability. Publishing the criteria, the appeals process and the removal grounds costs nothing. An individual pathway to signing — accreditation of persons, not only products and organisations, with the cost borne publicly — is the harder and more necessary step.

Fix revocation before scaling. The Nikon episode was contained because Horshack disclosed it, and could not be fully remediated because validators do not check revocation by default. A provenance ecosystem in which a revoked certificate validates is worse than no ecosystem, because it manufactures unearned confidence. Golaszewski and colleagues have supplied the formal analysis; the specification should be treated as pre-deployment until their findings are addressed.

Regulate the reader, not only the writer. Article 50 obliges emitters to mark. It says nothing about the platforms that strip those marks in transit. A distribution-side duty to preserve and display provenance data, enforceable against very large platforms under the Digital Services Act, would make the marking obligation meaningful. At present the EU compels the creation of evidence and permits its destruction seconds later.

The pug flying the aeroplane was never really about Nikon. It was about the discovery that the certificate and the thing certified had come apart, and that only the certifier could put them back together. That is the position ordinary people are being moved into across every domain where truth must now be demonstrated rather than observed. The ability to fabricate has been handed to everybody. The ability to be believed is being metered, priced and administered by a small number of hardware manufacturers, platforms, model providers and identity vendors, on terms they have not published, with an appeals process that does not exist.

Confidence is indeed becoming the scarce resource. Whether that is a market opportunity or a civil liberties emergency turns not on whether verification gets built, but on whether the people who cannot afford it are treated as unproven or as liars.

References

1. Yang Xite, “Information Pollution and the Rise of the Trust Economy,” Modern Diplomacy, 16 August 2026. https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2026/08/16/information-pollution-and-the-rise-of-the-trust-economy/
2. Yukun Zhang and Tianyang Zhang, “The Economics of Information Pollution in the Age of AI: General Equilibrium, Welfare, and Policy Design,” arXiv:2509.13729, 17 September 2025, revised 4 January 2026. https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13729
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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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