I guess it’s gonna be weird trying to figure out how to not be codependent, I think that’s just something that I am always predisposed to in a relationship if I’m being honest.

Why Albums Are Fading Away

Album rollouts once turned music into a grand narrative, teasing singles and revealing artwork layer by layer, culminating in a full project that demanded complete attention. These events captured the essence of albums as artistic statements, where tracks intertwined like chapters in a story. As of 2026, that tradition is dissolving. Streaming platforms and social media fragment listening into isolated moments, sidelining cohesive works for bite-sized singles that algorithms favor. Rollouts, reliant on sustained anticipation, now clash with a culture of instant consumption.

Albums provided depth and sequence, rewarding patience with evolving themes and emotional arcs. Today’s ecosystem prioritizes playlists and clips, rendering full projects relics. This shift reflects broader changes in how music is created, discovered, and experienced.

The Album’s Heyday: Unity and Immersion

Albums peaked when listening meant commitment. Artists sequenced tracks deliberately, with openers setting the tone, interludes bridging ideas, and closers delivering resolution. Think conceptual masterpieces like OK Computer or To Pimp a Butterfly, where every element served the whole. Fans pored over liner notes, debated motifs, and replayed for nuances.

Rollouts amplified this magic: lead singles acted as appetizers, cryptic videos hinted at mysteries, and interviews unpacked inspirations. Scarcity ruled, as releases arrived infrequently, turning each one into a ritual. Listeners gathered for first spins, absorbing narratives that unfolded over 40 minutes. The format honored ambition and allowed experimentation beyond radio constraints.

Independent creators thrived in this space too, crafting bedroom epics shared through tapes or early digital platforms. Albums embodied vision, turning solitary work into a shared journey.

Streaming’s Fragmentation Effect

Platforms like Spotify reshaped everything after 2015. Algorithms curate playlists from disparate tracks, ignoring intended order. A new album surfaces briefly in Release Radar, then scatters as listeners cherry-pick songs that fit algorithmic preferences. With over 120,000 daily uploads, full projects drown in noise unless propelled by viral singles.

Attention spans compound the fracture. TikTok and Reels thrive on 15-second hooks, training ears for snippets instead of sequences. Why endure builds and payoffs when clips deliver instant highs? Rollouts, designed for weeks of buildup, fatigue quickly in this environment. Teasers merge into endless feeds, and launch days vanish amid scrolls.

The result is that albums become optional extras. Playlists now dominate 70 percent of listening, and full spins are rare outside superfans. Cohesion erodes as tracks exist in isolation.

Listener Habits: Playlists Over Narratives

Culture now revolves around moods, not stories. Custom playlists such as “Late Night Vibes” or “Road Trip Energy” blend eras and artists, stripping context. Fans curate personal flows, bypassing original visions. Social discovery reinforces this pattern: a viral clip crowns a song while its album is forgotten.

Daily rhythms reinforce the trend. Music becomes background to commutes, workouts, and scrolls. Albums demand focused attention; singles slip seamlessly into fragmented listening. Generational tastes push this further, as younger audiences favor AI-curated lists and rarely seek artist intent.

Nostalgia persists for vinyl rituals, but even collectors stream previews first. Albums retreat to niche appreciation.

Creative Pressures: Hooks Trump Depth

Artists adapt to survive. Rollouts demand instant appeal, and lead singles must hook immediately or risk sinking the project. Depth is sacrificed. Songs shorten, structures simplify, and experiments are trimmed for skip-proofing. Spoken bridges, ambient fades, and multi-part suites disappear, replaced by uniform pop architecture.

The emotional toll shows in the output: polished but predictable. Ambition wanes as creators chase playlist metrics instead of personal arcs. Rollouts worsen this, turning art into countdowns where hype dictates pace rather than inspiration.

Online forums echo laments like “Albums feel like chores now.” Yet the cycle endures, dooming full works to obscurity.

The Rise of Singles and Loose Series

Singles fill the void naturally. Frequent drops align with algorithmic demands, allowing artists to test ideas without full commitment. Themed series emerge, forming “eras” of loosely connected tracks that act as de facto albums without rigid hype. Waterfall release strategies preview collections through standouts, blending discovery with eventual unity.

Visual and spatial formats evolve too, from short films per track to immersive audio experiences. Albums fragment into modular pieces that fans or playlists can reassemble.

Live and Niche Revivals

Stages preserve album spirit for a while, with full plays at intimate shows that recapture the original sequence. Festivals showcase deep cuts, but streaming remains the main point of contact. Niche platforms like Bandcamp sustain direct sales to completists, where pay-what-you-want models honor the full project.

Technology brings glimmers of hope, such as VR listening parties and interactive apps that simulate rollouts. Yet the mainstream still bends toward singles.

Cultural Ripples: Music as Ephemeral Content

This fade reshapes industry norms. Labels prioritize tracks, media coverage shrinks for album critiques, and awards celebrate singles rather than cohesive visions. Discovery depends on virality instead of narrative craft.

There is an upside to accessibility. Global creators can release freely without the burden of project-scale demands. Diversity flourishes in shorter forms.

Glimmers of Resistance

Superfans keep albums alive through subscriptions and exclusives. Certain genres such as prog and ambient continue to defy the trends, crafting expansive works for dedicated listeners. Newsletters and online communities rebuild hype organically, sharing process over spectacle.

Elegy for the Album Era

Albums die from mismatch, vessels of depth in a shallow, fragmented sea. Rollouts and their fanfare fade quietly. Music simplifies into moments, solos into statements, and playlists into panoramas.

Echoes remain in rediscovered gems, late-night immersions, and the persistent pull toward wholeness. The form may wane, but the hunger for stories endures.

Why words aren’t the only way to say something — and how instrumental tracks can carry as much narrative weight as a song with vocals

There’s a familiar insecurity that creeps in when you make mostly instrumental electronic music:

“Is this enough? Should I be writing lyrics? Will anyone care about a track that doesn’t say something out loud?”

Lyrics have a built-in way of signaling meaning. They spell things out. They get quoted, dissected, and turned into captions and tattoos. In a culture obsessed with language and shareable lines, it’s easy to assume that “real” storytelling requires words.

But if electronic music has taught us anything over the past few decades, it’s this: you can tell a complete, emotionally coherent story without a single lyric. The question isn’t “lyrics or no lyrics?” It’s “what kind of storytelling am I actually trying to do?”

Why lyrics feel like the “default” version of storytelling

Most of us grew up in a music culture where songs = singers + words.

Pop, rock, rap, folk, R&B — so much of the canon is lyric-centric that we start to think of language as the primary payload of music. The instrumental backing becomes the “supporting cast” to the vocal.

That bias quietly shapes how we judge our own work:

• A beat without a topline can feel “unfinished.”
• A fully produced instrumental somehow seems like a demo.
• We call entire genres “beat music” or “background” if no one sings on them.

This isn’t entirely irrational. Lyrics do a few things extremely well:

• They anchor the listener’s interpretation.
• They create clear hooks people can remember in one listen.
• They allow direct statements: political, personal, narrative.
• They travel well across social media as text and quotable moments.

If your goal is to communicate something specific and overt — “this break-up wrecked me,” “this system is broken,” “I grew up like this” — lyrics are a straight line from your brain to the listener’s.

But that directness has a shadow side: once you say something explicitly, it can limit how a track lives in people’s imaginations.

Instrumental storytelling operates on different rules.

How instrumental tracks tell stories without words

When you strip out lyrics, you’re not stripping out meaning. You’re shifting where that meaning lives.

Instrumental storytelling leans on elements like:

• Harmony and tonality: tension, release, ambiguity, brightness, darkness.
• Dynamics: the size and intensity of sections, the way things bloom or retreat.
• Texture and timbre: harsh vs soft, synthetic vs organic, clean vs distorted.
• Rhythm: patterns, grooves, syncopation, repetition vs disruption.
• Structure: how sections emerge, return, or refuse to resolve.
• Space and ambience: reverb, delay, stereo field, how “close” or “far” the sound feels.

These are not just technical choices. They’re narrative devices.

An evolving pad that slowly opens over 32 bars tells a story of emergence. A sudden filter cutoff and dry kick in the middle of a euphoric lead line can feel like the floor dropping out. A melody that never quite resolves keeps the listener emotionally suspended.

Listeners might not be able to explain why they feel what they feel, but they don’t need language for the story to land.

In some ways, instrumental tracks can feel more personal because the meaning isn’t pre-digested. The listener completes the story with their own experiences, memories, and associations.

The different kinds of “story” in electronic music

Part of the confusion around lyrics vs instrumentals comes from assuming storytelling always means “a linear plot.”

But in electronic music, “story” often means something broader:

• Emotional arc: how you feel at the start vs the end.
• Energetic journey: how intensity, tempo, and density evolve.
• Spatial journey: how the perceived environment shifts, claustrophobic to wide open, dry to wet, mono to stereo.
• Temporal narrative: how sound design implies time (analogue nostalgia, futuristic textures, retro references).

Lyrics excel at narrative clarity: “this happened, then this, and I feel this.”

Instrumental storytelling excels at embodied experience: “I don’t know why, but I feel like I’ve been somewhere.”

Both are valid. They just operate on different channels.

When lyrics actually help electronic music

There are times when adding lyrics (or even minimal vocal elements) can unlock something an instrumental can’t quite reach.

Lyrics are powerful when you want to:

• Make a concept explicit rather than implied.
• Invite people into a very specific perspective or identity.
• Create sing-along moments that work in communal spaces.
• Anchor a track in a particular language or culture.
• Communicate nuance that sound alone might obscure.

Even in underground electronic scenes, vocal snippets and phrases show up all the time, not as full, linear verses, but as semantic anchors:

• A single line repeated over a drop that frames the entire track.
• Chopped, time-stretched phrases that suggest meaning more than they state it.
• Spoken-word fragments that set a mood or context.

In those cases, language is another instrument. It doesn’t dominate the track; it punctuates it.

Full lyrical songs in electronic music take that further. Think of how a strong topline can transform a track from club weapon to something that resonates in headphones and memories.

The key is intention: are you adding lyrics because the track truly wants language, or because you’re afraid people won’t respect an instrumental?

The pressure to “add a vocalist” and why it can backfire

There’s a subtle industry bias that whispers: “If you want this to go anywhere, you need a vocal on it.”

Labels ask for it. Playlists favor it. Many listeners gravitate to it. So producers end up:

• Forcing vocal features onto tracks that were never designed to carry one.
• Writing generic toplines because “something has to be there.”
• Diluting the most interesting parts of their arrangement to make space for a mediocre song.

The result is often a hybrid that satisfies no one: the song isn’t strong enough to compete as a pop track, and the production isn’t allowed to breathe like a fully instrumental work.

It’s not that vocals ruin electronic music; far from it. Some of the most powerful electronic records are vocal-led. But when the reason for adding vocals is external pressure rather than internal necessity, you can feel it.

Sometimes the track is already speaking fluently. It doesn’t need a narrator.

Instrumental music in a lyric-obsessed culture

There’s a real question here: in a world dominated by caption culture and quotable lines, does instrumental music stand a chance of being heard and understood?

Instrumental artists face particular challenges:

• It’s harder to generate shareable text-based content around a wordless track.
• People often ask “what’s this about?” expecting a narrative, not a feeling.
• Algorithms and editorial teams may favor vocal tracks as “more accessible.”

But there are also advantages:

• Instrumentals travel well across language barriers.
• They slot naturally into film, games, streaming, and ambient listening.
• They leave space for listeners to attach their own meanings, which can deepen long-term connection.

Many listeners already use instrumental electronic music as the soundtrack to their lives: work, study, night drives, grief, joy. The story might be happening in their world rather than inside the song’s text, but the relationship is just as real.

You don’t have to explain everything for your music to matter.

Hybrid approaches: when sound design becomes “the lyric”

One of the most interesting spaces in electronic music is the grey area where you use vocal techniques without traditional songwriting — or use sound design in ways that feel like language.

Think about:

• Vocal chops as melodic instruments, where syllables become pure texture.
• Heavily processed phrases that are technically words but function more as timbral events.
• Motivic hooks (short, memorable melodic shapes) that are as catchy as a sung chorus.
• Sound motifs that return across tracks, almost like characters in a story.

In these cases, the “lyric” isn’t text. It’s identity.

A single synth patch with a distinctive gesture can be as recognizable as a singer’s voice. A drum pattern can become a signature phrase. A recurring field recording or tonal motif can create continuity across a body of work in the way themes do in novels or films.

If you think of storytelling as “building a world and letting people visit it,” then every sound choice is world-building, whether or not anyone is singing in that world.

Choosing your medium of meaning on purpose

So where does this leave you, especially if you’re an electronic producer feeling the pull between lyrical songs and pure instrumentals?

A useful question to ask per track is:

“What is the core thing this piece wants to communicate — and what’s the most honest medium for that?”

Some possibilities:

• If you need to process a specific experience or tell a clear personal story: lyrics might be the right tool.
• If you’re exploring mood, space, or abstract states: instrumental forms might be better.
• If you want both clarity and ambiguity: a hybrid track with sparse, strong phrases and rich instrumental development can sit in the middle.

You don’t have to pick one identity forever. You can be an electronic artist who:

• Releases mostly instrumentals but occasionally drops a vocal-led track when it really calls for it.
• Uses vocal textures as instruments without stepping into full songwriting every time.
• Collaborates with vocalists as guests in your sonic world, not as the default center.

The key is to make a conscious decision, not a defensive one.

“Everyone else is doing vocal tracks” is not a creative reason. “This idea requires words” is.

Giving instrumental work the framing it deserves

One practical piece that often gets overlooked: even if your music is instrumental, you can still frame it with language around the track.

You can:

• Use titles that hint at the emotional or conceptual space of the piece.
• Write short descriptions or liner notes for your newsletter or Bandcamp.
• Share the story of how the track came to be, even if the track itself is wordless.
• Name recurring themes or sounds so listeners start to recognize your internal language.

This doesn’t mean over-explaining or turning every track into a dissertation. It just means giving listeners a little foothold, a sense that there is a story here, even if it’s not sung.

Words can live around your music without living inside it.

You’re allowed to let the synth speak

At the end of the day, both lyric writing and instrumental storytelling are languages. Each has strengths, limitations, and unique affordances.

Lyrics:

• Clear, quote-ready, socially shareable.
• Great for direct statements and character-driven narratives.
• Can sometimes over-determine the listening experience.

Instrumental storytelling:

• Ambiguous, immersive, deeply personal in interpretation.
• Great for emotional arcs, atmospheres, and non-verbal experiences.
• Can feel “invisible” in a culture that worships words, unless you frame it well.

Neither is inherently superior. What matters is whether the method you choose for a given piece is true to what that piece needs to be.

If you’re an electronic producer whose heart lives in sounds, spaces, and textures, you don’t owe anyone a chorus just to legitimize your work. You’re already telling stories, just in a language that doesn’t always show up in quotes on social media.

Sometimes the most honest thing you can do is let the synth speak, and trust that the right listeners will hear exactly what you mean.

The Algorithm Isn’t Magic, It’s Math

There’s a weird moment every indie artist hits: you stare at your Spotify stats, see streams trickling in, and still feel like the platform is pretending you don’t exist. That’s usually the moment you run into a phrase you never see in the app itself: Spotify’s Popularity Index. It’s invisible to listeners, but for your tracks, it quietly behaves like a trust score.

