Last Saturday, we went to Guitar Center to look for a keyboard. A musician once said that Guitar Center is the Olive Garden of music stores, but the one in Manhattan’s 14th Street has a good vibe, at least as far as I can see. We had a vague idea of what we wanted, a somewhat flexible budget, and limited knowledge of the available products on the market. We are also at an age where one might reasonably assume we have some funds for discretionary spending. In other words, we should have been a salesperson’s ideal customers. But they left us alone for about fifteen minutes. We also didn’t see anyone who seemed interested in engaging with a customer. So, we played around with a few keyboards, found one we liked, and then left the store. From there, we bought it online for the best price. If we want our city streets to have more than just cannabis dispensaries and ghost kitchens, we need good, useful retail stores. Mimicking an impersonal online experience is not the answer.

Bataclan, plus de dix ans déjà. Une journée de commémoration triste à mourir. A-t-on appris de tout cela ? Non, on n'apprend jamais rien. Il y a l'Ukraine, Gaza, le Soudan. Et toutes ces fusillades qui éclatent à gauche et à droite aux États-Unis et ailleurs. Au lieu de se concerter pour assurer la paix, chacun s'arme de son côté. Je vous le dis, ça ne va pas s'arranger. Et tout comme les Allemands, humiliés après la Première Guerre mondiale, ont bousculé le monde entier avec la Deuxième, les victimes gazaouis, ceux qui ont perdu leur maison, des parents, des amis, ne s'arrêteront pas là. Un peuple humilié peut arriver à de grandes choses en terme de désolation du monde. Il ne faut jamais sous-estimer leur capacité de détruire, de faire mal, de rendre coup pour coup, sans pitié pour les victimes collatérales. Car ce sont eux les victimes, pas les autres. D'autres Bataclan sont à prévoir.

L'écart entre les plus riches et les plus pauvres s'avère gigantesque. Il y a un manque d'autorité, un manque de volonté, de sorte que personne n'est responsable de rien. L'itinérance est là, des gens meurent dans la rue, dans un état de dégradation qui atténue considérablement leur humanité. Mais on ne fait rien, on ne peut rien faire, même pas les obliger à suivre une cure de désintoxication en circuit fermé. Ils sont libres, paraît-il. Ils ont des droits. Déféquer sur le bord du trottoir est dorénavant un droit fondamental. On met la faute sur la crise du logement, comme si le fumeur de crack en avait à cirer du logement.

La liberté individuelle, complément nécessaire à la loi du marché, atteint des sommets inconnus jusqu'alors. Chacun est libre de choisir son métier, sa dépendance, son sexe – ou plutôt son genre –, son pays, sa vie, quoi. Tout le monde a des droits, personne n'a de devoir. Bref, on fait ce qu'on veut et on ne doit rien à personne. Chacun est singulier dans sa diversité, même si tout le monde pense pareil en fin de compte – pensée unique, pensée magique.

Et Dieu dans tout ça ? Bah… on préfère pénétrer dans une tente de sudation que d'aller se recueillir dans une église. Je suis de la génération de ceux et celles qui se sont libéré de l'emprise de l'Église catholique, même si, personnellement, je n'ai pas l'impression de m'être libéré de grand chose. Mais de quoi la nouvelle génération va-t-elle se libérer ? Je me le demande. De nous, les vieux, sans doute… A-t-on le courage de se dire athée ? Très peu de gens l'ont, ce courage, car même l'athéisme exige un effort de la pensée, un exercice spirituel. Il est plus facile de se rabattre sur le bouddhisme qu'on réduit à quelques formules de base : saisir le moment présent, vivre l'instant, contempler une goutte de pluie, respirer à fond.

Je suis pessimiste aujourd'hui. Je suis fatigué de ce monde. Ma carcasse est de plus en plus lourde à traîner sur les trottoirs de la ville. Acheter un objet ne me procure plus aucune satisfaction, aucun plaisir. Je ne fais même plus de projet. Même les voyages ne me disent plus rien.

Ça ira mieux demain.

---

Daniel Ducharme : 2025-12-05 Mots-clés : #existence #société

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

Amen

Jesus is Lord! Come Lord Jesus!

Come Lord Jesus! Christ is Lord!

Lightbound

It was around Wales that we won the accord People watched in action and in peace Better governance for the Understood Our world at daylight for the country As today, people mean well in peace- The substance of time and society Is it a wonder we are matter of good

Prophets in history took to our haven Next to triumphancy there was rule, the rule of law and esteem And a cadence unto that which we seek Opposites of courage control us Coming back to each precedent is time We know we should keep our stories Keen learning to be strong- The elect are our fortune.

Příběh z Dědolesa o smradlavém odhodlání

V Dědolesu žila odjakživa tři významná společenstva: dědci, jezevci a prdelaté sovy. Každé z nich sledovalo vlastní zájmy, mělo své prdelní priority a svůj způsob přežití v krajině, kde smrad patřil ke kultuře stejně pevně jako tlačenka a prdová komora.

Přesto bylo období, kdy se tato tři společenstva navzájem ignorovala. Dědci řešili dědkovské věci, jezevci své hluboké nory a sovy si seděly na větvích, odkud mohly klovat prdel komukoliv. Společná aliance zněla jako utopie — něco jako svět bez smradu. Nepředstavitelné.

A pak přišli prdelatí jeleni.

---

🦌🔥 Vzestup jelení prdelnosti

Jeleni byli v Dědolesu odjakživa, ale dřív se chovali normálně: běhali, žrali trávu, občas někomu zaprďuli dveře a šli dál.

Jenže jedna generace se zvrhla.

Říká se, že Podhoubí Dědas jednou fermentovalo příliš silně a z prdelního éteru unikla energie, která jelenům přetvořila jejich prdelní žlázy. Z obyčejných prdelí se stala biologická prdometná zařízení. Jeleni začali cítit potřebu zaprdět vše, co má tvar světničky, nory nebo dutiny.

A tak začal jejich teror.

První padly dědkovské světničky — mnoho z nich bylo po jediném jelením výpadu na týdny neobyvatelných. Jezevci se dusili v zakouřených norách. Sovy padaly z větví, kloaky se jim kroutily jako hadice v zimě.

Nikdo nebyl v bezpečí.

