To the Tune of 'Sound of Silence'

Hello headache, my old friend, I’ve come to bargain with you again. Somewhere between “just one more round” And waking up face-down, profound, There’s a lesson I ignore with brewski beer: Morning’s here. And it brought drums.

In yesterday’s rooms, not quite alone, Searching for my lover’s tone. ’Neath the judgment of the bathroom light, Bleary-eyed blossom, avoiding the light. And the coffee whispered, “Poor thing, you were too immersed.” Could be worse. Now here comes the thrum.

And in this home’s quiet presence, Outside, a cardinal in the tree. His song today sounds blurry. No one dared Disturb the couch of silence.

“Hey, AI, can you sing my song for me? Make it easy and folky.”

#poetry #songwriter #beer

I’m a printaholic. I love printing PDFs into booklet form, folding, and stapling them. Sometimes, I’ll cut at the folds, two-hole punch them, and insert those two-prong holders if the book is too thick.

I love the way fresh blank pieces of paper is imprinted with jet ink and heated on both sides, how stacks of finished sheets are ready to be folded or sliced in half, and how freeing it is to give the middle finger to those who keep saying “we’re going to live in a paperless society.”

Unfortunately, today is a bad day in my printing world. I had to print out a lot of PDF documents for my son’s school to sign and turn in. When I tried to print them out my laptop didn’t recognize the hardware. Even after reinstalling the drivers the printer still didn’t work. My wife tried printing on her computer and it didn’t work as well.

The printer is a Canon MX-522 that I’ve had for years. After being a dedicated and reliable printer surviving multiple computers and operating systems, moving from one house to another, and replacing countless ink cartridges, it’s finally time to retire it. So thank you for your service Canon MX-522. Maybe someone else can put it to good use when I donate it.

Now the hard part is finding a reliable printer with ink cartridges that isn’t too expensive.

#printing #printer #documents #ebooks #ink #PDF #technology

Many a times I ask myself who do I want to learn photography. It is not a career option for me. It is not something I had always wanted to do. It’s just something I picked up last year.

Not long ago, I was writing an article. In that article, to emphasise my point, I wanted to add a pic of an umbrella that has come from the rain. A few droplets of the rain was supposed to be on the umbrella.

I wanted that picture to be clicked by myself. Obviously I could download one from google or unsplash but that does not produce the same emotion as the one that I had clicked with my own hands. The one I had edited according to my own preferences.

I could not find any.

This is when I thought why people take picture. Not because they also write something and need to hammer their point but the picture represents something to them. A lady wearing a red in autumn can mean nothing to me but it can very well remind someone of their home. Or the time when they were very emoted.

I am in my mid twenties and currently in a partial hospitalization program for intensive trauma therapy. And honestly, I had no idea what untangling years of suppression could actually look like.

I thought healing would be as simple as talking things out. That’s always what I had done. In a weird way, I think that’s why I convinced myself I had already worked through a lot of my trauma — because I was never secretive about it. I could name it. I could explain it. I could tell the story without crying.

What I didn’t realize is that naming something is sometimes only barely grazing the surface.

The truth is: I am exhausted.

I am having nightmares. My depression and mood swings feel like a new rollercoaster every day. I never know when the ride is going to drop suddenly or take a sharp turn. Sometimes it throws me into a corkscrew I didn’t see coming and I come out physically hurting — my neck tight, my head pounding, my forehead tense like I’ve been clenching against something for years.

That’s metaphorical, but also very literal.

My brain feels swollen. My body feels banged up. My nervous system feels like it’s screaming at me after spending years whispering.

I didn’t know healing could feel this physical. I didn’t know finally feeling things could make me feel worse before better. I didn’t know how much I had actually been carrying.

And maybe the hardest part is realizing how much I gaslit myself into believing I was “dramatic” because other people had it worse. But trauma is not a competition. Your body does not care whether someone else “deserved” to hurt more than you did. It only knows what it experienced and what it had to do to survive it.

So this is a trigger warning for anyone reading this: I am going to use this space to be honest about my experience. That may include talking openly about trauma, mental health, emotional instability, physical symptoms of stress, fear, grief, anger, and the ugly parts of healing people don’t romanticize online.

Please protect yourself accordingly if those topics are triggering for you. My goal is never to set anyone back. I just want to be real about what it can actually mean to unravel years of both little and big traumas.

I am learning as I go.

And despite how hard this is, my goal is not to stay trapped in the pain or turn my suffering into my identity. My goal is to build a brain that feels safe. A mind that is loving instead of constantly at war with itself. A nervous system that no longer feels booby-trapped by the survival mechanisms that protected me for years, but are no longer helping me grow.

I want my life back.

And I think that starts with finally telling the truth about what healing actually looks like.

My therapist asked me to write about the ways in which my early childhood trauma affected the direction of my life. So, naturally, I spent the following several days reading about cybernetics, coming up with projects, writing on my work-related blog, and generally avoiding the subject.

I'm intensely drawn to the idea of spending several hours writing about threat modeling, which overwhelmed my mind last night. I lay awake thinking about formal languages based on constrained English, threat inheritance, and using data flow graphs to identify risk. During that time I did not think about how frustrated I can get when my kids start fighting, or how overwhelming their feelings must be for them right now.

I designed and wrote a testing framework, now used by thousands of people. Tests are developed by multiple teams. Test definitions are relatively easy to write, and (unlike many other things) actually lend themselves well to being written by LLMs. This is true, despite the fact that LLMs didn't exist when I designed and wrote the first prototype.

I spend days, weeks, in deep thought. I thought about code. I thought about organizational structures. I've spent so much time reading and learning, trying to understand. I focused to the exclusion of everything else: first my pregnant partner, then my kids.

The first six weeks after the birth of each of my children was the most human I have been for a long time. The first week is nothing but survival. You must be present because a tiny life is relying on your constant attention. But even as the weeks rolled on, as I was off of work and able to focus on my family, the trial crept back in and pulled my attention away. Then the disability and leave team, having messed something or other up, threatened me.

It's so much easier to follow those threads: logic, fear, distraction. It's easier to fill my head with something than to leave it empty and quiet enough for the feelings to come in.

I never noticed before. It just felt exciting to hack for hours straight, order a sandwich to eat while reading some specification or other, focusing on each detail until my roommates broke my concentration with a glass of whiskey and chants of “bar night.”

Focus, then numb, for decades now. When did it even start? From the moment I got my eyes on the Internet, I was always thinking. Perhaps some of that was a reaction to the boredom of rural living, spending most of the day alone in my house while my mom was at work. I wasn't much older back then than my oldest is now. How much different it must be for her, unending activity vs my unending isolation.

The more I've unwound it, the more I've been able to allow myself to feel, the worse I feel I've gotten at my job. Then one day I couldn't do it anymore. I noticed it before I actually snapped. This time I noticed my feelings.

Years earlier I had put my fist through a window. That's what it had taken for me to realize there was a problem.

Before the shooting, I had spent a few years in therapy. After those few years I experienced something I hadn't ever experienced: I stopped thinking for a few moments. My internal dialog, which had never really stopped as long as I could remember, was silent. My therapist was Buddhist. We had focused on mindfulness. I had been gone to a meditation course at Toorcamp a little earlier and had been working on my awareness. After a bit more work, I was able to be present for a bit.

I hadn't noticed how much I had been suppressing my emotions by thinking. But the more I would take a moment here and there to just be present, the more I noticed them. I realized I needed to stop working as a consultant for a bit. I went to work somewhere else. On the walk to work every day I would stop for a moment and breathe.

Then Trump happened. It was a reminder of something I had left behind. My experience in the rural part of the American West Coast were dark. I was different, and the places I lived were not very tolerant of difference. And I was bored. There was a crushing boredom, a hopelessness, a feeling of being trapped. Looking back now, I realize it's not so much rural living as a reality constrained by my lack of access to a car. The Internet changed some of these things. Some people opened their minds a bit. (Other people became more radically entrenched in their intolerance.)