The Number That Judges Your Songs

Spotify gives every track and every artist a score from 0 to 100. You never see it inside your artist dashboard, it’s not part of your Wrapped, and yet it has a say in who gets recommended, who lands in algorithmic playlists, and who stays stuck in “friends and family” mode.

The important part: this number is about momentum, not history.

It leans heavily on things like:

• How many people are listening right now (usually over the last few weeks)
• How many of them save the track to their library
• How often it gets added to personal playlists
• How many people actually listen through instead of skipping early
• Whether it shows up in algorithmic or editorial playlists and how people react there

An old track that suddenly goes semi-viral can shoot up. A “successful” release from last year can sink to mediocrity if nobody revisits it. The index isn’t asking “Did this song ever do well?” It’s asking, “Is this song still alive?”

That’s uncomfortable, but it explains a lot of “why did this flop?” feelings.

In the screenshot from my track “I Need It All” — you can see exactly how this plays out in the real world. Since release, it has been picked up by Discover Weekly three separate times in just under two months, each spike lining up with a little burst of new listeners and saves. That’s the Popularity Index in motion: once the song proved it could hold attention, the algorithm kept circling back to test it with fresh audiences.

How It Interacts With the Algorithm

The index isn’t the only thing Spotify uses, but it’s wired into several systems you should care about:

• How often you get slotted into Radio and Autoplay after other artists
• Whether your new release gets tested in Release Radar beyond your existing followers
• How often you show up in Discover Weekly for people who listen to similar stuff
• How high you appear in search and “Fans also like”

You never get a notification saying “Congrats, your popularity score passed 50, here’s a cookie.” Instead, you suddenly see small but noticeable shifts: more algorithmic streams, more unknown listeners, more saves from countries you’ve never targeted.

On the flip side, if your popularity score is low, you’re effectively harder to “trust.” Spotify doesn’t want to risk recommending tracks that most people will skip. So it feeds listeners something safer: artists with stronger history of engagement.

That’s why some songs feel like they’re glued to the floor. They’re not “bad”; they’re not generating the kind of behavior that gives Spotify confidence to push them.

The Stuff You Can Actually Influence

You don’t get access to the formula, but the ingredients are clear enough once you look at your own data and talk to other artists. The main levers are:

• Recency of activity

Things that happen in the last few weeks are more powerful than what happened months ago. A short, intense burst of listening is better than a slow, flat line.

• Saves and library adds

A stream says “I heard this once.” A save says “I’m going to come back.” The index pays attention to that difference. High save percentages on a new track are a good sign.

• Playlist behavior

Being on playlists matters, but only if the people who hear the track react well. A small, engaged playlist can be better than a huge one where everyone skips.

• Skip and completion rates

If most listeners leave in the first 15–30 seconds, that’s a red flag. If they stay for most of the track, that’s a green light. Arrangement and intro decisions feed straight into this.

• Repeat listeners

One person listening three times is more meaningful than three people who never return. Repeat plays look like genuine attachment, and that’s exactly what recommendation systems want to amplify.

Those are all things you can affect without a label or a budget. Not perfectly, but enough to tilt the odds.

Designing a Release Around Behavior, Not Hype

Most indie releases follow this pattern: upload, post a link, hope. That’s not a strategy; that’s a wish. If you want the index to move, you have to think like this: “How do I concentrate real, high‑quality activity into a relatively small window?”

• Before release

Warm up your closest listeners first: newsletter subscribers, Discord, group chats, people who already care.

Explain what helps: “If you like this when it drops, a full listen, a save, and adding it to your own playlists does more than any like on social.”

Use pre-saves, but don’t worship them. They’re useful mostly because they turn into automatic day‑one library adds.

• Release week

Treat release week like a focused sprint, not random noise.

Share short, specific moments of the song: a hook, a tension point, a sound design detail.

Tell small stories: why the track exists, why a certain sound is there, what headspace you were in.

Direct people toward actions, not just “check this out when you have time.” The actions that matter are: listening through, saving, and playlisting.

You’re not begging; you’re letting people who support you know how the system works and inviting them to push back against it with you.

Producing With Attention in Mind

There’s always a fear that thinking about skip rates means “sell out.” It doesn’t have to.

You don’t need to turn every song into a two‑minute, instantly‑gratifying loop. You can keep intros, ambience, slow burns. The key is: don’t waste the first impression.

Some ideas that respect both your taste and the listener’s patience:

• Give them something early: a motif, a tone, a chord change, a rhythmic idea that hints at where the track is going.
• Avoid long stretches where “nothing” seems to happen, especially if the track might be heard for the first time through a random playlist.
• Build in replay value: subtle layers, evolving textures, little details that reward multiple listens. The more someone comes back, the better your track looks.

You’re already thinking deeply about sound design and arrangement. This is about adding another question to your process: “If I’d never heard this before, when would I decide to stay or leave?”

Promotion That Feels Human, Not Desperate

As an independent artist, your best weapon isn’t a marketing budget. It’s closeness.

Instead of trying to blast your link at strangers, focus on a small group of people who are willing to act, not just react.

Build a small “inner circle”: 20–100 people who genuinely like your work. Could be a Discord, a Substack audience, private stories, whatever fits your world.

Talk to them like collaborators: “You’re the ones who can actually tip the data in my favor. Here’s how.”

Give them context: early demos, breakdown videos, or explanations of your process so they feel invested when the final track lands.

On the playlist side, skip the fantasy of magically landing on massive editorial lists right away. Smaller, well‑curated user playlists in your niche are easier to reach and often send better‑behaved listeners your way.

You can:

• Pitch to thoughtful curators instead of mass‑spamming everyone with a playlist.
• Trade tracks with other artists at a similar level: “I’ll add yours, you add mine,” as long as it’s genuine and genre‑aligned.
• Make your own playlists that mix your tracks with artists you love. Share them as listening experiences, not just ego catalogues.

A Different Way to Think About the Index

If you strip away the jargon, the Popularity Index is asking a very simple question: “Do people prove with their behavior that this music matters to them?”

You don’t control every variable, but you control more than it feels like:

• You can shape how a listener experiences the first minute.
• You can decide whether a release is random or treated as an event.
• You can choose to build a small, committed base rather than chasing faceless virality.
• You can pay attention to what songs people replay, save, and bring back into their lives.

None of that guarantees a specific score. But it does mean you’re no longer just throwing songs into the void and hoping an opaque system has mercy. You’re creating conditions where, over time, your catalog looks more and more like something Spotify can safely show to strangers.

In other words: you stop waiting to “get picked” and start giving both humans and algorithms good reasons to pick you. That’s a much better place to create from.

How TikTok’s American rescue turned into worse surveillance in a Trump‑friendly package

You would think that after decades of watching platforms play hot potato with our data, we would be harder to fool. Yet every few years, someone wraps surveillance in a flag and calls it safety, and a lot of people nod along like that is progress.

The TikTok panic was a perfect example. The headlines screamed about China collecting data, like the real scandal was the nationality, not the practice itself. The supposed fix felt heroic on the surface: move TikTok’s US operations into American hands, talk loudly about “protecting national security,” and act like the job is done. Problem solved. We can all go back to scrolling.

Except nothing meaningful changed. The data firehose kept running. Location, behavior patterns, interaction graphs, all of it kept flowing. The only real difference was whose lawyers and lobbyists got to sit closest to the tap. In fact, it got worse.

The Handoff That Made It Worse

The neat trick here is selling people on the idea that surveillance is fine as long as it is domestic. As if metadata suddenly becomes respectful when it is mined in Virginia instead of Beijing.

When TikTok landed in a US controlled structure, it did not suddenly become privacy friendly. It just shifted into a system that already lives on tracking, profiling, and prediction at scale. The new setup still pulled in huge amounts of information, still fed it into recommendation systems, and still sat on top of a weak privacy framework that barely protects anyone.

What changed most was the story. Now the data collection could be framed as patriotic. Same machine, same logo, cleaner talking points. But with more political muscle behind it.

The Flag Was Never the Core Problem

China absolutely has an ugly track record on censorship and surveillance. That is not in dispute. But pretending that the problem disappears when an American company is in charge is just dishonest.

US tech giants have been running massive data collection operations for years. They track across websites, apps, devices, and even physical locations. They sell access to audiences, lease out behavioral profiles, and power targeting for politics and commerce. Lawmakers barely flinch at that, but suddenly grow a conscience when the owner is foreign.

So the debate around TikTok turned into a convenient distraction. Focus on China, ignore the entire surveillance model that all the major platforms already use at home. The villain becomes “them,” not “this.”

Where Trump’s Orbit Enters the Chat

There is another piece of this story that makes the whole “we saved TikTok” narrative even harder to swallow. The new power structure around the app does not live in some neutral, apolitical vacuum. It sits inside the orbit of Trump aligned money and influence, the same ecosystem that treats media platforms as weapons, not as public spaces.

That matters. If the group that inherits control over a global attention machine already has a history of gaming outrage, bending narratives, and turning every channel into a loyalty test, you should not expect them to suddenly morph into privacy first idealists. You should expect them to treat TikTok as leverage. As a megaphone. As a way to shape what people see and what never reaches them.

Suddenly the story stops being “We had to protect Americans from a foreign adversary” and starts looking a lot more like “We wanted that power for ourselves.” The concern is not that a platform can track, influence, and censor. The concern is who gets to do it, who they answer to, and what they plan to use it for. Now with even more targeted reach.

Censorship, Just With Better PR

Ownership shifted, but TikTok did not magically become a free expression paradise. If anything, it slid neatly into the same quiet censorship patterns that already shape US based social media, with added political incentives to suppress certain voices.

Modern censorship is rarely a blunt ban. It looks like invisible limits on reach, mysterious guideline violations, and content that just stops being shown. Algorithms suffocate posts without ever saying why. Certain topics quietly sink. Others are pushed to the front. The line between “safety” and “sanitizing” blurs completely.

Once the platform has to please US regulators, advertisers, investors, and a politically connected ownership circle, it follows a familiar playbook. Avoid controversy, minimize political heat, and make the feed as brand friendly and campaign friendly as possible. That is not freedom. It is risk management dressed up as moderation. And it scales faster under aligned leadership.

Privacy Wrapped in Patriotism

The framing around TikTok’s deal was almost textbook. Politicians warned about “foreign access” to American data. Commentators repeated phrases about national security. Then, once a US led structure and Trump aligned money took center stage, the urgency faded. The story shifted from “danger” to “deal completed.”

The deeper issue stayed untouched. The US still does not have a strong, comprehensive federal privacy law. Data brokers still operate in the shadows. Government agencies can often get around warrant rules by simply buying data from those brokers. None of that changes because ownership paperwork moves from one jurisdiction to another, or from one president’s enemies list to another president’s friends list.

Calling this “protection” is clever branding. It reassures people without actually reducing the ways their data can be harvested and reused. If anything, it invites more.

Data Does Not Respect Borders

There is also a basic technical reality that gets ignored. Data does not care about flags or lines on a map. It moves through cloud providers, delivery networks, analytics tools, and vendor integrations that span the globe.

Even after the restructuring, user data still flows through a complex stack of partners, hosting providers, and services. Some are American, some are not, many are intertwined. The point is that the system is already deeply international. Shifting legal control does not suddenly make the pipes domestic or the model ethical.

What really changed is who gets to claim they are “in charge” of that flow, who gets to profit, and who gets to tap into it for political and commercial goals. Not whether the surveillance model exists. Now it is just more efficient.

From Data Collection to Behavior Shaping

People often focus on the raw data, but the bigger story is how that data feeds behavior engineering. TikTok’s recommendation engine is built to learn what keeps you watching. It tracks what you skip, what you replay, how long you linger, and how quickly you move away.

Over time, that turns into a tight feedback loop. The system does not just show what you like. It nudges what you will like next. It can amplify moods, obsessions, and beliefs, because it has a constant stream of signals to refine its guesses.

Now place that tool under the influence of a political movement that has already shown it understands the value of attention and outrage. Lawmakers demand “responsible” curation. Loyal media figures push for more reach, less criticism, softer coverage. The algorithm becomes a subtle instrument of influence, even when everyone involved insists it is neutral and purely driven by “engagement.” This is surveillance on steroids.

Freedom Talk, Control Reality

American tech discourse loves the language of freedom and innovation. In practice, most big platforms run on the same basic logic as any other data heavy system: track, profile, optimize, control.

The US model wraps this in private enterprise and markets. The Chinese model wraps it in state power. The lived experience for regular users is a lot closer than many people want to admit. Feeds are curated, speech is constrained by opaque rules, and underlying data is almost always collected far beyond what is strictly necessary.

The main difference is who benefits and who sets the constraints. Under a Trump aligned ownership structure, you would be naive not to assume that political interests sit very close to the center of those decisions. The mechanics, though, are the same ones Silicon Valley has been perfecting for years. Just with more partisan firepower.

There Are No Heroes Here

It is tempting to imagine some pure version of TikTok or any social app that does not harvest or manipulate. But the business model is built on those exact things. Engagement is money. Data is the fuel.

Swapping owners does not change that. Technology follows incentives, not speeches. As long as the incentive is to extract as much attention and insight as possible, that is what the platform will optimize for. Whether the checks are signed in Beijing, Los Angeles, or Mar-a-Lago, the logic does not suddenly grow a conscience.

TikTok did not become safe because it became more American, or more Trump friendly, or more “patriotic.” It became more normalized. It now looks and behaves more like the rest of the US platform ecosystem, which was already a surveillance machine in its own right. Now it is worse.

The Pattern That Keeps Repeating

The TikTok saga is not an exception. It is a template. First, raise alarms about a foreign threat. Second, force a restructure that brings the asset under domestic and politically connected control. Third, present the outcome as a victory for security and users. Finally, go back to letting the same extraction economy run underneath it all.

Other countries are already repeating the pattern with their own rules and tools. Each one claims that their version of surveillance is the “responsible” one. Each one blames someone else for the original problem.

What almost never happens is a real conversation about limiting data collection itself, breaking the business model that depends on it, or genuinely protecting the people who use these platforms.

In the end, the logic is absurd. The world was told that TikTok was dangerous because it could harvest data and shape narratives. The remedy, somehow, was to hand even more structured power over that system to a domestic, politically wired group that operates inside a surveillance friendly legal environment.

So the same platform keeps harvesting, profiling, and moderating. Only now it is wrapped in national pride, campaign interests, and corporate talking points. Worse surveillance, better optics.

Groundbreaking logic.

The Fediverse and Nostr already offer real exits — so why are we pretending the story starts over?

Threads has turned into a weird little showroom for “European alternatives” lately. The posts all follow the same template: a clean brand, a vaguely rebellious mission statement, and a neat little before/after story where the “before” is Big Tech (usually US-based) and the “after” is… this new thing you’re supposed to join immediately.

Monnet.social keeps popping up in that feed, often framed as the answer to Meta products — Instagram in particular. “We’re the European option.” “We’re the human option.” “We’re not surveillance capitalism.” You know the tone even if you haven’t seen the exact posts.

Here’s the awkward part: I am exactly the kind of person this pitch should work on. I’m in Europe. I’m tired of ad-tech platforms. I’m done with algorithmic clown shows where the loudest, most outrage‑bait content gets rewarded while everyone else is slowly retrained to perform for a machine. I care about creators having leverage. I care about not being turned into “engagement inventory.”

So when something calls itself an alternative, I actually pay attention.

But paying attention is precisely why this kind of messaging starts to grate. Because what’s being sold is not a fundamentally different structure. It’s a story that depends on people not knowing what already exists — and not asking too many questions once they get inside.