---

🦡✨ Proč vznikla aliance? Tři různé důvody, jeden společný nepřítel

🧓 Dědci

Dědci nemohli snést, že jim jeleni zaprdávají světničky. Světnice jsou pro dědky něco jako chrám — místo klidu, přemítání a občasného prdění do ticha. Když jim jeleni začali prdět dovnitř i přes zavřené okenice, dědkům praskly nervy i prdele.

🦡 Jezevci

Jeleni začali dělat něco ještě odpornějšího: prdět do jezevčích nor. To je pro jezevce horší než válka. Nora je jejich útočiště, jejich ložnice, jejich meditační jeskyně smradu. A jeleni to narušovali s radostí. Jezevci se rozhodli, že dál ustupovat nebudou.

🦉Prdelate sovy

Sovy nejprve jen klovaly do jelenních prdelí, když se přibližovaly k větvím. Jenže jeleni začali útočit i na stromové dutiny — zaprděním vzduchu, který stoupá jako teplý proud.

Sovy to vnímaly jako útok na svou vzdušnou svobodu. A přestože jsou to bytosti často náladové a agresivní, poprvé za mnoho let chtěly spolupracovat.

---

🤝💨 Vznik aliance: Prdelní trojspolek

Dědci svolali tajný sraz za starým mlýnem Zmrdovce. Jezevci se připlížili z nor. Sovy přiletěly a usedly na dřevěné trámy.

A tam, v husté mlze, smradlavé od dědkovských prdů a napjaté od jezevčího funění, vznikla Aliance Prdelního Oporu.

Dědek Koudelka tehdy pronesl památnou větu:

„Když se sovy slutí, jezevci zabejčí a dědek zatne prdel, není síly, která nás zaprdí.“

A všichni souhlasili.

---

🔥🦌💨 Bitva o Prdelný Háj

Aliance se spojila a zaútočila na jelení stádo u Prdelného Háje, kde jeleni plánovali masový útok na několik vesnic najednou.

Dědci

Dědci použili své nejsilnější prdové techniky — Dlouhoprdelný dědek vypustil legendární „Pomalý tlak od žaludku“, který jelenům rozhodil takt.

Jezevci

Jezevci vylétli z nor jako chlupaté projektily a zakousli se jelenům do stehen i ocasů. Někteří použili techniku Dvojprdelné Sekery, kterou dovedl k dokonalosti Smraďoch Vyhloublý.

Sovy

Sovy bombardovaly jelení zadky kloakostřelem ze vzduchu. Přesnost byla 85 %, účinek devastující.

---

💥 Výsledek: Jeleni poraženi (prozatím)

Jeleni byli zaskočeni koordinovaným odporem. Utekli z Háje s parohy mezi nohama a prdelmi mezi stromy.

Dědci slavili celý týden, jezevci opravovali nory a sovy… sovy se do všeho míchaly dál, ale už méně agresivně.

Aliance stála. Dědoles byl zachráněn.

Ale nikdo nepochybuje, že jeleni se znovu namnoží a zase přijde čas velkých prdelních činů.

What a shit concert LOL but I’m just glad E was with me.

Before starting Day 5, I noticed that I forgot to add ESLint, Prettier, and proper typechecking on project init.

So I've added it and also run into an issue in my Neovim config. Where I was unable to use some LSP methods. The solution was that I tried to use a tool that was not installed, and after the typescript-tools migration for Neovim v0.11, this tool initialization was failing silently and causing some problems. Strange that this is only recently an issue. But ok, I found a fix, and now my Neovim is back working again with TypeScript. :)

After adding ESLint, Prettier, and proper typechecking with my now working Neovim, I resolved some issues, and the project is now “clean.”

---

63 of #100DaysToOffload
#log #AdventOfProgress
Thoughts?

The Advent of code started a few days ago, and this year I decided to implement my solutions in Clojure.

My solutions in this repo: https://github.com/dimiro1/adventofcode2025-clj

Later I will update this post with my overall impressions on the challenges of this year.

para qué más si cada palabra nos encierra

o sigue para que las palabras nos liberen

Fight On! issue 17 now available on DTRPG and Lulu (POD and PDF)!

Massive issue counting 164 pages (!)—twelve pages more than the titanic third issue—featuring adventures, monsters, classes, artwork, and essays from over thirty contributors. Scroll down for full table of contents.

I contributed 7 Contrarian Practices for Running Online Games essay, outlining practices from our long-running sandbox game. This is a continuation of the 21 Lessons Learned After Running 100 Sessions essay published in the previous issue, which resonated with many readers. Several wrote to me and asked if I could write more about how we play online.

Bigger than a bull baluchitherium barreling through Bucklebury, Fight On! is BACK! Writers and artists old and new proudly present a whopping 166 PAGES of men, magic, monsters, treasures, underworlds, and wilderness adventures for your dreamworld delectation! It’s never been a better day to Fight On!

Discerning dungeoneers and daring dilettantes alike will be DAZZLED with articles, adventures, and art by Toren Atkinson, Attronarch, Zhu Baijee, Rick Base, J. Blasso-Gieseke, Calithena, Paul Carrick, Dr. John Cichowski, Jasmine Collins, Geoffrey O. Dale, Patrick Farley, Graphite Prime, Idle Doodler, Kelvin Green, Allan Grohe, Philipp H., Dave Hargrave, Cameron Hawkey, Kesher, Gabor Lux, Ripley Matthews, James Maliszewski, James Mishler, Michael Mornard, Peter Mullen, Prince of Nothing, Steve Queen, Glenn Robinson, DeWayne Rogers, Frank Scacalossi, Daniel Scherrey, Robert Scudder, Settembrini, Dan Sousa, Oakes Spalding, Anthony Stiller, Paul Swanlund, Del Teigeler, Andrew Walter, Bill Webb, Jennifer Weigel, Alex Zisch, and many more! Don’t delay – score your copy today!

