I have always disliked when people use the term hallucination to describe the confident mistakes LLMs print when they reach the limits of their knowledge. I think “confabulation” would be a much more accurate term.

Merriam-Webster, my preferred dictionary, doesn't define confabulation per se, so let's use Dictionary.com instead.

Dictionary.com defines hallucination as:

a sensory experience of something that does not exist outside the mind, caused by various physical and mental disorders, or by reaction to certain toxic substances, and usually manifested as visual or auditory images.

It defines confabulation as:

the replacement of a gap in a person's memory by a falsification that they believe to be true.

We don't know if LLMs experience anything, although I don't rule it out entirely, but they certainly do replace gaps in their memory with obvious falsehoods that they seem to believe.

The next time Claude or ChatGPT tells you about a business that doesn't exist, then, or describes a feature your phone doesn't have, consider that it might not be hallucinating, but rather confabulating.

#Tech

I'm hoping to follow two different college football games today: one from the Big 12 Conference and one from the Big 10 Conference.

First up from the Big 12 Conference we find the (6-1) Texas Tech Red Raiders hosting the (6-1) Arizona Wildcats in a game scheduled to start at 11:00 AM CT.

Next from the Big 10 Conference we'll have the (7-1) Indiana Hoosiers hosting the (5-2) Minnesota Golden Gophers in a game scheduled to start at 2:30 PM CT.

And the adventure continues.

Truth to Power from Eugene N. Marais

In the quiet corners of the farm house on Oakvilla, amid the dust-laden shelves that held the weight of my father’s intellectual pursuits, the books that stood out like sentinels of forbidden knowledge: Eugene N. Marais’s Die Siel van die Mier and The Soul of the White Ant, alongside Die Siel van die Aap and its English counterpart, The Soul of the Ape. My dad, Mastelek, a man whose mind was as vast and untamed as the veld he loved, kept both the Afrikaans originals and their English translations, treating them not just as literature but as blueprints for understanding the world. He pored over Marais’s observations of termite colonies and baboon societies, drawing parallels to human evolution that challenged the rigid doctrines of our time. “See here, BB,” he’d say, his finger tracing lines about the collective soul of the white ant, “if nature builds empires without a single king dictating every move, why do we insist on divine mandates for our own hierarchies?”

Those discussions, often on road trips in a lorry or bakkie, ignited something fierce in me. Marais’s work wasn’t mere natural history; it was a quiet rebellion against the creationist fervor peddled by the Calvinist prudes and the politicians who cloaked their bigotry in biblical certainty. If they were wrong about evolution, denying the intricate dance of adaptation and survival that Marais so vividly described, then surely they were wrong about apartheid, that monstrous system built on the lie of inherent superiority. My father’s passion for these ideas seeped into my bones, turning me into an apartheid dissident before I even fully understood the word. I carried that fire with me through the sandstone of Grey College, where I bumped heads with teachers and classmates alike. Debates on evolution morphed seamlessly into arguments against segregation, my voice rising against the tide of conformity. I survived those clashes, not scarred or unbowed, because the intellectual ground Marais had laid was sound, rooted in observation, not ideology.

Marais himself, though, was a tragic figure, his genius overshadowed by the very world he sought to illuminate. Born in Pretoria, he was a polymath: a lawyer by training, a poet whose verses captured the raw beauty of the South African landscape, and a naturalist whose studies on ants and apes predated modern ethology. His poems, like “Winternag” with its haunting evocation of a winter night, remain pillars of Afrikaans literature, blending melancholy with profound insight. Yet his life was marred by hardship. Addicted to morphine after a bout with malaria, he wandered the fringes of society, his groundbreaking work on termites—detailing their symbiotic societies and what he called their “phyletic soul”—plagiarized by the Belgian Nobel laureate Maurice Maeterlinck. Maeterlinck’s The Life of the Termites lifted passages verbatim from Marais’s articles in Die Burger and Huisgenoot, without credit, even admitting he’d never seen a termite in the flesh. Marais, ever the gentleman, called it a “left-handed compliment,” but the theft stung deeply, contributing to the despair that led to his suicide before the Second World War.

