Years ago, Emily Schuman took a selfie in her car and posted it to Instagram. It was an unremarkable act, the kind of thing that happens several hundred thousand times a minute. In September 2026 that photograph came back to her as a sponsored advertisement in which she appeared to be holding up a vial of GLP-1 medication on behalf of a telehealth company called Gala, a business she had never heard of and had no relationship with.

Writing in the Guardian on 12 September 2026, Arielle Pardes reported that Schuman, the creator of the lifestyle blog Cupcakes and Cashmere and the holder of an Instagram audience above 500,000, had been the subject of at least three such fabrications. Alongside the weight-loss drug advertisement, a version of her with darker hair applied foundation for a cosmetics brand called Meroda, and generated images of her circulated on TikTok promoting a blood testing company called Superpower. “So violating,” she told Pardes. The synthetic versions were, in her description, “just like me, but the upside-down version.”

Her followers noticed before she did. They flooded her inbox asking about the sponsorship, because a GLP-1 endorsement did not fit the person they thought they knew. Schuman and her manager reported the advertisement to Meta. It took weeks of badgering before the GLP-1 advertisement came down. The cosmetics advertisement, according to the Guardian's reporting, was still circulating.

That sequence contains the whole economic problem, and almost every account of the deepfake crisis walks past it. The interesting thing is not that a face was copied. It is that the copy was profitable enough for someone to buy advertising inventory to distribute it, that the platform sold that inventory, that the audience did the detection work for free, and that the only party who paid to have it removed was the person whose face it was.

The Recommendation Economy Was Always Selling a Verification Shortcut

To understand what is being destroyed, you have to be precise about what was being sold.

An influencer endorsement is not, economically speaking, an advertisement. It is a transferred credibility judgement. The academic framework underpinning the entire industry is the source credibility model, which holds that persuasion depends on the perceived trustworthiness, expertise and attractiveness of the messenger rather than the message. Layered on top of that is parasocial interaction theory, the observation that audiences form one-sided relationships with media figures that function psychologically like friendships. The creator economy monetises the intersection: a viewer who feels they know someone will accept that person's product judgement at a discount to the scrutiny they would apply to a corporate claim.

The commercial scale of that shortcut is substantial and, unlike much of the surrounding statistical fog, reasonably well evidenced. In its February 2026 forecast, eMarketer revised United States social media creator marketing spending to 21.10 billion dollars for the year. Its reporting on buyer intentions found that 57 per cent of ad buyers described influencer advertisements and partnerships as their top priority for 2026, up from 48 per cent the previous year. Matter Communications' consumer research in 2025 found 71 per cent of consumers saying they trust recommendations from creators they follow more than advertisements from brands directly.

Hold that last figure loosely: it is a self-reported attitude rather than a behavioural measurement, and attitudes about advertising correlate poorly with responses to it. But the direction is not in dispute, and neither is the mechanism. Brands pay a premium over equivalent display inventory precisely because the face does verification work that a logo cannot.

Alice Marwick, director of research at the Data & Society Research Institute, made the supply-side point to the Guardian: influencers are unusually easy to replicate because they “have hundreds of hours of footage and thousands of pictures of them online”. The obligation to be constantly visible is also the obligation to furnish a training set.

Now notice what that implies. The asset was never the face. The asset was the audience's belief that the face could only appear where its owner had consented to put it. The face was merely the carrier of a scarcity assumption. Generative models did not destroy the face. They destroyed the scarcity.

The Headline Number Is Cumulative, and the Guardian Made It Annual

The figure attached to this story in almost every retelling is 3.7 billion dollars, described in the Guardian's own framing as what global consumers “may have lost as much as” to deepfake scams “in 2026”, with social media impersonation accounting for roughly half.

That framing is wrong, and the error matters because it multiplies the apparent velocity of the problem by roughly five.

The source is a research chart published by Surfshark, a company that sells virtual private network subscriptions. Its own methodology page is explicit: the 3.7 billion dollar total is cumulative, covering January 2020 through June 2026. The distribution within that window is steep. Surfshark records 83 million dollars across the whole of 2020 to 2023, 335 million dollars in 2024, 2.5 billion dollars in 2025 and 764 million dollars in the first half of 2026. Social media is the largest single origin category at 1.73 billion dollars, or 47 per cent of the cumulative total, driven overwhelmingly by criminals using synthetic celebrities to promote fraudulent investment schemes. Impersonation fraud, defined separately as bypassing identity checks or gaining access to financial services, accounts for a further 911 million dollars.

So “half of it through social media impersonation” is an elision of two different categories, and “in 2026” describes six and a half years.

There is a second problem, and it is the one that should make anyone reaching for this statistic uneasy. Surfshark's own charts do not agree with each other. An earlier chart on the same research hub, covering social media specifically, reports deepfake losses of 1.1 billion dollars in 2025, tripling from 360 million dollars in 2024 and a ninefold increase on the 128 million dollars recorded between 2020 and 2023. The later origins chart gives 2.5 billion dollars for 2025, 335 million dollars for 2024 and 83 million dollars for 2020 to 2023. These are not rounding differences. The 2025 figure has more than doubled between publications.

This is not necessarily dishonesty. The method aggregates the AI Incident Database, Resemble.AI's deepfake incident database and the OECD's AI Incidents and Hazards Monitor, counting only incidents with a documented financial loss verified in media reports. A method like that reports the growth of journalism about deepfake fraud as faithfully as it reports the growth of deepfake fraud, and it revises upward whenever reporting catches up with older incidents. Surfshark says as much: the figures are a conservative floor built from publicly reported cases.

What it means in practice is that the number cannot bear the weight placed on it. It is not a measurement of losses. It is a count of the losses that got written up. Anybody citing it as an annual total for 2026 has compounded a provenance problem with an arithmetic one.

The figures that do come from primary collection agencies are less dramatic and more usable. The United States Federal Trade Commission, publishing its Consumer Sentinel data in April 2026, reported that consumers filed three million fraud reports in 2025 with 15.9 billion dollars in losses, up from 12 billion dollars the previous year. Nearly 30 per cent of people who reported losing money said the scam started on social media, with those losses totalling 2.1 billion dollars, an eightfold increase on the 261 million dollars reported in 2020. Facebook was named in more loss reports than any other platform, with WhatsApp and Instagram distant seconds. Investment scams originating on social media accounted for 1.1 billion dollars, more than half the social media total.