But at that time, in that place, I had felt trapped and hopeless. It had almost killed me, but I had escaped. Now the horrible thing I recognized, the wild incompetence, the anti-intellectualism, the fanatical religious authoritarianism, the blatant corruption, they were all there. They were all embodied in one man.

Folks living in cities felt the time warp. This thing didn't belong to the modern era. It was old and weird, clawing us all back in time. But for me that time also had a place. I had felt the time warp in reverse when I escaped. But the monster had followed me.

That focus, filling my mind with so much information that nothing else could get in, was adaptive under capitalism. It got me job after job. I was a top performer wherever I worked, because I never stopped trying to get better. My personal life would vanish as I poured myself into learning, growing, improving. I read books and took classes. No one could believe I had dropped out of high school. All of my peers had secondary degrees. I could pass for something that I wasn't, and part of that was driven by fear: fear that I would be found out, fear that I would, somehow, have to go back.

But back came for everyone, so I organized.

I had learned this skill, the skill of learning, the skill of focusing at the exclusion of everything. I had learned it to adapt to capitalism, to adapt to my trauma, to keep myself safe. I applied the skill. I applied it to my organizing, I applied it at work. I was always working on something. I worked on organizing plans. I wrote code. I worked on software architectures. I wrote papers, so many papers, to get these ideas funded. I pushed myself without feeling. I pushed until I broke. (or, I guess, until I broke a window.)

Time off, therapy, things started to get better. We realized we could leave. I paid attention to my feelings. We moved to the Netherlands.

I thought that things could be better, and they were. The longer I've been here, the more I've been able to be with my feelings. When I stopped working, I realized I needed to focus on my emotions if I wanted any hope of getting back to work. So I've been writing.

The more I do this, the more I let myself engage with feelings, the more I've started to notice this thing that I do. Sometimes it even comes in when I'm in therapy or talking about my feelings. I shift to the theory, the context, depersonalize it and think about my experience as part of the system.

But I didn't follow that thread last night. I let myself drift away from theory and notice what I had been doing.

This adaptation, which I learned to deal with childhood trauma, works well for capitalism but poorly for parenting. So here I am, trying to figure out how to balance the need to fill my head with information, theory and code, to get back to work against the needs of my kids for me to be emotionally available. And the transition is harsh.

I want to talk about capitalism. I want to talk about how it tunes people in maladaptive ways. I want to talk about how it is a system of death, a system that gradually makes social reproduction more difficult until it kills the society it infects. I want to talk about all this, so I don't have to think about how bad it feels to actually be in the thing. By thinking about this as a system, I can rally a comfortable anger against something horrible. By thinking about this as a system, I can remove myself from the experience of it. By thinking about this system, I can not feel it.

It is far easier to talk about this monstrous system, to clinically analyze it, than to admit that I feel scared, and sad, and helpless. The monstrosity of this faceless system, operating on the emotionless logic of profit, mirrors the incomprehensibility of the world of my own childhood.

And there's the answer. How has my childhood trauma shaped my life? How hasn't it? Every part of who I am is intermeshed with my strategies for adapting to this trauma. So then, what am I left with if I treat the trauma? How do I survive if survival in the capitalist system has been predicated on an adaptation to trauma that eliminates the feelings I need to help my kids grow?

How do I let go of something I need? How do I provide for my family without the tool that makes me successful?

Have been a little quiet on here of late, work, life and the end of the football season has been transpiring against me.

Calmer seas ahead so finding a little more time to spend with the formbook and I’ve found two today …

3.10 Catterick I wish there were eight runners here, but there isn’t. I’m am however, still going to put up INGLEBY ARCHIE as a selection. The 5yo will have absolutely needed his reappearance run LTO so I’m putting a line through that and what interests me here is he is – LTO aside – back in a class 5 off what is with Jack Nicholl’s claim, a career low mark at a grade where he is 3321158214. First run at the course against some rivals who love it here, but 13/2 seems a fair price for a horse who seems to relish racing at this time of year.

INGLEBY ARCHIE // 0.5pt E/W @ 13/2 (Bet365) BOG

4.50 Catterick An each way bet to nothing on Jedd O’Keefe’s old timer SAISONS D’OR here. A good winner LTO on the tapeta at Southwell and should find this easier than recent turf assignments with this being a 0-60. Is 5lbs lower than his last winning mark (over C&D) and similar to the selection in the 3.10, actually finds himself on a career low turf mark too. Ticks plenty of other boxes (course form, ground, trip etc) and hopeful he can be very competitive.

SAISONS D’OR // 0.5pt E/W @ 11/2 (Coral) BOG

Hello again. I hope you and your family are well.

POTUS has decided that those who attacked the capital during the constitutionally mandated ceremony of counting the votes of the electoral college must be rewarded. POTUS, in ordering the settlement of his own suit against the IRS, has ignored congressional power to spend money and forced them to create a fund to reward those who would have burned down the capital if they had had just a little more time.

In addition he has forced the justice department to make his family, business and any other organization they create, immune to any action by the irs. So, he can ignore the law, ignore the requirement to pay any tax, and prevent the department from auditing his or his family or business tax returns. So, if he fills in every line of his 1040 with zeroes, there is nothing the irs can do. No one else in the world has such immunity.

This is just another example of why POTUS and his cohorts must be removed from their positions as soon as possible. Otherwise POTUS and the MAGA Monsters will destroy our democracy.

POTUS Roaster

Thanks for reading my posts. If you enjoy them, please tell your friends and family, If you want to read more, please go to write.as/potusroaster/archive/

仕事らしい仕事の入っていない朝だった。 曇った窓を眺めているうちに、特に外へ出る理由もないまま、結局、公園まで歩くことにした。 外は、小雨が降っているようで降っていない。水たまりだけが残っていて、空はぎりぎり曇っている。

撥水の効いたシャツに黒いパンツ。 棚の下には、ゴアテックスのスニーカーが置かれていた。

橋の下を抜ける途中、軒下でノートパソコンを開いている人がいた。 雨粒が地面を叩く音のなかで、キーボードだけが乾いた音を立てている。

最近、自分のなかで、気分が変わる条件が変わった気がする。 前なら、新しい下着をまとめて買い替えるだけで、生活が少し更新された。 けれど今は、それではもう足りない。 何を変えれば、新しい日付の側へ移れるのか、自分でも分からなくなっている。

公園のベンチに座りたかったが、少し湿っていたので、立ったままうろうろしていた。 濡れた木の匂いがした。

微妙な寒さに、そういえば昔、腹巻きを買ったことがあったのを思い出した。 冷え対策だったと思う。 数日だけ真面目に着けて、すぐにやめた。 ああいう、生活を改善しようとする小さな決意は、たいてい静かに失踪する。

雨脚が少し強くなった。 遠くで、どこかのビルのエレベーターの音が聞こえた気がした。 エレベーターのなかでは、たまにピアノのイージーリスニングが流れていることがある。 この先の人生は、たぶんこんなふうにレールの上を進んでいくのだと、不意に脳へ感覚が浮かび上がり、少し抵抗したくなる。

植物園にも行きたいし、夜の天体観測もしてみたいし、釣りもしたい。 落語だって見に行きたいと思い続けている。 まだ、やりたいことをほとんどできていない。

けれど、やりたいことは、やる前がいちばん均整の取れた形をしていて、実際の生活はいつもその手前で止まり続ける。

年末の大掃除が待ち遠しい。 まだ梅雨も明けていないのに。 全部を捨てて、床を拭いて、空気を入れ替える日のことを考えると、少しだけ安心する。

公園の時計を見る。 まだ昼にもなっていなかった。 雨のせいで、時間が薄く伸びている。

立ち上がる。 帰ったら、多分、好きなソファに座って、夏に着る服でも眺めるのだと思う。

There is a particular kind of professional disappearance that does not show up in the unemployment figures. The illustrator still has a desk. The translator still has a website. The session musician still owns a violin. None of them have been fired. None of them have been informed, in any official capacity, that their occupation is being phased out. Their names remain on the same freelance registers, the same union rolls, the same tax filings as last year. And yet, quietly, almost imperceptibly at first, the floor underneath their work has begun to give way.