His own tribe, the Afrikaner community, failed to honor him as he deserved, perhaps uncomfortable with a man who questioned the certainties of faith and society. In a way, Marais’s story mirrored my own smaller rebellions: a life of unacknowledged brilliance, fighting against the plagiarism of ideas and the theft of dignity. Those books my father cherished didn’t just teach me about evolution; they taught me to question, to dissent, and to see the interconnected soul in all things, ants, apes, and apartheid’s unwilling subjects alike.

Ronald Bartels | LinkedIn | Instagram

My Love Affair with Tractors

Growing up on Oakvilla Farm in the rolling midlands of Natal, South Africa, my world was a patchwork of green fields, muddy tracks, and the ceaseless hum of farming machinery. But nothing captivated me quite like the tractors. They were the beating heart of the farm, colossal beasts of red steel that churned the earth and shaped our days. I was so entranced by them that my very first word wasn’t “mama” or “dada,” but “ugandaganda” – the Zulu term for tractor, a word that rolls off the tongue like the rumble of an engine, full of power and poetry. To this day, it’s my favorite word, evoking the raw, mechanical magic that defined my childhood. My dad and mother were very proud of my first word, and readily informed all and sundry about it.

Back then, I was blissfully unaware that my given name was Ronald. Everyone, from my parents to the Zulu workers who shared our land, called me Beebee. It stuck like mud on a tire tread, a nickname that followed me through the dusty tracks and endless rows of crops. My fascination started early, as a plump toddler barely able to waddle. My parents, sensing my obsession, gifted me a shiny plastic red ride-on tractor with push pedals. I’d zoom around the yard for hours, imagining myself plowing vast fields, the wind in my blonde hair and the world at my command. Yes, I was blonde and my hair darken as a teenager.

As soon as I could toddle close enough, I’d beg to sit on my dad’s lap atop one of our real tractors. Those were glorious moments: the vibration of the engine thrumming through my tiny body, the scent of diesel mingling with fresh-turned soil. Before long, I’d grab the steering wheel with chubby hands, guiding us along the furrows. When I grew a bit taller – though still too short to reach the pedals, I’d hop off the seat and stomp on the brake or clutch with both feet, my laughter echoing over the fields. Holidays were the best; while other kids played games, I’d volunteer to plough, letting the Zulu tractor driver nap under a shady tree as I took the wheel.

Our farm was a symphony of cultivation, with potatoes as the star, a vegetable I now hold in almost religious awe, their humble tubers yielding endless bounty. We’d rotate in cabbage, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, and madumbis, those creamy tubers that make the quintessential curry, rich and comforting like a warm embrace. To work the land, we relied on an arsenal of attachments: a tiller for breaking soil, a rotor for finer prep, and a massive multiple-row plough with circular ploughshares that sliced through the earth like a knife through butter.

At the core of it all were our red Massey Ferguson tractors, the unyielding workhorses that powered everything. My dad, ever the innovator, even designed a custom attachment he dubbed the “Stelek Stumper”, a beastly contraption that uprooted tree stumps with ruthless efficiency, clearing fields for new planting in record time. (See my drawing as a kid of the tractor and stumper) We had a grader attachment too, essential for maintaining the valley roads after the relentless Natal rains turned them into quagmires. To top them off, we’d haul loads of gray shale using a converted Ford truck with a dumper body, which I’d help load using our yellow Massey Ferguson TLB (tractor-loader-backhoe). That TLB was a marvel, a Swiss Army knife on wheels.

My brother, my boet, & I once put it to mischievous use, building a makeshift dam across a stream that fed into the Inyosi River. We piled up earth and rocks, dreaming of our own private pond. But when it filled, the water overflowed and diverted the stream straight down the farm road, flooding everything in sight. That led to a frantic after-hours session in the dark, my dad using floodlights and the very same TLB to dismantle our creation, grumbling all the while but with a twinkle in his eye.

Not all our tractors were heroes, though. We had one blue Ford that was perpetually on the fritz, coughing & sputtering until it was finally abandoned to rust in a forgotten corner of the farmyard, a relic of mechanical defeat.