In the United Kingdom, Ofcom estimated in July 2026 that around 200 million pounds is lost to fraudulent advertising annually, and that 51 per cent of online adults have encountered a potentially fraudulent advertisement, with 36 per cent seeing them frequently. These numbers are smaller than the ones that circulate on conference slides. They are also collected by bodies with statutory reporting obligations rather than by companies selling security products, and they point at the same structural fact: the losses concentrate where paid distribution and impersonation intersect.

Four Per Cent Is a Figure in Search of a Source

The same provenance problem afflicts the other statistic carried in the Guardian's framing, that virtual influencers now account for around 4 per cent of brand spending.

Trace it and you arrive at a figure of roughly 1.37 billion dollars in annual brand spending on AI-generated personas, attributed to the analytics firm HypeAuditor, expressed as 4.2 per cent of a total influencer market usually put at 32.5 billion dollars. The percentage is not a measured share. It is one company's estimate of a numerator divided by a different company's estimate of a denominator, and it propagates through a mesh of search-optimised statistics aggregators, each citing the last.

The Influencer Marketing Hub's own 2026 Benchmark Report, built on a survey of more than 600 marketing professionals and the most frequently cited primary instrument in the sector, contains no data on virtual influencers at all. Its AI findings are about workflow: 36.67 per cent of respondents use AI for creator discovery, 21.11 per cent for content generation, 13.89 per cent for brief development. Brands are using AI to find humans, not to replace them. Meanwhile Linqia's enterprise research has been reported as finding that 89 per cent of enterprise marketers avoid virtual influencers entirely.

A number can be approximately right and still be epistemically worthless, and the four per cent figure sits in that category. The honest version of the claim is narrower and more interesting: synthetic personas are a small but fast-growing slice of a growing market, disproportionately visible relative to spend, and enterprise buyers remain wary. That is a different story from an inexorable synthetic takeover, and it bears directly on the question of what happens to endorsement value, because it means the immediate threat to a creator's income is not a virtual competitor. It is a counterfeit of themselves.

The Person Whose Face It Is Pays for the Cleanup

The clearest read on where the cost lands comes from the individual who has been absorbing it longest.

The financial journalist Martin Lewis sued Facebook for defamation in 2018 over advertisements that appropriated his image, settling after Meta agreed to donate three million pounds to charity and to build a scam advertisement reporting button. In July 2023 he described what he believed to be the first deepfake video scam advertisement using his likeness, a fabricated clip in which he appeared to endorse an investment scheme branded as a project of Elon Musk's. By April 2026, as Charlotte Tobitt reported in Press Gazette, Lewis was describing the situation as “worse than ever”, a “deliberate perversion of my name, reputation and work by organised criminals around the world”.

The operational detail in that reporting is the part worth dwelling on. Of 537 reports made to Action Fraud in 2024 about advertisements misusing someone's name, Lewis's identity featured in 44 per cent. Musk featured in 40 per cent. To manage this, Lewis funds the equivalent of one full-time member of staff doing nothing but chasing fraudulent advertisements. He pays for that. “I'm not Meta, I'm not X,” he told Press Gazette. “I can't take them down.” His proposed remedy was blunt and unfashionable: “You're framing this as a technology problem. Employ people to vet every advert.”

Set that against Schuman's position and the asymmetry becomes a formula. Lewis is a nationally recognised broadcaster with a media organisation behind him and a successful defamation settlement in his history, and his mitigation strategy is a permanent salaried headcount. Schuman is a lifestyle blogger with half a million followers. Her options, as the Guardian laid them out, are to hire lawyers, which costs money and time she would otherwise spend earning, or to do nothing and watch her audience conclude she has started selling weight-loss injections. There is no third option in which someone else bears the cost.

This is the answer to the question of who pays, and it is not a satisfying one. The loss is distributed to whoever has the least ability to refuse it. Consumers absorb the fraud losses. Creators absorb the reputational damage and the enforcement labour. The platform collects the advertising revenue in both directions, from the legitimate campaign and from the counterfeit of it.

Meta Priced the Problem Internally and Decided It Could Live With It

That last sentence would be a rhetorical flourish were it not for the documents.

In November 2025 Reuters published an investigation based on a cache of internal Meta records. The headline finding was that Meta had projected its 2024 revenue from advertisements for scams and banned goods at around 16 billion dollars, roughly 10 per cent of total revenue. The category covered fraudulent e-commerce and investment schemes, illegal online casinos and prohibited medical products. Meta's systems were estimated to show users around 15 billion higher-risk scam advertisements a day, generating roughly seven billion dollars in annualised sales. The company was recording around 3.5 billion dollars every six months from advertisements its own legal team had classified as carrying higher legal risk, a category that expressly included impersonating a brand or a celebrity.

Two operational parameters in that reporting explain everything about Schuman's weeks of badgering. The first is that Meta's automated systems banned an advertiser only when they were 95 per cent certain the account was committing fraud. A 95 per cent confidence threshold guarantees that a large volume of probable fraud stays live, because most fraud is not 95 per cent legible to a classifier. The second is a February 2025 document that quantified precisely how much revenue the company was prepared to forgo in order to clamp down on suspicious advertisers: 0.15 per cent of total revenue, or 135 million dollars.

Meta has contested the framing, with a spokesperson describing the 10 per cent projection as “a rough and overly-inclusive estimate” and saying the company aggressively addresses scam advertisements. Take that at face value and the structure still holds, because the structure is the enforcement threshold and the budget ceiling, not the revenue estimate.

Now compare the numbers. Ofcom's proposed fraudulent advertising code, consulted on from 10 July 2026 with a final statement promised by mid-2027 at the latest, would carry maximum fines of 18 million pounds or 10 per cent of global revenue. The 10 per cent figure is the meaningful one, because 18 million pounds is an eighth of the sum Meta had already earmarked as its acceptable annual cost of enforcement. The company is not gambling that regulators will not fine it. It is operating a system in which the fine is a line item and the revenue is the business.

Meta does run a countermeasure, and its shape is instructive. Since late 2024 it has used facial recognition to compare faces in suspected celebrity-bait advertisements against the profile pictures of enrolled public figures, blocking matches and deleting the biometric comparison data immediately afterwards. The company has reported that user reports of celebrity-bait scam advertisements, as a proportion of total impressions, fell 22 per cent globally in the first half of 2025, and that nearly 500,000 public figures are covered.

Nearly 500,000 protected public figures. Schuman has more than 500,000 followers. She was not one of them, or if she was, the system did not work. The protection is a list, and lists have edges, and the edge of this one runs straight through the middle of the professional creator population.

The Law Values Your Face at Whatever You Could Have Charged For It

Ask what legal remedy exists and you discover that the dominant frameworks were built to compensate a lost licensing fee, which is exactly the wrong instrument for a harm that destroys the licence's value.