Here is the table of contents:

Article	Author(s)	Page
Reptiles and Samurai	Calithena	5
Martial Stances	Jeff Hollifield	12
Grognard’s Grimoire: Codex of Droon	Matt the Bastard DM	14
Knights & Knaves: Stumble	Paul Swanlund	18
New Kindred for Tunnels & Trolls!	Kesher	20
Return of the Ancients	Prince of Nothing	22
Creepies & Crawlies: The Thoul	Allan Grohe	42
Spiders, Spiders, Spiders!	James Mishler	50
Lobogolem “Laster”	Del L. Beaudry	61
Gems of Zylarthen, Part II	Oakes Spalding	62
Black Powder Firearms	Jack Griffis	68
Artifacts, Adjuncts, & Oddments	Various	72
The Eshkom District	James Maliszewski	75
Under Samora: Al’Murtok’s Refuge	Philipp H.	85
Contrarian Practices Online	Attronarch	101
Running for Large Groups	Bill Web	103
Portal Fantasy Protagonists	Will Mistretta	105
Saint Cuthbert of Lindisfarne	H. Kazantzakis	108
The Charioteer’s Shrine	Gabor Lux	111
Tables for Fables	Reilly, Koed & Blasso-Gieseke	116
Lady Omen’s Island	Glenn Robinson	122
Memories of Dave Sutherland	Michael Mornard	143
Demonweb Savanna	Alex Zisch	145
Rose Bush Hedge Maze	Geoffrey O. Dale	151
Chainmail / Sarissa: Fomalhaut	Settembrini / Gabor Lux	155
Doxy, Urgent Care Cleric	Linneman / Green	162
Humor & Art	J. B-G, Cal, Queen, and Scherrey	163

Back issues are available via DTRPG and Lulu.

#News #OSR #FightOn

I shall apply Chatham House Rules, where no names nor affiliations may be revealed, though discussions may be reproduced outside of the discussion room.

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Q: How do you handle fame? It's so easy to get lost in ego and fame. Bon Jovi said: “Fame is a liar and a thief. I've seen it ruin people. It is what I do, and I do it well, but it does not define me. I have a family, a business, and tennis.” Fame can be so destructive.

A: Don't define your worth based on who takes a photo with you after red-carpet events, or how many followers you have on social media. Find the people you look up to, such as directors or other actors, and ask them for their feedback on your craftsmanship as an actor. If you believe your own publicity, then you will also believe the negative comments.

Q: do you think your roles represent you as the person you want to be? You have worn many hats – you have been an actor, a producer, and a director.

A: [chuckles.] That's quite a meta- kind of question. [pause] I bring my best self to work. I show up on time. On set, I give everyone the time of day: the AD (Assistant Director), the ADPA (Assistant Director Production Assistant), and the caterer. There are so many people on set. And, I like tequila, [audience laughs] but 48 hours before a shoot, I avoid drinking. If you can hold your liquor, that's fine, but that's how I conduct myself. I don't know if this behaviour represents my race, my ethnicity, and my nationality, but that's what I do.

Q: how did it happen? How did you get inside the world of [redacted]?

A: Well, I met this guy, [redacted], in [redacted]. I don't know what possessed me, but I gave him a bunch of cards, and said, “Here are my head shots”. One year later, he called me up on a Thursday, and said, “The casting director wants to see you on Saturday, in [redacted].” Now, there was no way I could get from [redacted] to [redacted] on such short notice. And you know how casting calls work in [redacted], you have a specific time that you show up, say, 5.27 PM, and if you are not there, you're out. But, you know, my niece – she's here today, in the audience – and my mother, they went with me to the airport. They said, “It doesn't matter, the size [of your travel expenses]. This is your dream, right?”

So I flew over, I rented a car, and I went to [redacted]. And I was very jet-lagged, and I entered the room, and I saw ten other people, who all looked just like me. [audience laughs.] And, I have been directing for years, I haven't auditioned in a while, and my nerves were starting to get to me. And then I went into the room – there is a Flow state that musicians have, you know, where you just get lost in the music – well, I went into the room, and I said my lines, and then I left the room, and after that, I realised I couldn't recall what I did in that room. Not a thing.

And then I waited six weeks, paying for my lodging, out of my own pocket, and then they called me in for a second audition. And it gets even more nerve-racking, because you're closer now, but there's also a chance that everything could end for you, just like that [snaps fingers]. Behind actors' huge confidence is a huge sense of insecurity and fear. [audience giggles.]

And you think the Casting Director can get you in, but the Casting Director is just the beginning. You have to talk to the Studios, to see if they want you, and then you have to talk to the director. This director, [redacted], he meets people in person, for the smallest role. There was this character who has only one line in the whole movie – he says: [redacted] – and the director went to have coffee with him, just to hear him say that one line.

So, some time later, I was driving, and I got a call. And [redacted] said, “are you sitting down?” I said, “I'm not, I'm driving! But I will try to stop driving.” So I pulled into a gas station, and then she said, “You got it.”

And I don't have enough time to tell you everything that I have seen on set, the lovely actors I've met.

Sometimes I look at the sound stage, I look at the stunt crew, and I just let it all sink in. The night before, I'm rehearsing my lines in my head, and saying them out loud, over and over – so that it comes out as naturally as possible – but when I arrive on set, and see everything moving, I just have to let it sink in: “This is really happening.”

#acting

moon drenched night of softly sung velvet near the fragrant edge — what thicket of leaves!

sway, windswept boughs of gold into quiet spears spindled

04.12.2025, fragment

In the late 90s and early 00s, a casual stroll through the internet could spawn dozens or more pop-over and pop-under ads. Browsers helped us fight against intrusive pop-up ads.

Today, we're in a similar situation to what we faced in the early 00s except this time, our browsers have betrayed our trust.

Simple to complex

In the earlier days of the web, websites were relatively simple. You could scroll and read. You could click on links that took you to other places. By the time I was using a web browser, graphics were displayed on the websites directly. That's an innovation that didn't exist in the earliest browsers. Adding images? An improvement. I suspect that's where ads really kicked off, but we'll get there.

Eventually, people and companies wanted to do more with their browsers than just read, scroll, click, and look at images. Eventually, we'd want to do everything in our browser that we could do in our computers. That's a story for another day but it's not just a bunny trail. Nope, we're stopping at this sight seeing spot for a reason. In the mid-90s, Javascript was invented.

The Pop-up War

HTML isn't a programming language in the same way that Basic, C, Perl, etc. are. It's a markup language, designed to format and display hypertext. Javascript let you run programs in your browser. At first, they were simple. But not too simple to avoid the creation of one of the first great menaces of the internet: the pop-up ad.

You're browsing a site — perhaps several — and suddenly a new window pops up. It's got an ad in it. Extremely annoying. You close it. Maybe it opens another. Soon, you're playing whack-a-mole with pop-ups.