“Not Big Tech” is a slogan, not a structure

There’s a pattern to these “European alternative” pitches: they define themselves mainly by what they are not.

Not American. Not Silicon Valley. Not Big Tech. Not surveillance. Not algorithm‑addicted.

That framing is emotionally satisfying. It gives you a villain, and it makes signing up feel like a moral choice instead of just another app install.

But “not Big Tech” is not a product spec.

It’s not a funding model. It’s not a governance model. It’s not an interoperability promise. It’s not an answer to “what happens if we want to leave?”

It’s just branding.

Branding is the easiest part of a platform. You can always design a nice logo, write some soulful copy, and talk about “values.” The hard part is what happens when real‑world pressures show up:

• When growth slows.
• When infrastructure gets expensive.
• When moderation becomes a full‑time crisis.
• When investors — current or future — want a return.
• When you realize that “scale” and “safety” are in direct tension.

That’s when you find out whether the platform is actually built differently, or whether it just has nicer fonts and a European flag in the footer.

So when someone leans heavily on “European values,” my first reaction isn’t to sneer. But I do immediately ask: how are those values enforced in the design?

Who owns the network? Who controls the identities? Can anyone else run compatible infrastructure? Can users leave with their relationships intact?

If there are no concrete answers, “values” are just decoration.

The convenient silence about Mastodon (and the Fediverse)

Here’s where the marketing really loses me.

If you’re going to frame yourself as a Big Tech alternative, you are walking into a space where alternatives already exist. Not as vaporware or “alpha access soon,” but as real, running, populated networks.

The obvious one you can’t hand‑wave away is Mastodon and the wider Fediverse: a constellation of independent servers using open protocols (primarily ActivityPub) so that different communities can talk to each other without belonging to one corporation.

Is Mastodon perfect? Of course not. Onboarding can be clunky. Discovery is more “wander and find your people” than “algorithm spoonfeeds you.” Each server has its own norms and moderation style. Sometimes that diversity is liberating, sometimes it’s just confusing.

But the structural difference matters: your identity and your social connections are not trapped in a single company’s database.

So when a new platform shows up talking about “finally, an alternative,” but doesn’t even acknowledge Mastodon or the Fediverse, it reads as either:

• shockingly uninformed, or
• very carefully selective.

Neither is flattering.

Because the moment you acknowledge the Fediverse, you invite questions like:

• Why can’t this interoperate with that?
• Why should I rebuild my network from scratch again?
• Why would I join a new closed system when an open one already exists?

And if your whole pitch relies on “Big Tech bad, us good,” those questions puncture the story fast.

If you’re “against Instagram” but ignore Pixelfed, you’re not serious

A lot of the Monnet‑adjacent rhetoric positions it as an answer to Instagram: less extractive, more human, more respectful, more European. That would be a great mission — if there weren’t already Instagram‑shaped alternatives doing the structural work.

There is one. It’s called Pixelfed.

Pixelfed is a photo‑centric platform built on ActivityPub and designed from day one to live inside the broader Fediverse instead of functioning as a sealed‑off clone. It has feeds, profiles, follows, comments — the familiar building blocks. But instead of funneling everyone into one company’s walled garden, it interoperates with other Fediverse apps and instances.

You don’t have to be a Pixelfed fan to admit its existence matters. It proves that “an Instagram alternative” is not some novel revelation that appeared the day your startup launched a landing page.

Then there’s Loops for short video: a TikTok‑style experience being built with federation in mind, focused on open protocols instead of recreating another endless‑scroll casino with a single owner lurking behind the curtain. Again, whether you personally like short‑form video or not is irrelevant. The point is: people are already building photo and video platforms that plug into an open ecosystem rather than trying to replace it.

So when someone says, “We’re the new answer to Instagram,” and never once mentions Pixelfed, or anything ActivityPub‑based in the visual space — it’s hard not to see that as deliberate framing.

Because the second you admit Pixelfed exists, you have to answer:

Why should I pick your new silo instead of an interoperable network that already works today?

And if your honest answer is “because we need all the users and network effect inside our app for our long‑term business model,” then fine, say that. But don’t pretend that’s “escaping Big Tech.” That’s just trying to become a smaller Big Tech, with nicer onboarding and fresher branding.

Europe as a trust badge

There’s another move happening here that feels off: using “European” as a kind of instant trust badge.

The implication is always the same:

European means ethical. European means privacy‑respecting. European means community‑oriented. European means you can relax.

Yes, EU‑level privacy regulation is (mostly) better than what users get by default in the US. That matters, especially around data collection and user consent. But regulation is not magic.

You can comply with privacy law and still design a profoundly manipulative interface. You can be based in Europe and still centralize power, still lock in users, still refuse to interoperate, still treat people as content factories feeding your engagement metrics.

What bothers me is when “European” becomes a rhetorical shortcut that replaces the harder conversation:

• How exactly do users retain control?
• How do they leave?
• How do they avoid being trapped in yet another closed system?

If the answer to those questions is “well, trust us, we’re European,” then nothing fundamental has changed. The power balance is still owner vs user. The only difference is where the servers sit and whose politicians get name‑checked in the pitch deck.

I don’t want a European version of the same dependency. I want less dependency.

Interoperability is the actual test

If you really want to convince people you’re serious about being an alternative, interoperability is the test that matters.

Not “nice UX.” Not “we’re ad‑free… for now.” Not “we’re built in Luxembourg” or “in Europe.”

Interoperability.

Because interoperability changes the power dynamic:

• The network effect isn’t locked inside one app.
• Your social graph isn’t held hostage by a single company.
• Communities can live across multiple tools instead of being trapped inside one.
• Leaving is painful, sure — but not the same kind of total amputation it is on closed platforms.

Open protocols like ActivityPub are not sexy in a marketing slide, but they’re what makes it harder for any one organization to become the landlord of your social life. They make it possible for other people to run compatible services, to fork ideas, to experiment without asking monopolies for permission.

So when a platform loudly sells itself as “the alternative” but has nothing to say about interoperability — no protocol support, no federation roadmap, no serious data portability story, that’s very telling.

You can hang whatever values you want over the door. If people can’t walk out carrying their relationships with them, it’s still a cage.

If you truly mean decentralized, look at relays (Nostr)

The Fediverse is one piece of this. Nostr is another.

Nostr takes a different approach: instead of tying your identity to an account on one server, your identity is a keypair you control. Your posts (events) are signed with that key and broadcast to relays. Relays are servers that store and forward those events. Crucially, you don’t have to pick just one relay. Clients can connect to many at once.

That one detail, multiple relays — means there is no single “Nostr platform” in the same way there’s a “X platform” or “Instagram platform.” There are clients, there are relays, and there are social graphs emerging from how people choose to connect them.

You can lean heavily on a popular relay if you want. Or you can add niche relays for specific topics, regions, or communities. If a relay is overrun with spam, or run by people you don’t trust, you can drop it and add others.

And if you’re serious, you can run your own relay. Not as some abstract fantasy, but as an actual, practical option: your own policies, your own moderation, your own rules. It’s not trivial work, but it is possible — and that possibility is exactly what centralized platforms are designed to deny you.

Nostr is far from perfect. It wrestles with spam, moderation complexity, UX friction, and the harsh reality that “you are your keys” is empowering until you lose them. But if you care about restructuring social media away from single‑owner control, it’s a crucial proof of concept.

Which is why it’s so frustrating when a new platform talks like “we’re finally offering the escape hatch,” as if things like Mastodon, Pixelfed, Loops, or Nostr were just some vague theory instead of live, working systems people are using right now.

If your “escape” requires everyone to move into another closed‑off tower that you own, that’s not escape. That’s relocation.

The creator angle: the migration tax is real

All of this becomes painfully tangible when you think about it from a creator’s point of view.

Every new “alternative” basically asks the same thing:

Come here. Start over. Build from scratch. Post your best stuff. Convince your audience to follow you again. Hope this one works out better.

The psychological tax of doing that repeatedly is brutal. It’s not just about numbers. It’s about constantly re‑negotiating whether you actually own your relationship with your audience, or whether you’re just renting it from whatever platform is currently fashionable.

When a new platform says “we’re different,” the obvious follow‑up question is: what happens if I leave?

If “leaving” means losing every follower, every connection, every DM, every bit of social context around your work, then you’re not in a relationship with your audience. You’re in a relationship with the platform, and the platform is in a relationship with your audience.

That’s why the Fediverse and Nostr matter here — not because they are pleasant or polished all the time, but because they’re experiments in lowering that migration tax. Identity that isn’t tightly glued to one company. Connections that can exist across multiple services. The ability to choose infrastructure, not just apps.

If a new “European alternative” doesn’t engage with that at all, it’s hard not to read the whole thing as, “We would like to be the new intermediary in your relationship with your audience, please.”

Which might be honest business, but it’s not liberation.

What a fair Monnet.social pitch would actually look like

I don’t think every new social product is automatically bad. Sometimes new tools genuinely are better. Sometimes better UX and better defaults matter a lot. I’m not allergic to “new.”

What I am allergic to is pretending the story starts over every time a new app appears.

A fair, grown‑up pitch for something like Monnet.social would sound more like:

• “We know Mastodon and the Fediverse exist. Here’s what we think they do well, and here’s where we think they fall short for mainstream users.”
• “Here’s our stance on interoperability: whether we plan to support ActivityPub, bridges, export tools, or something else — and here’s the honest reason if we’re not doing any of that.”
• “Here’s our funding model, and here’s what happens if our current model stops working.”
• “Here’s what you can export if you leave — data, media, maybe even some representation of your social graph.”
• “Here’s who makes decisions, and how users can influence or challenge those decisions.”

Even if I disagreed with half of it, I could at least respect that level of honesty. It would treat users as adults who understand trade‑offs instead of as confused “humans” who just need a simpler story with a comforting flag on the box.

Stop selling escape while rebuilding the cage

Monnet.social is not unique in this. It’s part of a broader pattern: every couple of years, a new platform declares itself the answer to Big Tech, while quietly recreating the same structural dynamics that made people sick of Big Tech in the first place.

Centralized identity. Closed protocols. Opaque governance. Network effects captured and held.

The location of the company and the tone of the branding don’t change that.

If you genuinely care about “escaping Big Tech,” stop pretending the story begins with the latest startup. The story already includes Mastodon and the Fediverse. It includes Pixelfed and Loops. It includes Nostr and relays. It includes years of messy, imperfect, but real work on interoperable and user‑controlled infrastructure.

You don’t have to love any of those projects. You don’t have to use them. But if you ignore them entirely, you’re not leading a movement. You’re marketing a product.

And that’s fine, just don’t call it freedom.

Cuando vinimos a ver esta casa, le dije a mi esposo:

-Me gusta. Es ideal para nosotros. Cerciórate de que no haya nada turbio ni truculento, no quiero estar atada a algo que nos vaya a mortificar a lo largo del tiempo.

Aquí estamos cómodos. Es una buena vecindad, cada uno de los muchachos tiene su habitación, los domingos suelen venir familiares y amigos, el patio es grande y estamos terminando de ampliar la barbacoa.

Todo transcurría fenomenal hasta que tuve la ocurrencia de reformar el jardín y clavé la pala justo donde pega el sol en la mañana. Me asusté, porque al toparme con algo duro, encontré un hueso. No era pequeño. Era grande. Me dije: lo que me faltaba, un muerto. Enseguida me imaginé a la policía, los periodistas, los vecinos… y a mí, viendo el fantasma del muerto cada vez que me acordara del patio. Pensé enseguida que podía ser un hueso de perro, no de pollo, como mucho de un caballo. Metí más la pala, más, y más, como si hubiera perdido la razón; como si con un hueso de ese tamaño no hubiera tenido ya lo suficiente.

Recordé las clases de yoga. Inspiré hondo y solté todo el aire pútrido. Miré a todos lados y empecé a pensar: nadie me ha visto, nadie sabe que aquí está el hueso. Freno aquí, lo vuelvo a enterrar, tapo y san se acabó, con un rosal encima.

Y a mí marido nada, que lo cuenta todo.

El ascensor de este edificio tiene una especie de vida propia. No sé si en la estética japonesa del wabi-sabi, aplicada por ejemplo a las tazas de té, ya saben, el encanto del paso del tiempo, podría entrar un ascensor. En Japón quizás sea una herejía, pero a este ascensor yo le veo esa pátina, la misteriosa fascinación de lo que es tal cual.

El edificio es viejo, de finales de los años sesenta del siglo pasado. Fue uno de los primeros encargos que recibió el gran arquitecto Luzón Navas-Cordero. Doce plantas, como romper el cielo en esta ciudad.

Subiendo y bajando han viajado miles de personas. Está documentado que una princesa belga fue a la sexta, donde estuvo la sede de la Cruz Roja provincial, y que el complot de los años noventa para asesinar al presidente se fraguó en la planta doce. En los buenos tiempos, allí estuvo la delegación del ministerio de gobierno.

Podría contar miles de historias. Personas que se enamoraron, que se suicidaron, que nacieron, que se ganaron la lotería. Historias que viví o escuché mientras subía y bajaba.

-Hola, buenos días. A la diez, por favor.

Y en cumplimiento del deber, imagínense cuántas veces habré pulsado este botón.

俺はホテルにいた。 壁紙は薄いベージュで、ところどころに古いシミが浮かび、エアコンはつけていないのに、どこか乾いた風のような音だけがしている。

ベッドに腰掛け、何気なくブラウン管テレビをつけた。 立方体に近い、やたら古いテレビだ。 昔はテレビスターがやたらいたが、このヘンテコな箱のデザインが、そうしたスターの雰囲気づくりに一役買っていたのだろうと思うほど、昔のテレビは妙な形をしている。

画面に映ったのは、黄色い衣装の男だった。 昭和の子ども向け科学番組に出てきそうな、妙に仕立ての良いスーツ風の衣装だ。白い手袋までしている。 一言で言えば、エセ科学者。

彼は実に楽しそうに語っていた。

「夜に洗濯物を干さない方が良い。なぜなら冷蔵庫の野菜が腐ってしまうから」

穏やかな声だった。 やけに耳に残る、古風な抑揚がある。

――いや、そんな事より今なんか変なこと言わなかったか。

思わずテレビに視線を戻す。 科学者はにこりと微笑み、同じ言葉をもう一度繰り返した。

「夜に洗濯物を干さない方が良い。なぜなら冷蔵庫の野菜が腐ってしまうから、です。ええ、これは極めて論理的な話ですよ。ご安心ください」

いやいやいや。 夜に干さない理由って普通は――乾きにくいとか、臭くなるとか、そういう話だろ。

すると彼は、まるで私の心の声を聞いたかのように頷いた。

「夜に洗濯物を干すと、太陽光ではなく月の光で服を乾かすことになりますね」

……いや。 正直、あれを「月の光で乾かしている」と思ったことはないが。

「月の光を浴びた服は、そこから低温の蒸気を出すようになるのです。昼間なら空気が活発なので散っていきますが、夜は空気の流れが悪くなるため、暖かい家の中に入り込んでくる。夜の蒸気は常に温かい場所へ向かう性質があるのです。」

画面の向こうで、彼の笑みが深くなる。

「その湿気は普通の水分とは違い、まとまったままふわふわ漂います。そして電気を使う家電のまわり、特に冷蔵庫に集まりやすい」 彼は続ける。

「すると冷蔵庫の中で細かい湿気が野菜にくっつき、目に見えない薄い水の膜を作る。その膜は空気を通しやすく、その膜を通じて空気が入り込み、野菜がどんどん酸化して腐っていくんですね。朝起きると毎回野菜が少し黒くなっているでしょう？これが原因なんですよ」

朝起きて野菜が腐ってる、なんて思ったことはない。

「科学とは、日常の中に潜む静かな連鎖を見つける営み。どうぞ今夜から、洗濯物と冷蔵庫の関係に、ほんの少し思いを馳せてみてください。――それでは、ごきげんよう」

そこで画面は突然ノイズに変わった。

しばらく、真っ暗になったブラウン管を見つめていた。 ホテルは変な局が映るんだなと思いながら、再び眠りについた。

Dankzij het befaamde Salduz arrest van het EHRM hebben daders recht op juridische bijstand, zelfs voordat zij worden ondervraagd. Slachtoffers staan er van A tot Z moederziel alleen voor. Dat zou zo niet mogen zijn volgens de internationale verplichtingen die Staten hebben ten aanzien van slachtoffers van seksueel geweld op minderjarigen. Waarom daders wel, en slachtoffers niet? Eigenlijk moeten we eerst definiëren wie slachtoffer is en wat seksueel geweld op minderjarigen is. Dat komt in een volgende publicatie. Weet dat Slachtoffers zowel de minderjarigen zijn die het seksueel geweld ondergaan, maar ook hun familie, en iedereen in hun omgeving die door het seksueel geweld op de minderjarige wordt geraakt.