In the United Kingdom there is no personality right and no image right. The nearest analogue is the tort of passing off, and its application to endorsement was settled in Irvine v Talksport, in which the Formula One driver Eddie Irvine succeeded against a radio station that had doctored a photograph to replace the mobile phone in his hand with a portable radio bearing the station's branding. The High Court established that no common field of activity was required and that a false message of endorsement understood by the market was actionable. The Court of Appeal then raised the damages from 2,000 pounds to 25,000 pounds, and the basis on which it did so is the point: the award represented the reasonable endorsement fee the defendant would have had to pay for lawful use.

That is the measure of loss the common law understands. What you could have charged. It works tolerably when a single brochure goes to a thousand advertising buyers. It fails completely when thousands of counterfeit endorsements are algorithmically distributed to your own audience, because the damage is not the unpaid fee. The damage is that every future fee is worth less, including the ones you did negotiate, because the signal they used to carry has been debased by forgeries you were not paid for and could not prevent.

The United States has a more developed apparatus and the same underlying logic. The right of publicity is a state-level property right in the commercial value of identity, meaning the protection tracks the market value. Recent statutes have widened it: Tennessee's ELVIS Act, signed on 21 March 2024, added voice to the state's protected personal rights and criminalised unauthorised commercial voice cloning; California's AB 2602 requires contractual provisions for digital replicas to describe intended uses with reasonable specificity and to be negotiated with representation, while AB 1836 governs replicas of the deceased.

At federal level the NO FAKES Act, reintroduced as S.4591, was advanced unanimously by the Senate Judiciary Committee on 18 June 2026 with a coalition spanning Hollywood, the recording industry and major technology firms. It would create a federal digital replication right covering voice and visual likeness, transferable and licensable, surviving death and terminating no more than 70 years afterwards, with a notice-and-takedown regime and carve-outs for news reporting, parody and criticism.

It is a serious piece of drafting and it would materially improve the position of someone like Schuman, mainly by giving her a federal takedown channel that platforms must operate rather than a customer service queue they may ignore. But note what it is. It is a property right, descendible for seven decades, structured like copyright. The legislative answer to the collapse of endorsement scarcity is to manufacture artificial scarcity by statute and then allow it to be traded. Which tells you where the value is expected to end up: with whoever accumulates the licences.

Denmark has taken the logic furthest. Its proposed amendment to the Copyright Act, unveiled on 26 June 2025 with cross-party backing, would grant every individual copyright-style entitlements over their body, facial features and voice, enabling takedown notices, compensation without proof of reputational harm, and platform liability for failure to act. As of 2026 it awaits final parliamentary adoption. It is the first serious attempt to attach the remedy to personhood rather than to market value, which is precisely why it is difficult: a right everyone holds equally is a right that cannot be cheaply administered.

Sometimes the Forger Is the Brand You Signed With

The assumption running through all of this is that the counterfeiter is a criminal somewhere offshore. One of 2026's more uncomfortable cases suggests the risk is also internal to the commercial relationship.

On 9 June 2026, the creator Molly Tranchin, who posts as FashionVeggie, filed a complaint in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California against the intimate apparel company EBY Inc. She had entered a content creation agreement and produced promotional footage wearing the company's products in a modest, non-sexual manner consistent with her established brand. The complaint alleged that EBY then used AI tools to alter that footage into an explicit version exposing portions of her body not visible in the original, and published it to its Instagram account without her review or consent. She pleaded California's non-consensual deepfake statute alongside defamation, copyright infringement and breach of contract.

The case produced no ruling. Tranchin voluntarily dismissed without prejudice after the company argued the court lacked subject-matter jurisdiction, and indicated she would refile in a court of competent jurisdiction.

No liability has been established and none should be inferred. What the filing demonstrates regardless is the shape of a new counterparty risk. A creator licences footage of herself for a defined use. The licensee possesses both the raw material and the tools to extend it. The contract, drafted for an era when footage could only be cut and not continued, may not say anything useful about generation. California's AB 2602 exists precisely to close that gap by requiring specific description of digital replica uses, which is an admission that the gap was open and that standard influencer agreements were sitting in it.

Disclosure Regimes Bind Everyone Except the Forger

The regulatory response across three jurisdictions converges on transparency, and transparency has a structural flaw that is obvious the moment you name it.

Article 50 of the EU AI Act entered into application on 2 August 2026. Deployers who use AI to generate or manipulate image, audio or video content constituting a deepfake must disclose that the content is artificially generated in a clear, distinguishable and accessible manner, no later than first exposure. Providers must mark outputs in machine-readable form. Penalties reach 15 million euros or 3 per cent of worldwide annual turnover. The AI Omnibus, on which Parliament and Council reached political agreement, pushes the Article 50(2) marking obligation back to 2 December 2026, but only for generative systems already placed on the EU market before 2 August 2026, so anything released since then carries the obligation already. The deployer disclosure duty took effect on 2 August 2026 regardless and stands untouched.

In the United Kingdom, the Advertising Standards Authority has made its position clear through guidance and rulings, confirming that AI-generated imagery is judged against the CAP Code like any other imagery and that AI-generated depictions of real people, particularly celebrities, must not mislead consumers into believing a genuine endorsement exists. Liability sits with the advertiser regardless of what the tool produced. The Ofcom fraudulent advertising consultation, open until 2 October 2026, proposes close to 40 measures binding Category 1 and Category 2A services, covering paid-for advertising only and excluding user-generated content and non-sponsored search results. In the United States, the FTC's Endorsement Guides at 16 CFR Part 255 were amended in 2024 to reach AI-generated and AI-modified endorsement content, and the Commission's supplemental rulemaking to extend its impersonation rule from governments and businesses to individuals remains unfinished, the proposed means-and-instrumentalities provision having been dropped.

Every one of these instruments binds a party with a registered address, a compliance function and revenue worth taking a percentage of. None of them binds the operator who bought Instagram placement for a fabricated GLP-1 endorsement through a shell account. Fraudulent deepfakes do not carry disclosures, because the entire commercial proposition of a fraudulent deepfake is that it is not disclosed.

The predictable consequence is an inversion of the signal. Compliant advertisers label their synthetic content. Criminals do not. Over time, the presence of an AI label comes to indicate a company with lawyers, and its absence indicates nothing at all, because absence now covers both authentic human content and everything produced outside the regime. Regulation designed to help audiences distinguish real from synthetic ends up marking only the subset of synthetic content that was never the problem.

Verification Exists, and It Is Billed in Biometrics

Platforms have built the tool that would help, and the price is worth reading carefully.