This is the strangest economic story of the decade, and it is unfolding without a moment of high drama. There are no factory closures, no mass layoffs, no town-square photographs of redundant workers carrying cardboard boxes. Instead, there is a slow, grinding compression of the rates a cover illustrator can charge for a magazine commission, a slight but stubborn drop in the volume of subtitling work coming through the agency in São Paulo, a pause in the email chain from the German publisher who used to commission a translator in Lagos every six months. Each individual moment is deniable. Taken together, they describe a structural rearrangement of the creative economy that the existing policy vocabulary, fixated on automation and job displacement, is not equipped to name.

UNESCO's flagship report on creativity and digital transformation, published on 18 February 2026 as the fourth edition of its Re|Shaping Policies for Creativity series, attempted to put a number on the rearrangement. Drawing on data from more than 120 countries, the report projected that creators worldwide are on course to lose up to 24 per cent of their revenues by 2028 as a direct consequence of generative AI, with music creators bearing the heaviest exposure and audiovisual creators close behind. An accompanying analysis published the same week by Inter Press Service amplified the geographical dimension of the problem, observing that the income losses are falling most heavily on freelance and self-employed creators in the global south, layering a new digital injury on top of long-standing inequalities in the cultural economy.

The numbers are striking, but they are not the most interesting part of the story. The most interesting part is the mechanism. This is not, in the conventional sense, a tale of automation. The translator working from Yoruba to Spanish has not been replaced by a translation engine in any specific role. She is still the translator on her own letterhead. What has happened is that the demand curve she used to live on has been displaced, almost overnight, by something that produces an approximate substitute for her output at near-zero marginal cost. The publishers, the production companies, the marketing agencies who used to commission her have not declared that they are switching to machines. They have simply stopped commissioning at the same volume, or they have begun negotiating from a position that assumes her labour competes with a free alternative. There is no transition point. There is no redundancy notice. There is no clean moment at which the policy concept of retraining becomes applicable, because the person is still doing the job. It is the job, as a paid activity, that is being hollowed out.

This distinction matters, and not only as semantics. The entire architecture of late twentieth-century labour policy, from unemployment insurance to active labour market programmes, was built on the assumption that economic dislocation comes with a clear event horizon. Someone is hired. Someone is laid off. Someone is retrained. Someone is rehired. Generative AI breaks the model not by accelerating the cycle but by detaching the harm from any of these events. The freelance writer is never laid off because she was never on a payroll. The illustrator does not get a redundancy package because there was no employer. The market she sold into has simply contracted, and the policy instruments designed to catch falling workers were not built to catch a falling market.

If the diagnosis is right, then the question that follows is the one the UNESCO report, the IPS News analysis, and a fast-growing literature on AI and the creative economy have all begun to circle. What policy instruments, beyond copyright reform, can address the harm? And who, in any meaningful sense, is responsible for the structural losses already under way?

The market, not the job, is the unit of analysis

To understand why this matters, it helps to look at what the existing debate is mostly about. Almost every legal and political fight currently being waged on behalf of creative workers concerns the upstream side of the AI value chain: whether AI labs should be allowed to train models on copyrighted works without permission, whether they should pay licensing fees for ingesting them, whether opt-out registers should be opt-in, whether the European Union's text-and-data-mining exception should narrow or expand. These are real and important fights. The Copyright Licensing Agency in the United Kingdom announced its Generative AI Training Licence to allow collective compensation for ingestion. The US Copyright Office has explored extended collective licensing on the Danish model. The Court of Justice of the European Union held its first hearing on generative AI and copyright in March 2026 in Like Company v Google, a case that may reshape the press publishers' right across the bloc.

Yet copyright, in any of its forms, only addresses one half of the harm UNESCO identified. The CISAC global economic study published in late 2024, conducted by the consultancy PMP Strategy on behalf of the international confederation of authors' societies, was unusually clear about this. The losses creators face split into two distinct streams. The first stream is the value of their existing works being scraped into training data without consent or remuneration. Copyright reform, however imperfectly, is built to address that. The second stream is the substitution effect: AI-generated outputs competing in the market against human-made works, depressing rates and shrinking commissions. Copyright, as currently understood, has very little to say about that second stream. Even a perfectly negotiated training licence does not change the fact that, once the model is trained, the marginal cost of producing a passable cover illustration falls towards zero, and the rate the illustrator can charge falls with it.

This is the harder problem, and it is the one to which the policy debate is only beginning to turn. The question is no longer simply how to compensate creators for the use of their work in training. It is how to sustain a market for human creative labour at all, when the marginal product of that labour can be approximated, however crudely, by a system that does not pay rent, sleep, or eat.

A taxonomy of instruments beyond copyright

The good news, if it can be called that, is that the policy toolkit available to address market collapse is broader than the copyright debate sometimes suggests. The bad news is that almost every instrument involves redistributing money from somebody who currently does not pay to somebody who currently does not receive, and the political economy of that redistribution is brutal.

AI cultural levies

The most direct proposal, and the one that has gained the most traction in European policy circles over the past year, is a levy on AI systems pegged to their commercial use of human cultural output. Arthur Mensch, the chief executive of the French AI lab Mistral, surprised many observers in 2025 when he publicly endorsed a revenue-based levy of roughly 1 to 1.5 per cent on commercial providers placing AI models on the European market, with funds channelled into a central pot to support cultural creation. The Mistral proposal is hardly altruistic; it would also, conveniently, harden a continental moat against American and Chinese model providers. But its underlying logic is sound, and it draws on a legal heritage that goes back six decades.

The German Copyright Act of 1965 introduced the first private copying levy, attaching a small charge to the cost of devices and media that allowed users to duplicate protected works. The principle was that where copying is structurally uncontrollable, levy-funded compensation, distributed by collective management organisations, is a more workable alternative than litigation. Generative AI presents an almost perfect analogue. The training and inference of a foundation model, at any meaningful scale, is structurally beyond the reach of one-by-one licensing. A statutory levy on commercial AI services, collected by reformed collective management organisations and distributed to creators on a metered basis, would close the substitution-side gap that copyright cannot reach. It would also avoid the worst pathology of contemporary copyright reform, which is that platforms can outspend rights holders in any line-by-line negotiation.

There are real objections. A levy must be set high enough to matter and low enough not to suppress useful applications. It must be administered by institutions trusted by both creators and developers, which is not how the existing collective management landscape is universally regarded. And it must avoid becoming a moat for incumbents who can absorb a 1.5 per cent levy more easily than a research lab in Nairobi or a co-operative model in Buenos Aires. None of these objections is fatal. All of them require institutional design rather than policy retreat.

Statutory remuneration rights

A close cousin of the levy approach is the statutory remuneration right, which decouples permission from payment. Under such a regime, AI developers might be permitted to train on lawfully accessible works without negotiating individual licences, but they would owe a non-waivable payment to authors through a collective body. The European Parliament's commissioned study on generative AI and copyright, published in 2025, examined this possibility in detail. Springer Nature's International Review of Intellectual Property and Competition Law has run a series of analyses, by scholars including Christophe Geiger, arguing that a statutory remuneration right grounded in fundamental rights to participate in cultural life could be the most workable foundation for a new compact.