Eventually, the pop-up ad was replaced by something even more nefarious: the pop-under. Unless you're watching your taskbar closely, you don't even realize that a casual stroll through the internet is spawning dozens of ad windows you'll have to deal with once you've stopped your session. It was a menace that users couldn't effectively control themselves. Outside intervention was needed.

That intervention came from the browsers themselves. According to Wikipedia, by 2004, even Internet Explorer had pop-up blocking.

Like the flu, pop-overs and pop-unders haven't really gone away. Nefarious advertisers on the seedier parts of the internet use all sorts of tricks to get around the protection that every browser offers today.

The war is over, though. With browsers as our champions, users won.

All Your Data

Our current battle has been going on for a while. Ads are a vital part of revenue for the web but they're out of control.

The advertisers have fancy new tools to ensure that they can tie everything you do on the internet to a profile they can use to advertise to you. It's a surveillance state that would make Jeremy Bentham blush. But don't worry! The only thing they want is to sell us things! And sell our data to others. And manipulate our vote. But that's the absolute limit, we swear!

What else is there?

As if those things weren't reprehensible enough, they've also made most news sites unusable. Try reading an article while the page moves around underneath you as ads load in and out. Random videos play without any interaction. Trying to select some text to highlight it takes you to new pages.

The most popular browser, Chrome, is owned by one of the largest advertising companies in the world. Chrome doesn't want you running a real, effective ad blocker so they've shut down the interfaces that allow a plug-in to be effective at ad-blocking.

Safari at least gives you an option to use Reader Mode so the page doesn't move around on you while you read. It's also pretty far behind and incompatible with much of the more recent web developments.

Peanut Butter Jelly Time

It's time for browsers to stop betraying their users.

You can have ads. They can't be abusive, though. They can't continue to J. Edgar Hoover our private data and track us. They can't bog down our browsers so much that we have to close them to get our computers' fans to stop blasting hot air continuously. They can't render websites unusable by loading in and out or click hijacking.

Browsers, it's time to implement ad-blocking. Not for ads that respect the privacy of readers and behave themselves in the browser. Pop-up blocking was never about blocking ads. It was about the bad behavior.

Until browsers turn things around, get yourself a browser that will work with an ad blocker. I like Ad Nauseam. Among other things, it lets me see ads on sites that don't use trackers, rewarding sites that are behaving themselves.

Shameless self-promotion

This 'ad' won't track you. It doesn't know who you are. It won't even know if you clicked on it. 😹 If you enjoyed my rant disguised as part history and part advocacy, please consider checking out my first book.

The passengers of the Scampering Pete are on their way to Oshang Daro. If they had more money, they probably would have taken another transit. When the captain of the ship takes ill, five passengers rise to the occasion. Each were looking for a new start and the opportunity presented may be just what they were looking for. Assuming they can survive it!

Death In Transit is now available across ebook stores including Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Everand, Thalia, Smashwords, Vivlio, and Fable.

#Technology

Existence is not a choice, feeding a hunger is.

The ancient sea turtle does not ask for the wet into which it slips,

Nor the cephalopod for the dark that winds around it like a slow, deliberate hand.

The humble flower never chooses the sun that coaxes it open— petal by trembling petal— as if undressing it.

Nor does the gentle butterfly petition the garden where it lands; wings and proboscis quivering at the first shy contact.

But he—

Just a foolish boy with a body too alive for sleep— chose the night instead of rest.

He claimed a patch of earth, bare and waiting, breath shallow in his throat, heart beating hard enough to heat his own skin.

There he made the one choice that undid him— to open himself fully, ribs loosened, defenses stripped away like clothing left behind.

And when her star fell, it did not simply touch him; it pressed against him, sliding into every place he had left unguarded— and in that slow, luminous descent, it melted him from within, leaving heat where longing had once lived alone.

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In Summary: * No complaints about this Thursday at all. Gregorian Chant is playing in my room now, and I still have some night prayers to get to, then a bit of reading, then to bed. That is my plan for the remainder of this night.

Prayers, etc.: * My daily prayers

Health Metrics: * bw= 220.02 lbs. * bp= 147/91 (62)

Exercise: * kegel pelvic floor exercise, half squats, calf raises, wall push-ups

Diet: * 05:50 – 1 peanut butter sandwich * 07:10 – sausage, pancakes, biscuit & jam, 1 breakfast taco * 11:30 – fried chicken, white bread and butter * 16:45 – 1 fresh orange

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 04:30 – listen to local news talk radio * 05:50 – bank accounts activity monitored * 05:55 – read, pray, listen to news reports from various sources * 13:30 to 14:30 – watch old game shows with Sylvia * 14:45 – follow news reports from various sources * 17:00 – listening to The Joe Pags Show * 18:00 – tuning into an NCAA women's basketball game, Arkansas Razorbacks vs. SMU Mustangs * 20:00 – Congrats to the SMU Lady Mustangs who defeated Arkansas 78-63. Now I'll finish my night prayers, put on some relaxing music, and read for a bit before bedtime.

Chess: * 11:15 – moved in all pending CC games

The smartphone in your pocket contains a curious paradox. Apple, one of the world's most valuable companies, builds its own chips, designs its own operating system, and controls every aspect of its ecosystem with obsessive precision. Yet when you tap Safari's search bar, you're not using an Apple search engine. You're using Google. And Google pays Apple a staggering $20 billion every year to keep it that way.

This colossal payment, revealed during the US Department of Justice's antitrust trial against Google, represents far more than a simple business arrangement. It's the visible tip of a fundamental transformation in how digital platforms compete, collaborate, and ultimately extract value from the billions of searches and queries humans perform daily. As artificial intelligence reshapes the search landscape and digital assistants become genuine conversational partners rather than glorified keyword matchers, these backend licensing deals are quietly redrawing the competitive map of the digital economy.

The stakes have never been higher. Search advertising generated $102.9 billion in revenue in the United States alone during 2024, accounting for nearly 40 per cent of all digital advertising spending. But the ground is shifting beneath the industry's feet. AI-powered search experiences from OpenAI's ChatGPT, Microsoft's Copilot, and Google's own AI Overviews are fundamentally changing how people find information, and these changes threaten to upend decades of established business models. Into this volatile mix come a new wave of licensing deals, platform partnerships, and strategic alliances that could determine which companies dominate the next generation of digital interaction.

