TITLE: Unwilling act of breathing. SUBTITLE: The breathing and it's own desire to keeping me alive, even when I don't want to.

Breathing is the rhythmic process of inhaling oxygen and exhaling carbon dioxide. – google

Our body works 24/7 without a break so it can keep us alive, yet our brain often works against that. Our thoughts drive us, and because they are rarely positive, they make me wonder whether all the work our body puts in is even needed.

My lungs continue to breathe even in the moment my heart doesn’t want to, making it work — even when it doesn’t feel the need to. Won’t be the end of the world if it stopped for a while, as I’ve already died in those moments, so many times.

It makes my heart do its work, even when it is tired of pushing around all that blood, just so I can cut myself once and for all and lose all its progress because one day all my feelings caught up.

---

I don’t understand feelings.

It is a complex concept for me, there are so many feelings that one is supposed to feel, and I seem to be only feeling the worst ones. It’s been a long time since I have been feeling pain, and I can’t seem to find the reason for all this hurt. I see others with far more problems than me, and somehow they have figured out a way to live through all of it— even if they break down from time to time, they pick themselves up again, and shine their light for the world one more time.

I on the other hand, have zero idea of what to do. I don’t understand what my mind, heart and the body is going through, and that makes it harder to know what I should be doing to fix their problems. I don’t have a way to pick myself up, I don’t know how to bring my shine back.

I am a bulb losing its light, and there is no way to fix it, than replacing it.

But how can I be replaced?

People need me around them right? Well I sit in my room whole day, and their life goes on without my input, so I guess they are fine without me too.

People must be searching for me, when they are sad? Everyone has their own method of coping and people around them to help them, I am just an accessory to most of the people, you need it sometimes, but you can live without it too.

There has to be someone who misses my presence! or maybe not.

Even while writing all this, I wonder what will people think. Even though I am the kind of person who doesn’t usually cares about what people might think about him, but I still dress good, walk/drive nicely, don’t get into fights, and don’t make creepy unnecessary eye contacts when I am outside. It’s not because I am worried about me ruining someone’s day without even doing something significant or without being a part of their life.

I don’t care about what others might think about me, I care to not give them a reason to think bad about me.

I…am not living from any standard, maybe one standard, I am breathing, and conscious, so I have it better than deads and the people in coma atleast.

But I don’t seem to find myself in a simple category of a person, I am not a achiever kind of person, but I am also not doing anything.

I do a few things, sometimes, not everything at once but I live to try everything just once.

I am not an artist, but I can create stuff.

I am not a connoisseur of anything, but I am connoisseur of knowing and exploring everything.

that urge to know and live everything is what’s not letting me live, I breathe but for what? to be confined by manmade ideas and systems? How am I better than a dead person? We both don’t have our personal identity, we both can’t feel, and we both are just floating around with no real purpose. Even the deads have their unfulfilled purposes, I have them too. They don’t have the chance to fulfill those purposes, but even with the chances, I am not fulfilling them too.

Am I better being dead? TBH I don’t have an answer to that, but what I do have is — I’ll get to be free of these desires, needs, and wants. And that might just allow me to live freely for once.

The constant breathing, you don’t feel it happening through your nose until you catch a cold, and get a stuffy nose. Only then, one realises how much they work and how your life goes all upside down when they don’t. And death is just like that cold, till the day my nostrils are pulling that oxygen I will fill up my life with all the experiences (negative and positive), and one day all those experiences will lead to a day of cold, a slower breathing, so slow that my heart can barely keep racing to supply all the blood around, my eyes will slowly shut down, my body will start to relax, there will be a moment when my brain will play memories of this life, and a realisation that all of this is ending will hit me, as everything will fade away and I will turn cold once and for all.

That cold, that will be the only reminder of how much my life actually mattered, and to whom and if not to anyone atleast me. And unlike normal cold, I won’t get my warmth back, and get to see a day without the cold.

I’ll be layed down soon after, with people crying near me, and according to my religion, once again— people will make a choice for me, burn me, bury me and then they will forget about me.

---

Breathing may just be an automatic function of lungs, working till they can’t. but it sure as hell keeps making me work even after I’ve past the stage of can’t. -deep

Fever vs Sky

The Indiana Fever are scheduled to play the Chicago Sky this evening. This WNBA game is to be broadcast live on Prime TV starting at 5:30 PM CDT and I plan to watch.

And the adventure continues.

Yet again, we have another summer of disorder on the streets here in the UK and also, over the water in Ireland. Disorder with its roots in inter-communal tensions. Disorder centred around the question raised by some of who does and who does not belong in these islands. Disorder that’s being fanned by elements with very deep pockets and sinister agendas. Disorder that unless people take a few steps back to think through the situation and realise they’re being played, looks set to get worse. Disorder that looks increasingly likely to lead to some form of civil conflict.

There’s a lot that’s being said and written about the roots of the disorder that we’ve seen so far this summer. There will undoubtedly be a lot more that will be said and written. At some point, I intend to compile a reading list of the more thoughtful, nuanced pieces that are getting written about the volatile and increasingly dangerous situation we’re facing. What I want to do with this piece is look at the consequences that will be arising from the ongoing street disorder and the way it appears to be getting whipped up online. The aim of this is to get people to take a few steps back, and as calmly as is possible under the circumstances, start to think about how all of this is getting used and manipulated to impose an agenda that will eventually strip us of many of our freedoms.

Online safety is being touted as an issue by the UK government. Now I’m not going to say that the Internet, and social media in particular, is perfect because any casual observation will reveal that it’s becoming an incredibly toxic environment. The question is this – is the Internet making society increasingly toxic, does it just reflect back an already toxic society or, is it a complex interplay between the two? I’m of the opinion that while the Internet is a mirror of an increasingly dysfunctional society, it also plays a role in amplifying that dysfunctionality. In other words, there’s a complex feedback loop that if we’re being totally honest with ourselves, is defying any attempt to unravel and understand it.

Looking at social media over the last few weeks of street disorder, it’s all too obvious that actors with very sinister agendas are going out of their way to inflame tensions. There are already moves in place to restrict social media access to under 16s. As an aside, knowing how tech savvy many under 16s are, somehow I can’t see that really working without a considerable degree of friction! With recent events on the streets of the UK and Ireland, there have been calls from some quarters for access to social media to be restricted for everyone in times of ‘crisis’. Calls for clampdowns on social media are nothing new but, given the goals of the ‘great reset’ a.k.a.Agenda 2030, those calls from certain actors are intensifying. This has been touched upon by a number of commentators, this piece being just one example: Quick Take…The (Well-Timed) Belfast Riots – Kit Knightly | offGuardian | 10.6.26:

The timing of all of this is very interesting.

As we have covered in detail, the UK is in the midst of a “controversy” over social media – with the government moving to ban children from accessing it or bring in other tyrannical measures for the purposes of harvesting private data.

In a similar vein, five days ago, Labour’s deputy Leader Lucy Powell was calling for a “misinformation clampdown” on social media.

On Saturday, Technology Secretary Liz Kendall was in the papers expressing “concern” over the role of social media during times of unrest, and wishing they could “do more”.

While I find that social media can be pretty abhorrent at times, being a believer in free speech, I can’t go along with calls to restrict or block it. Bellends have the right to let the world know that they are indeed, utter bellends. We have the absolute right to judge that people are bellends and to respond in the appropriate manner. That may be by blocking them or, ripping the absolute piss out of them. These calls for online restrictions are made using concern for ‘safety’ as their prime justification. That’s the safety of online users who may be offended by the bile that’s being spouted on social media by some elements. What is also expressed is the concern that social media platforms are being weaponised to mobilise people to take to the streets. All very praiseworthy if you take the expression of these concerns at face value.