The advantage of a statutory remuneration right over a pure levy is that it sits more comfortably within the existing copyright framework. The disadvantage is that it still ties payment to the use of identifiable works, which means it primarily addresses the ingestion side rather than the substitution side. Combined with a levy, however, it begins to look like a serviceable architecture.

Public commissioning and the Irish experiment

While the levy debate continues, a quieter experiment has been running in Ireland since 2022. The Basic Income for the Arts scheme, originally a three-year pilot, paid 2,000 randomly selected artists 325 euros a week, regardless of output. The Irish Department of Culture, Communications and Sport opened applications for the 2026 to 2029 successor scheme in April 2026, and a published cost-benefit analysis found that for every euro invested, society received a return of 1.39 euros, a number that has been disputed in the Irish press but has not been seriously dislodged.

The Irish scheme is not a response to AI. It was designed to address the chronic under-monetisation of cultural work in a digital economy that had already eroded the freelance commercial base before generative models arrived. But its logic transfers cleanly. If the market for creative output is being structurally compressed by a technology whose externalities are not internalised, then a state instrument that decouples income from market success becomes more, not less, defensible. A universal creative income, scaled to the working population of practising artists in any given country, would stand to working creatives roughly as agricultural support payments stand to small farmers facing global commodity competition. It is unromantic, slightly bureaucratic, and precisely the kind of thing that has historically allowed cultural production to survive market shocks.

The political objection is that it looks like a cultural welfare state. The substantive objection is that, depending on how it is administered, it can entrench the credentialing power of arts councils and reproduce existing gatekeeping. Both are genuine. Neither is decisive against an instrument that, in Ireland at least, has empirical results to its name.

Public procurement as creative-economy policy

A surprisingly underused lever is the purchasing power of governments themselves. Public sector bodies are, in aggregate, among the largest commissioners of design, illustration, translation, audiovisual production, and music in most economies. The US General Services Administration's draft AI procurement clause, the December 2025 OMB memorandum M-26-04, the United Kingdom's Procurement Policy Note 017 from February 2025, and California's executive order on AI vendor certification signed by Governor Gavin Newsom in April 2026 all introduce disclosure obligations for AI-generated content within government contracts. None of them, however, goes the further step of creating a procurement preference for human creative work in cultural production funded by public money.

A modest reform would be to require, for example, that any public broadcaster, national museum, ministry of culture, or city government commissioning creative output beyond a defined threshold use human creators where reasonably possible, with transparent disclosure when generative tools are used. This costs the state more, in the short term, than letting procurement officers chase the cheapest bid. It also creates a stable demand floor for working creatives and signals, with the kind of clarity that markets respond to, that public money will not be deployed to accelerate the collapse of the freelance creative class. India's labelling thresholds for AI-generated visual and audio content, and the EU AI Act's transparency requirements, are early sketches of the disclosure architecture this would require.

Collective bargaining as economic infrastructure

The 2023 agreements between the Writers Guild of America, the Screen Actors Guild and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers are, for all their imperfections, the most concrete demonstration that collective bargaining can produce workable rules around AI in creative work. The WGA contract specifies that AI-generated material cannot be considered literary material for credit purposes and gives writers the right to refuse to use AI tools, while preserving their ability to challenge the use of writers' work to train AI. The SAG-AFTRA contract distinguishes digital replicas of identifiable performers from synthetic performers built from no individual likeness, and creates compensation and consent obligations around both.

These provisions are not perfect. The 2024 SAG-AFTRA video game performer strike, which ran for many months over precisely these AI consent and compensation issues in the interactive sector, demonstrated how quickly a contract negotiated for one segment of the industry begins to look incomplete when applied to another. But the agreements demonstrate the principle that collective bargaining can do work that copyright cannot, by setting industry-wide floors on consent, attribution, and compensation that apply regardless of the specific upstream provenance of any given AI output.

The implication for creative workers outside the unionised entertainment sector is uncomfortable but unavoidable. The freelance illustrator, the literary translator, the independent musician, the documentary editor often have no equivalent collective body. Building one, on a national or transnational basis, becomes infrastructure rather than ideology. The European Federation of Journalists, the European Writers' Council, the International Federation of Translators, and the Concerts Promoters Association are all operating in this space, as are emerging co-operative models among illustrators in continental Europe. Any serious policy response to the structural compression of creative labour markets needs to take seriously the question of how to fund and support these bodies.

Sovereign wealth approaches and creative commons funds

A more radical proposal, occasionally floated in policy circles and yet to find a serious political champion, is the sovereign wealth approach. The argument runs that the corpus of human cultural output ingested by foundation models is a non-rival public resource analogous to a national fishery or a hydrocarbon basin. Where states extract rents from companies exploiting natural resources, the rents fund either current public expenditure or, in the Norwegian case, an intergenerational sovereign wealth fund. By analogy, a national or supranational creative commons fund, capitalised by an ingestion-based levy on commercial AI training and operation, could be invested to provide perpetual support for cultural production.

The sovereign wealth analogy is imperfect. Cultural output is not extracted from a finite reservoir; it is generated, continuously, by living people whose labour the fund is meant to compensate. But the analogy is useful precisely because it forces a recognition that the value flowing into AI labs from human cultural output is, in macroeconomic terms, an unpriced externality of historic scale. The OECD's 2025 report on intellectual property and AI training data raised, without endorsing, the question of whether the absence of pricing on this externality represents a market failure that justifies non-market correction. That is exactly the conceptual frame a sovereign wealth approach would adopt.

The global south is not a footnote

Any honest reckoning with the policy space has to confront the dimension that the IPS News analysis put squarely on the table: the income losses from generative AI are not falling evenly across geography. They are falling disproportionately on freelance and self-employed creators in the global south. UNESCO's data, repeated in the Re|Shaping Policies for Creativity report, is sobering. In developed economies, 67 per cent of people possess essential digital skills; in developing economies the figure is 28 per cent. Cultural and creative leadership in developed countries has reached 64 per cent women in some institutional categories; in developing nations it is 30 per cent. Public funding for culture sits below 0.6 per cent of global GDP and is projected to decline. Only 61 per cent of countries surveyed have intellectual property frameworks UNESCO considers adequate.

These structural baselines were already producing inequality. Generative AI compounds them. Viviana Rangel, a Colombian independent expert quoted in the IPS News analysis, framed the problem in a sentence: the region does not produce this kind of technology; it consumes it. The economic flow runs in one direction. Cultural workers in Lagos, Lima, Manila, and Karachi see their commissions evaporate as European and North American clients route work through models trained on a corpus from which their own contributions are statistically marginal. The royalties and rents from those models, when they exist at all, flow to collective management organisations and rights holders concentrated in the North Atlantic.

This dimension has implications for every instrument discussed above. A European AI cultural levy, however well designed, will tend to recapture funds from European AI providers and recycle them through European collective management organisations to predominantly European creators. That is not necessarily wrong, but it is not a global solution. The CISAC study's projection of 22 billion euros in cumulative losses to music and audiovisual creators globally over five years is a number that needs distributional analysis. Where do the losses fall? Where do the few gains fall? UNESCO's framing of the problem as a global development issue, rather than a North Atlantic intellectual property dispute, opens space for instruments that the copyright debate alone would not generate.

The most credible candidates, at this point, are international transfers built into the supranational architecture of AI governance. A share of any revenues raised through training data taxes, statutory remuneration rights, or AI cultural levies should be directed, by treaty or legislative carve-out, to a global fund supporting creators in the regions where the harm falls hardest. This is not charity. It is restitution for an extraction whose proceeds are presently retained by a small group of companies whose corpora include cultural output from every continent. UNESCO, by virtue of its mandate over cultural diversity and the global character of its 120-country reporting, is the obvious institutional vehicle, although the World Intellectual Property Organisation and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development have credible roles to play.