Staten kiezen vrijwillig om partij te zijn aan hogere rechtsnormen, zoals internationale verdragen. Daarmee zegt een Staat dat zij haar wet ondergeschikt acht aan de internationale norm. Wat zeggen internationale normen met betrekking tot juridische bijstand voor Slachtoffers? Wij halen een aantal pijlers aan.

De bottom line is: Slachtoffers van seksueel geweld op minderjarigen hebben recht op kosteloze gespecialiseerde juridische bijstand, en in de realiteit zorgen Staten ervoor dat dat recht geschonden wordt.

In deze bijdrage vind je: – het kinderrechtenverdrag van de VN en haar protocol – Het Verdrag van Lanzarote – EU Richtlijn 2011/92/EU – Waarom dan krijgen Slachtoffers geen juridische bijstand? – En toch ? – Veroordeel de Staat ! – In afwachting …

Het kinderrechtenverdrag van de VN

Het kinderrechtenverdrag van de Verenigde Naties werd uitgebreid met het protocol over kinderhandel, kinderprostitutie en kinderpornografie dat specifiek seksueel geweld op minderjarigen behandelt. België werd partij op 17 maart 2006 en Nederland op 23 augustus 2005.

Haar art. 8 meldt niet expliciet dat Slachtoffers recht hebben op juridische bijstand, maar uit de tekst valt duidelijk op te maken dat men met ondersteuning van Slachtoffers ook juridische bijstand bedoelt.

De Richtlijnen verduidelijken, en melden in C.97.© volgende verplichtingen:

© Het verstrekken van gratis juridische bijstand, waaronder het toewijzen (afhankelijk van het nationale rechtssysteem) van een advocaat of voogd ad litem of een andere gekwalificeerde belangenbehartiger om het kind te vertegenwoordigen, en geestelijke gezondheidszorg door goed opgeleide professionals zoals kinderpsychiaters, psychologen en maatschappelijk werkers aan elk kindslachtoffer tijdens het strafrechtelijke proces. (vrije vertaling van “Providing free legal aid, including assigning (depending on the national legal system) a lawyer or guardian ad litem or another qualified advocate to represent the child, and mental health support by well-trained professionals such as child psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers to every child victim during the criminal justice process”)

De Belgische Grondwet heeft een art. 22bis, die het VN Kinderrechtenverdrag en haar protocollen rechtstreeks in de Grondwet verankerd. Wij, Belgen, vonden kinderrechten zo belangrijk dat het VN Verdrag en haar Protocollen in de Grondwet werden opgenomen.

Er dient door de Staat gratis juridische bijstand aan Slachtoffers te worden verleend.

Het Verdrag van Lanzarote

Het Verdrag van de Raad van Europa inzake de bescherming van kinderen tegen seksuele uitbuiting en seksueel misbruik, kortweg het Verdrag Van Lanzarote, dateert van 25/10/2007. Het Verdrag is van toepassing voor België sinds 01/07/2013, en voor Nederland is dat 01/07/2010.

Het is in Europa “het” verplichtende juridische instrument waar Staten zich aan “moeten” houden.

Volgens art. 1.1.b is de doelstelling van het Verdrag:

het beschermen van de rechten van kinderen die het slachtoffer zijn van seksuele uitbuiting en seksueel misbruik;

Haar art. 31.1.d start soft door te stellen dat:

het beschermen van de rechten van kinderen die het slachtoffer zijn van seksuele uitbuiting en seksueel misbruik;

Haar artikel 31.3 stelt dat de Staat Slachtoffers toegang tot rechtsbijstand moet waarborgen:

Elke Partij waarborgt dat slachtoffers toegang hebben tot rechtsbijstand, die wanneer gerechtvaardigd kosteloos wordt verstrekt, wanneer zij de status van partij in de strafrechtelijke procedure kunnen verkrijgen.

Haar art. 31.1 stelt verder dat zij die juridisch interveniëren, zoals advocaten, moeten een specifieke Slachtoffer gerichte opleiding hebben genoten:

Elke Partij neemt de wetgevende of andere maatregelen die nodig zijn, met inachtneming van de regels inzake de onafhankelijkheid van beoefenaars van juridische beroepen, om te waarborgen dat opleiding inzake de rechten van kinderen en seksuele uitbuiting en seksueel misbruik van kinderen beschikbaar is voor alle personen die bij het proces betrokken zijn, met name rechters, officieren van justitie en advocaten.

Ook het art. 36.1 bevestigt dat opleiding van juridische interveniënten, zoals advocaten, verplicht is:

Elke Partij neemt de wetgevende of andere maatregelen die nodig zijn, met inachtneming van de regels inzake de onafhankelijkheid van beoefenaars van juridische beroepen, om te waarborgen dat opleiding inzake de rechten van kinderen en seksuele uitbuiting en seksueel misbruik van kinderen beschikbaar is voor alle personen die bij het proces betrokken zijn, met name rechters, officieren van justitie en advocaten.

Tot slot zegt art. 35.1.f dat:

het kind vergezeld mag worden door zijn juridische vertegenwoordiger

De Memorie van toelichting bij het Verdrag van Lanzarote stelt in randnummer 225 dat Slachtoffers geen automatisch recht hebben tot juridische bijstand, maar punt 226 stelt op basis van art. 6 van het Europees Verdrag voor de Rechten van de Mens en jurisprudentie van het Europees Hof voor de Rechten van de Mens dat:

Het Europese Hof voor de Rechten van de Mens hield rekening met de complexiteit van de procedure en de emoties die daarmee gepaard gingen […] om kosteloze bijstand te verkrijgen van een officieel toegewezen advocaat. Dus zelfs als er geen wetgeving bestaat die toegang biedt tot een toegewezen advocaat in burgerrechtelijke zaken, is het aan de rechtbank om te beoordelen of, in het belang van de rechtspraak, een onvermogende partij die zich geen advocaat kan veroorloven, rechtsbijstand moet krijgen. (Vrije vertaling van: The Court took account of the complexity of the proceedings and the passions involved […] to obtain free assistance from an officially assigned defence counsel. Thus even in the absence of legislation affording access to an officially assigned defence counsel in civil cases, it is up to the court to assess whether, in the interests of justice, a destitute party unable to afford a lawyer's fees must be provided with legal assistance.)

Iedereen weet welke extreme emoties Slachtoffers van seksueel geweld op minderjarigen ondergaan. Bijvoorbeeld omschreef de Working Group on Contemporary Forms of Slavery van de Verenigde Naties incest in het kader van het Slavernij Verdrag met de meest extreme bewoordingen ooit on its eighteenth session, punten 67 and 68”) (meer daarover in een toekomstige bijdrage).

Dus, zelfs al is er geen nationale wetgeving die Slachtoffers het recht geeft tot bijstand door een advocaat, en zelfs buiten de strafrechtelijke procedure in burgerrechtelijke procedures met betrekking tot of samenhangend met seksueel geweld op minderjarigen, moeten Slachtoffers volgens het Verdrag van Lanzarote bijgestaan kunnen worden door een advocaat, die sowieso specifiek opgeleid moet zijn, en gezien de emotionele tol op slachtoffers de Slachtoffers vanwege de Staat kosteloos bijstaat.**

EU Richtlijn

Er wordt al jaren gewerkt aan een verbetering van de huidig geldende EU Richtlijn 2011/92/EU ter bestrijding van seksueel misbruik en seksuele uitbuiting van kinderen en kinderpornografie.

Art. 20.2 stelt:

De lidstaten zorgen ervoor dat kindslachtoffers, onverwijld, toegang hebben tot juridisch advies en, overeenkomstig de rol die het desbetreffende rechtsstelsel aan het slachtoffer toebedeelt, vertegenwoordiging in rechte, onder meer om schadevergoeding te eisen. Juridisch advies en vertegenwoordiging in rechte moeten kosteloos zijn wanneer het slachtoffer niet over voldoende financiële middelen beschikt.

Randnummer 32 stelt:

Kaderbesluit 2001/220/JBZ stelt een aantal rechten van het slachtoffer in de strafprocedure vast, waaronder het recht op bescherming en schadevergoeding. Voorts dienen kinderen die het slachtoffer zijn van seksueel misbruik, seksuele uitbuiting en kinderpornografie toegang te krijgen tot juridisch advies en, overeenkomstig de rol die het toepasselijke rechtsstelsel aan het slachtoffer toebedeelt, tot vertegenwoordiging in rechte, ook voor het vorderen van een schadevordering. Dit juridische advies en deze vertegenwoordiging zouden ook door de bevoegde autoriteiten kunnen worden verleend in het geval de schadevergoeding van de staat wordt gevorderd. Het juridische advies heeft ten doel slachtoffers in staat te stellen informatie en advies te krijgen over de verschil lende mogelijkheden waarover zij beschikken. Juridisch advies dient te worden verstrekt door iemand die een passende juridische opleiding heeft genoten, maar dit hoeft niet noodzakelijk een jurist te zijn. Juridisch advies en, overeenkomstig de rol die het toepasselijke rechts stelsel aan het slachtoffer toebedeelt, vertegenwoordiging in rechte moeten kosteloos zijn, in elk geval wanneer het slachtoffer over onvoldoende financiële middelen be schikt, en conform de nationale procedures van de lid staten beschikbaar zijn.

Duidelijk. Zowel België als Nederland moeten “onverwijld” zorgen dat Slachtoffers juridisch advies krijgen, die, ook zoals de jurisprudentie van het EHRM eerder besproken, kosteloos moet zijn.

Kaderbesluit 2001/220/JBZ werd ondertussen wel al vervangen door de Richtlijn 2012/29/EU tot vaststelling van minimumnormen voor de rechten, de ondersteuning en de bescherming van slachtoffers van strafbare feiten. Deze laatste is ook aan herziening toe, maar tot zolang is volgens art. 4.1.d :

1. De lidstaten zorgen ervoor dat het slachtoffer zonder on nodige vertraging vanaf zijn eerste contact met een bevoegde autoriteit de volgende informatie wordt aangeboden, teneinde hem in staat te stellen toegang te hebben tot de in deze richtlijn opgenomen rechten: d) hoe en onder welke voorwaarden het slachtoffer toegang krijgt tot juridisch advies, rechtsbijstand en andere vormen van advies;

Het Randnummer 38 verduidelijkt:

Aan personen die bijzonder kwetsbaar zijn of zich in situaties bevinden waarin zij worden blootgesteld aan een bijzonder hoog risico op schade, zoals mensen die het slachtoffer zijn van herhaald geweld in hechte relaties, en slachtoffers van gendergerelateerd geweld of van andere strafbare feiten in een lidstaat waarvan zij geen onderdaan of inwoner zijn, moet gespecialiseerde ondersteuning en wettelijke bescherming worden verstrekt. Gespecialiseerde hulporganisaties moeten gebaseerd zijn op een geïntegreerde en doelgerichte benadering, die in het bijzonder rekening houdt met de specifieke behoeften van slachtoffers, de ernst van de als gevolg van het strafbare feit geleden schade, alsmede de relatie tussen slacht offers, daders, kinderen en hun ruimere sociale omgeving. Een belangrijke taak van deze organisaties en hun personeel, aan wie een belangrijke rol toekomt bij het verlenen van ondersteuning aan het slachtoffer bij het herstel en het te boven komen van mogelijke schade of een mogelijk trauma als gevolg van een strafbaar feit, moet erin bestaan het slachtoffer te informeren over de in deze richtlijn opgenomen rechten zodat hij beslissingen kan nemen in een ondersteunende omgeving waarin hij met waardigheid, respect en gevoel wordt behandeld. De soorten ondersteuning die door deze gespecialiseerde hulporganisaties moeten worden geboden, kunnen om vatten: het verschaffen van onderdak en veilige opvang, eerste medische zorg, doorverwijzing voor medisch en forensisch onderzoek met het oog op bewijsvergaring in het geval van verkrachting of aanranding, kort- of langdurende psychologische bijstand, traumazorg, juridisch advies, belangenbehartiging en specifieke diensten voor kinderen als directe of indirecte slachtoffers.

Waarom dan krijgen Slachtoffers geen juridische bijstand?

Europa probeert al jaren Richtlijn 2012/29/EU aan de juridische realiteit van hogere rechtsnormen aan te passen omdat onze politici weten dat er iets fundamenteel met de Richtlijn schort. Dat aanpassen lukt niet omdat lidstaten niet willen betalen voor die bijstand, vinden dat slachtoffers te veel geld kosten aan de Staat.

Randnummer 47 van de Richtlijn 2012/29/EU stelt:

Van slachtoffers mag niet worden verwacht dat zij kosten maken in verband met hun deelname aan een strafprocedure.

Tot zover is alles nog goed. Maar dan onder hetzelfde randnummer 47:

De lidstaten moeten worden verplicht alleen noodzakelijke uitgaven van het slachtoffer in verband met zijn deelname aan de strafprocedure te vergoeden en van hen kan niet worden gevergd dat zij de honoraria voor juridische bijstand aan het slachtoffer vergoeden. De lidstaten moeten in staat zijn in het nationale recht voorwaarden voor de vergoeding van kosten op te leggen, zoals termijnen voor het eisen van terugbetaling, standaardtarieven voor reis- en verblijfkosten en maximumbedragen voor dagvergoedingen wegens derving van inkomsten. Het recht op vergoeding van kosten in strafprocedures mag niet ontstaan in een situatie waarin een slachtoffer een verklaring over een strafbaar feit aflegt. Kosten behoeven alleen te worden vergoed indien het slachtoffer is verplicht of door de bevoegde autoriteiten is verzocht aanwezig te zijn en actief aan de strafprocedure deel te nemen.

En toch ?

Het VN kinderrechtenverdrag en haar protocol zijn van 2000, Lanzarote is van 2007, en de EU Richtlijn is van 2012. Het Standstill principe, dat in België is verankerd in art. 23 van de Grondwet en in de internationale rechtsorde steeds aanwezig is, zorgt ervoor dat verleende rechten niet mogen onderworpen worden aan later opgeworpen restricties of voorwaarden. Er zijn ook het Verdrag van Wenen inzake het verdragenrecht en het Verdrag van Wenen inzake het Verdragenrecht tussen Staten en Internationale Organisaties of tussen Internationale Organisaties, beide minstens mits hun art. 18, die de Staat verbiedt om een handeling te stellen tegen een Verdrag.