Let’s take the concerns that social media is being weaponised to get people out onto the streets to create mayhem. I’ve seen footage of residents being burned out of their homes by Loyalist mobs in East Belfast simply because they have dark skins. In short, it’s a racist pogrom. One that it’s been claimed has been inflamed by social media. That claim has more holes in it than a garden sieve. It was the fathers and grandfathers of these Loyalist scum who back in 1969, burned Catholic residents from their homes, forcing them to relocate to other areas of Belfast where they would feel safer. There were lists of people they wanted to ‘remove’. This was all done by word of mouth. Removing access to social media in the current circumstances will do nothing to stop the initiation of a racist pogrom, nothing at all.

Social media, abhorrent as it can be because it’s a mirror of a dysfunctional society, offers a degree of transparency. Without social media, I would have to rely on the mainstream ‘news’ to keep up with what’s going on. Obviously I have to view social media with a critical lens and question the veracity of what I read and see. The worrying thing is that too many people do take what they read and see on social media at face value without thinking about whether they’re being played and/or manipulated. That sadly is down to an education system that no longer appears to teach critical thinking skills to the mass of people. That’s because the powers that be don’t want people who can think for themselves and ask difficult questions that would pose a threat to their authority.

The now almost inevitable clampdowns on social media will be justified in the name of ‘safety’ and ‘de-escalation’. Using those justifications will ensure the support of those people who still have some investment in the social system as it is. That’s even though that investment is eventually going to be thrown back into their faces as the hammer starts to come down on all of us. Restrictions on, and the eventual blocking of a growing number of social media platforms is about controlling the populace. The manipulation of social media has pretty much done the job of atomising and dividing us. The question is, what happens next?

Unless there’s a miracle, the social disorder in the UK and Ireland is going to spread this summer. The social media landscape as we currently experience will likely be very different come the autumn. That’s because it will be cited as a major factor in the spread of social disorder and therefore, something that has to be clamped down upon. I’ll be very surprised if we’ll be able to access platforms such as X come the autumn. The owner of X, one Elon Musk, has been very vocal in his support of the anti-migrant protests across the UK and Ireland. That’s even when they have led to rioting and pogroms. Musk knows that the UK government are itching to ban his platform. He knows that he faces losing a significant number of users and also income. Yet he persists with his inflammatory rhetoric. Which begs quite a few questions relating to how far into the project of Agenda 2030 he is and how much of what we’re seeing is scripted theatre? There are people better qualified than me to go down those rabbit holes – when they post something of interest, I’ll be happy to share it with you:)

So at the very least, we face a massive clampdown on social media. At the worst, we face a state of emergency and possibly, some form of martial law. A situation where a fearful populace will gladly accept whatever measures are imposed by the powers that be in order to restore a degree of ‘stability’. That’s the ‘stability’ offered by what to all intents will be a digital prison. The implementation of which starts with a clampdown on social media. It then moves on to pushing through various forms of digital identity in order to know who is and isn’t ‘legitimate’. Whether it’s Starmer, Farage (Reform) or even Lowe (Restore) who eventually end up imposing digital identity is immaterial. Yes, I know Farage and Lowe have mouthed objections to digital identity but, when both have expressed a desire for ‘mass re-migration’ I can’t see how that could be implemented without it. Beware of Trojan Horses and all of that. Then as a further measure of control, there’s Central Bank Digital Currency. The ultimate form of control as it can be programmed to determine what you can and can’t spend money on. The kind of control where an ‘emergency’ situation can be used to justify implementing it. The problem is that we’re being pushed towards that ‘emergency’ situation.

As I’ve written more times than I care to remember, it’s the playing out of the problem / reaction / solution scenario. Problems that have intentionally been allowed to develop in order to generate a reaction from an increasingly pissed off population. Ever since 2024 and particularly this summer, it’s only too clear that we’re now at the reaction stage of this scenario. ‘Reactions’ that once you start looking, it becomes all too clear are being manipulated and even orchestrated. Aided and abetted by an over-supply of useful idiots. Ones who as things stand at the moment, are unaware of their role in justifying the aforementioned ‘solutions’ that will eventually be imposed upon us.

The useful idiots, what to do about them? I’m talking about the ones who respond to the rage bait on social media, spread it around a bit more and take to the streets without questioning what they’ve read. For clarification, those who are taking to the streets as a result of frustration and anger arising from lived experience, while obviously I don’t agree with their perspective or the course of action they’ve chosen to take, I’m not classing them as useful idiots. They’re the people that somehow we need to reach out to in order to persuade rather than cancel. It’s the morons online who don’t even think or look before sharing rage bait. That’s look to check the AI generated images they’re sharing which even on a cursory examination, prove to be utterly risible. As an aside, all of this falling for AI shite may well be the subject of a future post.

Somehow, we have to think of a way of reaching people who are falling for rage bait and AI shite, and persuade them that taking to the streets is not going to do them or us any favours. All it’s doing is giving the powers that be the justification for imposing their aforementioned solutions upon us, ones that will severely limit our freedoms and utterly change the way we live. There are no easy answers to this that’s for sure. It means finding a way of getting people to see the bigger picture, join the dots and not get distracted by rage bait. The inevitable clampdown on social media is going to make reaching these people even harder than it already is. Should a state of ‘emergency’ end up being declared after a summer of strife on the streets, then getting our message across is going to be even harder than that. Regardless of the difficulties involved, we have to keep trying to alert people to what’s being done to us, why it’s being done to us, and who the shadowy bastards in the background are who will benefit from us being totally screwed down. There we were hoping for a nice quiet retirement – that aspiration is definitely on the back burner now!

i did overdoes on my mental pills, im confsued dizzy and start to lose consciousnes itl be late ifyoure reading this inkow youwill

she landed in the field lightly, then came the heavy rain

I'm sorry, she said. I remembered wanting to put both of my hands on her marble-pale thin neck and snap it in half. She always had apologetic eyes, even when she wasn't apologizing.

Her name is Caroline. Caroline von Aurelia, the eldest daughter of House Aurelia, one of the most prestigious noble families in the Kingdom. I was there for business. I was twenty, had just begun making my name as an info broker — as the “White Spider.”

The grand pillars of House Aurelia extended higher than the tallest tree back on the small island I grew up on. Statues of their ancestors — some saints, apparently — perched where the pillars met the domed ceiling, half their carved features swallowed by shadow. It was an odd space. The halls were long, icy in the moonlight pouring through the giant glass windows. The archways usually ended with enormous carved wooden double doors, always a crack short of closing — and from that crack, warm orange light slanted out. With it, the silver peal of laughter, the heavy rich scent of meat and wine. Sometimes the doors were left open just enough for a quick glance as we passed — women, velvet-draped, lace-edged, lounging like Persian cats, fat or slim. I immediately thought of the house cat my family used to own. It had spent its last years overweight, pooling around the fireplace or the only fur rug in the house, green eyes in a permanent lazy haze.

But I can't recall its name. I stopped being able to remember a lot of things from that small home island since I left at seventeen.

Akira shot me a warning look, and I realized I'd been staring. But the servants didn't seem to care, nor did the noble ladies inside the lavish rooms. The job had come through Akira’s contact. This had been the first big job I'd taken — finally, no more chasing bad debts from small-name pirates or shady black market merchants. We needed money for a better ship to enter the Grand Line.