The harder version of the global south argument concerns sovereignty. If a Senegalese government wants to protect its translators, illustrators, and musicians from market compression caused by foundation models trained largely outside its borders, what tools does it have? The honest answer is: not many, in the short term. National AI levies on a small market produce modest revenue. National copyright reform reaches AI labs only weakly. National public commissioning and basic income programmes are constrained by fiscal capacity. This is one reason why the architecture of any serious policy response has to be partly supranational. It is also why policy frameworks that treat the global south as an afterthought, or that solve the problem of the European illustrator while leaving the Lagos illustrator untouched, will be morally and politically unstable.

Who bears responsibility?

The question of responsibility is the one most likely to be flattened by political slogans, so it is worth taking slowly. There are at least five candidates for the moral and economic ledger, and a serious policy framework needs to assign weight to each rather than collapsing them into a single villain.

The AI labs themselves are the most obvious candidate. They built the systems whose outputs are compressing creative labour markets. They trained the models on corpora they did not pay for, in most cases, and they continue to extract economic rent from those corpora at scale. The defence offered by lab leadership tends to combine the argument that training on publicly available content is fair use with the argument that the productivity gains from foundation models will, over time, raise everyone's incomes including creators'. Both arguments are contestable. The fair use claim is being litigated across multiple jurisdictions. The productivity-spillover claim has, so far, generated almost no observable benefit for the working creators whose markets are contracting fastest. Responsibility, on any plausible reading, sits substantially with the labs, and the policy instruments above should be priced accordingly.

The platforms that distribute creative work are a second locus. Streaming services that ingest AI-generated music into the same recommendation streams as human-made music; stock image platforms that have become, in some categories, predominantly synthetic; commissioning marketplaces that allow buyers to specify AI-generated drafts as deliverables. Each of these platforms makes choices about how to label, reward, and surface human versus synthetic output. UNESCO's report observes that opaque algorithms and platform consolidation are themselves part of the structural undercutting. Procurement-style transparency requirements, content provenance standards, and labelling rules are the relevant instruments here, and platforms are properly the subjects of them.

Governments are the third candidate. They license the regulatory environment within which labs and platforms operate, and they hold the fiscal and statutory authority to introduce levies, statutory remuneration rights, public commissioning rules, and basic income schemes. They also have the slowest reflexes. The EU AI Act, the UK text-and-data-mining consultation, the patchwork of state-level AI laws in the United States, and the regulatory regimes emerging across Asia and Latin America operate on time horizons measured in years; market compression is occurring in quarters. Responsibility for that gap falls on legislatures and on public agencies that have not yet pivoted from a copyright-only frame to a market-structure frame.

The fourth candidate is the end user: the corporate or individual buyer who chooses an AI-generated cover, a synthetic voice-over, or an automated translation over a human alternative. Moral responsibility here is real but limited. Buyers respond to prices, and prices are an artefact of upstream institutional architecture; no buyer can plausibly be expected to internalise an externality the policy regime has not bothered to price. End-user weight matters most in the public sector, in editorial institutions whose readers care about provenance, and in industries where reputation rewards transparency. Disclosure rules, labelling standards, and provenance technologies make this responsibility legible and therefore actionable.

The fifth candidate, the most diffuse and the least talked about, is the public itself, conceived as the political constituency that decides whether to treat creative labour as economically valuable enough to defend. The Irish basic income scheme exists because Irish politics decided it should. The WGA and SAG-AFTRA agreements exist because audiences, in the end, did not want to consume an industry whose writers and performers were being squeezed past tolerance. The slow shift in European policy thinking towards an AI cultural levy exists because European publics and their elected representatives have, for now, not lost their attachment to the idea that cultural work is a public good worth supporting through institutional design. That political attachment is not automatic. It can erode. Where it erodes, the labs and platforms set the frame.

What a serious settlement would look like

A serious policy settlement, on the analysis above, is not a single instrument but a stack. Copyright reform sits at the bottom of the stack, addressing the upstream ingestion question that copyright is institutionally suited to handle. Statutory remuneration rights and AI cultural levies sit above it, addressing the substitution-side compression that copyright cannot reach. Public commissioning rules and procurement preferences sit above those, deploying the state's purchasing power to maintain a demand floor for human creative work. Universal creative income schemes, on the Irish model, sit above those, decoupling baseline livelihood from market success. Collective bargaining and trade-association infrastructure sits across the stack, providing the institutional capacity for creators to negotiate consent, attribution, and compensation in real-time as the technology evolves. International transfers, capitalised by the levies and routed through multilateral cultural institutions, sit on top, addressing the global south dimension that no national policy can solve alone.

No single country has the full stack today. Ireland has a basic income scheme. France and the European Union are debating a levy. The United Kingdom has a collective licensing prototype. Spain has labelling rules. Germany has a private copying levy heritage that could be retrofitted. The United States has the WGA and SAG-AFTRA agreements, the GSA procurement clause, and California's vendor certification regime. India has labelling thresholds. UNESCO has 8,100 catalogued policy measures across 120 countries. The pieces exist; what is missing is the integration.

This is, in some sense, the unromantic conclusion. The problem that generative AI has created in the creative economy is not, primarily, a problem that demands a new philosophical framework, although philosophical frameworks help. It is a problem that demands the assembly of a known set of instruments into a coherent stack, with serious institutional design and credible enforcement, and with explicit redistribution towards the creators and regions where the harm is concentrated. The political difficulty of that assembly is high. The intellectual difficulty is lower than the public debate sometimes implies.

The alternative, if no such stack is built, is reasonably easy to describe. The compression continues. The freelance creative class, in the global north and more sharply in the global south, contracts. The cultural production that survives concentrates among those with independent means, institutional employment, or audiences large enough to bypass the compression. The texture of cultural output narrows in ways that are hard to see in real time but legible in retrospect, in the same way the disappearance of regional newspapers became legible only after the fact. The labs and platforms continue to capture the rents from a corpus they did not build. Lodovico Folin-Calabi, the UNESCO director who told the press at the report's launch that the world must critically examine how these technologies are deployed and whose voices are represented, may turn out to have been describing not a turning point but a wake.

Whether the settlement gets built is, finally, a political question rather than a technical one. The technical question has answers. The political question, whether public, labs, platforms, and governments collectively decide that the structural losses already under way are worth correcting, has only the answers a generation chooses to give. The 24 per cent number is a forecast. It is also a decision, not yet made.