YouTube's likeness detection scans uploads for altered or synthetic uses of an enrolled creator's face and surfaces matches in YouTube Studio, from which removal can be requested. In May 2026 it was extended to all creators aged 18 and over, having been expanded in March 2026 to a pilot group including government officials, journalists and political candidates. To enrol, a creator submits a facial scan and government-issued photographic identification.

TikTok has moved in a parallel direction, requiring advertisers using voice clones or digital likenesses to upload consent documentation to Ads Manager including the individual's full legal name, a description of permitted use, campaign duration and a signed release, alongside labelling obligations for realistic depictions of people that draw on C2PA Content Credentials for automatic detection. Meta's facial recognition programme, described above, works the same way: to be defended, you must first be enrolled.

So the remedy for unauthorised biometric replication is authorised biometric submission. You defeat the copy of your face by giving a platform a verified original, plus a passport. For a professional creator that may be a rational trade. It is a harder trade for a journalist in a hostile jurisdiction, or for anyone whose objection to the deepfake was always that they never wanted their face in a corporate database.

The consent question was tested at Meta in July 2026, when Creative Artists Agency publicly urged the company to make likeness protection the default in its Muse Image generator and to require documented consent before third parties use a person's name, image, likeness, voice or work. SAG-AFTRA recommended that its members opt out of the feature entirely. An opt-out recommendation from the largest actors' union is a fairly precise statement of how much confidence the represented talent has in platform-administered likeness governance.

Disclosure Devalues the Genuine Article Too

There is a final mechanism, and it is the one that determines whether the recommendation economy can price its way out of this.

The experimental literature is beginning to quantify what audiences do when synthetic origin is made explicit. A between-subjects study by Fatema Juzer Ujjainwala, published in the Journal of Marketing & Social Research in November 2025, ran 320 social media users across conditions varying influencer type, human against AI, and disclosure, explicit against absent. AI-generated influencers produced significantly lower perceived authenticity and brand trust than human ones. Crucially, explicit disclosure of AI origin intensified the negative reaction rather than neutralising it. Digital literacy moderated the effect, with more literate consumers reacting less negatively.

A single study of 320 supports directional inference, not settled fact, and will need replication. But it aligns with the Gen Z research showing human influencers rated significantly higher on authenticity, trustworthiness and parasocial interaction, and it points at something the industry's transparency advocates have not fully absorbed. Disclosure does not restore trust. It transfers the cost of synthetic content onto the disclosing party.

Combine that with an environment in which audiences have been trained by fabricated advertisements to treat any endorsement as potentially counterfeit, and you get the endorsement equivalent of the liar's dividend. Schuman's genuine partnerships now arrive in front of an audience that has recently been fooled by fake ones. Every legitimate campaign inherits a suspicion tax it did nothing to earn. The forgery does not merely steal a fee. It degrades the yield on the asset that remains.

Where the Value Migrates When the Face Stops Being Scarce

Put the pieces together and the destination becomes legible.

If a face can be printed by anyone, its endorsement value does not simply fall. It migrates to whoever can certify that a given appearance was authorised. That capability currently sits with three sets of actors, and none of them is the creator.

It sits with the platforms, which hold the enrolment databases, the facial recognition pipelines and the takedown queues, and which are already monetising verification in adjacent forms. It sits with the legislatures, through instruments like the NO FAKES Act, which convert likeness into a descendible property right that will be aggregated by the parties best equipped to aggregate rights, which is to say agencies, labels and estates rather than individual creators. And it sits with brands, for whom the rational hedge against an uncontrollable human endorser is an endorser they own outright, which is the actual argument for virtual influencers and always has been. The four per cent figure may be poorly sourced, but the strategic logic it gestures at is sound: a synthetic persona cannot be impersonated in a way that damages the brand, because the brand holds the original.

The creator, in this arrangement, moves from proprietor to tenant. They hold an asset whose value now depends on a verification service they do not control, cannot audit and did not commission, enrolled in a system that requires them to surrender the very biometric data whose misuse they are trying to prevent, with a legal remedy calibrated to the licence fee they would have charged rather than to the market they have lost.

Can the recommendation economy price verification? It can, and it is already starting to. That is not the reassuring answer it sounds like. Pricing verification means that being believed becomes a service with a supplier, a fee structure and an eligibility criterion. It means that the creators who can afford a full-time member of staff to chase counterfeits, as Martin Lewis does, retain their credibility, and the ones who cannot, as most cannot, watch it erode while their inboxes fill with followers asking whether they have really started selling injectables.

Schuman's phrase was better than she may have intended. The upside-down version is not merely a mirror image. It is the same face with the polarity of the economics reversed: all the reach, none of the accountability, the revenue flowing to a stranger and the cost flowing to her. The technology did not take her face. It took the assumption that her face meant she had agreed, and that assumption, not the pixels, was the thing she had spent a decade building and was in the business of selling.

References

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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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Im sick. and as any other human being would say. i hate being sick unless you’re one of those pathetic people who actually anjoys having an excuse to lie around and do nothing. or find it as a free pass to be lazy. but you get it. i hate being sick i hate feeling weak, stressed and tired and somehow it irritates me more than usual, which is impressive considering im already irritated most of the time. i went to work anyway because i guess feeling sick wasnt enough of a reason to stay home. really smart. anyway eventually i stopped being cautious altogether and i dont even remember getting home. i just woke up there, so i guess my body decided it had enough and someone agreed. and the time couldnt be better becuae i have to go to the hospital tomorrow for other things. because of coruse i do. i cant just be sick once. No, there has to be something else somewhere waiting around the corner. and i hate this, i hate feeling sick and weak i hate being able to trust myself to do something as simple as go to work without eventually losing all sense of caution and waking up at home like somebody pressed the off button.

i hate hospitals and i hate being sick and i hate everything and i feel exhuasted.

fuck.

Sincerely, Not enjoying this.

In Summary: * A full day, this Wednesday, conducted intentionally at a more relaxed pace than otherwise culd have been the case. And I think that's a good thing. Listening now the the Texas Rangers pregame show ahead of their game tonight with the New York Mets. I'll finish up the night prayers as the game plays and head to bed when the brain starts to shut down, whether or not the game's finished.