Caroline didn't strike me as particularly pretty, nor one of those stereotypes of a high-house “princess.” At first glance, she wasn't very tall, nor plump in the way of someone raised on buttermilk and silk. But the more you looked at her, the more small details filed themselves into your brain. The long thin neck. The delicate lines of her shoulders. And a faint crease — not quite a dimple — that attempts to form at her right cheek when she smiled.

The duke — more commissioner than host — kept us waiting outside his study for nearly three quarters of an hour. When we finally came inside, his eyes lingered on my face and silver hair for a heartbeat — a treatment I always got because of my hair color — and then dropped to the contracts on his desk. When he spoke, he spoke to Akira. Obviously assumed I was “the woman by the man.”

I felt my pulse spike, a small tremor in my fingers as I pulled out one of the spare chairs and seated myself in front of his big expensive oak desk.

“Now that’s more comfortable. Where were we, Mr. Aurelia.”

Akira stood there. Even without looking, I could sense the faint curve at the corner of his mouth. With a slight nod of his head, he stepped back to stand guard by the door.

When the meeting was done, the duke invited us to stay for a few more days — his counselor was out of town, and he wanted me to go over the finer details of certain information with him. When Akira and I left the study, we found Caroline already waiting for us outside.

“Allow me to show you around.” She offered, taking over the lantern from the servant, whose surprised “M'y lady?” was cut off by a light wave of her hand. “It's a bit of a long walk — wouldn't want Father's guests getting lost.” She smiled and led the way, light and fast.

Walking once again down the long cold archway, I realized her eyes were actually more emerald green up close, instead of the blue they'd seemed at first glance.

Turns out the duke had an entire guest wing. Caroline left us at the giant metal door of the dining hall. “Make yourselves at home.” She says, “Don’t hesitate to call for me if anything——anything at all.” Her green eyes lingered on mine for a second longer, before she turned around and left.

“Didn’t realize there were oddballs in places like this,” I mumbled, gulping down beef stew beside Akira on the long bench of the dining hall.

“Not as uncommon as you’d think,” he answered, didn’t look up from his food. “But…I admit, most of them are so out of touch they couldn’t be bothered with civilians at all. Unless they have to be.”

“Then why do you think she waited for us and asked all those questions, Aki?”

“Boredom. Most likely.”

“Also — a female info broker with silver hair.” Akira smirked. “I'd want to see for myself too.”

“HEY!” I punched him in the side, and the thin man almost choked on his rice.

[hey folks, been getting kinda tired of unable to find where people could post their creative pieces, thoughts, journals and still get some read. it's a bit ridiculous all these 'text' platforms seemed to be focusing more on performance instead of genuine sharing. I've stumbled upon a few pieces here that made me heart lit up reading it. truly reminds of early internet]

Based exclusively on downloads, it looks like THE SOLAR GRID has readers in Brazil, Canada, Egypt, Finland, Ireland, Mexico, The Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, Sweden, the United Kingdom, in addition of course to the United States.

The story, I think, is just asking to travel into other languages.

The latest newsletter went out a couple days ago. RESTRICTED FREQUENCY #234: Shortform.

#journal #RF #TSG

Between two digital hegemonies, middle powers no longer have to choose vassalage. The White Paper V2.0 of the Aether Initiative offers something else: a mutual for technological sovereignty — pragmatic, fundable, governable.

-—

We long lived under the illusion of a neutral cyberspace, a common good of fluid globalization. The systemic outages of 2025 and the remotely activated “kill switches” tore away this veil: the digital world has become a battlefield where every processor is either a lever of power or a leash.

It is in this context that the White Paper V2.0 of the Aether Initiative appears. More than a technical document, it is a founding act: the organized response of middle powers that refuse to choose between two empires and prefer to build their own vertical.

Why now?

The geopolitics of 2026 is no longer read on maps, but on the mapping of bottlenecks: EUV lithography, sub-3 nm foundries, frontier AI models. Each link is controlled by the Sino-American duopoly — and each link is a potential weapon.

Champions like ASML or TSMC hold the keys to the future, but their locks are forged elsewhere. Subject to extraterritorial laws and export controls, they are no longer masters of their customers or their destiny. For a middle power, dependence is no longer a theoretical risk: it is a daily erosion of sovereignty.

Three shifts make 2026 decisive:

1. The regulatory awakening. The CADA framework (Cloud and AI Development Act) finally creates a captive market for sovereignty in Europe, excluding from sensitive markets actors subject to hostile foreign laws.

2. The reality shock. The incidents of 2025 proved that technological dependence can paralyze a state in a second.

3. The critical mass. Collectively, middle powers already hold all the pieces of the puzzle. All that was missing was the binder.

The sovereignty mutual: the Visa model applied to tech

Aether's genius lies in a paradigm shift: no longer recruiting through idealism, but offering insurance against erasure.

The inspiration comes from Visa before 2008: a cooperative where competing banks collectively owned the infrastructure that none could build alone. Aether transposes this logic: exchange a fraction of local revenue for universal and protected access to critical resources.

The architecture is based on three tiers:

- The Aether Foundation (Geneva) — the guardian. It defines the “Aether Grade” standards, certifies, arbitrates, and guarantees the project's neutrality.

- The Aether Operating Co. — the commercial arm. Owned by the members, it sells cloud, AI, and computing power. This is what funds autonomy.

- The Aether Commons — the legitimacy mechanism. 15% of profits are redistributed to education and a “capacity dividend,” so that the citizen is a shareholder and not just a consumer.

The wedge strategy: hit one point, open the way

Where Gaia-X wanted to define everything before producing anything, Aether adopts the wedge method: one entry point, then expansion.

Phase 1 — Federated cloud and sovereign AI. AetherCloud does not build datacenters from scratch: it certifies and interconnects existing champions (OVHcloud, Scaleway, etc.) under a single interface. For the developer, the experience is equal to that of American hyperscalers — with total extraterritorial immunity. Added to this is a sovereign inference layer built on open models like Mistral, for administrations and regulated sectors that can no longer entrust their data to overseas algorithms.

Phases 2 and 3 — From software to silicon, then to matter. Once revenues are secured, Aether moves into hardware. Not by competing with TSMC in the nanometer race, but by securing mature nodes (28–65 nm) that power 80% of the real industry: automotive, IoT, infrastructure. Then the project goes back up to the refining of rare earths — the true lock of the energy transition.

The capacity dividend: a new social contract

Rather than micro-monetary payments diluted by inflation, Aether redistributes capacity: sovereign storage, computing credits, certifying training.

Education is treated as CAPEX, not philanthropy. Training a million developers in India, Brazil, or Europe is building the human infrastructure that will make Aether's supply chain indestructible in ten years.

Anti-capture governance

To avoid becoming an “institutional zombie,” Aether has engraved three locks in its statutes:

1. Sovereignty lock — only actors legally and capitalistically controlled from a member country can vote. GAFAM can be customers, never architects.

2. Anti-hegemony lock — no state can exceed 8% of voting rights. End of any bilateral directorate.

3. Neutrality lock — no service cutoff for political reasons without a three-quarters majority in both chambers.

Added to this is a democratic innovation: a Citizens' Chamber drawn by lot, with a veto on ethical issues (data sales, surveillance partnerships). Aether does not just want to be efficient; it wants to be legitimate.

Addressing doubts

Thirty billion dollars against the hundreds of billions of hyperscalers? The objection misses the point. Aether does not win by volume, it wins by relevance: it is the only option for those who refuse to disappear, the only one that guarantees that a judge, a doctor, or an engineer will not see their tools shut down by a decision made 10,000 kilometers away.