References & Sources

1. UNESCO. Re|Shaping Policies for Creativity: Making Creativity Count. Fourth global monitoring report. Launched 18 February 2026. https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/creators-face-projected-global-revenue-losses-24-2028-new-unesco-report-shows
2. UNESCO Diversity of Cultural Expressions. “Making creativity matter: UNESCO's latest Re|Shaping Policies for Creativity report calls for bold policy action.” February 2026. https://www.unesco.org/creativity/en/articles/making-creativity-matter-unescos-latest-reshaping-policies-creativity-report-calls-bold-policy
3. United Nations News. “Artists face steep income decline due to AI, UNESCO finds.” 18 February 2026. https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/02/1166989
4. Inter Press Service. “Generative AI Could Deepen Inequality, Revenue Losses in Creative Industries.” February 2026. https://www.ipsnews.net/2026/02/generative-ai-could-deepen-inequality-revenue-losses-in-creative-industries/
5. CISAC and PMP Strategy. Global economic study shows human creators' future at risk from generative AI. December 2024. https://www.cisac.org/Newsroom/news-releases/global-economic-study-shows-human-creators-future-risk-generative-ai
6. AI Business / IT Pro. “Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch calls for AI cultural levy in Europe.” 2025. https://www.itpro.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/mistral-ceo-calls-for-ai-cultural-levy
7. Copyright Licensing Agency. “CLA announces development of Generative AI Training Licence.” 2025. https://cla.co.uk/development-of-cla-generative-ai-licence/
8. United States Copyright Office. Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, Part 3: Generative AI Training (pre-publication report). 2025. https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intelligence-Part-3-Generative-AI-Training-Report-Pre-Publication-Version.pdf
9. OECD. Intellectual property issues in artificial intelligence trained on scraped data. 2025. https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/intellectual-property-issues-in-artificial-intelligence-trained-on-scraped-data_d5241a23-en.html
10. Geiger, Christophe et al. “Generative AI, Digital Constitutionalism and Copyright: Towards a Statutory Remuneration Right grounded in Fundamental Rights.” Kluwer Copyright Blog and International Review of Intellectual Property and Competition Law (Springer Nature). 2025. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40319-025-01569-6
11. European Parliament. Generative AI and Copyright: Training, Creation, Regulation. Study commissioned by the JURI Committee. 2025. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2025/774095/IUST_STU(2025)774095_EN.pdf
12. Government of Ireland, Department of Culture, Communications and Sport. “Basic Income for the Arts Scheme 2026-2029 Guidelines for Application.” April 2026. https://www.gov.ie/en/department-of-culture-communications-and-sport/publications/basic-income-for-the-arts-scheme-2026-2029-guidelines-for-application/
13. CNN Style. “Ireland is paying artists a basic income in a pioneering scheme.” 12 February 2026. https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/12/style/ireland-artists-basic-income-intl-scli
14. Perkins Coie. “Generative AI in Movies and TV: How the 2023 SAG-AFTRA and WGA Contracts Address Generative AI.” 2023. https://perkinscoie.com/insights/blog/generative-ai-movies-and-tv-how-2023-sag-aftra-and-wga-contracts-address-generative
15. Center for Democracy and Technology. “New WGA Labor Agreement Gives Hollywood Writers Important Protections in the Era of AI.” 2023. https://cdt.org/insights/new-wga-labor-agreement-gives-hollywood-writers-important-protections-in-the-era-of-ai/
16. Bird & Bird. “Like Company v Google: CJEU Holds First-Ever Hearing on Generative AI and Copyright on 10 March 2026.” 2026. https://www.twobirds.com/en/insights/2026/like-company-v-google-cjeu-holds-first-ever-hearing-on-generative-ai-and-copyright
17. Gibson Dunn. “GSA AI Procurement Rules Would Introduce New Disclosure and Use-Rights Requirements for Federal Contractors.” 2025. https://www.gibsondunn.com/gsa-ai-procurement-rules-would-introduce-new-disclosure-and-use-rights-requirements-for-federal-contractors/
18. Ropes & Gray. “Newsom Signs Executive Order Establishing AI Vendor Certification and Procurement Framework.” April 2026. https://www.ropesgray.com/en/insights/alerts/2026/04/newsom-signs-executive-order-establishing-ai-vendor-certification-and-procurement-framework
19. Euronews. “Spain could fine AI companies up to €35 million for mislabelling content.” 12 March 2025. https://www.euronews.com/next/2025/03/12/spain-could-fine-ai-companies-up-to-35-million-in-fines-for-mislabelling-content

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: * Spent over an hour this morning on yard work, trimming front walks and trying to tidy up the pile of branches by the front curb waiting to be picked up. Though I was very unsteady on my feet, I didn't fall. Thank God.

Happy to see the Indiana Fever leading by 21 points early in the 3rd quarter. Playing very well even without Caitlin Clark tonight. Hoping the Spurs win their game later tonight.

And I hope all goes well tomorrow at my GP apt. It's just a regular 4-month check up, but at my age, ya' never know. Ya' know? We do have issues to talk about.

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. Details of that regimen are linked to my link tree, which is linked to my profile page here.

Starting Ash Wednesday, 2026, I've added this daily prayer as part of the Prayer Crusade Preceding the 2026 SSPX Episcopal Consecrations.

Health Metrics: * bw= 234.90 lbs. * bp= 141/84 (66)

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

Diet: * 07:10 – 1 peanut butter sandwich * 09:50 – air-popped popcorn * 12:15 – beef chop suey, fried rice * 16:00 – egg drop soup, fried rice

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 04:15 – listening to local news talk radio * 05:20 – bank accounts activity monitored. * 06:05 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, nap, * 11:00 to 12:15 – cut branches and trim walks in front yard * 12:15 to 13:30 – watch old game shows and eat lunch at home with Sylvia * 14:00 – tuned into the warmup show for this afternoon's Rangers vs Rockies MLB game. First pitch is only mnutes away. * 17:15 – Rangers win, 5 to 4. * 17:30 – listening to Indiana Fever Pregame Show ahead of tonight's game vs the Portland Fire

Chess: * 19:10 – moved in all pending CC games

There’s not so much going on in my head lately, for some reason. It’s like a blank space which I picture as being white rather than black

So that is good, because I am feeling good

it feels good to feel good.

I am working as an IT Sheriff now, or soon will be. Met some clients today and we had a lunch

I could help them with anything really, by going into bitbucket for example, and put Borg Cubes as icons for all of their kubernetes repos

If need be

It doesn’t matter that much

I can patch stuff,

I feel the carpenter last year said some wise words; I asked whether he could do these dressings around the massive windows. He said that as long as he got paid he could, and he could even mow the lawns

If he got paid

And there is wisdom in this, of course

Furthermore, on this special lunch, by happenstance, I saw a travelling friend who was visiting my town today

And we decided to have a beer this evening

Which we did

I had a black one, a stout, which the bartender said tasted of decadence. Sweet, strong and bitter. I think he was right about that

I often dip my toes in decadence, like the yin to my yang (or vice versa), I think it’s a way of finding a sort of balance

It balances the humours, I feel

And still, I picture a grey mind as being way worse than having a black one

Ok thanks for reading this text straight from my heart (because like I said, there’s nothing much going on in my brain)

I did not know green burials were a thing until my mom said she wanted one. So I made the arrangements but didn’t really know what to expect. And my mom died on Saturday, and on Tuesday we buried her. (There’s no embalming with a green burial, so you have to get it done pretty quickly. They told us it could be as long as a week.)

Here’s what it was like. (We did this in Greater Cincinnati, so obviously the details may be different depending on your location, but I just wanted to give people an idea of what the process is like)

First, the burial ground is a beautiful and peaceful meadow that is also a nature preserve with hiking trails. Scattered around the meadow are little mounds with grass growing out of them where folks have been buried. So it doesn’t feel like a cemetery—there are no rows of granite markers or anything—it just feels like a field.

My mom’s body was in the back of the hearse, wrapped in a (thick and definitely not see-through) shroud that was in a big wicker basket. Me and five of my relatives moved the basket onto a little wagon, and I pulled the wagon to the gravesite. Once there, we lifted the shroud out of the basket and placed it on planks that were over the grave.

My mom’s priest said some words, and a representative from the place said some words. We had a moment of silence and listened to the breeze and the birds flying overhead. There were straps under the shroud, and we grabbed those and held my mom’s body up while the staff pulled the planks away. We then used the straps to lower my mom’s body into the ground. And then a mix of staff and relatives grabbed shovels and filled in the grave. (It was hot and I was in a suit, so I did one shovelful. Some of my relatives really went hard on the shoveling).

I’ve been to a fair amount of funerals, and this felt much better to me than seeing a body in a metal casket lowered into a concrete vault. My mom’s body quite literally returned to the earth, and in a few years there will be nothing left of her as the matter of her body will have become the soil that feeds the grass. There will be a marker—a little stone flush with the ground that has her name on it. Like, a literal stone, not a granite monument.