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= 224.65 lbs. * bp= 157/88 (69)

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

Diet: * 05:25 – 1 banana, 2 HEB bakery cookies * 06:15 – 1 pb&j on white bread toast * 12:00 – pizza

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 04:15 – listen to local news talk radio * 04:55 – bank accounts activity monitored . * 05:00 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, listen to music, nap * 12:00 to 15:00 – watch old game shows, visit mobile home park, eat lunch at home with the wife * 16:00 – listen to the Jack Riccardi Show * 17:00 – pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, listen to music * 18:30 – listening now to 105.3 The Fan, DFW's #1 Sports Station, ahead of this tonight's MLB game between the Rangers and the Mets

Chess: * 09:00 – moved in all pending CC games

Bientôt six mois que je n'ai pas composé de nouvelle entrée de ce journal accompagnant ma démarche sous Linux et un ThinkPad T480 (ou T470s). La raison est asez simple, je ne les avais pas réutilisés.

Ce soir, j'y reviens pour mettre à jour ma configuration. Cela prend évidement un peu de temps.

Pourquoi y revenir ? Parce que cela reste une question d'actualité d'être le plus possible coupé des GAFAM et développer une activité la plus débranchée possible des réseaux.

L'écoystème d'Apple est très performant. Clairement.

Du côté de mon MacBook Air, il est possible d'entrer dans cette démarche. En tout cas jusqu'à un certain point. Cela explique aussi le fait que je n'ai pas utilisé mon ThinkPad durant cette période.

Ma recette est la suivante: 1° Ne pas connecter son mac à un compte Apple et notamment son Apple Store 2° Se protéger avec des solutions telles que Proton pour son mail, ses mots de passe, son VPN notamment 3° Recourir le plus possible à des solutions OpenSource. La principale est pour moi LibreOffice. 4° Se connecter parcimonieusement aux réseaux et utiliser son ordinateur hors ligne. Voir favoriser l'écriture manuscrite dans des carnets. 5° Frugalité : préférer la lecture d'un livre papier ou de la lecture de musique sur son iPod ou équivalent au visionnement de vidéos YouTube ou l'écoute en streaming (Spotify). 6° Faire des photos avec un appareil photo et non son smartphone. 7° Bouger avec ses pieds.

Tags : #AuCafé #Linux #ThinkPad #ŧ480 #t470s #Apple #MacBookNeon #MacBook

Many in the alternative news talk about puppet politicians and that there are masters pulling the strings to these politicians. They usually can point to where the campaign money comes from as at least one source of influence (the masters); this is often lobby groups and corporate donors. Some people can dig further into deeper conspiracies of the past, and that often is following the money or personal letters. It is difficult to pinpoint “who is at the top.” I like the ‘Pyramid of Power’ series by Derrick Broze talking on the subject. Many don’t think there is any one group a the top it’s just a mess of power hungry people and groups vying for power – which is a very reasonable conclusion. I believe at the very center of the “circles of intrigue” or top of the pyramid of worldly power is Lucifer. But in the physical realm I couldn’t tell you. Some people think they’ve figured that out. I’d imagine that many of those more extremely wealthy obscure figures pointed at are at least closer to the inner circle’s mouth and ears than the more commonly known politicians and corporate CEO’s in the daily news. James Corbett frames it as “what is at the top of the pyramid” which to me is a better way of thinking about it. It is an ideology more than an individual. links below to listen to his words on the idea.

I personally think there is a very tight and small central power which likely has multiple groups represented in this. Something like a round table group. I cannot tell you who it is, it just fits very well in all that I’ve read on this stuff. I don’t think they want to be known, because what they do would get them killed if the public knew clearly what they have been doing and are doing and are planning for humanity. If you think this a possibility there are fun books and documentaries to watch to get a glimpse of it all. But let’s just pretend that I’m close to reality here. I’ll give suggested resources at the bottom if you want to dig further on your own.

Just for argument’s sake let’s pretend that there is at least very powerful influence that has connection to nearly all government. A force that is behind major decisions made by Russia, China, the USA, NATO, the EU, the UK, Brazil, Venezuela, and just about any other nation. What if these influences are in collaboration with each nation and major organization individually and have a plan. I do not mean to suggest that every single thing they want to accomplish is easy or that it goes their way every time – but they have back up plans to help move in the direction they desire either way – they fund all sides. These nations have some autonomy and most of the leaders are “in the dark,” meaning they don’t know the plan (maybe portions of it); they cannot connect all the dots – they just follow marching orders if they want to stay in their position of puppet with some powers. And those at the top are cautious when giving marching orders so they can keep their puppets in the dark.

So let’s move on here to the point I want to get to. What I’m seeing in world events is a well orchestrated dismantling of the west. It looks very much like the war in Russia and Iran is a way to ramp up in preparing to topple the west. China and others are watching, gathering intel, being given information, and preparing by building weapon systems to counter what the west uses. Russia is in full operation in figuring out how to beat NATO and US weapon systems. They are getting better every month at beating the west. NATO and the USA are not really preparing, and I believe this is intentional. The west is dumping insane amounts of money into obsolete and nearly obsolete weapons and weapon systems. If they were preparing to actually win, it would look more like what Russia, China, Iran, and others are doing. Ramping up on new systems, and new ways of warfare – because warfare has changed. The west is almost acting like the French in WWI throwing calvary at machine gun fire. Or lining up in rows with muskets to fight people hiding behind trees in the American revolutionary war. Warfare has changed and the west is acting as if they are still in the 20th century with only slight modifications. The main things they are dumping money into that is anything new is for what comes after the collapse. A technocratic society with a massive ai surveillance state with ai replacing many or even most people. Then the “useless eaters,” as they are so compassionately called, can be killed off or coddled to their grave in a fairly pointless existence.

If this is coordinated behind the scenes or not, it is going forward so far on a path that will likely lead to the fall of the USA and the west with it. The way things have been with the USA taking charge of the world building up after WWII is coming to an end. If they cannot adapt they will lose. And what will happen in the aftermath? I’d imagine it is moving towards a multi-polar new world order (MPNWO) with a technocratic backbone. That seems to me the goal, the aim, and what has been happening. The Covid-19 thing shined a light on this. The entire world was in lock-step through that. Digital ID and digital currency is also shining a light on this. Russia, China, Australia, Iran, the Philippines, the USA, the EU, just about everyone is doing the same thing or at least trying to. The ones furthest behind are just poor rural areas that aren’t connected. This is why one of the things regurgitated by many world leaders saying the biggest problems they saw through Covid-19 was that too many people were not connected to the internet and that digital ID will help with future pandemics. Reading between the lines the reason for this is that the internet helps program the people and unify the world towards the solutions and agenda those in power desire – it corrals the herd for the aimed outcome. The digital ID helps keep track of the results and find the resistance or those that are not in compliance.

The west has too much history rich in individual liberty. Even if most of it has degraded it’s still there in the minds and history. So I don’t think those in power want that to spread. They would rather the more clearly authoritarian regimes take a higher role as the MPNWO comes into fruition.