And the V2.0 has cleaned up: the sale of data, even anonymized, has been removed; the gadget blockchain has given way to citizen audits and rigorous certifications. Aether has become a cold economic machine in its execution, burning in its vision.

Conclusion: the choice of verticality

Will we remain passive customers of empires that see us as data deposits? Or will we become the builders of an infrastructure that resembles us and protects us?

The call of June 2026 is clear. To governments, it asks for political courage. To industrialists, a long-term vision. To citizens, conscious adherence. Aether is not a third empire awakening — it is a third way opening, where technology becomes again what it should never have stopped being: a tool in the service of humanity.

Check out the project:

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1DozT6ekrn/

#AetherAlliance #TechSovereignty #DigitalRenaissance #DigitalSovereignty #SovereignCloud

I was watching a video while driving home (listening) And he was talking about how negativity bias is an incredibly potent thing in dating. Specifically he characterized flirting as trying to have as much plausible deniability as possible, and that comes with a lot of ambiguity. If you view dating as 10% explicitly positive, 10% explicitly negative, and the other 80% as ambiguous, if you predispose yourself to believing that things are negative, you end up with a weirdly self fulfilling prophecy. And I think about that in recent time, because in the past when I was way less secure with myself and happy with the person that I am, if I receive some kind of an ambiguous signal, I would take it as just general niceness out of potentially pity, and I would turn into almost evidence that I could not be wanted. And that would then lead to even worse outcomes in the long run. But now, I think it’s fair to say that I have not received too many explicit indications of people being interested in me, I definitely have received a fairly significant amount of explicit interest, but a lot of it is vague. A lot of it is me kind of just giggling and going she want me FR, and I know for a fact that not all of that is necessarily real. But I also do think that it’s served its purpose in a way unintentionally, because I really do believe that I am desirable now which I’m really thankful for.

This spring has been great. Never a dull time on the homestead. I've been a plumber, electrician, carpenter, mechanic, gardener, rancher, sheep shearing assistant, and much more. The cherry on top is attempting to be a decent husband and father — which is also the most challenging.

This week our good friend let us borrow his skid steer to get some work done. It's pretty crazy how much work can be done in three days with that machine. By hand it would have taken me so long that I likely wouldn't have done some of those jobs. We were able to move a huge mound of soil, level a platform for a future building, move fencing, move and mound a huge pile of manure for garden compost, and move a bunch of large hay bales.

We also had the local government come check up on our plumbing (greywater system) and humanure operation. They don't know a whole lot about humanure but are being mellow about it. They would like us to fence it in to keep animals and kids back. That is understandable enough; we'll try and get that done soon. We'd like it if they swing by again that we can be marked off their list of people to check up on. I showed them the state of two-year-old humanure composted which was dirt. Also shared some basic ideas on the how safe it is and recommended he read “The Humanure Handbook” to alleviate any concerns he might have. It would be awesome if he started to promote the practice to people where it would be a good fit — instead of promoting nasty plastic portable outhouses full of chemicals.

Anyways, just wanted to share a small update. Very busy, lots to do. I would love to read and write more, but that seems like a winter sport overall.

I'm still working on the DIY solar system write-up. I might send it out not as polished as I'd like if I don't have the time to fine tune it as much as I'd prefer. It's in a pretty good state but I want to add some examples for people. That might take more time than I have right now. I might put it out sooner rather than later and then put an updated version out later on when I have time.

Anyways you all have a great day, week, and beyond!

Somewhere in a bedroom in suburban Ohio, a teenager with no musical training opens Suno on a laptop, types a sentence about heartbreak and rain, and 22 seconds later receives a fully produced indie folk ballad with layered harmonics, fingerpicked guitar, and vocals that sound like they belong on a Spotify editorial playlist. The song is not exceptional. It is also not bad. It exists in a strange new territory that the music industry has no vocabulary for: technically competent, emotionally coherent, and created with less effort than it takes to boil an egg.

This is not a hypothetical future. This is the present. Suno, the generative AI music platform founded by former Meta researchers, now counts over 100 million users worldwide and generates roughly 7 million songs per day. That figure is worth sitting with. It means Suno's user base reproduces the equivalent of Spotify's entire 100-million-song catalogue approximately every two weeks. In November 2025 the company raised $250 million in its Series C round at a $2.45 billion valuation, and by early 2026 reported annual recurring revenue of around $300 million. Its competitor Udio, founded by former Spotify AI researchers, offers similar capabilities with a focus on granular production control. Both platforms charge around $10 per month for standard access.

The sheer volume is staggering, but it is the quality that forces the harder questions. In November 2025, Deezer and Ipsos conducted a survey of 9,000 people across eight countries and found that 97 per cent of respondents could not distinguish between AI-generated music and human-made music in a blind listening test. That same month, an AI-generated country track called “Walk My Walk,” credited to the anonymous project Breaking Rust, topped Spotify's Viral 50 USA chart and the Billboard Country Digital Song Sales chart. It was among the first AI-generated songs to top a Billboard ranking, though the milestone was narrower than the headlines suggested. Country Digital Song Sales is a low-volume metric: number one required only a few thousand purchases, and at roughly a dollar per download, around $3,000 in sales was enough to claim it. The track did not appear on the main streaming country charts, making it notable but not a mainstream hit.

These are not glitches in the system. They are the system working exactly as designed.

The Flood Has Already Arrived

The language of crisis has become unavoidable when describing what is happening on streaming platforms. Deezer, the French streaming service that has been the most transparent about the scale of the problem, has published a series of reports documenting a trajectory that looks less like gradual change and more like exponential inundation. In January 2025, the platform received approximately 10,000 fully AI-generated tracks per day, representing 10 per cent of all uploads. By April, that figure had doubled to 20,000 daily tracks and 18 per cent of uploads. By September, it was 30,000 tracks and 28 per cent. By November, 50,000 fully AI-generated tracks were arriving every single day, accounting for 34 per cent of all music delivered to the service. By January 2026, the number had climbed to 60,000 daily tracks, roughly 39 per cent of total daily intake. And by April 2026, nearly 75,000 fully AI-generated tracks were being uploaded each day, around 44 per cent of all new music arriving on the platform and more than two million synthetic tracks every month. Over the course of 2025, Deezer detected and tagged more than 13.4 million AI-generated tracks on its platform.

Spotify has been less forthcoming with its own figures but has acknowledged the problem in operational terms. In September 2025, the company revealed it had removed more than 75 million “spammy tracks” from its platform over the preceding 12 months. It now categorises uploads into three tiers: human-created, AI-assisted, and fully AI-generated. The platform named protecting artist identity a priority, and in March 2026 launched Artist Profile Protection, giving artists a pre-release approval queue to combat AI-generated tracks being misattributed to real musicians.

The fraud dimension is significant. Deezer found that up to 85 per cent of streams on AI-generated tracks were fraudulent in 2025, compared to an overall streaming fraud rate of 8 per cent across its entire catalogue. The motive is straightforward: generate thousands of tracks at near-zero cost, use bot farms to inflate stream counts, and siphon royalty payments from a pool that would otherwise go to human artists. When Deezer detects stream manipulation, it excludes those streams from royalty payments, but detection is a perpetual arms race.