En toch, Richtlijn 2012/29/EU heeft een Slachtoffer rechten schendend randnummer 47. Europa heeft de bescherming van Slachtoffers verminderd uit vermeende financiële belangen van de lidstaten.

Ondanks art. 23 en 22bis van de Grondwet … “O dierbaar België, o heilig land der kinderprutsers …” tot op vandaag geen advocaat voor Slachtoffers van seksueel geweld op minderjarigen, noch voor Slachtoffers van kinderhandel trouwens.

Veroordeel de Staat !

En welk Slachtoffer heeft de centen, de emotionele stabiliteit, de tijd, de energie, de kennis en het kunnen, het doorzettingsvermogen, … ? om dat te doen? Hoe zou je daar ook maar aan beginnen? Wie kan bij welk gerecht terecht?

| | individueel slachtoffer | groep slachtoffers | Staat | | — | — | — | — | | EHRM tegen Staat | ja | moeilijk | neen | | CURIA tegen Staat | ja | ja | ja | | ICC tegen individuele autoriteit | moeilijk | ja | enkel subsidiair | | ICJ tegen Staat | neen | neen | ja | | nationale rechtbank | ja | ja | moeilijk |

Een voorbeeld is de veroordeling van België door een nationale rechtbank voor misdaden tegen de mensheid in 2024. Het kan dus, echt. Maar vergeet niet dat de “ego” van de advocaat er ook voor kan zorgen dat het niet wordt gehaald. In die zaak wilde men het Vaticaan veroordelen in plaats van de Belgische Staat …

In afwachting …

In afwachting dat Slachtoffers daadwerkelijk toegang krijgen tot juridische bijstand kunnen slachtoffers niet anders dan via juridisch knutselen te pogen voor een advocaat te zorgen.

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An anonymous post not published before.

Sydney is gorged with humidity, and I understand what going troppo is all about.

There comes a moment in every believer’s life when the heart whispers a prayer so sincere, so tender, so full of longing that it feels like heaven should open instantly. We ask for beauty, for clarity, for breakthrough, for something gentle and life-giving and good. We ask for flowers, imagining a field of color blooming effortlessly at our feet. Yet more often than not, what arrives first is not beauty but darkness, not blossoms but clouds, not answers but rainfall. And in that unexpected moment, the soul begins to wrestle with a question it rarely knows how to articulate: why would God give rain when I prayed for flowers? Why would He send storms when I begged for peace? Why would the ground beneath me feel heavier right when I was most desperate for something light? These questions mark the very beginning of a spiritual transformation, because they pull us deeper into the mystery of how God works, how He heals, how He prepares, and how He grows the very things we once begged Him to deliver without delay.

It is far too easy to assume that rain is a sign of rejection, or that storms are symbols of abandonment. When life becomes heavy, the mind instinctively gravitates toward the idea that something has gone wrong, that God must be displeased, or that the prayer must not have been worthy of an answer. But rain is rarely a punishment in Scripture. Rain is nourishment. Rain is preparation. Rain is the beginning of growth even when the ground feels too hard to receive anything at all. And yet, when we are the ones standing beneath the downpour, soaked by circumstances we didn’t ask for, facing emotions we never wanted to feel, it can be almost impossible to see that rain may be an act of mercy disguised as a storm. In those moments, the heart becomes fragile, the spirit becomes tender, and faith becomes a battlefield where every fear, every doubt, and every memory of waiting rises to the surface all at once. Still, this is where God does His most intimate work, shaping the unseen parts of our story before the visible beauty ever appears.

There is a hidden tension woven through every season of waiting: the desire for immediate beauty and the need for deeper preparation. We want God to plant flowers directly into our hands, vibrant and complete, fragrant and undeniable. But God is not a florist; He is a gardener. Gardeners do not place flowers fully grown. They work with seeds, with soil, with time, with unseen processes. And seeds do not flourish without rain. This truth becomes easier to understand when distance gives clarity, but in the middle of the storm it can feel unbearable. We want beauty now. We want breakthrough now. We want answers now. Yet the very beauty we desire cannot exist without the watering that frustration often brings. Rain softens the soil so the seed can open. Rain prepares the ground to receive what sunlight alone could never produce. Rain shifts the condition of the earth so new life can take root. And while we may interpret the storm as a setback, heaven sees it as a starting point.

When God sends rain into the life of someone who prayed for flowers, He is not denying the request. He is ensuring the foundation is strong enough to hold the blessing. Flowers arrive quickly, but roots take time. And God loves us too deeply to give us something that looks beautiful but cannot survive. Many believers spend years waiting for an answer that feels overdue, all while missing the miracle happening beneath the surface. During seasons of rain, our character deepens, our motives refine, our desires clarify, and our faith learns to grow without visible proof. Rain exposes what cannot stay and strengthens what must remain. Rain teaches us endurance, patience, humility, and resilience. Rain brings us face-to-face with the things we’ve been avoiding internally, the things that need healing before the blessing arrives. What looks like delay is often divine protection. What feels like unanswered prayer is often the exact preparation required for everything we asked God to bring into our lives.

Many people assume that heavy seasons mean God is distant, but nothing could be further from the truth. Rain is not the absence of God; it is one of His softest voices. Storms are not proof of abandonment; they are places where God stands nearest. When Scripture describes God speaking through thunder, whispering through wind, or revealing Himself in the midst of storm clouds, it paints a picture of a God who is not intimidated by trouble. The rain that falls over your life carries His fingerprints. The storm that surrounds you carries His intention. The clouds overhead are not signs of darkness coming for you, but signs of nourishment coming to you. And yet, the human heart often misreads divine timing as divine neglect. We equate silence with indifference. We interpret waiting as dismissal. But God’s silence is never apathy. His timing is never careless. His process is never wasteful. Rain that comes from heaven carries purpose even when it arrives without explanation.

The truth is that God will often answer your prayer in a form that contradicts your expectation. He will send what looks like a setback to set something new in motion. He will allow discomfort to expose roots that were growing in the wrong direction. He will let you walk through seasons that feel unsettling because the settling He is bringing requires a different version of you. Rain does not only prepare the soil; it prepares the sower. Flowers may be what we want, but transformation is what God wants. And transformation rarely begins with beauty; it begins with breaking. The seed must break so that life can emerge. The soil must break so that roots can descend. The clouds must break so the rain can fall. And the heart must break in the hands of God so it can be reshaped into something capable of carrying new life with honor, gratitude, and spiritual maturity.

There is a sacred discomfort in waiting for beauty while standing in the rain, a feeling of contradiction that unsettles even the strongest believers. We pray with hope and receive hardship. We dream with expectation and wake up in confusion. We take steps of faith only to feel like we’re sinking in unexpected muddy terrain. But this is where the most powerful stories of Scripture took shape. Joseph asked for purpose and received betrayal. Moses asked for deliverance and received a wilderness. David asked for anointing and received giants. Paul asked for clarity and received a thorn. None of these were punishments. They were preparations. And if we look closely enough, we will discover a pattern: God often sends rain before He sends flowers, storms before clarity, tension before release, breaking before breakthrough. It is not cruelty. It is cultivation.

Many people read the story of Jesus calming the storm as a moment of divine intervention, but it is also a moment of divine revelation. The disciples panicked during the storm because they assumed storms were signs of danger. They forgot that storms were also signs of teaching, shaping, and spiritual expansion. They woke Jesus because they believed the rain was the problem, when in truth the rain was revealing their inner landscape. God still uses storms this way. Your storm is not exposing your weakness; it is exposing your readiness. Your rain is not announcing loss; it is announcing that the seed is about to open. And just like the disciples, many believers cry out to God not because the storm is too big, but because the storm feels too close. Storms make you confront the version of yourself you would never see in the sunlight. Rain reveals where faith stands and where fear still hides. But the presence of a storm is evidence that God is preparing something worthy of endurance.

The deeper truth hidden beneath every season of rain is that God is planting something you cannot see yet. And just like natural seeds, spiritual seeds often grow in silence. The soil looks the same day after day, giving no indication that anything is happening beneath the surface. When you look at your life and nothing seems to change, when your prayers echo back with no visible sign of movement, when your dreams feel paused or postponed or concealed, you may be tempted to believe that nothing is growing. But rain never returns empty. It always changes the ground it touches, even when the transformation is invisible. Faith grows in the unseen. Character develops in the unseen. Healing takes place in the unseen. Roots anchor themselves in the unseen. And this unseen work becomes the very foundation your future depends on.

There is a reason God often lets the ground remain dark and quiet after the rain. It forces us to let go of control. It teaches us to trust without validation. It invites us into a deeper intimacy with God, one where the gift is not merely the flower but the transformation taking place inside the one who longs for it. Too many people ask God for flowers without realizing that flowers come with responsibility. Beauty is easy to admire but requires maturity to sustain. Influence looks glamorous but demands humility to steward. Blessings feel like rewards but behave like assignments. And assignments require depth. God sends rain to give us depth. Rain builds spiritual infrastructure. Rain makes sure that when the blessing comes, it does not crush us but grows us.

Something profound happens inside the believer who learns to welcome rain instead of resisting it. The heart grows softer. The spirit grows stronger. The eyes grow clearer. Rain changes how we interpret hardship, how we perceive delay, and how we respond to disappointment. Instead of asking why something is happening, we begin to ask what God is growing through it. Instead of assuming abandonment, we start recognizing alignment. Instead of seeing storms as threats, we begin seeing them as invitations. Rain reframes everything. And when rain becomes a teacher rather than a tormentor, the believer steps into a new level of spiritual maturity that cannot be faked, forced, or fabricated.

The remarkable thing about seasons of rain is that they do not merely prepare you for blessings; they prepare you to become someone who can bring blessing into the lives of others. Rain produces empathy, compassion, tenderness, humility, and a deeper sensitivity to the struggles of those who walk through storms of their own. A person who has never walked through storms often lacks depth when trying to comfort another. They may offer clichés instead of care, quick answers instead of understanding, or religious phrases instead of genuine presence. But someone who has stood in the rain long enough to feel it, question it, and eventually learn from it becomes a vessel of comfort in ways no sermon or study can replicate. Rain births ministers. Rain births intercessors. Rain births the kind of people who can sit with another soul in silence and know exactly what to say when words finally come. Rain softens hearts so that compassion can take root, and compassion becomes the fragrance of a life touched by God’s mercy. Sometimes the flowers God grows through you are not the ones you prayed for, but the ones someone else desperately needed to see.

When rain becomes part of the spiritual rhythm of your life, something extraordinary begins to shift within your identity. You stop seeing yourself as someone life happens to and start seeing yourself as someone God is shaping intentionally. You stop interpreting adversity through the lens of defeat and start seeing it through the lens of preparation. You stop asking why things are happening to you and begin asking why things are happening for you. This shift may sound subtle, but it is monumental. It transforms anxiety into anticipation. It transforms confusion into curiosity. It transforms fear into faith. A believer who sees rain as preparation no longer walks through storms with dread but with expectation, knowing that God never allows rain unless He has planted something beneath the surface that requires it. Rain becomes a promise instead of a threat. The clouds become a signal that something is beginning, not ending. This posture changes everything about how you move through life, because it teaches you to trust the process even before the promise appears.

There comes a point in every season of rain when the believer reaches a place of revelation, a moment where the heart recognizes that the rain was not punishment but promise. In that moment, the rain does not stop immediately, but its meaning changes. The same storm that once felt heavy now feels holy. The same season that once felt confusing now feels instructive. The same unanswered prayer that once felt like a barrier now becomes a doorway. When the meaning of rain changes, the spirit enters a new dimension of gratitude, one where the believer begins thanking God not only for blessings but for burdens that taught them how to carry those blessings well. Gratitude that blooms in the rain is deeper than gratitude born in sunlight. It is richer, truer, and more enduring. Anyone can thank God for flowers. It takes a transformed heart to thank Him for rain. When that kind of gratitude emerges in your spirit, it becomes a foundation for joy that no circumstance can steal.

As the rain continues its work, something beautiful begins to happen beneath the surface of a life that once felt barren. The soil shifts. The roots strengthen. The seed awakens. There is a divine timing to everything God grows, a sacred pace that does not rush but also never delays. While the rain falls, God is orchestrating things you cannot see, preparing connections, orchestrating opportunities, healing wounds you forgot you carried, removing people who cannot go where you are headed, and reshaping your heart to recognize the blessing when it finally blooms. Many people receive blessings they prayed for but fail to recognize them because their hearts were not prepared to perceive beauty when it arrived. Rain gives you spiritual eyesight. Rain teaches discernment. Rain sharpens intuition. Rain prepares you to see what you once would have overlooked. When your spiritual eyes open after a season of rain, you begin recognizing the hand of God in places that once appeared ordinary.

When the first signs of growth finally emerge, they rarely look like the flowers you imagined. Growth begins subtly. A shift in your thinking. A change in your priorities. An unexpected opportunity. A conversation that aligns with something God whispered to you years ago. A release from something that kept you bound. A new clarity about what matters and what no longer does. These are the early signs of spiritual blooming. Flowers do not appear instantly; their growth happens in layers. Roots form first, then stems, then leaves, then buds, then blossoms. God grows people the same way. He grows us through stages and seasons, never skipping the foundational work necessary to sustain what He is building. That is why it takes time. That is why the process does not feel glamorous. That is why the rain feels heavy before the beauty feels visible. God is not a God of shortcuts. He is a God of deep work, and deep work always takes time.

There is something profoundly sacred about the moment you realize the thing you once resented became the very thing that grew you into who you needed to become. That realization changes everything. You stop fighting the process. You stop resisting growth. You stop blaming yourself for seasons that were never meant to break you but to shape you. You start embracing every chapter—not because it was easy, but because it was necessary. You see that the rain you prayed against became the nourishment you needed. You see that the delay you despised became the protection that saved you. You see that the silence you feared became the stillness where God whispered to you with clarity. This kind of revelation is not cheap. It is purchased through tears, endurance, surrender, and trust. But once your spirit reaches this place, wisdom begins to bloom in ways that anchor you for the rest of your life. The believer who has lived through storms with God emerges with a kind of internal strength that cannot be shaken by superficial circumstances.

The deeper beauty of God’s process is that flowers do eventually come. They do not arrive on our preferred timeline. They do not always look like the pictures in our imagination. They do not appear to validate our expectations but to confirm God’s faithfulness. When the flowers bloom, they bloom in abundance. They bloom with brilliance. They bloom in a way only God could orchestrate. And when you finally see them, something inside you softens permanently. You begin to understand why the rain had to fall the way it did. You begin to see how every drop was necessary. You realize that the timing was not arbitrary. You recognize that the soil of your soul needed every ounce of nourishment that only a storm could provide. When the flowers come, they testify silently to every moment of growth you could not see happening, every hidden transformation God was guiding, and every whispered promise He never forgot.

One of the most profound truths of the spiritual journey is that God never once intended the rain to bury you; He intended it to plant you. Being planted and being buried feel identical in the beginning. Both are dark. Both are isolating. Both feel like downward motion. Both look like endings. But only one leads to resurrection. Only one leads to growth. Only one leads to something emerging stronger than before. When you interpret your storm as burial, you will feel defeated. When you interpret your storm as planting, you will feel expectant. The difference is perspective. God never buries His children. He plants them in places where roots can grow, where strength can form, where character can deepen, and where the future can rise securely. You may feel underground right now, but underground is where God begins every great story.