When Search Was Simple

To understand where we're heading, it helps to grasp how we got here. Google's dominance in search wasn't accidental. The company built the best search engine, captured roughly 90 per cent of the market, and then methodically paid billions to ensure its search bar appeared by default on every device that mattered. Apple, Samsung, Mozilla, and countless other device manufacturers and browser makers accepted these payments, making Google the path of least resistance for billions of users worldwide.

The economics were brutally simple. Google paid Apple $20 billion annually, representing roughly 21 per cent of Apple's entire services revenue in 2024. In exchange, Google maintained its dominant position in mobile search, where it captured nearly 95 per cent of smartphone searches. For Apple, this represented essentially free money, high-margin revenue that required no product development, no customer support, no operational complexity. The company simply collected a 36 per cent commission on advertising revenue generated from Safari searches.

Judge Amit Mehta, in his landmark August 2024 ruling in United States v. Google LLC, described this arrangement with clinical precision: “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly.” The 277-page opinion found that Google's exclusive contracts violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act, maintaining illegal monopoly power in general search services and text advertising markets.

Yet even as the legal system caught up with Google's practices, a more profound transformation was already underway. The rise of large language models and generative AI was creating an entirely new category of digital interaction, one where traditional search might become just one option among many. And the companies positioning themselves for this future weren't waiting for courts to dictate the terms.

When Assistants Get Smart

Apple's June 2024 partnership announcement with OpenAI marked a watershed moment. The integration of ChatGPT, powered by GPT-4o, into iOS, iPadOS, and macOS represented something fundamentally different from the Google search deal. This wasn't about directing queries to an existing search engine; it was about embedding advanced AI capabilities directly into the operating system's fabric.

The deal's structure reveals the shifting economics of the AI era. Unlike the Google arrangement, where billions of dollars changed hands annually, the OpenAI partnership reportedly involves no direct payment from Apple to OpenAI. Instead, OpenAI gains exposure to over one billion potential users across Apple's device ecosystem. Users can access ChatGPT for free without creating an account, and premium ChatGPT subscribers can connect their accounts to access advanced features. For OpenAI, the deal represents a potential path to reaching one billion users, a scale that could transform the company's trajectory.

But here's where it gets interesting. Apple didn't abandon Google when it partnered with OpenAI. The Google search deal continues, meaning Apple now has two horses in the race: traditional search through Google and conversational AI through OpenAI. Siri, Apple's long-struggling digital assistant, can now call upon ChatGPT when it encounters queries beyond its capabilities, whilst maintaining Google as the default search engine for web searches.

This dual-track strategy reflects a crucial truth about the current moment: nobody knows exactly how the search and assistant markets will evolve. Will users prefer traditional search results with AI-generated summaries, as Google is betting with its AI Overviews feature? Or will they migrate to conversational AI interfaces that provide direct answers without traditional web links? Apple's strategy is to cover both scenarios whilst maintaining optionality.

Microsoft, meanwhile, had moved earlier and more aggressively. The company's multi-billion dollar investment in OpenAI, first disclosed in January 2023, gave it exclusive rights to integrate OpenAI's technology into its products. Bing, Microsoft's perennial search underdog, became the first major search engine to integrate GPT-4 directly into search results. The new Bing, announced in February 2023, promised to “reinvent search” by combining traditional web results with AI-generated summaries and conversational interactions.

The Microsoft-OpenAI arrangement differs fundamentally from the Apple-Google model. Rather than simply paying for default placement, Microsoft invested billions directly in OpenAI, reportedly securing 49 per cent of the company's profits until Microsoft recoups its investment. This structure aligns incentives more closely: Microsoft succeeds if OpenAI succeeds, and vice versa. The partnership granted Microsoft exclusive access to OpenAI's models for integration into commercial products, including not just Bing but also Office applications, Windows, and Azure cloud services.

Yet despite the technological leap, Bing's market share remains stubbornly low. Even with AI superpowers, Google's dominance barely budged. Google's search market share dipped below 90 per cent for the first time since 2015 in October 2024, but the company still controlled the vast majority of queries. This stubborn reality underscores a crucial lesson: technological superiority alone doesn't break entrenched defaults and user habits.

The Economics of Digital Gatekeeping

The financial mechanics behind these deals reveal the extraordinary value of controlling access points to digital information. Google paid a total of $26.3 billion in 2021 across all its default search placements, with $20 billion going to Apple alone. To put this in perspective, that's more than the entire annual revenue of many Fortune 500 companies, paid simply to remain the default choice.

These payments work because defaults matter enormously. Research on user behaviour consistently shows that overwhelming majorities never change default settings. When Google is the default search engine, around 95 per cent of users never switch. This makes default placement extraordinarily valuable, justifying multi-billion dollar payments that would seem absurd in a genuinely competitive market.

The business model creates what economists call a two-sided market with network effects. On one side, users generate queries. On the other, advertisers pay for access to those users. Google's dominance in search made it the essential platform for digital advertising, and that dominance was maintained partly through ensuring its search bar appeared everywhere users might look for information.

US search advertising revenues surged 15.9 per cent to reach $102.9 billion in 2024, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PwC annual Internet Advertising Revenue Report. Google captured the lion's share, with search spending on Google rising 10 per cent year-over-year in the fourth quarter of 2024 alone. The average cost per click increased 7 per cent, demonstrating that even as queries grew, the value of each search remained robust.

But the AI revolution threatens to disrupt these economics fundamentally. Generative AI search tools experienced an astonishing 525 per cent revenue growth in 2024, albeit from a small base. More concerning for traditional search, studies found that Google search results featuring AI Overviews saw 34.5 per cent lower clickthrough rates compared to traditional results. When users get their answers directly from AI-generated summaries, they don't click through to websites, which undermines the entire advertising model built on those clicks.

Research firm SparkToro found that roughly 60 per cent of Google searches now end without a click to any website. Gartner predicted that traditional search engine volume will decline by 25 per cent by 2026 due to AI chatbot applications. If these trends continue, the entire economic foundation of search advertising could crumble, making those multi-billion dollar default placement deals look like investments in a declining asset.

This creates a fascinating strategic dilemma for companies like Google. The company must integrate AI features to remain competitive and meet user expectations for more sophisticated answers. Yet every AI-generated summary that satisfies a user's query without requiring a click potentially destroys a small amount of advertising value. Google is essentially forced to cannibalise its own business model to prevent competitors from doing it first.