The case of the Velvet Sundown illustrates how far the deception can travel before it is caught. In June 2025, a band with no prior public existence released a debut album called “Floating on Echoes” on Spotify. The music sounded like a peer of the Eagles and Led Zeppelin, a warm, analogue-textured blend of folk rock and psychedelia. Within weeks, the band had accumulated over 1.4 million monthly listeners via a verified Spotify account. Their track “Dust on the Wind” reached number one on Spotify's daily Viral 50 in Britain, Norway, and Sweden. It was only after Reddit users began investigating the band's curiously absent biographical details that a representative confirmed to Rolling Stone that the Velvet Sundown was created using Suno. The band's Spotify bio was quietly updated to describe it as “a synthetic music project guided by human creative direction, and composed, voiced, and visualized with the support of artificial intelligence.”

Roberto Neri, CEO of the Ivors Academy, warned that AI-generated bands like the Velvet Sundown, reaching large audiences without involving human creators, raise “serious concerns around transparency, authorship and consent.” The incident exposed what many in the industry had feared: that AI-generated music could not only pass as human but could build genuine fanbases before anyone thought to ask whether a human being had been involved at all.

The Aura Problem

In 1935, the German philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin wrote what remains perhaps the most prescient essay on what happens to art when reproduction becomes frictionless. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” argued that every artwork possesses an “aura,” a quality bound to its unique existence in time and space, its history, its provenance, and the ritual context in which it was created. “Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element,” Benjamin wrote. “Its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” Mechanical reproduction, he argued, detaches the artwork from this context, substituting quantity for quality and exhibition value for cult value.

Benjamin was writing about photography and film. Nearly a century later, his framework maps onto AI-generated music with uncomfortable precision. If the aura of a work of art derives partly from the knowledge that a specific human being laboured to bring it into existence, that they made choices, overcame limitations, and embedded something of their lived experience into the work, then what happens when the labour disappears entirely? When the choices are delegated to a statistical model trained on the patterns of millions of prior works? When the limitation was merely not having opened an app yet?

The traditional pathway into music involved what might be called a filtration process built on friction. You learned an instrument. You studied song structure. You developed an ear over years of listening and playing. You made terrible music for a long time before making passable music, and passable music for even longer before making good music. This process did not merely produce technically proficient musicians. It produced people with knowledge, perspective, and something to say, artists who had been filtered by their own commitment and the inherent difficulty of the craft. The effort was not incidental to the art. It was constitutive of it.

This is the assumption that AI music tools are now dissolving. When someone with no musical background can generate a polished track in under a minute, the effort that historically served as a proxy for seriousness, for having earned the right to be heard, evaporates. And with it evaporates a set of cultural heuristics that listeners, critics, and the industry itself have relied upon for generations to distinguish signal from noise.

What the Listeners Say They Want

The data on listener attitudes reveals a population caught between what they experience and what they believe they should value. The Deezer-Ipsos survey found that while 66 per cent of music streaming users said they would listen to fully AI-generated music at least once out of curiosity, 45 per cent said they would like it filtered out of their streaming service, and 40 per cent said they would simply skip it without listening. Eighty per cent agreed that fully AI-generated music should be clearly labelled, and 73 per cent said they want to know if their streaming platform is recommending synthetic tracks. Sixty-nine per cent agreed that royalty payouts for fully AI-generated music should be lower than for human-made music. Seventy-three per cent of respondents believed it is unethical to use copyrighted material to generate new artificial music without permission from the original artists.

The British Phonographic Industry reached similar conclusions closer to home. Its “All About the Music 2025” survey of more than 1,750 UK consumers found that 80.1 per cent said human-made music is more valuable to them than AI-generated music, 81.5 per cent believe music generated solely by AI should be clearly labelled, and 82.7 per cent agreed that human creativity is essential to music. The pattern is a public that prizes the human story behind a song and wants the synthetic clearly marked apart from it, even as the sound itself becomes ever harder to tell apart.

Researchers have documented a phenomenon known as algorithm aversion in this context. Studies find that audiences consistently rate music less favourably once informed of AI authorship, even when the same piece was rated positively in a blind test. A 2025 preprint adds a caveat: this devaluation appears to be substantially mediated by listeners' pre-existing attitudes toward AI, rather than a clean, unconditional effect of authorship itself. Even so, the broader pattern holds. The perception of human effort and intentionality is not merely a contextual bonus but, for many listeners, a constitutive element of how they experience music as meaningful. The knowledge that a person struggled, chose, and cared does not just add value to the listening experience. For many listeners, it is the listening experience.

And yet, 97 per cent of those same listeners could not tell the difference. This is the paradox at the heart of the entire debate. People say they value human-made music. They say they want labels and filters and lower payouts for AI tracks. But when the labels are removed and the music stands on its own, nearly everyone is fooled. The question this raises is whether the value listeners place on human authorship is a genuine aesthetic preference or a social construction, a story people tell themselves about what matters because the alternative is too disorienting to contemplate.

The Industry Scrambles for Ground Rules

The institutional responses have been varied, reflecting an industry that recognises the magnitude of the shift but cannot agree on whether it represents a threat to be contained or an opportunity to be managed.

Deezer has taken the most aggressive stance among streaming platforms. It became the first major streaming service to explicitly tag AI-generated music in June 2025 and automatically removes fully AI-generated songs from algorithmic recommendations and editorial playlists. The company has developed an AI detection tool that it now sells to other companies, including Billboard, which uses it to determine which tracks in its charts are AI-generated.

In November 2025, iHeartMedia became the first major US radio group to codify its position against AI-generated content with its “Guaranteed Human” programme. An internal memo from Chief Programming Officer Tom Poleman established a formal directive: every voice heard on iHeart stations must be human. DJs must now include a line in their hourly legal IDs affirming that they are “Guaranteed Human.” The initiative bans AI-generated songs, AI disc jockeys, AI callers, and digital avatars from all its radio stations and podcasts. The company cited research indicating that roughly nine in ten consumers want the media they consume to be created by a real person, that 92 per cent say nothing can replace human connection, and that a similar share believe human trust cannot be replicated by AI.

The Recording Academy has attempted to navigate a middle path. CEO Harvey Mason Jr. has described the challenge of AI as “the toughest part of my job,” noting that he represents 40,000 Academy members trying to determine the right position. The Academy adjusted Grammy eligibility rules to permit the use of AI production tools whilst maintaining that Grammys will “continue to honour human creatives” and will not be “giving Grammys to AI artists or AI written songs.” Mason has said that “every” songwriter and producer he knows is now using AI in the studio in some capacity, citing artists including Pusha T, Charlie Puth, Teddy Swims, and Timbaland as public examples. In a March 2025 TED talk, Mason offered what he called a “survival guide” for human creators in the age of AI.

The legal landscape has shifted with remarkable speed. In January 2025, the US Copyright Office released a report concluding that works generated by AI based solely on text prompts are not protected under current copyright law, regardless of the complexity of the prompt. A federal appeals court affirmed this position in March 2025, ruling in Thaler v. Perlmutter that human authorship is a “bedrock requirement” for copyright registration. On 2 March 2026, the US Supreme Court denied certiorari in Thaler's appeal, leaving the human-authorship requirement as settled law. The practical implication is stark: the millions of tracks generated daily on Suno and Udio exist in a legal grey zone where their creators may have no intellectual property protections at all.

Meanwhile, the major labels have pursued a dual strategy of litigation and partnership that would be incoherent in any other industry. In June 2024, Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment filed aggressive copyright lawsuits against both Suno and Udio, alleging that the platforms trained their models on copyrighted recordings without permission. But by October 2025, Universal had settled with Udio and announced a partnership. Warner Music Group settled with both Suno and Udio in November 2025 and signed licensing deals allowing the platforms to build future models using its catalogue. Sony and Universal's lawsuits against Suno remain active; UMG-Suno licensing talks reportedly stalled in spring 2026, and a pivotal fair-use ruling in the Sony cases is anticipated later in 2026.