Many believers never realize that the darkest parts of their journeys were the wombs of their greatest callings. What felt like loss was actually formation. What felt like confusion was actually redirection. What felt like abandonment was actually alignment. God used every tear as water. He used every disappointment as pruning. He used every delay as protection. He used every struggle as preparation. Nothing was wasted. Not a moment. Not a season. Not a hardship. Everything was shaping you for a future far greater than the one you imagined when you first asked for flowers. And when you finally stand in a field of blessings, you will realize that the rain you once questioned was the exact ingredient that made the beauty possible.

If you are in a season of rain right now, this is not where your story ends. This is not the chapter where God forgets you or distances Himself from you. This is the chapter where He draws near, where He speaks softly, where He strengthens what is fragile and waters what is hidden. This is the chapter where everything feels uncertain because everything inside you is being rearranged for greater capacity. This is the chapter where your roots grow deeper than your fear. This is the chapter where heaven is preparing something that requires patience, trust, and surrender. And when the time is right, when the soil has settled, when the roots have strengthened, and when the seed has opened—your flowers will come. They will bloom in ways that redeem every storm. They will bloom in ways that honor every prayer you cried through trembling hands. They will bloom in ways that prove God was never withholding beauty from you; He was preparing you to carry it without losing yourself.

So do not curse the rain. Do not despise the storm. Do not assume the heaviness means God has denied you. You are not forgotten. You are not abandoned. You are not behind. You are not being buried. You are being planted. And when God plants something, it grows. It flourishes. It expands. It becomes more than you prayed for. The flowers are coming. They are already on their way. And when they bloom, you will understand why the rain had to fall the way it did. You will see that every drop carried purpose. You will recognize that the storm was not a setback but a sacred setup. You will look back and realize that what you thought was breaking you was actually building you. Rain is not rejection. Rain is preparation. Rain is evidence that God is growing something inside you that sunlight alone could never produce.

And when you finally walk through fields of beauty in the season to come, you will not simply be someone who received flowers; you will be someone who became a garden others can draw life from. That is the deeper miracle. The rain that once felt heavy becomes the testimony someone else needs. The storm that once looked senseless becomes the story that pulls someone else out of despair. The unanswered prayer that once broke you becomes the wisdom that strengthens someone else’s faith. God does not grow gardens only for your enjoyment. He grows them so others can walk through them and find hope, healing, and a reminder that rain is never the end of the story. It is always the beginning.

Your friend, Douglas Vandergraph

Watch Douglas Vandergraph’s inspiring faith-based videos on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@douglasvandergraph

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The question used to be simple: who has the best algorithm? For a decade, the artificial intelligence race rewarded clever code. Researchers at university labs and scrappy startups could publish a paper, train a model on rented cloud compute, and genuinely compete with the biggest players on the planet. That era is ending. The new race belongs to whoever controls the physical stack, from the launchpad to the server rack to the orbital relay station beaming data back to Earth.

In February 2026, SpaceX absorbed xAI in a deal valued at $1.25 trillion, according to Bloomberg. The transaction, structured as a share exchange, merged rocket manufacturing, satellite broadband, and frontier AI development under a single corporate umbrella. Elon Musk described the result as “the most ambitious, vertically-integrated innovation engine on (and off) Earth.” Days later, SpaceX filed with the Federal Communications Commission for authorisation to launch up to one million satellites as part of what it called an “orbital data centre.” The filing proposed satellites operating between 500 and 2,000 kilometres in altitude, functioning as distributed processing nodes optimised for large-scale AI inference.

This is not incremental progress. It is a structural break. And it raises a question that the entire technology industry will spend the next decade answering: does the future of artificial intelligence belong to whoever writes the smartest code, or to whoever controls the infrastructure on which all code must run?

The Stack Nobody Else Owns

To understand why the SpaceX-xAI combination matters, you need to see the full vertical stack it now commands. At the bottom sits rocket manufacturing and launch services. SpaceX launched more than 2,500 Starlink satellites in 2025 alone and remains on track to exceed its projected $15.5 billion in revenue for that year. The company generated an estimated $8 billion in profit on $15 billion to $16 billion of revenue in 2025, according to Reuters. No other entity on Earth can put hardware into orbit at remotely comparable cost or cadence.

One layer up sits the satellite constellation itself. More than 9,500 Starlink satellites have been launched to date, with roughly 8,000 functioning. The network already provides broadband connectivity across six continents. Next-generation Starlink V3 satellites, slated for deployment beginning in 2026 aboard Starship, will deliver more than 20 times the capacity of current V2 satellites. Each V3 satellite will support terabit-class bandwidth and connect to the broader constellation via laser mesh links capable of up to one terabit per second. Current Starlink satellites already carry three lasers operating at up to 200 gigabits per second, forming a mesh network that routes data across the constellation without touching the ground. This means the network can move information between continents at the speed of light through vacuum, which is roughly 47 per cent faster than light travels through fibre optic cables.

Then comes the AI layer. Before the merger, xAI had already built Colossus, widely regarded as the world's largest AI supercomputer. Located in a repurposed Electrolux factory in Memphis, Tennessee, Colossus went from conception to 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs in just 122 days, going live on 22 July 2024. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang noted that projects of this scale typically take around four years, making the deployment remarkably fast. The facility then doubled to 200,000 GPUs in another 92 days. As of mid-2025, Colossus comprises 150,000 H100 GPUs, 50,000 H200 GPUs, and 30,000 GB200 GPUs, with stated plans to expand beyond one million GPUs. The system uses NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet networking and achieves 95 per cent data throughput with zero application latency degradation or packet loss. It draws up to 250 megawatts from the grid, supplemented by a 150-megawatt Megapack battery system, with an expansion target of 1.2 gigawatts.

Finally, the communications layer ties everything together. Starlink already provides the backbone for global data relay, and the proposed orbital data centre satellites would connect to Starlink via high-bandwidth optical links before routing down to ground stations. The result is a closed loop: SpaceX builds the rockets, launches the satellites, operates the network, trains the AI models, and serves the inference requests, all without depending on a single external supplier for any critical link in the chain.

Jensen Huang, speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2026, described AI as a “five-layer cake” comprising energy, chips, infrastructure, AI models, and applications. He called the current moment “the largest infrastructure build-out in human history” and estimated that the next five years would present a $3 trillion to $4 trillion AI infrastructure opportunity. The SpaceX-xAI merger represents perhaps the most aggressive attempt by any single entity to own every layer of that cake simultaneously.

Why the Grid Cannot Keep Up

The rationale for moving AI infrastructure into orbit begins with a terrestrial crisis. The primary constraint on AI expansion is no longer capital or algorithmic talent. It is electricity.

According to the International Energy Agency, global electricity consumption by data centres is projected to more than double by 2030, reaching approximately 945 terawatt hours, with AI workloads as the primary driver. In the United States specifically, the Energy Information Administration projects total electricity consumption will reach record levels in both 2025 and 2026, rising from about 4,110 billion kilowatt hours in 2024 to more than 4,260 billion kilowatt hours in 2026. Data centres already consume more than 4 per cent of the country's total electricity supply.

The numbers at the facility level are staggering. The Stargate project, a $500 billion AI infrastructure joint venture announced by President Donald Trump in January 2025 involving OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle, has already brought its flagship site in Abilene, Texas online. That single campus houses hundreds of thousands of Nvidia GB200 GPUs and pulls roughly 900 megawatts of power. Meta is developing a one-gigawatt “Prometheus” cluster and has plans for a five-gigawatt “Hyperion” facility. A single AI-related task can consume up to 1,000 times more electricity than a traditional web search, which explains why a handful of AI facilities can destabilise a regional power supply in ways that hundreds of conventional data centres never could.

The grid simply cannot keep pace. A survey found that 72 per cent of data centre industry respondents consider power and grid capacity to be “very or extremely challenging.” Power constraints are extending data centre construction timelines by 24 to 72 months. In the PJM regional grid serving 65 million people across the eastern United States, capacity market clearing prices for the 2026 to 2027 delivery year surged to $329.17 per megawatt, more than ten times the $28.92 per megawatt price just two years earlier. Regional grids in many cases cannot accommodate large-scale data centres without transmission and distribution upgrades that require five to ten years of planning, permitting, and construction.

This is the opening that orbital infrastructure exploits. In space, continuous access to solar energy eliminates dependence on terrestrial power grids. The vacuum provides natural cooling, removing one of the most expensive and water-intensive requirements of ground-based data centres. A typical terrestrial data centre uses 300,000 gallons of water daily for cooling, with the largest facilities consuming 5 million gallons, equivalent to the demands of a town of 50,000 residents. And because orbital platforms sit above national borders, they bypass the community resistance and permitting bottlenecks that have slowed terrestrial expansion to a crawl.

Musk has stated that deploying one million tonnes of satellites per year could add approximately 100 gigawatts of AI computing capacity, with the potential to scale to one terawatt annually. “My estimate is that within 2 to 3 years, the lowest cost way to generate AI compute will be in space,” he wrote. Whether that timeline proves accurate or wildly optimistic, the strategic logic is clear: if you cannot plug into the grid fast enough, you go above it.

The Terrestrial Rivals and Their Structural Gaps

No competitor currently matches this vertical integration, though several are trying to close the gap through different strategies.

Amazon represents the most credible challenger, combining Project Kuiper (rebranded as Amazon Leo in November 2025) with AWS cloud infrastructure. Amazon has invested over $10 billion in launch contracts alone and plans a constellation of 3,236 LEO satellites across three orbital shells. As of early 2026, the company has launched more than 200 production satellites, with its first Ariane 6 mission in February 2026 deploying 32 satellites in a single flight. However, Amazon faces an FCC deadline to deploy 1,618 satellites by July 2026, a requirement it is statistically unlikely to meet at current launch cadence. In January 2026, Amazon filed for a regulatory waiver to extend this deadline. The total capital expenditure for the first-generation system is estimated between $16.5 billion and $20 billion, significantly exceeding initial guidance.

The structural gap is illuminating. Amazon must purchase launches from external providers, including, remarkably, SpaceX's own Falcon 9 rockets. It does not manufacture its own launch vehicles. Blue Origin, the Jeff Bezos-founded rocket company, has yet to achieve the launch cadence necessary to serve as Kuiper's primary deployer. And while AWS provides formidable cloud infrastructure on the ground, with plans for more than 300 ground stations to interface with the Leo constellation, Amazon has not announced plans for orbital compute capabilities comparable to SpaceX's vision. The result is a competitor that owns significant pieces of the stack but not the complete vertical chain.

The European Union is pursuing sovereignty through IRIS squared, its Infrastructure for Resilience, Interconnectivity and Security by Satellite programme. Awarded to the SpaceRISE consortium of SES, Eutelsat, and Hispasat in October 2024, IRIS squared carries a budget of 10.6 billion euros, including 6.5 billion euros from public funding and over 4 billion euros from industry. The system plans approximately 290 satellites across LEO and MEO orbits. But the first launch is not envisioned until 2029, with full operational capacity expected in 2030. The programme's urgent geopolitical motivation became sharper after the February 2025 suspension of United States military aid to Ukraine, which raised questions about continued Starlink availability and underscored Europe's dependency on American infrastructure. By the time the European constellation reaches operational status, SpaceX may have tens of thousands of additional satellites in orbit.

China presents a different kind of challenge, one driven by state coordination rather than corporate integration. The Guowang constellation aims for 13,000 satellites, with plans to launch 310 in 2026, 900 in 2027, and 3,600 annually beginning in 2028. The Qianfan constellation, backed by the Shanghai municipal government and developed by Shanghai SpaceCom Satellite Technology, targets 15,000 satellites by 2030. Most significantly for the AI infrastructure question, China launched the “Three-Body Computing Constellation” in May 2025 via a Long March-2D rocket, sending 12 satellites into orbit as a first batch. Developed by the China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation in partnership with Zhejiang Lab, each satellite carries an 8-billion-parameter AI model capable of 744 tera operations per second. Collectively, the initial 12 satellites achieved 5 peta operations per second, equivalent to a top-tier supercomputer. The satellites demonstrated the ability to classify astronomical phenomena and terrestrial infrastructure with 94 per cent accuracy without ground intervention, and by processing data in space they reduce downlink data volume by a factor of 1,000 for specific tasks. Plans call for scaling to 2,800 satellites delivering exa-scale compute power by 2030.

China's approach demonstrates that the orbital AI concept is not unique to SpaceX. But China lacks a single vertically integrated entity controlling the entire stack. Its satellite programmes are distributed across state-owned enterprises, private companies, and municipal governments. The coordination overhead of this distributed model may prove a disadvantage against a single entity that can make decisions at the speed of a corporate hierarchy rather than a bureaucratic one.

The Data Feedback Loop

Vertical integration does not merely reduce costs. It creates a compounding advantage through data feedback loops that terrestrial-only competitors cannot replicate.

Consider what happens when the same entity operates both the satellite constellation and the AI models. Starlink generates vast quantities of real-time data about atmospheric conditions, signal propagation, orbital debris patterns, and network traffic flows across the entire globe. That data feeds directly into xAI's models, which can optimise satellite operations, predict hardware failures, and improve routing algorithms. The improved operations generate better data, which produces better models, which further improve operations. This is the flywheel effect that has powered platform monopolies in the internet age, now extended to orbital infrastructure.

The Harvard Business Review noted in November 2025 that businesses across industries are using real-time satellite data to gain competitive advantage, with the number of active satellites tripling in five years and projected to reach 60,000 by 2030. Modern satellites equipped with AI and edge computing have become “smart tools for predictive logistics, environmental monitoring, and fast disaster response.” Yet only 18 per cent of surveyed executives expect to scale these tools soon, held back by the perception that space technology is too complex for daily business. A vertically integrated provider that can package satellite data, AI analysis, and connectivity into a single service removes that complexity barrier entirely.

The implications for training data are equally significant. An entity with global satellite coverage has access to a continuously updated stream of Earth observation data that no terrestrial competitor can match. Remote sensing, weather patterns, maritime tracking, agricultural monitoring, urban development, and infrastructure change detection all become training inputs. When the AI models trained on this data are then used to optimise the satellite constellation that gathered it, the loop closes in a way that generates structural advantages compounding over time.

The Algorithmic Counterargument

Against this infrastructure-first thesis stands a powerful rejoinder: DeepSeek.

In January 2025, the Chinese AI lab released its R1 reasoning model, achieving performance competitive with OpenAI's o1 on mathematical and coding benchmarks. The claimed training cost was approximately $5.6 million using just 2,000 GPUs over 55 days, perhaps 5 per cent of what OpenAI spent on comparable capability. DeepSeek's architectural innovations, including Multi-Head Latent Attention and its proprietary Mixture of Experts approach, demonstrated that clever engineering could substitute for brute-force compute to a remarkable degree. One year later, DeepSeek R1 remained the most liked open-source model on Hugging Face.

This matters because it challenges the assumption that infrastructure alone determines capability. If a relatively small team with constrained hardware access can produce frontier-quality models, then perhaps the vertically integrated orbital stack is an expensive solution to a problem that algorithmic efficiency will solve more cheaply. The RAND Corporation noted that DeepSeek's success “calls into question” the assumption that Washington enjoys a decisive advantage due to massive compute budgets.