New Street Research estimated that AI Overviews advertising would account for just 1 per cent of Google's search advertising revenues in 2025, growing to 3 per cent in 2026. But this gradual integration masked deeper uncertainties about long-term monetisation. How do you sell advertising against conversational AI interactions that don't involve clicking on links? Google's experiments with embedding ads directly in AI-generated summaries provided one answer, but it remained unclear whether users would accept this model or whether advertisers would pay comparable rates for these new formats.

The Regulatory Hammer Falls

Into this already complex landscape came regulators, wielding antitrust law with renewed vigour. Judge Mehta's August 2024 ruling that Google maintained an illegal monopoly in search triggered a lengthy remedies process, culminating in a May 2025 trial to determine how to restore competition.

The Department of Justice initially proposed aggressive remedies. The DOJ called for Google to divest Chrome, its web browser, and to end exclusive distribution agreements with device makers like Apple and Samsung. The department argued that only structural separation could prevent Google from using its control over key distribution channels to maintain its search monopoly.

Apple moved to intervene in the case, filing motions to defend its “contractual interests” in the Google relationship. The company argued that the Justice Department's efforts would harm consumers and stifle innovation, particularly in artificial intelligence. The filing revealed Apple's dependence on this revenue stream; analysts at J.P. Morgan estimated Apple faced a potential $12.5 billion annual revenue hit if courts forced Google to stop making payments.

The eventual ruling, delivered in September 2025, split the difference. Judge Mehta prohibited Google from entering or maintaining exclusive contracts relating to search distribution but stopped short of requiring Chrome's divestiture. Critically, the ruling allowed Google to continue making payments to partners, just not under exclusive terms. Apple and other partners would need to offer users genuine choices, but they could still receive payments for making Google one available option.

The ruling represented a partial victory for Apple and Google's business relationship whilst establishing important guardrails. As Judge Mehta noted, “Cutting off payments from Google almost certainly will impose substantial, in some cases, crippling, downstream harms to distribution partners.” Mozilla, maker of the Firefox browser, had revealed that search engine royalties totalled $510 million against total revenue of just $594 million in 2022, illustrating the existential dependence some companies had developed on these payments.

Across the Atlantic, European regulators took a different approach. The Digital Markets Act, which came into force in March 2024, designated six companies as “gatekeepers”: Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, and Microsoft. These companies faced strict obligations to enable interoperability, prohibit self-preferencing, and provide fair access to their platforms.

The European Commission opened non-compliance investigations against Alphabet, Apple, and Meta in March 2024. The Commission expressed concern that Alphabet's search preferenced its own vertical services, such as Google Shopping and Google Hotels, over rival offerings. By March 2025, the Commission had informed Alphabet that Google search treated the company's services more favourably than competitors, a violation of DMA provisions.

The DMA's approach differed from US antitrust enforcement in important ways. Rather than requiring proof of market harm through lengthy litigation, the DMA imposed ex ante obligations on designated gatekeepers, shifting the burden to these platforms to demonstrate compliance. Penalties could reach 10 per cent of global annual revenue for violations, or 20 per cent for repeated infringements. The Commission fined Apple €500 million and Meta €200 million in April 2025 for non-compliance.

Critically, the DMA required gatekeepers like Google to share data useful for training search models, potentially lowering barriers for alternative search engines. This provision acknowledged that in the AI era, access to training data mattered as much as access to users. A search engine couldn't compete effectively without both the scale to attract users and the data to train increasingly sophisticated AI models.

The Small Players' Dilemma

For smaller search engines and AI model providers, these backend deals and regulatory interventions created a complex and often contradictory landscape. Companies like DuckDuckGo and Ecosia had built businesses around privacy-focused search, capturing small but loyal user bases. DuckDuckGo held a 0.63 per cent worldwide market share, whilst Ecosia claimed 0.11 per cent.

But these alternative search engines faced a fundamental problem: they didn't actually operate their own search infrastructure. DuckDuckGo sourced its main search results from Bing and Yahoo. Ecosia's search content and advertisements came from Bing. This dependence on larger tech companies for backend infrastructure limited their ability to truly differentiate and left them vulnerable to changes in these upstream relationships.

The barrier to entry for building a competitive search index was immense. Google had spent decades and tens of billions of dollars crawling the web, indexing pages, and refining ranking algorithms. Microsoft's Bing represented a similar massive investment. Smaller players simply couldn't match this scale of infrastructure investment and ongoing operational costs.

In November 2024, Ecosia and Qwant announced a partnership to build a European search index, explicitly aiming to reduce dependence on US technology companies. The initiative acknowledged that the Digital Markets Act's requirement for Google to share data provided an opening, but it would take years and substantial investment to build a competitive alternative index.

The shift towards generative AI created additional barriers for smaller players. Training large language models required not just vast amounts of data but also expensive computing infrastructure. Smaller AI firms often faced 12 to 18-month wait times for GPU delivery, whilst well-capitalised hyperscalers secured priority access to scarce H100 and next-generation G100 accelerators through billion-dollar pre-purchase contracts.

Cloud infrastructure dependency compounded these challenges. Smaller AI companies weren't just running on the cloud; they were locked into it. Big Tech companies structured deals to ensure that partner rollouts were routed through their cloud infrastructure, creating additional revenue streams and control points. A startup building on Amazon's Bedrock platform or Microsoft's Azure AI services generated ongoing cloud computing fees for these giants, even if it charged end-users directly.

Yet open-source models provided some countervailing force. Over 50 per cent of foundation models were available with open weights, meaning an AI startup could download a state-of-the-art model and build on it rather than investing millions training from scratch. Meta's Llama models, Mistral's offerings, and numerous other open alternatives lowered barriers to entry for application developers, even if training truly frontier models remained the province of well-funded labs.

The Apple-OpenAI deal illustrated both the opportunities and limitations for AI startups in this environment. On one hand, OpenAI's access to over a billion Apple devices represented extraordinary distribution that no startup could hope to match independently. On the other, the deal didn't provide OpenAI with direct payment from Apple, relying instead on the assumption that exposure would drive premium subscriptions and enterprise deals.