Spencer Kornhaber, writing in The Atlantic, captured the dissonance of this moment in a piece titled “AI Is Democratizing Music. Unfortunately.” The case against AI music feels, to many, intuitive, he argued, but the implications of its popularity are much bigger than a few more cringe songs. The technology is warping the record industry in strange and foreboding ways, blurring the line between democratisation and degradation.

When Proficiency Stops Meaning Anything

For most of recorded music history, technical proficiency served as a reliable signal. A guitarist who could play complex chord voicings was assumed to have something to say. A vocalist with a distinctive timbre was presumed to have earned it through years of practice and performance. A producer who could achieve a particular sonic texture was credited with knowledge and taste that took time to acquire. These assumptions were never perfectly correlated with artistic merit, but they provided a rough sorting mechanism that helped listeners, labels, and critics allocate attention in a world of finite output.

That sorting mechanism is now broken. When AI can generate technically flawless guitar work, pitch-perfect vocals, and commercially polished production in seconds, technical proficiency ceases to function as a proxy for anything. It reveals nothing about the creator's knowledge, commitment, or artistic vision. It is simply a default output of the system.

This is not entirely unprecedented. The history of music technology is, in many ways, a history of lowered barriers. The electric guitar democratised volume. The synthesiser democratised sonic texture. The drum machine democratised rhythm. The digital audio workstation democratised production. Auto-Tune democratised pitch. At each stage, gatekeepers warned that the removal of a technical barrier would diminish the art form, and at each stage, the art form not only survived but expanded in directions no one had anticipated. Punk rock was a direct response to the perceived elitism of progressive rock. Hip-hop was born from repurposing existing recordings in ways the original creators never intended. Electronic music was built on machines that traditional musicians initially dismissed as toys.

But there is a qualitative difference between lowering a barrier and eliminating it entirely. Previous technologies reduced the effort required to achieve specific musical effects whilst still demanding substantial skill, creativity, and intentionality from the human operator. A drum machine freed a producer from needing a live drummer but still required the producer to programme patterns, make rhythmic choices, and integrate those choices into a larger creative vision. AI music generation reduces the human contribution to a text prompt. The difference is not one of degree but of kind.

The question this raises for the broader culture is whether effort and struggle are necessary conditions for artistic legitimacy or merely historical accidents, contingent features of a technological landscape that happened to make music creation difficult. If a song makes a listener feel something, does it matter whether a human being suffered to create it? If the emotional response is indistinguishable, is the insistence on human authorship a genuine aesthetic principle or a form of nostalgia dressed up as philosophy?

The Scarcity That Made Us Care

There is a compelling argument that scarcity itself has always been the hidden engine of cultural value in music. Not artificial scarcity of the kind imposed by record labels and streaming algorithms, but the natural scarcity that arises from the simple fact that creating good music is hard. It takes time. It requires talent, which is unequally distributed. It demands persistence through years of mediocrity. The result is that, historically, the supply of genuinely compelling music has always been limited relative to the demand for it. This scarcity gave music its weight. It made the discovery of a great new artist feel like an event. It made the relationship between artist and listener feel like something earned on both sides.

AI music generation threatens to dissolve this scarcity entirely. When 7 million tracks are generated on a single platform in a single day, the supply of technically acceptable music becomes essentially infinite. And when supply becomes infinite, the economics of attention shift in ways that disadvantage human creators. Algorithms optimise for engagement, not for the conditions under which a piece of music was created. A track that holds a listener's attention for three minutes generates the same revenue whether it was produced by a human artist over six months or by an algorithm in 22 seconds.

This is the dynamic that Deezer's data illuminates from the opposite direction. By April 2026, AI-generated tracks made up around 44 per cent of all uploads to the platform, yet they remained a small fraction of what people actually played: Deezer reported AI consumption in the low single digits, roughly 1 to 3 per cent of total streams. This suggests that, at least for now, the market is performing a kind of organic filtration, that listeners are gravitating toward human-made music even without explicit labels. But this filtration depends on the current ratio of AI to human content and on the current state of detection and labelling. As AI music improves and its volume increases, the question is whether this natural sorting will hold or whether the sheer weight of synthetic content will eventually overwhelm it.

The deeper concern is not that AI music will replace human music in listener preferences but that it will dilute the ecosystem to the point where human music becomes harder to find, harder to monetise, and harder to justify as a career. If the ocean of content grows tenfold while the pool of listener attention remains constant, the per-stream economics for every creator, human or otherwise, deteriorate. The musicians who can least afford this deterioration are precisely the independent and emerging artists who have always depended on streaming platforms as their primary route to an audience.

Redefining What Counts

If technical proficiency and market scarcity no longer serve as credible proxies for artistic legitimacy, what replaces them? Several possibilities are emerging, though none has yet consolidated into a new consensus.

The first is provenance as value. In this model, the identity and story of the creator become the primary markers of worth. Music made by a specific human being, with a documented history, a visible creative process, and a relationship with an audience built over time, commands a premium precisely because it can be traced to a real life. This is essentially what iHeartMedia's “Guaranteed Human” programme is betting on, and it aligns with the consumer sentiment captured by Deezer and the BPI: most listeners say they value human-made music more highly and want synthetic tracks clearly labelled. It represents a shift from evaluating music on the basis of what it sounds like to evaluating it on the basis of where it came from.

The second is liveness as legitimacy. If studio recordings become indistinguishable from AI output, the live performance becomes the last irreducible proof of human artistry. A person standing on a stage, singing and playing in real time, cannot be faked. Or at least not yet. This may explain why live music revenues have continued to climb even as recorded music enters a period of profound uncertainty. The concert becomes not just entertainment but verification, a demonstration of authenticity in a world where recordings can no longer provide it.

The third is curation as craft. In a world of infinite content, the ability to find, contextualise, and present music becomes a form of artistry in itself. Playlist curators, radio hosts, music journalists, and community tastemakers may assume a role analogous to art gallery directors, their selections conferring value not because of what the music sounds like in isolation but because of the context and intentionality of the presentation.

The fourth, and perhaps most radical, is the abandonment of authenticity as a relevant criterion altogether. In this view, the insistence that music must come from human suffering to be valuable is itself a form of gatekeeping, a Romantic-era ideology that has been selectively applied to protect incumbent interests. If people enjoy AI-generated music, this argument goes, then it has value, full stop. The philosopher's insistence on human authorship is no more defensible than the classical purist's insistence that electronic music is not real music.

Each of these frameworks has adherents, and none is likely to triumph completely. What seems more probable is a fragmentation, a cultural landscape in which different communities and platforms adopt different standards of value, and in which the question “Is this real music?” yields different answers depending on whom you ask.

The Recording That Knows It Is Being Recorded

Harvey Mason Jr. has described himself as “optimistic but scared” about AI's impact on the music industry. That formulation captures something essential about this moment. The optimism is real: AI tools have the potential to democratise music creation in ways that empower people who were previously excluded by the cost and complexity of traditional production. The fear is equally real: that democratisation, taken to its logical extreme, may produce a landscape in which the very concept of musical achievement loses its meaning.

The US Copyright Office's determination that purely AI-generated works cannot receive copyright protection introduces an additional wrinkle, one now reinforced by the Supreme Court's refusal in March 2026 to revisit the question. If the millions of tracks created daily on Suno and Udio have no legal intellectual property protections, they exist in a peculiar liminal space: culturally present but legally unprotected, commercially available but not commercially ownable. This may, paradoxically, reinforce the value of human-created music by creating a legal distinction that the ears alone cannot make. Copyright becomes not just a legal protection but a certificate of human origin.