But the counterargument has limits. As the Centre for Strategic and International Studies noted, while DeepSeek lowered AI entry barriers, it “has not achieved a disruptive expansion of capability boundaries nor altered the trajectory of AI development.” Its innovations represent refinements of existing techniques rather than fundamental breakthroughs. And critically, DeepSeek's efficiency gains have not reduced aggregate demand for compute. Global investment in AI infrastructure continues to accelerate, with Big Tech capital expenditure crossing $300 billion in 2025 alone, including $100 billion from Amazon, $80 billion from Microsoft, and substantial commitments from Alphabet and Meta.

The Jevons Paradox looms large. As AI becomes cheaper to run per unit, it proliferates into more applications, driving total demand higher. Google reported that over a 12-month period, the energy footprint of its median Gemini Apps text prompt dropped by 33 times while delivering higher quality responses. Yet Google's total electricity consumption still rose 27 per cent year over year. Efficiency gains are real, but they are being overwhelmed by the velocity of adoption. McKinsey forecasts $6.7 trillion in global capital for data centre infrastructure through 2030.

Research published on ResearchGate in 2026 argues explicitly that “infrastructure architecture itself, distinct from algorithmic innovation, constitutes a significant lever” for AI capability. The OECD's November 2025 report on competition in AI infrastructure identified “high concentration and barriers to entry” at every level of the AI supply chain, with “very high capital requirements” and “substantial economies of scale” creating structural advantages for incumbents. The report warned that vertical relationships where cloud providers also develop and deploy AI models could “make it hard for independent model developers to compete.”

The evidence suggests not an either-or dynamic but a hierarchy: algorithmic innovation remains necessary, yet infrastructure control increasingly determines who can deploy those algorithms at scale, who can iterate fastest, and who can serve the billions of inference requests that define commercial AI success.

Infrastructure as Geopolitical Lever

The implications extend far beyond corporate competition. As the Atlantic Council noted in its assessment of how AI will shape geopolitics in 2026, national policymakers are seeking to “impose greater control over critical digital infrastructure” including compute power, cloud storage, and microchips. The push to control this infrastructure is evolving into what analysts call a “battle of the AI stacks.”

An entity that controls orbital infrastructure operates from a position of extraordinary geopolitical leverage. Satellites do not require host-country permission to overfly territory. They can provide connectivity and compute to any point on the globe, bypassing national firewalls, regulatory regimes, and infrastructure deficits. A vertically integrated space-AI platform could, in theory, offer AI services to any government or enterprise on Earth without depending on any terrestrial intermediary.

This is precisely why Europe is investing 10.6 billion euros in IRIS squared and why China is racing to deploy its own constellations. The fear is not merely commercial disadvantage but strategic dependency. If the world's most capable AI inference runs on orbital infrastructure controlled by a single American corporation, then every nation without comparable capability becomes a customer rather than a sovereign actor in the AI age. The scarcity of satellite frequency and orbital resources, governed by a “first come, first served” principle at the International Telecommunication Union, adds urgency to the deployment race.

The OECD's 2025 competition report flags the cross-border implications directly: “enforcement actions, merger reviews, and policy interventions in one jurisdiction can have global implications.” The organisation recommends that competition authorities consider “ex ante measures, such as interoperability requirements” to address the risk of abuse of dominance in AI infrastructure markets.

Huang's Davos framing is instructive here. He urged every country to “build your own AI, take advantage of your fundamental natural resource, which is your language and culture; develop your AI, continue to refine it, and have your national intelligence part of your ecosystem.” But this advice assumes access to the underlying infrastructure stack. For nations that lack domestic launch capability, satellite manufacturing, and hyperscale compute, “building your own AI” means renting someone else's stack. And the landlord's terms are not always negotiable.

The Skeptics and the Technical Realities

None of this means orbital AI infrastructure is inevitable or imminent. The technical challenges remain formidable.

Kimberly Siversen Burke, director of government affairs for Quilty Space, told Via Satellite that orbital data centres “remain speculative” as a near-term revenue driver, citing “unproven economics, aging chips, latency, and limited use cases like defence, remote sensing, and sovereign compute.” She noted that linking SpaceX to AI infrastructure demand gives the company “valuation scaffolding” but cautioned that the economics remain unproven. A constellation of one million satellites with five-year operational lives would require replacing 200,000 satellites annually just to maintain capacity, roughly 550 per day. Radiation hardening, thermal management in vacuum conditions, and limited repair capabilities all represent unsolved engineering problems at scale.

The financial picture is also sobering. xAI was reportedly burning approximately $1 billion per month prior to the merger. SpaceX's $8 billion annual profit provides a significant cushion, but orbital data centres represent capital expenditure on a scale that would strain even the most profitable company on Earth. The planned SpaceX IPO, potentially raising up to $50 billion at a valuation as high as $1.5 trillion according to the Financial Times, would provide additional capital, but investors will demand evidence that orbital compute can generate returns within a reasonable time horizon.

There is also the question of latency. Orbital infrastructure at 500 to 2,000 kilometres altitude introduces signal propagation delays that make it unsuitable for applications requiring single-digit millisecond response times. Terrestrial data centres will remain essential for latency-sensitive workloads like autonomous vehicles, high-frequency trading, and real-time robotics. Orbital compute is better suited to batch processing, model training, and inference tasks where slightly higher latency is acceptable.

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt appears to be hedging this bet from a different angle. In March 2025, he took over as CEO of Relativity Space, a rocket startup with $2.9 billion in orders and a heavy-lift Terran R vehicle capable of carrying up to 33.5 metric tonnes to low Earth orbit, scheduled for its first launch at the end of 2026. Schmidt subsequently confirmed that his acquisition was connected to plans for orbital data centres, following congressional testimony in April 2025 where he described the “rapidly escalating energy demands of AI systems and the looming strain they are expected to place on national power infrastructure.” His approach differs from Musk's in scale and speed, but the strategic logic is identical: if terrestrial constraints are throttling AI growth, space offers an alternative path.

Consolidation on the Ground Mirrors Ambition in Orbit

The vertical integration thesis is not confined to space. On the ground, the satellite industry is consolidating rapidly. In July 2025, SES completed its $3.1 billion acquisition of Intelsat, creating a combined fleet of approximately 90 geostationary satellites and nearly 30 medium Earth orbit satellites. The FCC approved the merger partly because the combined entity would “more aggressively compete against Starlink and other LEO providers.” SES projects synergies with a total net present value of 2.4 billion euros.

This deal followed a wave of satellite industry consolidation that included Viasat's acquisition of Inmarsat and Eutelsat's acquisition of OneWeb. The FCC's order encapsulated the competitive pressures: with terrestrial fibre networks and streaming services reducing demand for satellite content distribution, legacy operators are being squeezed simultaneously by faster, higher-capacity LEO constellations. Consolidation is the survival strategy.

The satellite communication market was valued at $23.1 billion in 2024 and is growing at 12.3 per cent annually. The AI-specific segment is growing even faster, with the AI in satellite internet market projected to expand from $2.52 billion in 2025 to $8.91 billion by 2030, driven by a compound annual growth rate of 29 per cent. The pattern is consistent: companies are combining manufacturing control, AI-driven network optimisation, and cross-sector service delivery because the market rewards integration over specialisation.

From Algorithm Wars to Infrastructure Empires

The shift from algorithmic competition to infrastructure control represents something more fundamental than a change in business strategy. It represents a change in what determines power in the AI age.

For most of the past decade, the AI field operated on a relatively democratic premise. Breakthrough papers were published openly. Pre-trained models were shared on platforms like Hugging Face. Cloud compute could be rented by the hour. A brilliant researcher with a laptop and a credit card could, in principle, contribute to the frontier. DeepSeek's January 2025 release of R1 as an open-source model demonstrates that this democratic impulse remains alive.

But the infrastructure layer is not democratic. You cannot rent a rocket. You cannot subscribe to an orbital data centre. You cannot share a satellite constellation on GitHub. The physical assets required for vertically integrated space-AI infrastructure cost tens of billions of dollars, take years to deploy, and depend on regulatory approvals that only a handful of entities have the political influence to secure.

The Deloitte 2026 tech trends report frames this as “the AI infrastructure reckoning,” noting that the anticipated transition from compute expansion toward efficiency-focused orchestration results from a convergence of technological, economic, and organisational drivers. Capital constraints have reduced appetite for expansion without demonstrated returns, and organisations observing 50 to 70 per cent GPU underutilisation recognise that expansion compounds inefficiency. But orchestration still requires instruments to orchestrate. And the instruments, in this case orbital satellites, launch vehicles, terrestrial data centres, and global communication networks, are concentrating in fewer and fewer hands.

The Council on Foreign Relations, assessing how 2026 could decide the future of artificial intelligence, observed that “diffusion could be even more important than cutting-edge innovation” but acknowledged it is “harder to measure.” This distinction matters: innovation creates capability, but diffusion, the spread of that capability through infrastructure, determines who benefits from it. An entity that controls both the innovation layer and the diffusion layer holds a position that purely algorithmic competitors simply cannot match.

Whether this concentration proves beneficial or dangerous depends entirely on governance structures that do not yet exist. The regulatory frameworks designed for terrestrial telecommunications and antitrust were not built for entities that simultaneously manufacture rockets, operate global satellite networks, develop frontier AI models, and plan orbital data centres. The OECD has recommended that competition authorities “assess whether existing powers are sufficient to address potential abuses of dominance.” The answer, almost certainly, is that they are not.

The question that opened this article, whether the future of AI belongs to the best algorithm or the best infrastructure, is not quite right. The real question is whether we are comfortable with a world where the two become indistinguishable, where the algorithm and the infrastructure that runs it merge into a single system controlled by a single entity, and where the physics of rocket launches and orbital mechanics become as important to AI capability as the mathematics of gradient descent. That world is no longer hypothetical. It is being built, one satellite at a time, at a cadence of roughly 550 per day.

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References and Sources

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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

Jada Is Not Addicted to Porn

#nsfw #shorts

“I'm not addicted to porn,” Jada said to herself.

It was another early Saturday night. It was an ordinary night for her. She was in her home, soft music was playing. She just lit incense.

The husky smoky and sweet aroma filled her nostrils as she cupped her left breast and pinched her nipple. A low moan escaped her breath as the sensation traveled through her body.

“It's normal to touch yourself like this all day,” she thought to herself.

Jada really doesn't talk much on the weekends. She likes it that way. It's quiet. It's peaceful. She can be naked. She can be alone with her thoughts. She can touch herself.

Jada was sitting in her high end gaming chair. Fully nude with her legs spread. Her right index finger was slowly twirling her clit while another finger gently caressed her wet and open folds.

Jada's skin was a hue of smooth brown caramel. Her well planned diet and mild exercise kept her curves soft, but she was curvy in all the right ways and places. She liked her body. She looked very much like the women she saw on her screens every day. The only difference was that they had a massive following online and got paid to make pro-amateur porn.

They show their talents. They were beautifully flexible. They bravely insert dildos of size and girth that Jada only could dream about. She thinks they are so brave to be fully nude on the internet, faces showing, lets spread, presenting their womanly charms for everyone. Shameless, bold, bare, beautiful. And all of them look just like her. It felt good to see so many women that look like her feeling good all the time.

“I'm not addicted to porn,” Jada said to herself. “I just like watching them. They look so happy and free”

And Jada was right. They were happy and free. When she was in college, she would watch porn to relieve stress after hours of studying. She would steal glances on her phone just like others scrolled social media. Sometimes she would steal away to the restroom to touch herself.

Sometimes if she did really well on a test, she would hide away in her private dorm and masturbate for up to 8 hours or more for a job well done. Porn was her reward for everything she did. She's not addicted to porn because she still got good grades. She was succeeding. It wasn't a hindrance. It was empowerment. Porn was her reward.

“Porn addicts can't function without porn. They need it. I can stop any time I want. They can't hold a job like I can. They can't become a manager. They would be too busy masturbating to try to do anything productive.”

Jada rubbed her clit furiously at the idea of being so addicted to porn she can't function. The idea turns her on like nothing else. Right when she was about to cum, she stopped. “Not yet, I have more porn to watch. I need to keep going. It's ok to keep going.”

When Jada graduated, she nailed an entry level position right away. She proved her worth right away. She got glowing reviews, She got along well with her colleges, she even earned enough money to get her first apartment. That's when things escalated.

“Now that I'm on my own, I can do what I want. I have a good job, I have money in the bank. I should reward myself. I need to make my goon sessions better. I deserve it.”

After a year of steady paychecks and good reviews she got an offer to be a manager in her company. Her signing bonus was confirmation that using porn as her reward system was paying off.

So she decided to invest in her future. Jada built her ultimate goon station.

She bought a large wide desk, a high-end tower pc with massive storage, 4 monitors, and a comfortable chair. Of course she had a bed and a TV, but that's not where the action is. Her bed was small and humble, just big enough for her. Just enough to be comfortable while she scrolled porn until she fell asleep. Her couch was ok, she often played porn casually while she was eating her meals, but she just needed more screens.

One was never enough though. Sometimes, she would put her laptop on the coffee table and play porn too, but it wasn't the same. That's why she built her goon station. Her four 30 inch screens were the center of her world. They were her entertainment, her friends, her connection to all the good things in the world.

All the good things in the world are porn.

“I'm normal I can multitask. This is not an addiction.” Jada picked up her dildo and slid it slowly inside of herself savoring the moment. Years of planned control and patience has taught her how to edge for hours on end.

“Orgasms are too short, they are over too soon. Edging is better. Gooning is better. This is not porn addiction, this is a lifestyle”

And with that, Jada sat naked in her chair, edging, leaking a small puddle into the seat. Soft moans of pleasure surrounded her, filled her mind, her ears. It was the weekend after all. Young ladies in their late 20s spend all their time gooning to screens lost in pleasure. Hours passed by as she sank deeper.

Jada is normal in every way.

Cactus on the rocks, Red Rocks State Park near Sedona, AZ. 16 Feb. 2026.

If you like spectacular red rock formations everywhere you turn, then Sedona, Arizona is for you. We spent six days in Sedona last week, taking in the scenery, but also remnants of ancient indigenous cultures …

Detail from a sandstone wall at Crane Petroglyph Heritage Site in the Coconino National Forest, Rimrock, AZ. 15 Feb 2026.

And witnessing spiritual experiences by today’s indigenous inhabitants …

Native American spirtual leader playing a flute at the top of a red rock formation in Boynton Canyon, 17 Feb. 2026

More photos in the TechNewsLit photo library.

Red rocks formations panorama, 13 Feb. 2026

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There are chapters in Scripture that refuse to sit quietly in the background of theology, chapters that push their way into the raw, unfiltered spaces of human experience and demand to be lived rather than studied. Luke 19 is one of those rare passages that won’t let you stay the same after you touch it. It begins with a man trying to hide from God behind the branches of a sycamore tree and ends with a King weeping over a city that refuses to recognize the peace standing right in front of it. In between those bookends the story unfolds like a mirror, showing you what happens when heaven walks straight into the rooms you thought were too messy, too complicated, or too compromised for divine visitation. Luke 19 does not simply narrate events; it reveals a God who steps into human history with the disruptive tenderness of someone who knows exactly what you are avoiding, exactly what you are yearning for, and exactly what it will cost to heal you. The chapter moves with a kind of spiritual momentum that refuses to let your heart stay indifferent, because every verse whispers the same quiet, persistent truth: God always comes for what belongs to Him, even when the whole world assumes you are disqualified.