For smaller AI model providers, securing similar distribution deals appeared nearly impossible. Anthropic, despite raising billions from both Amazon and Google, took a different path, focusing on enterprise partnerships with companies like Cognizant, Salesforce, and Palantir rather than pursuing consumer platform deals. Anthropic's strategy reflected a pragmatic assessment that without Apple or Google-scale consumer platforms, the path to scale ran through business customers and cloud marketplaces.

Amazon's $4 billion investment in Anthropic, completed in March 2024, illustrated the deepening vertical integration between cloud providers and AI model developers. The investment gave Anthropic capital and guaranteed compute access through Amazon Web Services, whilst Amazon gained a competitive AI offering for its cloud customers. Similar dynamics played out with Google's investments in Anthropic and Microsoft's OpenAI partnership.

These investment structures created a new kind of gatekeeping. If the major cloud providers each had preferred AI partners, smaller model developers might struggle to secure both the computing resources needed for training and the distribution channels necessary for reaching customers. The market appeared to be consolidating into a handful of vertically integrated stacks: Microsoft-OpenAI, Google-Anthropic-Google's own models, Amazon-Anthropic, and Apple's multi-partner approach.

Search Monetisation in the AI Era

The transition from traditional search to AI-powered experiences raised fundamental questions about monetisation. The old model was straightforward: users entered queries, search engines displayed results along with relevant advertisements, and advertisers paid per click. This generated enormous revenues because queries signalled clear intent, making search advertising uniquely valuable.

AI-powered interactions threatened to disrupt this model in multiple ways. When a user asked ChatGPT or Claude a question and received a comprehensive answer, no advertisement appeared, and no advertiser paid anyone. The AI companies were essentially providing information services without a clear revenue model beyond subscription fees and enterprise licensing.

Google faced this challenge most acutely. The company had begun rolling out AI Overviews, which used generative AI to provide summaries at the top of search results. These summaries answered many queries directly, reducing the need for users to click through to websites. Studies found that clicks for URLs included in AI Overviews decreased by 8.9 per cent compared to when they appeared as normal search result links.

For publishers and websites that relied on search traffic, this was potentially catastrophic. If AI systems summarised content without driving clicks, the entire ecosystem of ad-supported content faced an existential threat. This explained the wave of licensing deals between AI companies and publishers throughout 2024.

OpenAI signed content licensing deals with News Corp (reportedly worth over $250 million over five years), The Atlantic, Condé Nast, and Hearst. Microsoft signed deals with the Financial Times, Reuters, Axel Springer, and USA Today Network for its Copilot Daily feature. Google signed its first publisher deal with the Associated Press in January 2025. Amazon courted publishers for its reinvented Alexa, securing a deal with The New York Times.

These deals typically involved two components: one-off payments for training rights to historical content, and ongoing variable payments for featuring current content with attribution. Axel Springer's $25 million deal with OpenAI, for instance, included both a training payment and backend fees based on usage.

The licensing deals served multiple purposes. They provided AI companies with high-quality training data and current information to improve model accuracy. They gave publishers new revenue streams to offset declining search traffic and programmatic advertising revenue. And they began establishing a new economic model for the AI era, where content creators received compensation for their contributions to AI training and operation.

But the deals also raised competitive concerns. If only the largest, best-funded AI companies could afford expensive licensing arrangements with major publishers, smaller model providers faced yet another barrier to competing effectively. The cost of content licensing could become a significant moat, favouring incumbents over startups.

Moreover, these deals didn't solve the fundamental monetisation challenge. Even with licensed content, AI companies still needed business models beyond subscriptions. ChatGPT Plus cost $20 per month, whilst enterprise deals commanded higher rates, but it wasn't clear whether subscription revenue alone could support the massive computing costs of running large language models at scale.

Advertising remained the obvious answer, but integrating advertisements into conversational AI experiences proved challenging. Users had grown accustomed to ad-free interactions with ChatGPT and Claude. Introducing advertisements risked degrading the user experience and driving users to competitors. Yet without advertising or equivalently robust revenue models, it wasn't clear how these services could achieve sustainable profitability at massive scale.

Google's experiments with advertising in AI Overviews represented one potential path forward. By embedding contextually relevant product recommendations and sponsored content within AI-generated summaries, Google aimed to preserve advertising revenue whilst providing the enhanced experiences users expected. But clickthrough rates remained lower than traditional search advertising, and it remained to be seen whether advertisers would pay comparable rates for these new formats.

The average ad spending per internet user in the Search Advertising market was estimated at $58.79 globally in 2025. For AI-powered experiences to generate comparable revenue, they would need to capture similar or greater value per interaction. This seemed plausible for high-intent commercial queries but much harder for informational searches where users simply wanted answers without purchase intent.

Collaboration, Competition, and Consolidation

The deals between platform owners and AI providers, search engines and publishers, and cloud providers and model developers painted a picture of an industry in flux. Old competitive boundaries were dissolving as former rivals became strategic partners whilst ostensibly collaborating companies competed in adjacent markets.

Apple's dual strategy with Google and OpenAI exemplified this complexity. The company maintained its lucrative search deal with Google whilst simultaneously partnering with Google's primary AI competitor. This hedging strategy made sense during a transition period when the ultimate shape of user behaviour remained uncertain. But it also created tensions: how would Apple balance these relationships if Google's search and OpenAI's ChatGPT increasingly competed for the same queries?

The regulatory environment added further complexity. The September 2025 ruling allowed Google to continue making payments whilst prohibiting exclusivity, but the practical implementation remained unclear. How would Apple, Samsung, and other partners implement genuine choice mechanisms? Would users face decision fatigue from too many options, leading them to stick with familiar defaults anyway?

The European Digital Markets Act's more prescriptive approach demanded specific interoperability and data-sharing requirements, but enforcement remained challenging. The Commission's investigations and fines demonstrated willingness to punish non-compliance, yet the underlying market dynamics favouring scale and integration proved hard to counteract through regulation alone.

For smaller companies, the landscape appeared increasingly difficult. The combination of infrastructure barriers, data access challenges, capital requirements, and distribution bottlenecks created formidable obstacles. Open-source models provided some relief, but the gap between open models and the capabilities of frontier systems from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic remained substantial.

The venture capital funding environment for AI startups remained robust, with billions flowing into the sector. But increasingly, strategic investments from cloud providers and large tech companies dominated financing rounds. These investments came with strings attached: compute credits tied to specific cloud platforms, distribution channels through investor platforms, and expectations about technology stack choices. The apparent abundance of capital masked a reality where meaningful independence from the major platforms became harder to maintain.