Beyond the fields, tractors wove into the fabric of our community life. On payday, we’d hitch a trailer to one and rumble into New Hanover dorp, ferrying the Zulu workers to the White House shop. Run by an Indian dealer, it was a wonderland crammed with everything imaginable: hardware tools on one shelf, fresh produce on another, clothes dangling from hooks, and even goods suspended from the ceiling on wires. It doubled as a greengrocer, supermarket, and candy emporium, that sweet counter was pure fascination, jars brimming with colorful temptations. Shops like that are lost to history now, replaced by sterile chains, but in my memory, it’s a chaotic paradise.

I’d also lend a hand hauling 20kg bags of mieliemeal from our storeroom to the workers’ quarters, balancing them precariously on the tractor’s rear attachment struts. Simple tasks, but they made me feel part of something bigger, the rhythm of farm life pulsing through every jolt and turn.

Even now, decades later, I crave the feel of a rusty tractor seat beneath me, each bump jarring my spine not as pain, but as a monk’s austere meditation – a reminder of hardship’s quiet grace. And the diesel exhaust roaring through the stacks? That’s no mere noise; it’s a symphony, pure and unfiltered, the soundtrack to a life forever tethered to those magnificent machines. Ugandaganda – the word, the wonder, the enduring fascination that started on Oakvilla and never let go.

Ronald Bartels | LinkedIn | Instagram

King’s Park, 1976

My first All Blacks Test was in 1976, when the Springboks hosted the New Zealanders at King’s Park in Durban. We left our farm, Oakvilla, mid-morning in the Mercedes-Benz 280E. My parents and I made the trip together. My brother went separately on the school bus. My sister skipped the whole thing to visit her friend Nolene.

We didn’t own Springbok jerseys or any proper kit in those days. I went in corduroy pants, a plaid shirt and my Grasshopper shoes. That was as close as it got to match-day attire for a farm kid from the Midlands.

First stop was the beachfront. We met my dad’s friend Oom Jan Strydom at Barons steakhouse, a place that sat in the same side street as Magoo’s Bar, the same Magoo’s that would later become notorious for reasons far darker than rugby. It was bombed by the ANC. Lunch was the mandatory steak, rump or sirloin, with basting and either pepper or mushroom sauce on the side. I always went for the monkey gland. Bliksems lekker. I could have happily turned around and be driven straight back to Oakvilla after that meal and still called it a perfect day.

Instead we pushed on to King’s Park. The place was packed. We parked some distance away and walked in with the crowd. Just past the ticket booth stood a trolley from The Fudge Lady. My mother bought toasted coconut marshmallows. Fresh, warm, with that unmistakable aroma you never get from the plastic-wrapped versions in Pick n Pay. I can still taste them.

We climbed to our seats on the open stands opposite the grandstand, right on the halfway line, second tier. The concrete steps felt dodgy even then. Behind us they had put up scaffolding for extra seats that almost certainly violated every health and safety rule in the book. But this was Africa, and the stands were full. My mom mentioned that Windhond played here. Windhond was her uncle, Riebeeck. He was a Junior Springbok.

There were no fly-bys that afternoon, but there were streakers. We laughed, and it was understood that the proper response was to try and hit them with ripe naartjies. Before kick-off there would be a quick sweep to pick up the fruit.

Then I saw him, the ice-cream vendor working his way along the row, polystyrene box balanced carefully. I tugged my dad’s sleeve. He raised a hand. The man opened the lid and dry ice billowed out. Among the loot I spotted them: Eskimo Pies.

I lost all composure and grabbed one.

You cannot understand what that meant unless you grew up on a farm like Oakvilla. We never had Eskimo Pies at home, and you didn’t find them in the New Hanover Tea Room either. Ice cream at home was the condensed-milk-and-cream version my mother made. This was different. Sitting in the stands at King’s Park on the day of an All Blacks/Springboks Test, biting into an Eskimo Pie, that memory is still sharp.