Once the grave was filled in, they gave me a rock to place on a cairn that was made up of rocks placed in honor of everyone who’d ever been buried there.

I was really struck by the beauty and simplicity of the entire process. It felt very natural and respectful, and at no point in the process did I feel like anyone was trying to upsell me in that “Don’t you want the $500 pillow for your loved one?” way that funeral directors so often do.

Throughout the day afterward, people kept coming up to me and saying how much the appreciated the green burial and that they’d never heard of it but now wanted one for themselves.

I should also mention that the entire process cost about half what a traditional burial would have cost.

There aren’t too many places that offer green burials yet, but I think as more people experience green burials, more people will want them. If you’re have questions about the process that I didn’t answer here, please feel free to click on the ol’ contact me link above. I’m just a consumer here, but I think this is a really nice process, and I’d like to help people who are interested.

¡Noticia! Ciudad Telaraña, el juego de terror y alienación que hemos terminado de crear, se publicará en formato físico con la editorial 77Mundos, esperemos que después del verano. 

Nos hemos colado en el canal de Friki Vetusto, en el programa Mundos Críticos de este mes, para anunciar la publicación en físico del juego. Además de presentar el origen de la colaboración con esta editorial, explicar la ambientación de Ciudad Telaraña y el sistema, de juego y contestar a las preguntas del público, pasamos un rato estupendo. Echadle un ojo al vídeo en el enlace de debajo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQvVM4hEBCY

Es ist höchste Zeit über meine Gastfamilie zu schreiben, wo sie mich so herzlich empfangen haben, und so viel für mich organisiert haben.

Nika hat die ganze Sache ins Rollen gebracht, da sie im Folklore Projekt von Pangeya Ultima aktiv ist. Das ist die NGO, bei der ich meinen Freiwilligendienst gemacht hab, über sie lief der Kontakt. Die Vorbereitung und Planung lag maßgeblich in ihrer Hand, ich bin beeindruckt wie souverän sie das mit gerade ein mal 16 Jahren auf die Beine gestellt hat. Nebenbei geht sie zur Schule, lernt daneben zusätzlich deutsch, englisch (erweitert), Gitarre spielen, Malen, Schießen, und ist im Volleyball Team der Schule, sowie in einem Young-Leadership Programm. Und weil das noch nicht reicht, backt sie Macarons und andere Köstlichkeiten auf höchstem Niveau, und verkauft sie an umliegende Cafés und Kaufhäuser. Einfach Wow.

Ihre ältere Schwester Katja ist Englischlehrerin, unterrichtet aber nicht an der Schule, sondern privat als Nachhilfelehrerin. Sie hat sehr oft und viel für mich übersetzt, wofür ich ihr unglaublich dankbar bin, sonst hätte ich niemals so viel verstehen und mitnehmen können. Außerdem hat sie mir viel von Berschad gezeigt, und mir viele Fragen beantwortet zu allen möglichen Themen.

Meine Gastmutter Vika ist ebenfalls gelernte Lehrerin, arbeitet aber schon lang in dem Schreibwaren / Haushaltsgeschäft, was sie mit ihrem Mann aufgebaut hat. Sie spricht kaum englisch, und so kommt mein ukrainisch bei ihr am meisten zum Tragen, juhuu :) Sie, wie auch ihr Mann haben in ihrem einfachen Dasein wirklich schon viel erlebt, wie alle Ukrainer*innen in ihrem Alter. Auch für sie gehört die Zeit der Sowjetunion zu ihrer Geschichte mit dazu. Ich habe den Eindruck, dass sie das weder verteufelt noch romantisiert, es war halt so. Und doch merkt man, dass sie stolz ist mit ihrem Mann den Laden von Null aufgebaut zu haben, das Haus gebaut, und auch für die Kinder vorgesorgt zu haben. Aber wenn davon erzählt wird, ist es auch nicht weit zur heutigen Situation: Jetzt geht das alles nicht mehr, vieles ist für sie nicht mehr finanzierbar, was vor der russischen Vollinvasion noch möglich war. Aber ohne sich darüber zu beschweren. Sie erzählt außerdem von ihrer Freundin, die jetzt in Berschad wohnt, nachdem sie aus Mariupol geflohen ist. Auf der Flucht wurde auch auf sie, als einfache Zivilistin, geschossen. Und Zack, ist der Krieg doch wieder sehr nah, auch hier.

Bohdan, mein Gastvater spricht auf einem Level Englisch, dass eine Konversation durchaus möglich ist, und er scheut die komplizierteren Themen nicht. Auf jede meiner Fragen, egal zu welchem Thema bekomme ich eine Antwort. Ich habe meine Gasteltern nach Selenskyj gefragt: als Comedian super, in der Serie “Diener des Volkes” – gut, aber vieles sei zu einfach dargestellt worden. Als Politiker bekommt er keine guten Noten, zu viele leere Versprechungen, weiterhin viel Korruption. Insbesondere die Straßen sind immer wieder im Gespräch, deren Qualität ist in Berschad und darum herum auch wirklich nicht gut. Und bei vielen Themen läuft es am Ende darauf hinaus, dass alle sehr enttäuscht von der Regierung sind. Und das in einem Ton, dass es definitiv nichts Neues ist. So oder so, wenn ich auf ihn treffe, lädt er mich meist mit einer Geste an den Hals zum Trinken ein – Tee natürlich ;)

Er spricht einige Sprachen, hat in seinem Leben viel gelernt und gelesen, “umtriebig” beschreibt ihn wohl ganz gut. Wenn es um die Situation im Osten geht, beschreibt er alles wie es ist. Er war früher selbst im Militär, hat damit abgeschlossen, gerade erlaubt es seine gesundheitliche Situation sowieso nicht. Aber sein Bruder ist im Militär, sowie andere Familienangehörige, Nachbarn, usw. Er kennt viele schlimme Schicksale, nicht das erste mal höre ich davon, dass Angehörige 3 Monate keinen Kontakt zu Soldaten im Krieg haben. Wie soll der Alltag in so einer Zeit weitergehen? Diese Sorgen sind für mich unvorstellbar. Er zeigt mir 2 ukrainische Filme, die den Krieg thematisieren, ein Horrorfilm mit Fantasy-Touch, und einer der die grausame Besatzung und die Massaker in Butscha ziemlich realgetreu nacherzählt. Ich verstehe nicht alles, aber doch genug, um die Handlungen zu verstehen. Immer wieder kommen Anmerkungen von ihm: “Das war wirklich so schlimm,” oder “in echt war es noch schlimmer, sie zeigen nicht alles.” Ich bin beeindruckt, dass solche Filme in so kurzer Zeit, trotz der aktuellen Situation realisiert werden können. Aber es ist wohl auch wichtig, sie zeigen das, was hier alle beschäftigt.

Bohdan macht gerne Witze, und ist unglaublich bemüht mir die ukrainische Kultur näher zu bringen. Er erklärt mir viele Sprichwörter, und an manchen Stellen fällt ihm dann der Rest der Familie ins Wort “don’t believe what he says” ;) Er kocht sehr lecker, und ist wirklich sehr dankbar für meine Anwesenheit. Zum einen weil seine Töchter mit mir ihr Englisch verbessern, bzw. anwenden können. Aber er sagt auch, dass ich mit meinem Besuch einige Klischees aufbreche, den Menschen zeige, dass ich als Ausländerin die Situation in der Ukraine sehe. Das ist ein unglaublich großes Kompliment für mich, und das ganze Projekt. Ich frage weiter, wie andere in der Stadt auf meine Präsenz reagieren, ob da nicht auch Unverständnis ist? Klare Antwort: Nein, alle freuen sich, dass du gekommen bist. Alle sehen, was Deutschland gerade für die Ukraine und ihre Landsleute tut, und zeigen mir wohl auch deshalb so viel Dankbarkeit und Gastfreundschaft. Explizit sagt er sogar noch dazu, dass dumme Witze über Deutsche und die Nazivergangenheit jetzt nicht mehr aufkommen, das ist vorbei.