It looks to me like we are in WWIII and it will likely get worse, it’s still early on. By the end, it is going to become extremely clear that the USA and the west have been dethroned. The world over will see clearly that the west cannot continue with their economic dominance, leadership dominance, strategic dominance, or dominance through military strength. If people cannot see it early enough it will likely lead to a full scale war which will go long enough to make that abundantly clear. I hope it does not come to that but that’s that path it looks like we are on.

An economic collapse of the west seems the most likely major move before the potential full escalation of war. This will cause further struggles for the west to cope with the pressures of adapting to a new kind of warfare. It could go in reverse so they can blame the collapse on war or a sort of teetering back and forth to balance the blames, we shall see. But I do think we will see it. It cannot go on like this, unsustainable systems are coming to an end. So those in control will steer these problems into their desired outcome.

I’m just trying to give a warning. Prepare as best you can for this change that is taking place. It seems very unlikely things will go back to the way it was. ‘The Great Reset’ is continuing, something the WEF (world economic forum) loves to talk about. It will become more challenging to resist. I do not condone violent resistance at all. I am a pacifist on the violent side of things but I do encourage non-violent resistance. However I do fully condone civil disobedience and to just say “No” to false authorities mandating compliance to things that you do not agree with morally, ethically, religiously, spiritually, or just because your conscience strongly disagrees. Reject digital ID systems, reject digital currency, decrease your dependencies of imports if you have issues with it. Labor on food production, learn how to fix things, learn how to build things if you see solutions in such actions. The quality of life in western nations may drastically decrease soon enough. In an economic collapse your net worth may plummet to close to nothing. There is a plan set up to take much of the assets out there to force people to “own nothing” and they promise you will “be happy.” That is one of the predictions the WEF has put out “you will own nothing and be happy.” So how will that happen? One part of that is laid out in the book and documentary “The Great Taking.” Most of the younger people are already prepared for this. Many cannot afford homes, new cars, don’t use cash, don’t have much, can’t find jobs, and more. Also through suggestive programming in media and education. I think most resistance will come from 40+ year olds and I doubt it will be too fierce. Most people will fold under pressure and say “what else can I do?” Because most people don’t labor on solutions, they do what they are told. And those who resist will likely comply if they loose their assets and cannot feed themselves. Hunger is a great tool to force change. Lack of funds also is a great persuader. “Just get digital ID and we can turn some of your frozen assets that the bank took into digital currency.” UBI (universal basic income) could also be an easy way to hook everyone into a new system. If jobs get worse off, economy collapses, war starts touching home, these will be strong motivators to submit into a new order. So how will people be happy? I dunno, my guess is the illusion of happiness through medication, UBI, smart cities, maybe free housing in those smart cities…

If the west was preparing to actually win these conflicts they wouldn’t be acting the way they are. They are either ridiculously retarded, or following marching orders from something outside national government. A strategic dismantling of the west is what it looks like. Those in control behind the scenes look like they do not want to take any chances. It’s a slow methodical controlled demolition.

Get prepared if you want to peacefully resist. Prepare mentally especially, where is the line you will not pass? What are your convictions that you would die for? Notice I don’t say kill for, peaceful non-resistance can lead to losing your life. What would you die for? I think it’s important to think about these things, without forethought you likely will fall in line to whatever you are told to do. It might be very slow or ramp up very quickly – time will tell. Things are hanging from a thread. One strategic snipping of one thread could drop the cluster of bombs looming overhead. I’d be extremely shocked if things go back, we are on a one way train – it’s going to get ugly. Some might even love the aftermath – but that peace and freedom propped up to greet the world in the aftermath are illusions created to keep the subjects (prisoners and slaves) complacent. It wouldn’t be surprising to me at all if it goes very slowly with as little pain as possible. This can give time for the older people who would be most reluctant to comply to die off. Just keep preparing the youth and merge relatively gently into this new order. Fear of pain is more effective than literal pain. So people can continually say to themselves “at least this or that didn’t happen…” And slowly be manipulated exactly where those controllers desired humanity to be driven to.

I hope I’m wrong, and I hope true liberty and peace are headed our way. Maybe, that would be great. But things often get a lot worse before they get better. And sometimes that better is where those in control manipulated everyone to be. Just because it’s better does not mean it is good. So long as there is a retention of freedom of religion and expression on the other side, I might be well enough off – hopefully you are too.

Additional resources:

https://thepyramidofpower.net/

https://corbettreport.com/whos-at-the-top/

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/214715.Brotherhood_of_Darkness

https://thegreattaking.com/the-documentary

Iran and Russian war analysis:

https://www.bitchute.com/video/GMH507KMTnQP

https://www.bitchute.com/video/JjGoqCfyxZEB

Wednesday's MLB Game of Choice.

Tonight my Texas Rangers will again host the New York Mets at Globe Life Field in Arlington, TX, in a game scheduled to start at 7:05 PM CDT. This will be the second game in a 3-game series the two teams are playing. As usual I'll be following the game's scores and stats in real time via MLB's Gameday Service where we can also find links to the radio-call of the game provided by announcers of either team we choose.

And the adventure continues.

Here’s a copy of the letter I sent to Maura Healey, Michelle Wu, and my state senator and state rep. We are in for a deadly winter in New England if our state and local governments don’t start planning for an entirely foreseeable crisis.

I’m writing with an urgent concern for the upcoming winter. As I write this, the average price of heating oil among the companies I’ve checked is between $5.50 and $5.75 per gallon. This is about $1.50 more per gallon than I’ve ever seen before.

I’m aware that the price hikes are tied to the war in Iran, which is not a local issue. What is a local issue, though, is that these prices will almost certainly result in deaths this winter.

That may sound hyperbolic, but I don’t believe it is. Many people in old homes, especially those on fixed incomes, cannot come up with an extra $300 every time they have to refill their oil tank. I’m afraid that people will either freeze in their homes or die when space heaters start fires or perhaps from carbon monoxide poisoning from trying to start a fire in a long-disused and possibly-unsafe fireplace.

As I said, I know nobody at the local level is to blame for this situation. But we now find ourselves in a situation where our neighbors are at risk of dying this winter, and I believe we have a responsibility to prevent that outcome.

I don’t have a specific policy recommendation, but I would really like to see our elected officials talking about this and making plans before this entirely foreseeable emergency unfolds. I’m certainly hoping for a mild winter, but we need to be doing more.

Thanks for your attention to this critically important matter.