What makes Luke 19 so powerful is that it speaks to anyone who has ever felt unseen, mislabeled, trapped by a past they can’t rewrite, or quietly ashamed of the life they built while trying to outrun their own emptiness. It begins with Zacchaeus, a man the people had written off as irredeemable. He wasn’t simply disliked; he was despised, considered a traitor, dismissed as beyond spiritual recovery. Yet underneath his corruption something was stirring, a hunger he couldn’t ignore, a curiosity strong enough that he climbed a tree just to catch a glimpse of Jesus. That detail is easy to overlook, but nothing is accidental in Scripture. When a grown man climbs a tree in public, he is no longer protecting his dignity; he is following the quiet ache in his soul. He wasn’t climbing because he wanted a better view of Jesus; he was climbing because he wanted to know if Jesus could see anything in him that was still worth rescuing. Luke 19 begins by reminding us that sometimes the first step toward transformation looks foolish, undignified, or childlike, and that God often finds you not when you are impressive, but when you are desperate enough to climb above the noise of your own reputation.

But the brilliance of this chapter is not that Zacchaeus climbed a tree; it’s that Jesus stopped beneath it. Jesus always stops where others pass by. He pauses where the world shrugs. He calls names where people whisper insults. He invites Himself into the homes the religious elite avoid. In that moment, standing under a sycamore tree, Jesus did more than acknowledge Zacchaeus; He announced Him. When He said “I must stay at your house today,” it was not a request, and it was not a suggestion. It was a divine insistence. It was heaven declaring, “I choose you before you clean your house, before you fix your habits, before you rewrite your story.” That one moment shatters centuries of assumptions about how God approaches sinners. Jesus didn’t wait for repentance; His presence created it. He didn’t demand transformation before entering; His entrance initiated the transformation itself. It is an upside-down kingdom where grace arrives before guilt is confessed, where love enters before shame is named, and where the Savior walks through a door the world said should remain forever locked.

Zacchaeus welcomed Him joyfully, but that joy didn’t come from moral accomplishment. It came from the realization that God had just walked straight into the darkest corners of his life without flinching. And isn’t that what we are all secretly afraid of—that if God ever truly looked inside, He would see too much damage, too much selfishness, too many choices we regret? Luke 19 confronts that fear by showing us a God who is not shocked by our sin, not intimidated by our failures, and not deterred by our past. He sees the very things we try to hide and walks toward them, not away. When Jesus steps into Zacchaeus’s home, He also steps into the relational wounds, the greed, the betrayal, and the loneliness that had built up like a wall around him. And in the presence of unconditional acceptance, something shifts inside Zacchaeus. Repentance is not forced; it is awakened. He stands before Jesus and voluntarily begins repairing the very places where his life had done the most harm. When transformation is real, it always touches the people you once wounded, because the grace that reaches you is too powerful to remain contained.

But Luke 19 is not simply a story of personal redemption; it is a declaration of divine purpose. Jesus ends His interaction with Zacchaeus with one of the most important sentences in the New Testament: “For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.” That truth isn’t theological poetry; it is the heartbeat of the Gospel. Jesus does not wait for the lost to find Him; He seeks them. He does not draw near to the polished, the perfect, or the put-together; He enters the home of the man everyone hated. And He doesn’t merely forgive; He restores. That one sentence is a direct confrontation to every lie that says you must earn your worth, perform your identity, or apologize your way into God’s approval. It is the divine insistence that rescue is God’s initiative, not ours. Zacchaeus wasn’t saved because he changed; he changed because he was found.

And then the chapter pivots. Jesus moves from a house filled with new repentance to a parable about a nobleman entrusting his servants with resources before leaving for a distant country. It is not a random transition; it is a continuation of the same theme. The man who had misused wealth is now surrounded by a parable that reveals how God expects His people to treat the resources He gives them. The parable of the minas is not about financial capitalism; it is about spiritual responsibility. It is the story of a God who entrusts His people with influence, opportunity, calling, and potential. And it challenges every believer to ask a question many avoid: what have you done with what heaven placed in your hands? Not compared to anyone else, not measured against culture, not evaluated through worldly metrics, but what have you done with the unique calling God assigned to you?

This parable is often misunderstood because we read it through the lens of modern productivity, but the heart of the story is not about performance; it is about trust. The nobleman gives each servant something valuable and expects them to engage, risk, invest, and multiply. But the third servant hides his gift, terrified of doing the wrong thing. Fear always buries potential. Fear always convinces you to protect what God called you to expand. Fear always whispers that playing small is safer than stepping into responsibility. Jesus uses this parable to expose how often believers bury their spiritual callings under the weight of insecurity, comparison, and self-protection. And by placing this parable immediately after the story of Zacchaeus, Luke is teaching us that God’s grace not only saves you; it sends you. Salvation is not the end of your story; it is the beginning of your assignment.

But Luke 19 does something profound after the parable. It shifts from private transformation to public revelation. Jesus begins His entry into Jerusalem, riding not a warhorse, but a donkey—a deliberate act of fulfilled prophecy. It is a moment dripping with symbolism, a moment where the King arrives in humility rather than domination, peace rather than force, vulnerability rather than spectacle. The crowds erupt in praise, laying down their cloaks and shouting blessings. It looks like a coronation, a celebration, the moment Israel has been waiting for. But appearances can be deceiving. The same voices crying out in worship would soon cry out in accusation. The same hands waving branches would later point toward crucifixion. Jesus knows every contradiction in the human heart, yet He rides forward anyway, not because the moment is flattering, but because the mission is eternal.

And yet the part of Luke 19 that cuts the deepest is not the cheering crowd; it’s the tears of Jesus. As He approaches the city, He begins to weep—not soft tears, but deep, aching sorrow. He weeps because the people do not recognize the peace offered to them. He weeps because they wanted deliverance more than relationship, victory more than surrender, revolution more than repentance. They wanted a king who met their expectations, not a Savior who exposed their need. And in that moment you see the heart of God revealed in a way that theologians have struggled to articulate for centuries. The King who could command angels to reshape history instead weeps over the unbelief of His people. He does not rage; He grieves. He does not retaliate; He laments. Because divine love is not indifferent to human resistance. It aches for what could have been, what should have been, what must be chosen freely by the human heart.

The final scene of the chapter often gets reduced to an image of anger, but it is far more layered than that. Jesus enters the temple and drives out the merchants who had turned sacred space into a marketplace. This was not an outburst; it was a prophetic act of restoration. The house meant for prayer had become a place of exploitation, distraction, and corruption. Jesus wasn’t simply cleansing a building; He was reclaiming the space where heaven and earth were meant to meet. And by ending the chapter this way, Luke ties everything together: God enters the places the world has misused, He restores what people have contaminated, and He refuses to allow sacred things to be treated casually. Zacchaeus’s house was restored. The temple was restored. Soon the world itself would be restored through a cross no one expected.

This is where Luke 19 becomes personal in a way no reader can avoid. The chapter is not asking whether Jesus has passed by your life; it is asking whether you are willing to let Him enter. It asks whether you are hiding behind excuses the same way Zacchaeus hid behind branches. It asks whether you are burying your calling the way the servant buried his mina. It asks whether your worship is genuine or merely emotional enthusiasm that disappears when obedience becomes costly. It asks whether you recognize the peace being offered to you or whether you are missing it while waiting for God to operate on your terms. And it asks whether the temple of your own heart is a place of prayer or a marketplace of distraction. Luke 19 is not a chapter that whispers; it confronts you with the evidence that God is always closer, more intentional, more disruptive, and more compassionate than you realized.

What strikes me as I move deeper into the flow of Luke 19 is how the chapter refuses to let anyone cling to a shallow version of faith. It does not allow you to treat Jesus like an idea or a distant historical figure. It forces you to confront Him as a living presence who walks straight into the unsettled rooms of your soul. Zacchaeus did not encounter a concept; he encountered a Person. The crowds did not wave palms at a philosophy; they celebrated a King. The city did not reject a metaphor; it rejected the very embodiment of peace standing in front of it. And the temple was not cleansed by an abstraction; it was cleansed by hands that carried both gentleness and authority at the same time. Luke 19 reveals a Savior who can step into a sinner’s living room with tenderness and then step into a temple with righteous disruption. It paints a portrait of a God who comforts the broken and confronts the corrupt, a God who heals what is wounded and overturns what is profane, a God who walks into your life with compassion but never compromises His holiness. This duality is not contradiction; it is completeness. The God who loves you enough to eat at your table is the same God who loves you enough to overturn every lie you’ve believed about yourself.

As I reflect on Luke 19 through the lens of its full emotional range, it becomes clear that the entire chapter is designed to expose the human heart in all its layers. It reveals the curiosity of Zacchaeus, who wants to see Jesus but is unsure if Jesus wants to see him. It reveals the resentment of the crowd, convinced that some people deserve grace and others do not. It reveals the fear of the servant who hides the gift instead of using it. It reveals the enthusiasm of the worshipers who praise Jesus as long as He fits their expectations. It reveals the heartbreak of a Savior who stands above a city He loves and weeps because they cannot see their own day of visitation. And it reveals the courage of a King who walks into a corrupted temple to restore its purpose. All these emotional movements are not isolated scenes; they are threads woven into the same fabric, exposing the realities of human nature and the consistency of divine love. Luke 19 invites every reader to locate themselves somewhere in the chapter, not to condemn them, but to awaken them to a God who moves toward them even when they are afraid to move toward Him.

The more I dwell on the story of Zacchaeus, the more I realize that his repentance was not a response to guilt; it was a response to being truly seen. Something powerful happens when God sees you without flinching. The shame that seemed permanent becomes temporary. The sin that felt immovable gets displaced by grace. The identity shaped by criticism and self-protection begins to collapse under the weight of divine acceptance. Repentance becomes less about fear and more about alignment, less about punishment and more about restoration, less about obligation and more about revelation. Zacchaeus didn’t change because he was threatened; he changed because Jesus stepped into his home with a love that revealed the truth of who he was always meant to be. When grace enters that deeply, it does not just modify your decisions; it rewires your desires. It awakens the kind of transformation that does not need to be forced or performed because it is no longer external; it is internal, organic, and undeniable.

But transformation does not end with restoration; it moves into responsibility. That is why the parable of the minas is such a critical second movement in the symphony of this chapter. It is God saying to every redeemed heart, “What you do with what I gave you now matters.” It is the reminder that grace does not end with rescue; it expands into assignment. You were not saved so you could settle; you were saved so you could serve with purpose, courage, and conviction. Yet many people live like the third servant, holding tightly to what was meant to be invested, preserving what was meant to be expanded, storing what was meant to be sown. That servant’s fear did not just rob him of productivity; it robbed him of partnership with the kingdom. God is not displeased when you try and fail; He is displeased when you refuse to try. The parable is not about performance; it is about participation. The minas were not tests of skill; they were invitations to trust. And when you live with the mindset of scarcity, you bury the very calling God entrusted to your hands. Luke 19 refuses to let believers settle for that mindset. It confronts the soul with the truth that faith without engagement becomes stagnation, and stagnation eventually becomes loss.

Then, as if the chapter wants to stretch the human heart even further, Jesus moves from teaching to embodiment. He steps onto a donkey and begins the descent into Jerusalem in an act of kingship that looks not like worldly power, but like divine humility. This moment is often read triumphantly, but there is a fragility to it that becomes clearer the more you sit with it. Jesus is riding toward the fulfillment of prophecy, but He is also riding toward rejection, betrayal, and crucifixion. The people cheering Him do not understand Him. They celebrate Him, but they do not see His mission. They praise Him with their voices, but they do not grasp the cost He is about to pay for their salvation. And yet He keeps riding. That is the beauty of Luke 19. It reveals a Savior whose love is not contingent on human consistency. He does not stop loving because people misunderstand Him. He does not withdraw His mission because devotion fades. He does not require perfect loyalty to continue pouring out perfect love. The King who enters Jerusalem on a donkey is a King who knows exactly how fragile human praise is, and yet He rides onward because His love is stronger than their confusion.

The moment Jesus reaches the city and begins to weep, something sacred unfolds that is easy to miss if you read too quickly. This is not the cry of defeat; this is the cry of divine heartbreak. It is the sound of a God who has given everything and watches humanity walk past peace as if it were invisible. He weeps because they long for answers but reject the truth. He weeps because they pray for deliverance but ignore the Deliverer. He weeps because they have cried for centuries for God to come near, and now that He stands before them, they cannot recognize Him. These tears reveal something that theology alone cannot articulate: God is not unmoved by human unbelief. He is not indifferent to spiritual blindness. He does not shrug at the resistance of the heart. He aches for it. He feels it. He grieves it. Divine sorrow is not weakness; it is evidence of divine love. And when you allow yourself to grasp that, Luke 19 becomes more than a chapter; it becomes a revelation of the God who feels more deeply for you than you have ever felt for Him.

That is why the cleansing of the temple must be understood as an act of love rather than anger. Jesus was not erupting; He was restoring. The house of prayer had become a place of noise, transaction, and distraction. It had lost its essence, its purity, its purpose. When Jesus overturned the tables, He was overturning everything that blocked authentic communion with God. He was removing the barriers between the people and the presence. He was reclaiming holy space that had been invaded by the cares and commerce of the world. And if you bring that image into your own life, you begin to see how often God has done the same in your heart. There are moments when His love disrupts your patterns, overturns your habits, exposes your compromises, or removes the things you thought you needed because they were quietly draining your spiritual strength. Divine disruption is often the doorway to spiritual freedom, and Luke 19 paints it vividly enough that no believer can avoid its implications. God will not allow sacred things in your life to be treated casually. He will confront whatever tries to replace prayer, purpose, or purity.

When the chapter closes with Jesus teaching daily in the temple, you see the full picture come together. He rescued the lost in Zacchaeus’s home. He entrusted purpose through the parable of the minas. He received worship during His entry into Jerusalem. He wept over the blindness of the city. He cleansed the temple of corruption. And then He taught, as if to say: this is what I came for—to restore, to reveal, to redeem, to renew. Luke 19 is a journey from hidden branches to holy spaces, from personal salvation to public proclamation, from private homes to public temples, from individual redemption to collective accountability. It is a chapter that touches every dimension of human life, because it reveals every dimension of God’s heart. And when you allow it to settle into your spirit, you begin to see that the God who walked into Zacchaeus’s house is the same God who walks into yours, the same God who entrusts you with calling, the same God who receives your worship, the same God who grieves your resistance, and the same God who restores what has been misused. Luke 19 becomes an invitation to let Him all the way in, not partially, not conditionally, but completely.

In the end, Luke 19 forces a decision. Not the decision of a moment, but the decision of a lifetime. Will you climb the tree to see Him even when you feel unworthy? Will you open the door when He calls you by name? Will you use the purpose He placed in your hands, or bury it under fear? Will your worship be emotional excitement or genuine surrender? Will you recognize the peace being offered to you right now, or will you let it pass by while waiting for something more familiar? Will you allow Him to cleanse the places in your soul where compromise has taken root? Luke 19 leaves no heart untouched, because it reveals a God who refuses to leave you untouched. It reveals a Savior who seeks the lost, a King who rides toward His mission with humility, a Redeemer who weeps for what humanity cannot see, and a Holy Presence who restores what has been desecrated. And when you let this chapter speak to you deeply enough, you begin to realize that the same God who entered Jericho, Jerusalem, and the temple is entering your life with the same intentionality, the same urgency, and the same love.

Your friend, Douglas Vandergraph

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