What remains uncertain is whether any of these adaptations will be sufficient to preserve the economic conditions under which human musicianship can sustain a career. A projection from Sonarworks, an audio-software company, suggests AI-generated content could overtake human content in volume within roughly five years in an accelerated scenario, or about a decade in its base case. A December 2024 global economic study by CISAC and PMP Strategy estimated that music creators could lose up to 24 per cent of their revenue by 2028 for want of protections against AI competition, a cumulative loss of some €10 billion over five years. These are projections, not certainties, but they describe a plausible trajectory in which the lived experience of being a professional musician becomes increasingly untenable for all but the most established artists.

The Recording Academy's Human Artistry Campaign, Tennessee's ELVIS Act protecting artists' voices and likenesses, and the bipartisan NO FAKES Act represent legislative attempts to create guardrails. The NO FAKES Act has not yet passed; it remains pending in committee and was reintroduced in May 2026 as the NO FAKES Act of 2026, with new exemptions for libraries and researchers. But legislation moves slowly, and the technology does not.

The Sound of Something That Was Never Felt

In the end, the question AI-generated music poses is not really about music at all. It is about what happens when any form of human expression can be simulated at scale, when the observable output of creativity can be reproduced without the internal experience that traditionally gave it meaning. Music has always been valued not merely as sound but as evidence of human feeling, as proof that someone, somewhere, felt something strongly enough to shape it into a form that others could share. The effort was part of the message. The struggle was part of the song.

When that evidentiary chain is broken, when the sound persists but the feeling behind it was never there, we are left with a philosophical question that no amount of data can resolve. Is the beauty in the sound itself, or in the knowledge that a human being made it? Is the value in the experience of listening, or in the story of creation? And if we cannot tell the difference, does the difference still matter?

The 97 per cent who could not distinguish AI from human in a blind test already have their answer, even if they do not yet know it. The 80 per cent who say they value human-made music more are clinging to a different answer, one rooted not in perception but in principle. Both answers are honest. Both are incomplete. And the space between them is where the future of music will be negotiated, one stream, one song, one difficult question at a time.

References and Sources

1. Suno platform statistics: 100 million users, 7 million daily generations, $250 million Series C, $2.45 billion valuation, and roughly $300 million in annual recurring revenue. Business of Apps, “Suno Revenue and Usage Statistics (2026).” https://www.businessofapps.com/data/suno-statistics/
2. Deezer and Ipsos survey of 9,000 respondents across eight countries finding 97 per cent could not distinguish AI from human music, alongside listener attitudes on labelling, filtering and royalty payouts. Deezer Newsroom, November 2025. https://newsroom-deezer.com/2025/11/deezer-ipsos-survey-ai-music/
3. Deezer AI upload statistics: 10,000 daily tracks in January 2025 (10 per cent), rising to 18 per cent by April and 30,000 (28 per cent) by September 2025. Deezer Newsroom, September 2025. https://newsroom-deezer.com/2025/09/28-fully-ai-generated-music/
4. Deezer January 2026 update: 60,000 daily AI tracks, 13.4 million AI tracks detected in 2025, up to 85 per cent of AI streams fraudulent against an 8 per cent overall fraud rate, demonetisation of fraudulent streams, and the sale of Deezer's AI-detection tool (used by Billboard). Deezer Newsroom, January 2026. https://newsroom-deezer.com/2026/01/ai-generated-music-deezer-selling-detection-tool/
5. Deezer April 2026 update: nearly 75,000 AI tracks uploaded per day, around 44 per cent of new uploads, more than two million synthetic tracks per month, the full upload-volume timeline, 13.4 million tracks detected in 2025, up to 85 per cent of AI streams fraudulent and demonetised, and AI consumption at roughly 1 to 3 per cent of total streams. Deezer Newsroom, April 2026. https://newsroom-deezer.com/2026/04/ai-generated-tracks-represent-44-of-new-uploaded-music/
6. Spotify removal of 75 million spammy tracks and new three-tier AI categorisation policy. Music Ally, September 2025. https://musically.com/2025/09/25/spotify-reveals-its-latest-measures-to-handle-ai-music/
7. Spotify launch of Artist Profile Protection to stop AI tracks being misattributed to real artists. TechCrunch, March 2026. https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/24/spotify-tests-new-tool-to-stop-ai-slop-from-being-attributed-to-real-artists/
8. Breaking Rust “Walk My Walk” topping Spotify Viral 50 USA and Billboard Country Digital Song Sales (with context on its low sales volume and absence from main streaming charts), and the broader AI music litigation timeline covering UMG and Sony lawsuits against Suno and Udio and the Warner Music settlements. Billboard, 2025. https://www.billboard.com/lists/biggest-ai-music-stories-2025-suno-udio-charts-more/
9. The Velvet Sundown confirmed to a representative as an AI project created using Suno. Rolling Stone, 2025. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/velvet-sundown-ai-band-suno-1235377652/
10. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935). Available at MIT: https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/benjamin.pdf
11. BPI “All About the Music 2025” survey of 1,750+ UK consumers: 80.1 per cent value human-made music more, 81.5 per cent want AI music clearly labelled, 82.7 per cent agree human creativity is essential. The BPI, 2025. https://www.bpi.co.uk/news-analysis/new-survey-reveals-uk-fans-want-greater-transparency-over-ai-generated-music
12. Algorithm aversion and the mediating role of pre-existing attitudes toward AI in perceptions of AI-generated music. arXiv preprint, December 2025. https://arxiv.org/html/2512.02785v1
13. iHeartMedia “Guaranteed Human” programme banning AI-generated content, including the legal-ID requirement, Tom Poleman's memo, and the supporting consumer research that roughly nine in ten consumers want media made by real people and 92 per cent say nothing replaces human connection. Billboard, November 2025. https://www.billboard.com/pro/iheartradio-bans-ai-music-podcasts-radio-djs-new-program/
14. Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. on AI as “the toughest part of my job,” representing 40,000 members, noting that every songwriter and producer he knows uses AI, and the adjusted Grammy eligibility rules. Billboard, 2025. https://www.billboard.com/music/awards/grammy-ai-harvey-mason-jr-recording-academy-1236126346/
15. US Copyright Office report on copyrightability of AI-generated works, concluding that outputs generated solely from text prompts are not protected. US Copyright Office, January 2025. https://www.copyright.gov/ai/
16. Federal appeals court ruling in Thaler v. Perlmutter affirming human authorship requirement. CNBC, March 2025. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/19/ai-art-cannot-be-copyrighted-appeals-court-rules.html
17. US Supreme Court denial of certiorari in Thaler v. Perlmutter, 2 March 2026, leaving the human-authorship requirement intact. Reed Smith, March 2026. https://www.reedsmith.com/our-insights/blogs/viewpoints/102mlpl/supreme-court-denies-certiorari-in-thaler-v-perlmutter-human-only-rule-for-ai/
18. UMG and Suno settlement talks reaching an impasse in spring 2026. Digital Music News, April 2026. https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2026/04/09/suno-universal-music-lawsuit-settlement-impasse/
19. Spencer Kornhaber, “AI Is Democratizing Music. Unfortunately.” The Atlantic, December 2025. https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2025/12/ai-music-suno-warner-bros/685331/
20. Roberto Neri, CEO of the Ivors Academy, on Velvet Sundown raising “serious concerns around transparency, authorship and consent,” and the band approaching 1.4 million monthly Spotify listeners. RouteNote, 2025. https://routenote.com/blog/music-industry-calls-for-greater-ai-transparency-from-dsps-after-the-velvet-sundown-controversy/
21. Sonarworks projection that AI-generated content could overtake human content within roughly five to ten years, from the company's CEO keynote on AI in music. Sonarworks Blog, 2025. https://www.sonarworks.com/blog/research/ceo-keynote-ai-in-the-music-industry-2025
22. CISAC and PMP Strategy global economic study estimating generative AI could put 24 per cent of music creators' revenues at risk by 2028. CISAC, December 2024. https://www.cisac.org/Newsroom/news-releases/global-economic-study-shows-human-creators-future-risk-generative-ai
23. Tennessee ELVIS Act protecting artists' voices and likenesses. Recording Academy advocacy. https://www.recordingacademy.com/advocacy/news/tennessee-victory-bill-lee-elvis-act
24. NO FAKES Act reintroduced in May 2026 as the NO FAKES Act of 2026, with new library and researcher exemptions; remains pending. IPWatchdog, May 2026. https://ipwatchdog.com/2026/05/20/no-fakes-reintroduced-with-more-protections-for-libraries-and-researchers/
25. Human Artistry Campaign principles for responsible AI in music. https://www.humanartistrycampaign.com