The New Yorker’ın kurgu editörü Deborah Treisman’ın derlediği kitaptan ikinci seçimim William Maxwell’in “Love” adlı hikâyesi. Sevginin en masum hali, bir öğrencinin gözünden okuyucunun kalbine dokunur ve seçilebilecek en yalın sözcüklerle karşımızda durur.

Love- William Maxwell (1983)

Tahtada bir ad belirir —Palmer metoduyla— yazılmış bir isim: Miss Vera Brown. Bir öğrencinin ağzından dökülüyorsa en sevilendir, en mutlu edendir. Anlatıcımız, bir öğrenci, beşinci sınıfın öğretmenini “hercai bir menekşeye” benzetiyor. Ah, bu çiçekler, her hikâyedeler.

Öğretmeniyse, sınıfı Alvin ve Sincaplar’a. Eski bir çizgi film (1983) olduğunu anlıyoruz ve bir metinden bir kültüre ait yeni şeyler öğreniyoruz. İşte gerçek zenginlik.

Öğretmen, sınıfa her döndüğünde masasında öğrencilerin bırakmış olduğu türlü nesnelerle karşılaşır. Bu bazen büyük bir elma, su matarasına yapıştırılmış bir yıldız çiçeği ve çiçeklerle süslenmiş bir kutu. Anlatıcımız söylememesine rağmen birçoğunu hayal edebiliyoruz; notlar, çizimler, kalpler ve süslü çıkartmalar…

Yazarımız William Maxwell’in başlıkta kastettiği “sevgi” işte tam burada ama sözcüklerle değil (eylemlerle) açığa çıkıyor. İznin olur mu Maxwell, hikâyenin adını “Sevgi Dili” diye değiştirsek?

İlerleyen satırlarda öğretmen, yönetmeni D. W. Griffith olan Hearts of the World (Dünyanın Kalpleri) filmine öğrencileriyle birlikte gider. Mekânı okul (sınıf) olan bir hikâyede, yazar niye bu filme referans veriyor olabilir? Hikâyeden yine bir şeyler öğreniyoruz. O da filmin, 1918 tarihli bir savaş-dram karışımı bir propaganda filmi olduğuna dair “izlemeden edindiğimiz” bir bilgi.

Ertesi gün öğrenciler, “asıl” öğretmenin masasında oturan “vekil öğretmeni” görür. Günler geçip gider; öğrenciler, öğretmenini özlemiştir ve hiçbir şey konuşulmamıştır. Bu duygu “vekil öğretmen” için de çok zorlayıcıdır. Bir pazartesi sabahı, öğretmen zorlanarak, “Miss Brown’un hasta olduğunu ve dönem sonuna kadar gelemeyeceğini” tüm sınıfa söyler.

Anlatıcımızın ağzından şu sözler dökülür:

“We meant to have her four our teacher forever. We intended to pass right up through the sixth, seventh, and eighth grades and on into high school taking her with us.” (353)

Maxwell bu dili çok masum ve bilindik bir yerden kurar. Aynı sınıftaki arkadaşı Benny’nin ailesinin yardımıyla adresini bulurlar. Bir yabancının (yaşlı bir kadın) yönlendirmesi sonucunda onu gördüklerinde, Miss Brown’un sanki “onları tanımadığı hissine” kapılırlar. “Flick recognition” dediği sahnede anlatıcı şu sözlerle karşımızdadır:

“She managed a flicker of recognition but I was struck dumb by the fact that she didn’t seem glad to see us. She didn’t belong to us anymore. She belonged to her ilnesses.” (354)

Arkadaşı Benny, soğuk bir tonla, “Umarım en yakın zamanda iyileşirsiniz,” der. Bir hafta sonra, Lincoln Evening Courier gazetesinden, “23 yaşındaki Miss Brown’un veremden vefat ettiğini” öğrenirler.

Ve hikâyenin kapanışı, bir çocuğun dünyasındaki “mezarlık” betimlemesiyle biter. Bu betimlemede mezar taşları vardır: “Sevgi dolu hatırasına” diyerek örnek verdiği: “In loving memory of, infant daughter of, beloved wife of” olarak çoğalan taşlar…

O taşlar arasında, o gün kapıyı açan yabancının, öğretmenine sadakati bir çocuk gözüyle gözlemlenmiştir ve öğretmenin anısına yaşatılan bir çiçeğin özeninde; hatırladıklarını kolay kolay unutmaz.

Bahsi geçen eserler:

A CENTURY OF FICTION IN THE NEW YORKER 1925-2025 EDITED BY DEBORAH TREISMAN. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2025.

Görselde kullanılan fotoğraf Barbara Burkhardt’ın William Maxwell, A Literary Life adlı kitabın kapak görseli, yayıncısı: Illinois Üniversitesi Yayınları.

There was sunlight today, gods be thanked!

And look, I did one unit of work, listening to music. Teleconferencing.

Drinking coffee

And somewhere around me, life is going on chaotically.

And even as I try my best, chaos has got a strong hold here, it’s a constant struggle to bring order

And I have got my head full of chaos too

And there’s just the endless struggle to bring order everywhere,

a task which is doomed to fail.

but it could be, that which looks like chaos, on closer inspection is in perfect order, like

The ants

#poetry

I oscillate regularly from one extreme to the next, there is no in between. Whether it lasts for a few hours or a few days, even a few weeks, my optimistic outlook shatters in an instant. Was it because my clothes were too tight, which made me feel disgusting and re-triggered my body dysmorphia? Or was it due to the overstimulation of the world, or understimulation of mundane work activities? It could be a combination of everything, which is what I tend to subscribe to. All these factors mixed together leads to my breaking points, which are inevitable. Though I understand the inevitability of mood swings, I loathe them with every fiber of my existence. I become disappointed, disillusioned to the point I can see nothing but negativity in front of me. Woe is me, blackness and doom I have succumbed to. There are two versions of me akin to Jekyll and Hyde. They fight with each other for control over my personality. Who will take over and prevail for long enough to color my experiences? One is kindhearted, compassionate and understanding. The other repeats nothing but expletives and death wishes. I suppose there is the third version, which is my higher self witnessing it all happen in real time, calmly longing for resolution she knows will come sooner or later because this oscillation is ingrained and predictable. She patiently waits for the two to cease fighting. She is always ready to pick up where we left off: motivated, inspired, intuitively caring for me through stasis. How do I return to her? The only way is through. I have only ever seen the journey through the highs and the lows. There is no stopping. I have seen the return to myself time after time, yet my ego demands and directs my attention on the turmoil. I wish I could turn it off, this oscillating ebb and flow of emotions. If there was an off switch though, I doubt I'd use it. I wouldn't learn very much about myself if I played the good girl all the time. There is no light without darkness. So I play in the dark precariously and somehow... I make it out every single time. I am never the same, and I wouldn't want to be either. The change is deliciously uncomfortable and I wear it on my sleeve.