The game itself was epic. Sid Going was everywhere, cheeky and disruptive, impossible to ignore. On the Springbok side Morné du Plessis carried a presence you could feel from the stands. Years later, when Oom Jood told me that Morné had gone to Grey, I turned to my dad and said I wanted to go there too. I wanted to become a Brak as well.

After the final whistle I stretched out along the full length of the back seat of the Mercedes. The lights of the car snaked through the Midlands as evening settled. I slept the whole way home to Oakvilla, tired, full, and completely happy.

It was a perfect day for it.

Ronald Bartels | LinkedIn | Instagram

Growing up a cowboy

There are days when the Natal sun comes slanting in so low and slow, That you’d swear it was being lazy, like the tractor driver after lunch. And on those days—red-dust, still as death—you remember things. Things like a boy’s room, just off the stoep’s missing corner. Yes, the stoep wrapped round our house like a plaaswife’s apron, But it left out one side, the side with my bedroom. That’s where the wild fig grew, like a lone prophet A fig tree thick with whispering leaves, and in it, a Hammerkop’s nest Crumpled together like an old man’s thoughts.

I used to lie in bed, staring at that nest, Beneath a cowboy bedspread, Lone Ranger in fading thread. Outside, the sunbirds pecked at Leonurus, Their wings a kind of hymn, too fine for any church. I wore plaid shirts and plastic guns on my hips Like a Kalahari Clint Eastwood, Until one day Pa came along with the real thing A Finnish rifle, cold and straight-shooting, And an Italian shotgun with the smell of cordite and old men’s stories.

You see, on that farm, we grew potatoes Not just a crop, but a calling. Pa said meilies was for eating, but potatoes were for love. And Ma made them a dozen ways Boiled, fried, roasted, mashed, each one a hymn to simpler days. To this day, I bite into one and I am six again, Dust on my knees, sun on my back, Listening to Martial eagles cry from the copper phone lines Before dropping like justice on a sun-baked leguwaan.

Some kids grew up with lullabies, I had the creak of tin roofing in the wind And the smell of clay bricks after rain. That house, with its polished red tile stoep, Shone like pride, even in poverty. It stood with shoulders squared against drought and debt and death. And I—dusty, sunburned, gun-slinging in plastic Grew up with hammerkops, sunbirds, potatoes, And the slow, unspoken things that build a boy into the kind of man who doesn’t flinch When the rain forgets your name or the road cracks beneath your veldskoens.

~Roald Bartholomew

Ronald Bartels | LinkedIn | Instagram

The end of another month. Two months left in this year. I think that the pills I'm taking are effecting my desire to do this, or is changing it at least. At the same time I don't really care. No great loss. That attitude towards it is likely also coming from the pills. It has only been two weeks and one day. I feel something, but not much. I wouldn't say that I feel good, or even better. Maybe weird. Like my senses are slightly more tuned in. They say the full effects won't be felt for 4 to 6 weeks, possibly up to 8. Maybe it will get better. Maybe it will get worse. I feel like Frank in Hellraiser when he acquired the box. I don't care which way it goes. Maybe it will tear my soul apart.

It would be funny if someone robbed a pharmacy and accidentally stole a bunch of these pills to sell on the street. Hey man, do you wanna buy some pills? One a day will make you tired, dizzy, and nauseous for a few of days, then give you a headache and make you gassy and constipated for two weeks straight. Then you'll feel kind of weird for another few weeks. At 4 to 6 weeks, or maybe 8, things might get better. Alternatively, your life could turn into a horror story because of them. Only 2 cents a pill. Ah whatever, just have them for free. Good luck. Have fun.

I'm supposed to come up with something to focus on in my next therapy session. A reason to be there. The first visit was sort of a general outline of my life. What do I hope to get out of it? What would I like to focus on first? I knew the questions were coming. Hilariously, they stressed me out. I guess anxiety, I said. The therapist said it has to be something more focused, narrowed down. I agreed, and said, yes, I suppose anxiety is a pretty broad stroke. Then it was time for me to leave. I said I would think about it. And I have been thinking about it.