Ich frage meine Gasteltern auch, ob sie seit Beginn der Invasion einmal überlegt hatten das Land zu verlassen (wobei Bohdan das sowieso nicht darf), die Antwort war ganz klar: Nein. Hier ist unser Geschäft, was sollen wir woanders? Berschad ist sicher, das einzige Ziel was hier getroffen wurde, liegt außerhalb der Stadt. Sie sind dankbar darüber, dass viele Landsleute in Deutschland ein neues Zuhause finden konnten, aber schnell kommt auch ein Wort auf, dessen Übersetzung wohl “Sozialschmarotzer” ist. Das finden sie nicht gut, dafür haben sie kein Verständnis. Und trotzdem, Vika und Bohdan wünschen sich, dass ihre Töchter was von der Welt sehen. Sowie sie es vor 2022 als Familie in verschiedenen Reisen zum Beispiel nach Ägypten und in die Türkei zusammen erleben konnten.

Ich bin immer noch beeindruckt, wie viel meine Gastfamilie mir in der kurzen Zeit zeigen und erklären konnte. Wir haben viel Zeit zusammen verbracht, in familiärem Umgang. Ich habe mich sehr gut aufgehoben gefühlt, und bin ihnen unglaublich dankbar für alles.

An dieser Stelle möchte ich auf eine NGO hinweisen, die im Osten des Landes Zivile Personen evakuiert. Viele Ukrainer*innen möchten in der Ukraine wohnen bleiben, in ihrer Heimat. Bei der Evakuierung von Wohngebiet in Frontnähe überlegen es sich manche dann doch anders, und benötigen dann Hilfe, um überhaupt noch weg, weiter Richtung Westen zu kommen. Die NGO “Universal Aid Ukraine” wurde von einer Frau aus Münster gegründet, hier könnt ihr sie bei ihrer Mission unterstützen:

https://www.universal-aid-ukraine.org/en/spenden

It's time to write about my host family, who welcomed me so warmly and organized so much for me.

Nika got the whole thing rolling, as she's active in the Folklore Project of Pangeya Ultima. That's the NGO where I did my volunteer service — the contact came through them. The preparation and planning were largely in her hands, and I'm impressed how confidently she made this at just 16 years old. On top of school, she's also learning German, English (advanced), guitar, painting, and shooting, plays on the school volleyball team, and is part of a Young Leadership program. And as if that weren't enough, she bakes macarons and other treats at an incredibly high level and sells them to nearby cafés and department stores. Just wow.

Her older sister Katja is an English teacher, though not at a school — she teaches privately as a tutor. She translated for me incredibly often and a lot, and I'm so grateful to her for that, because without her I never could have understood and taken in as much as I did. As well, she showed me a lot of Bershad, and answered many of my questions of different manner.

My host mother Vika is also a trained teacher, but has been working for a long time in the stationery and household goods store that she and her husband built up. She speaks very little English, so my Ukrainian gets the most use with her — yay :) She and her husband have genuinely been through a lot in their simple lives, like all Ukrainians their age. The Soviet era is part of their story too. I get the impression that she neither demonizes nor romanticizes it — it was just how it was. And yet you can tell she's proud of having built the shop from scratch with her husband, built the house, and taken care of the kids. But when that comes up, it's never far from today's reality: now a lot of that isn't possible anymore, many things they could afford before the full-scale Russian invasion are no longer within reach. But without a word of complaint. She also tells me about her friend who now lives in Bershad after fleeing from Mariupol. During the escape, she was shot at — just an ordinary civilian. And just like that, the war feels very close again, even here.

My host father Bohdan speaks English at a level where a real conversation is possible, and he doesn't shy away from the harder topics. Whatever I ask, on any subject, I get an answer. I asked my host parents about Zelensky: as a comedian — great, in the series “Servant of the People” — good, but a lot of it was presented too simply. As a politician, he doesn't get good marks — too many empty promises, still a lot of corruption. The roads in particular keep coming up; their quality in and around Berschad really is poor. And with many topics, it always comes back to the same thing: everyone is very disappointed from the government. And said in a tone that makes it clear this is nothing new. Either way, whenever I run into him, he usually invites me to have a drink with a gesture to his throat — tea, of course ;)

He speaks several languages, has learned and read a lot throughout his life — “resourceful” probably describes him well. When it comes to the situation in the east, he describes things as they are. He was in the military himself in the past, has moved on from that chapter, and his health situation wouldn't allow it anyway right now. But his brother is in the military, as are other family members, neighbors, and so on. He knows many terrible stories — it's not the first time I've heard of relatives being three months without any contact with soldiers at the front. How is everyday life supposed to go on in times like that? These worries are unimaginable to me. He shows me two Ukrainian films that deal with the war — one a horror film with a fantasy touch, and one that recounts fairly faithfully the brutal occupation and massacres in Bucha. I don't understand everything, but enough to follow what's happening. He keeps adding comments: “It really was that bad,” or “in reality it was even worse — they don't show everything.” I'm amazed that films like this can be made in such a short time, despite everything. But it's probably also important — they show what's on everyone's mind here.

Bohdan loves making jokes and puts incredible effort into helping me understand Ukrainian culture. He explains a lot of proverbs to me, and at certain points the rest of the family cuts in: “Don't believe what he says” ;) He cooks really well and is genuinely very grateful for my presence. Partly because his daughters get to practice and use their English with me. But he also says that my visit breaks down some stereotypes and shows to people that I, as a foreigner, see what’s happening in Ukraine. That's an incredibly big compliment to me, and to the whole project. I ask further how others in the city react to my presence — is there no confusion or incomprehension? Clear answer: No, everyone is glad you came. Everyone sees what Germany is doing for Ukraine and its people right now, and that's probably also why they show me so much gratitude and hospitality. He even adds explicitly that dumb jokes about Germans and the Nazi past don't come up anymore — that's over.

I also ask my host parents whether they ever considered leaving the country since the start of the invasion (Bohdan isn't allowed to anyway) — the answer was clear: No. Our business is here, what would we do somewhere else? Bershad is safe; the only target that was hit is outside of the city. They're grateful that so many of their compatriots have been able to find a new home in Germany, but quickly a word comes up that roughly translates to “welfare scrounger.” They don't approve of that — they have no understanding for it. And yet, Vika and Bohdan wish that their daughters get to see something of the world — the way they were able to experience it together as a family before 2022, on various trips, for example to Egypt and Turkey.

I'm still amazed at how much my host family managed to show and explain to me in such a short time. We spent a lot of time together, in a real family atmosphere. I felt very well looked after and am incredibly grateful to them for everything.

At this point I'd like to mention an NGO that evacuates civilians in the east of the country. Many Ukrainians want to stay in Ukraine, in their homeland. When it comes to evacuating residential areas close to the front line, some people change their minds and need help to get out and make it further west. The NGO “Universal Aid Ukraine” was founded by a woman from Münster — you can support her mission here:

https://www.universal-aid-ukraine.org/en/spenden

Vika, ich, Bohdan

ein kleiner Auszug aus Nika’s Backkünsten

Roma (Nika’s Freund), Nika, ich, Vika

Katja und ich vor dem Bahnhof von Berschad, wo die Schmalspurbahn fährt

natürlich sehr wichtig: Coconut. Meine Allergie war leider wieder sehr am start :( aber süßes Kätzchen.

September 2026 / Facilitated by Ern Rivera

Virtual, via Jitsi Exact date and time TBD

Overview

Content

Availability

This workshop will be held live via Jitsi. An asynchronous version will be available via Itch.io after the live session.