---

Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

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

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

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

Listen to the free weekly SmarterArticles Podcast

In Summary: * Major accomplishment today was spending an hour midday clearing out some major weed/bushes from the front of the house and stuffing the cut foliage into the big green organics bin which I then wheeled out to the front curb for collection tomorrow morning.

Listening now to the Texas Rangers Pregame Show ahead of tonight's game vs the KC Royals. I'll finish the night prayers while listening to the game, then head to bed afterwards.

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= 235.90 lbs * bp= 152/90 (67)

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

Diet: * 05:40 – 1 banana, 1 pb&j sandwich * 09:00 – cookies * 10:10 – 1 seafood salad and cheese sandwich * 11:00 – fried chicken, cut green beans, whole kernel corn * 13:00 – biscuit and jam, scrambled eggs, sausage, pancakes * 17:30 – 1 fresh apple

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 04:00 – listen to local news talk radio * 04:50 – bank accounts activity monitored. * 05:05 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, nap * 12:00 – yard work * 13:00 – watch old game shows and eat lunch at home with Sylvia * !4:00 – nap * 15:00 – listen to the Jack Riccardi Show * 17:00 – listen to 105.3 The Fan, DFW's #1 Sports Station, ahead of tonight's Rangers game.

Chess: * 11:16 – moved in all pending CC games

Water In The Distance

Far to winning floes The living have a dream And here this night we ran And saw stupor in its frame The chance of our affair To yesterday the whole of place in pond And distance from our rest In time forgive and known unto Place to be far and shore And occupant of still These duly soldiers walk in pain But willing on in peace and at this year We bless and blame the star of our accord Might and force to these seams we are at head Made to strife and current stop reune The place at night is war,- at staccato effect we earn and seasontide our press- who stand for shoals and making some unblame The showstop in her way as clock to distance on the march,- and to get wet this morning at the chill we know of Heaven And in our last benediction came ruin And vices then and for the distance Ruin and ruin of dengue with the specious drop of turns in blood And as it was November,- we stayed and wept at war and for the wretched Seeding home and curve to know our end of nights This year of us in mourning to our sons and crystal babes- denied as children in our grasp to light the dawn and let us rise The hearts unbeared to see This happenstance of then And when we walk to her, this spring of chance We’ll walk away the water until it burns,- and we will pass like many River making never and proud at touch of presence God in Heaven, refill this aquifer in Jesus Christ,- and let us borrow one more crutch- Waiting for the crops til Winter void and beings hush so far among your grace Favours for unto to let all things be relief and knowing pain together,- wonder war and good pursuit to sell us rain Thoughts of Heaven and before This God of Water aching to our being Tide to never rising But at once a soul as this- greatest storm from Holy strength And I object to Never as that flight at one that tried to burn us all- and rather Sun to our better day This tiny ditch, Apostles’ Creek And we’ll imbibe forever to the distance, hanging near And empty hands will falter Jettison this funeral, Distance May Our need for free esteem and to that well, our new obsession- One hundred percent and to our laws this tiny poem for best ahead- and neighbours feeling fine And all who dressed to Bethlehem We have spoken to the dark and sky of rain Our path will show the ruin for God to see And all our prayers renew- Our victim souls.

HIV

Into the scrape of death,- I sorted things to see And what went into, hiding This understudy and moral ratchet The year of pestilence untidy And who and wonder and her The day of prayer in socket And life as sober, ending well The sky pressed into my hand And heart and please The shoal of weapons, sky Inpostuous ruin and little things Like a day without her to remind In bearing Bread and life beautiful- as much as a husband provides And in this day for reasoning and sense,- I pocketed two of Rome For in there lives a body within To the beautiful and greatest I know And sunset no, for her problem And this difficult repeat for its place Tectonic to nine and moral bits to be home There was nothing left but surrender And to this day of Andrew and knowing where- But what of my esteem am I friending To seasons betold and maybe betrayed I was poor or maybe then not For four duly nights distracted I wished imperil for all for two seconds And knowing the whole of us to muster in truth The days of abandon are done.

Mangrove

To the forest I saw the deep Afraid at Kingdom night These special hearts would glow Fifteen years and sparkle gem Afraid to know Time’s repeating right The missing in St. Pattern to call mine Dust in gravity And what a cube is for Water lively says Come in A hold for just a minute Time away from keeps in our bateau Somebody has seen us Our right and left to dip Hands sliding and our go To beautiful and best The years of now forever The current, every star Dip in remand and shaking,- With purpose, we hide our breath These trees across to line the East In musted deep We sobbed at wild grasses And nurtured within our best Days of in this wall and fitting gently Under the forest Fire as our light But at sleep and so due The timeless match, our Water And I met, anew A simple and organic- Fed to the original- Our guess Beknighting future This our way of war To us lay henge And putting back for Heaven The road and only Communion in our hand And facing West,- we know Philosophy is lost And we will fly Dates of year and one Christmas and alone But see the Earth and why Crescent cherished Moon Spike our glow and let us in Purchased all corrections And silent to God Made for giving This chapter of You, Father Giving us back our time- and water of life Made for shepherd-breathing Finding forever Christ in our path And way to make His room A mangrove flow- free and hope to all men And to yours.

Tonight I choose to listen to a MLB Game: my Texas Rangers vs the KC Royals. The game is scheduled to start at 6:40 PM CDT. I'll tune into 105.3 The Fan, DFW's #1 Sports station, early to listen to pregame coverage, and I'll stay with this station for the radio call of the game.

And the adventure continues

Having had interesting conversations with various friends has made me in a great mood as i lie here atop the bed in my underwear with my dogs nearby

I had my picture taken today for the access card. When I saw the lunatic grinning back at me — from a red and bloated face with a wild beard and asymmetrical nose which has a tint of red just like the beard — on the screen

The lady asked me if I was happy with the picture, I just shrugged and said well I look like that

I used to be handsome and now I look like a that,

it’s my face

It looks like that

I like it, it’s mine

And I have been speaking about stuff from deep within with my friends, I showed them the kintsugi vase I am making of myself, and thus vulnerable, they help me put the pieces back together

Again

Because I value my kindness and have opted to try to keep this side of myself

Because without it, I am not sure who I would be

But still, this time it’ll be darker

There’s no helping it

And the temperature is mild, the dogs are mild, and the moon is somewhere up there in the sky

I am the luckiest man I know