I'm a dog running around like a chicken with its head cut off. Leash dragging and bouncing along the ground beside me. Life keeps grabbing the leash and jerking me around by the neck. Wanting the main course. Getting table scraps. It is fucking irritating. Is that also too general?

If I start typing things about it I might resolve it, and then I won't need to go. Not really. I don't know what I want. I don't know what I hope to gain from therapy. I don't know anything at all. Maybe that is a good starting point. I'm fifty five and I haven't figured out what I want to do with my life. I've just been taking it as it comes, as is. What's that they say, if life gives you lemons? Make lemonade? lol, more like, what am I supposed to do with this fucking lemon? I'm as is. Like an old car crumbling in the weeds and tall grass beside the driveway, or in the back row on the lot of a crooked dealership. Uncertified. Broken. Needs some work. Leaky gaskets. Rusty around the edges. Rotting frame. Don't look under the hood. Vision going. Tinnitus. 2 prescriptions. Tired.

By Tooth and Claw

A few years back, I woke in a morgue with burns on my body and no memories of who I was or how I got there. No one has been able to tell me who I am or who I was before the fire. The name they apply to unknown victims stuck to me so I'm called John Doe.

I may be strange but, so far, it seems I'm only as strange as the world I've found myself in. I have ten toes and ten fingers in the usual configuration. This world has villages, towns, cities, suburbs, rivers, trees, and animals. That doesn't mean the world or I are normal. There are things in these woods you can't find in a text book. If the man in the morgue had managed to open my chest, he would have found pieces of me that were not inside any other human. I've seen some of those parts myself but, like the woods and brambles I wander through, I haven't seen them all.

Would you like me to read the story to you instead? I have a recording of me reading it on YouTube?

Like the proverbial magpie, I spend a lot of my time learning about whatever new mystery happens to catch my notice. Maybe some of those things are in books. Maybe they're not. It's hard to get good books here. Today, I'm following some mysterious moths. Mrs. Welkie, whose house is maybe a mile away, lent me a book about moths in the region. These look like Ornate Tiger Moths but have blue coloration instead of orange.

I sat on a log and watched a group of the moths slowly opening their wings. The book said the Ornate Tiger Moths had a 1.7in wingspan. These seemed closer to 2 inches but I wasn't bothered by the discrepancy.

A pair of people approached, bothering the birds, bugs, and who knew what else. It was unlikely they were here for the bugs or at least not the same bugs I was watching.

The two stumbled around the biggest tree closest behind me.

“John?” a woman's voice said.

“Yes.” I didn't turn from my study subject.

“Mrs. Welkie said we'd find you out here,” a man's voice said. Mrs. Welkie was an older woman who made friends easily as I well knew.

“Does she need something?”

“No. She said you'd know where we might find three-banded ladybugs. They have yellow around their black spots —”

“I know what they look like. Try up that way,” I raised my left index finger and pointed up ahead. Strange enough to have someone else out here looking for a specific bug. Three-banded ladybugs might be about as rare as whatever I was looking at. I hadn't seen the bugs myself on this outing but I had a sense about it.

“Thanks!” the man said. The two started to march further into the forest. Both were dressed in tee shirts, shorts, and worn tennis shoes. Each carried a thin bag on their back.

“If you don't want to scare them off, walk more softly,” I said.

“Sure thing, dude,” the woman said.

I wasn't surprised when they continued to clomp and bluster through the wood. At least they were moving away from me and only a few of the moths had moved on.

---

I finished the lunch I'd packed and cleaned up the mess an hour or so after the sun had reached its highest level in the sky. There was a lot of light left in the day but the sky had started to turn a little. I'd been so engrossed in the moths that I hadn't been paying close enough attention.

The people after the ladybugs surely didn't have the gear they needed to deal with the coming storm. I sighed and retraced their route through the trampled plants they'd left in their wake.

Following them on foot would become harder once the sky darkened completely but I wasn't ready to pull out my flashlight yet.

Someone screamed a pretty good distance away. I ran toward the sound. I found the bugs they had been looking for but not the woman or man.

Their bags were up against a tree.