Industry consolidation appeared likely to continue. Just as the cloud infrastructure market concentrated into three major players (Amazon, Microsoft, and Google), the AI model and digital assistant markets seemed headed towards a similarly concentrated structure. The economics of scale in training, the advantages of vertical integration between models and distribution, and the network effects from user data all pushed towards consolidation.

Yet genuine innovation remained possible around the edges. Specialised models for specific domains, novel interaction paradigms, privacy-focused alternatives, and open-source collaboration all represented paths where smaller players could potentially carve out sustainable niches. The challenge was whether these niches could grow large enough to represent genuine alternatives to the dominant platforms.

The New Digital Divide

The backend deals reshaping search and digital assistants represent more than business arrangements between wealthy corporations. They reflect and reinforce a fundamental divide in the digital economy between companies with platform power and everyone else. Those controlling the devices people use, the operating systems running on those devices, and the default experiences presented to users wield extraordinary influence over which technologies succeed and which fail.

The $20 billion annual payment from Google to Apple isn't just a revenue stream; it's a tax on search monetisation that Google pays to maintain access to Apple's users. The multi-billion dollar investments in OpenAI and Anthropic aren't just capital allocations; they're defensive moats ensuring that Microsoft, Amazon, and Google maintain positions in whatever AI-powered future emerges.

For users, these deals often bring genuine benefits: better integrated experiences, more sophisticated capabilities, and services they can access without explicit payment. Apple users gained ChatGPT integration without monthly fees. Google users received AI-enhanced search results at no additional cost. The major platforms competed partly by giving away AI-powered features that would have seemed miraculous just years earlier.

Yet this largesse came with less visible costs. Competition constrained by billion-dollar barriers to entry was less vigorous than it might otherwise be. Innovation from smaller players struggled to reach users trapped behind platform gatekeepers. And the concentration of power in a handful of companies created systemic risks and governance challenges that societies were still learning to address.

The regulatory response, whilst increasingly aggressive, struggled to keep pace with market evolution. By the time courts ruled on Google's search monopoly, the market was already transitioning towards AI-powered experiences that might render traditional search less central. The remedies imposed risked fighting the last war whilst the next one had already begun.

Looking forward, the competitive dynamics for digital assistants and search monetisation will likely reflect broader patterns of platform power and vertical integration. Success will depend not just on building superior technology but on securing access to users, training data, computing infrastructure, and content licensing. The backend deals determining these access points will shape which companies thrive and which struggle to compete.

The market isn't winner-take-all, but neither is it a level playing field where merit alone determines outcomes. Platform power, network effects, capital resources, and strategic partnerships create strong advantages for incumbents and favourably positioned challengers. Smaller players can succeed, but increasingly only in partnership with or in niches uncontested by the major platforms.

For regulators, the challenge will be balancing the genuine benefits of integration and scale against the competitive and innovation harms from excessive concentration. Neither the US antitrust approach nor the EU's ex ante regulatory framework has yet found the right balance, and both will likely require continued adaptation as markets evolve.

The billion-dollar handshakes between platform owners and AI providers aren't ending anytime soon. They're evolving, becoming more sophisticated, and extending into new areas as the technological landscape shifts. Understanding these deals and their implications matters not just for industry insiders but for anyone concerned with how power, innovation, and value are distributed in the digital economy. The search bar on your phone isn't just a tool for finding information; it's a battleground where the future of digital interaction is being determined, one lucrative partnership at a time.

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Sources and References

1. US Department of Justice. (2024, August 5). “Department of Justice Prevails in Landmark Antitrust Case Against Google.” Official press release. https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/department-justice-prevails-landmark-antitrust-case-against-google

2. Mehta, A. (2024). United States v. Google LLC, Case No. 20-cv-3010. United States District Court for the District of Columbia. 277-page opinion.

3. IAB & PwC. (2024). “Internet Advertising Revenue Report 2024.” Reports $102.9 billion in US search advertising revenue, representing 39.8% of total digital advertising.

4. Fortune. (2025, July 30). “Apple risks $12.5 billion revenue hit as judge weighs Google antitrust remedies, J.P.Morgan warns.” https://fortune.com/2025/07/30/apple-google-jpmorgan-billion-revenue-hit-antitrust-doj-case/

5. OpenAI. (2024, June). “OpenAI and Apple announce partnership.” Official announcement. https://openai.com/index/openai-and-apple-announce-partnership/

6. Microsoft. (2023, February 7). “Reinventing search with a new AI-powered Microsoft Bing and Edge, your copilot for the web.” Official Microsoft Blog.

7. European Commission. (2024, March 25). “Commission opens non-compliance investigations against Alphabet, Apple and Meta under the Digital Markets Act.” Official press release.

8. Search Engine Land. (2024). “Google admits to paying Apple 36% of Safari revenue.” https://searchengineland.com/google-pay-apple-safari-revenue-antitrust-trial-434775

9. eMarketer. (2024). “Generative Search Trends 2024.” Reports 525% revenue growth for AI-driven search engines and 34.5% lower CTR for AI Overview results.

10. CNBC. (2024, November 12). “Ecosia, Qwant partner on search engine tech to counter Google's power.” Reports on European search index initiative.

11. Digiday. (2024). “2024 in review: A timeline of the major deals between publishers and AI companies.” Comprehensive overview of content licensing agreements.

12. Anthropic. (2024). “Anthropic and Salesforce expand partnership to bring Claude to regulated industries.” Official company announcement.

13. Statista. (2024). “US Google search ad revenue 2024.” Reports Google's search advertising revenue and market share data.

14. Gartner Research. (2024). Prediction of 25% decline in traditional search engine volume by 2026 due to AI chatbot applications.

15. SparkToro. (2024). Research finding that approximately 60% of Google searches end without a click to any website.

16. New Street Research. (2025). Analysis projecting AI Overviews advertising at 1% of Google search ad revenue in 2025, growing to 3% in 2026.

17. Harvard Law Review. (2024). “United States v. Google, LLC.” Legal analysis of the antitrust case. Volume 138.

18. Mozilla Foundation. (2023). Annual financial disclosure showing $510 million in search engine royalties against $594 million total revenue in 2022.

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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