(for Tania, Goldie, Jack, Georgia, and Grey) – may you rest

Sedative Ketamine Rainbow

My dogs, my loves, my deers

These were your last memories, and I could only think to pick up shards of glass as you laid in urine.

Hardly the time.

I know how to clean like Glenn Gould plays the piano or how Howard Hughes knows germs.

I wish I had kept the stains, kept the beds. I wish I had made daisies of your golden deaths.

#poetry

(revised from the chapbook Ghostpins, 2019)

I must be completely mad.

I've spent the better part of September creating what has amounted to a 40-page document that details builds and things that need getting made to get the studio in order.

Why am I like this?

#journal #studio #cairo

Retour au post de guet, la fenêtre d’un studio loué dans une minicité (chambre-salon, cuisinette, douche-WC) ou [soi se tenant dans le fond du couloir] l’embrasure commune de la porte d’entrée. On piste du regard et de l’ouïe, non l’entièreté physique de la ville immense, inembrassable d’un coup, mais sa nuit, le trou de la ville-nuit, en quoi ‒ ou plutôt qui ‒ défilent, pareils aux nuages dans la troposphère, le questionnement [de soi], tel épisode de fantasmes que l’on tourne en séries, la marge équivoque des songes, une poussée de confiance ou de désespoir, et surtout l’image de la ville, qui voile son inconnu.

[Soi devant cette image mouvante.]

#Fenêtresurville #Didascalies

 

---

Photo “deep forest 2” by the-photon-trap is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

too much tech is like escapism for our underlying human issues.

Somebody at church Wednesday night told me something I wrote on Facebook was labeled AI-created. Or AI-influenced. Or AI-something or another.

I laughed.

“Well, I use SpeakApp.”

And yes, apparently there’s some AI under the hood. I didn’t even realize that when I started using it.

I just knew the thing was useful.

I talk.

It listens.

Then it hands my words back to me.

That’s it.

I originally started using it because I’m a preacher and a hospice chaplain. Sometimes I need to remember exactly what was said. Sometimes the conversation is serious. Very serious. Sometimes I’m trying to determine whether somebody might hurt themselves:

“Do you intend self-harm? Do you have a plan, a tool, a device that could remove you from us or your pain?”

Words matter in those rooms.

So I started recording my thoughts and conversations when appropriate, then going back through them.

But somewhere along the road, I discovered something else.

I could write while driving.

Not typing.

Not staring at a screen.

Talking.

Like I’m doing right now.

SpeakApp is recording every word.

Later, I’ll go through it. Clean it up. Cut the fat. Straighten the crooked sentences. Make it sound like me.

I know exactly how I like to write. I love the voice of Pulp fiction. Noir.

Short sentences. Hard stops. A little thunder dripping off the edges.

Remember Mickey Spillane? That old noir style?

Somebody once asked me what pulp fiction writing sounded like. Years ago, before I started going to church, I used to give them this ridiculous example:

“She walked into my office. She was hot. Hotter than hot. She went through men like most men go through cigarettes.”

People laughed. They were supposed to. It was over the top. That was the point.

I wouldn’t write something like that today–too worldly. But I use it as a fairly good example of the writing style that I am most familiar with, the one that captures my “writing voice” and forges it into a hammer of vengeance when the need to make a point is paramount.

Pulp fiction writing isn’t trying to win a literary prize. It moves. Fast.

“He came through the door asking questions. I answered with my right hand. He wouldn’t be asking another one for a while.”

Swing the sledgehammer. Bang. Move on.

Bruce Willis could do that kind of thing on Moonlighting. Quick. Sharp. No wasted motion.

And frankly, I think that kind of writing works today because people’s attention spans aren’t exactly getting longer–thank you, X (the social media platform formerly known as Twitter).

So here I am. Driving down the road. I just dropped Vinnie off after chemo. I’ve already been doing chaplain work.

Now I’ve got to get home, grab my stuff, put on my little suit—the one that works for preaching and chaplain work—and head back out for a big meeting.

And through all of it, I’m talking. Capturing thoughts while they’re still warm. Before they disappear. Hands on the wheel. Voice in the App.

Because that’s the strange thing about writing. Every writer eventually develops what they call their “writer’s voice.”

You can study writing. Get an MFA. Get a PhD. Sit in classrooms and discuss “writer’s voice” until the coffee gets cold.

But this? This is literally my voice. My actual voice. Coming out of my mouth while I’m driving down the highway at 65 mph.

Then I take that spoken voice and hammer it into my writing voice. Cut a word here. Move a sentence there. Drop another one. Let a little pulp-fiction thunder drip down the page.

And then I post it.

So now I’m curious. What will Facebook call this?

AI-created? AI-assisted? AI-influenced? AI-derived?

Who knows? Who cares?

The thoughts are mine. The stories are mine. The experiences are mine. The voice coming through the microphone is mine. The machine just helps me catch it before it gets away.

And because of the voice recording, I’m writing more than I have in years. That matters to me.

Because I’m not sitting behind a keyboard trying to remember what I was thinking three hours ago. I’m catching the thought while it still has blood pumping through it.

I talk. I hit the red button. SpeakApp cleans up the dead air, the “uhs,” the pauses, the hiccups and coughs, and some of the verbal wreckage.

Then I go to work.

Sometimes I’ll even hear a preacher on YouTube say something worth remembering. I can capture the material, work with the transcript, and move what I need into Google Docs for my own notes and my own personal Bible study.

For a preacher, this thing is a toolbox. And don’t us guys just love tools.

A hammer doesn’t build the house by itself. A microphone doesn’t preach the sermon. A pen never wrote a book without a hand wrapped around it.

And software doesn’t have my memories.

It didn’t live my life. It didn’t drop Vinnie off at chemo today. It didn’t walk into hospice rooms yesterdays. It didn’t hold the hand of the dying patient, or lead that wayward soul into the Sinner’s Prayer. It didn’t stand behind my pulpit. It wasn’t there.

I was.

So call it whatever you want. AI-assisted. AI-influenced. Machine-polished.

I don’t particularly care. I’m still the guy behind the wheel. Literally.

And figuratively.

SpeakApp just helps me catch the words before they blow out the window.

Then I take them home… and make them thunder.

(Thank you, Jenny, for telling me that. I dedicate this blog post to you and our interactive Bible study questions at Wednesday Night Bible Study.)