I kept my eyes on the ground in front of my feet, moving slowly and only occasionally looking above. The plants between the trees had been pressed down. The ladybugs they'd been looking for might have a lost a few of their number to whatever had pressed down on the plants but there were still plenty of them on the trunks of the trees.

“Hello?” I called out. I waited to hear a response.

The only thing I heard was the chirp of bugs and the rustling of the wind in the branches of trees. A group of birds cleared up from their roosting spots and flew to new, nearby branches on the same trees.

They distracted me for a moment. I nearly fell into the hole.

The hole was roughly round and about four feet in diameter. The interior wall was built of dirt. Shocks of roots from grasses and trees stuck out of the tunnel. The hole didn't go straight down like a well. It curved down and into the dark. I moved around to the side facing furthest away from Mrs. Welkie's house since that was the direction the hole headed.

I turned around and checked I could still get out before I was any further into it than waist deep. Before I lost sight of the light, I shouted. “Hello?!”

I counted beats and listened. I only heard what might have been a scratching. I pulled a flashlight out of my pocket and pointed it at the looming dark ahead of me. Four foot of vertical space isn't much to work with. I had to crouch to move. I steadied myself on the sides of the tunnel and stopped every few steps to shine the light ahead.

“Hello?” I called into the dark. I weighed options. Whatever had made this hole was huge. So far, the things I had found in the dark were creatures that weren't able to deal a deadly blow to someone who could recover from burning to death. My memory was limited. The fire that sent me to the morgue hadn't killed me but I'd forgotten everything I'd known before then. I don't know what I am or what my limits are. I seemed to need to breathe, eat, and sleep. I might survive a fire — at great personal cost. I didn't know whether I could survive a fall, drowning, or some other thing.

Some stories I'd read suggested that strange entities like me might be killed by silver knives or salt. I'd never had a chance to test the silver theory but salted fried potatoes hadn't harmed me yet.

Assuming the woman and man were even in the tunnel, I might not be able to rescue them unassisted. I didn't have more on me than the clothes on my back, the flashlight in my hand, truck keys, wallet, notebook, pencil, and folding knife in my pockets. These weren't ideal tools for a rescue.

I shouted down the hole again. My voice echoed off the walls of the tunnel. I heard a drip and some rustling in the distance but no voices answered mine.

A few steps later, the tunnel under me crumbled and sent me down through another passage.

---

I woke in a pile of debris, looking up at faint light from a hole in the uneven roof of the place where I found myself. There were roots a few fingers thick leading up. I felt for my flashlight and found it by my right hand in the dirt and stones. I shined it up. The plastic lens in my flashlight had been cracked but it didn't do much to hurt the light. I'd still have to replace the lens sooner or later. Before I could deal with that, I would have to get out. Even with the light, I couldn't be sure I could climb back up that way. The roots might snap under my weight and, even if they didn't, there were too few of them to be certain about making my way out the same way I'd come in.

If the woman and man fell like I had, they would probably be injured. I always wore denim, long-sleeve shirt, and thick leather boots when I went in the woods. My outer layers were dirtied but the fall hadn't cut through them.

The casual clothes they had been wearing wouldn't cover much of their vulnerable skin let alone hold up to a fall like that.

I didn't know that was what had happened with them but the math was starting to go sideways. I got to my feet and dusted myself off.

“Hello?! Can you hear me?” I bellowed. My voice didn't echo as much here. I listened and shined my light around the makeshift room I found myself in. Water dripped from somewhere. Where I'd fallen was near the high spot of the space so I hadn't woken up in a puddle.

I pushed my way through a gap and into the next space. It was larger than the place I'd first found myself in but it still wasn't really a place in the way the tunnel had been. Something was using this empty area and had made changes to it but the space itself may have been there for decades or more.

I don't know whether it was rational or not but I felt a shiver of fear. This was not a place for shouting. I moved quietly and turned the light in a circle around the room.

Something big had flattened out some of the space in the room but I didn't see it anywhere. Things were moving, though.

I spotted a human arm and made my way to it. It was still attached to the person. The woman.

She was covered in a thick, gooey mucus. Otherwise, she looked very much like she had when she and her friend had asked me about the bugs. Maybe she'd had an easier trip here than I had.

I wiped my hand across her face, making sure her mouth and nose were clear.

She squirmed and moaned.

“Are you ok?” I whispered.

She whined and squeezed her eyes closed.

“Sorry,” I muttered and moved the light away from her face.

“Where is he?”

“Your boyfriend?”

“He's not my boyfriend.”

I didn't have an answer to my question and my hand was starting to numb from the stuff I'd cleared off of her. I pulled her to one of the low spots in the space and used the water from the puddle to clear the goo from her exposed skin.

This wasn't a good place to be in but I was never going to get her topside without her cooperation.

She shrieked.

“Hush!” I said.

“Where the hell are we?”

“Underground in a den or something. Probably made by whatever brought you here. Where is the man you were with?”

“Who?”

I moved her to one of the walls and sat her down.

“Stay here,” I said. “And stay quiet.”

She nodded at me. She looked sleepy.

“What's your name?”

“Steph.”

“And the name of the guy you were with?” I rinsed my hands in the puddle closest to her.

Some presence of mind shook loose.

“Nathan. His name is Nathan.” Steph crawled close to the puddle as I walked into the dark.

A loud thud came from the direction I was heading.

Steph startled behind me, splashing the water she was now rinsing her shorts in.

I crouched lower and pointed the light at the ground. I had to climb through a gap into the next space. I stood to full height again.

I heard voices. Or something that sounded very much like voices. Chanting. Not words, I don't think. The voices were around me, talking to each other. At least that's the way it seemed to me. Maybe like birds or bugs calling to each other.

Something whizzed by my head. I ducked and flashed the light around. I didn't see what had flown by me but I did spot Steph's friend. I scanned around the room as I stumbled through the uneven ground. Stones and roots threatened to make me stumble.

Nathan was completely out of it. His legs were splayed and his upper body was hunched over them. He looked a little rougher than Steph did. He had cuts on his arms and legs but nothing life threatening.

I shook his shoulders.

He wasn't as covered in whatever slime had gotten on Steph. Maybe that was the reason for the cuts but I didn't have evidence of that yet. Nathan thrashed, almost like he'd been stirred from a slumber.

“Where am I?” he muttered.

I pulled him to his feet.

“Come on, Nathan,” I said. “Let's get out of here.”

“Ok,” he mumbled. “I lost my shoes.”

“I'm not surprised,” I said. I led him by the hand.

He squirmed in my grasp but didn't pull his hand back.

---

“Nathan?” Steph said as we made it back to the same chamber I'd found her in.

Nathan pulled away. He rushed around me and hugged Steph.

“You've still got goo on you,” Steph complained. She squeezed out of his grip and shoved him into the puddle.

“Make it quick,” I said. “We need to get out of here.”

The voices returned. They surrounded us. I flashed the light around. I could only catch the edges of them. They might have been bats or very large insects. I wasn't ready to rule anything out yet.

Steph and Nathan splashed around in the puddle, making a quiet racket the voices and flutterings couldn't quite drown out.

The splashing stopped suddenly.

“We're ready,” Steph whispered. “Are we going out the same way you came in?” (15:23 issue) “No,” I shook my head, heedless of whether they would see me do it. “I doubt I could get myself up that way. Without a rope, the three of us definitely wouldn't make it.”

“Sorry,” Nathan said.

I didn't respond. I went left since behind and front of me were blocked off and the right is where I'd found Nathan. Someone grabbed the back of my shirt but the hand didn't pull on me.

The makeshift tunnel we went through was uneven. It winded up, down, left, and right at random intervals and had the ends of tree roots crossing through the paths. I'm not so good with time when I'm deprived of the sun, moon, and stars.} I've never seen the point of wearing a watch. It makes sense for others. Just not for me. I rarely have appointments and what little money I need I get from donations or trades.

I wished a little for a watch now, though. It would be good to know if I should bother looking for a trace of sunlight through the drizzle that was surely happening above by now.

We came to a wider spot with the path diverging in two directions.

“Which way do we go?” Nathan said.

“Stay here,” I said. “I'll check one and come back for you.”

Steph looked like she was going to panic.

Irritation rose in me. I didn't want to deal with this but I couldn't risk them screaming.

“I won't be gone long. Please stay calm. I'm sure you don't want to draw them here.” I didn't even know who 'them' might be in this case. I hoped they knew more about what had brought them here than I did. I wanted to ask them if they remembered anything now that their skin wasn't covered in the mucus. I might try again later. I just had to hope whatever memories they might have would be enough to motivate them.

Steph nodded, biting her lower lip like it would keep her from making any noise. One of those strange human things. It wasn't that the lips made the noise but rather some strange shared symbolism I didn't have access to.

Had I known that kind of thing before the fire that took my memory and my past? I considered it often.

I rounded the corner. The trail narrowed and went up before going down again. I followed it a little further.

Something startled me. Some ... being. A creature of some sort. I wasn't close enough to see it clearly. Its proportions were inhuman. It had short hind legs, long forelimbs and giant gold eyes. Its body was more like the size and shape of a large dog than a human. It didn't have skin or solid pieces of an exoskeleton like an insect. It could have been made of rags. Some of its patches were brown and others green, black, or cream colored. I wasn't close enough to see for sure whether the colored spots were really made of cloth.

I had never seen its like. At least not in the memories I still had. I waited there for a moment to see what it would do.

It stood still but not so steady that I could mistake it for a statue or a dead thing. Its chest expanded and then contracted like breath.

If I could have been sure it was safe to draw near, I still wouldn't. The creature didn't seem inclined to let me move past it.

I turned around and kept an ear out for movement behind me. If the thing did follow me, it was utterly silent and didn't change the pressure of the air that surrounded us.

Had something like the creature taken Steph and Nathan into the tunnels? Had beings like it made the tunnels near the surface? If so, the things might have no interest in whatever I was. That didn't mean I was in the clear from danger. Anything after the others was a threat to me and there were other things in these tunnels too. Not just creatures but probably holes and cliffs.

When I got back, Steph looked like she was ready to chase after me.

“Well?”

I shook my head and led them the other way.

The path started out narrower and went down deeper and faster than the other had.

Steph and Nathan whispered behind me.

I had a rule I'd developed since losing my memory. I didn't involve myself in others' conversations where I'm clearly not wanted even if the conversation is about me.

“Mister,” Nathan said.

“Yeah,” I said without looking back. The darkness still enveloped us on every side, tempered only in front of us by my flashlight. I didn't have spare batteries on me. I wouldn't lose my head if I didn't have the light but Steph and Nathan were barely holding on.

“We didn't get your name.”

“John Doe,” I said.

Nathan laughed.

“Really. What's your name?”

“It's a long story but that is my name,” I said. It wasn't really that long but I didn't feel like telling it.

“John?” Steph said.

“Yes?”

“What was on the other path?”

“Dead end,” I said. If they found this unconvincing, they didn't say anything about it.

The path widened into another space. This one didn't have offshoots to worry about so we moved through it and into the next tunnel. I flicked the flashlight off and felt my way through the winding passage.

Maybe I was listening closer since I couldn't see or maybe my companions were more scared because it was dark. They made so much noise behind me that I wasn't confident I could clearly hear the things ahead of us. I guessed asking them for quiet would have made them angry and noisier. I tried to live with it.

The path opened up after a long while. I turned the flashlight back on.

Steph shrieked and Nathan startled. Nathan fell back onto his butt. At least the dirt here was dry.

I spotted what they were concerned about. Four creatures. The same kind that had turned me back from the other tunnel.

The creatures jumped back when they heard the noise from the other two but they didn't move off the paths they had staked off.

“I don't think they're trying to hurt us,” I said. I moved toward the one path that wasn't blocked.

The creatures didn't move from their spots. Their eyes seemed to glow in the dim frame made by my flashlight. It was just a reflection of light in a slightly golden hue.

“Come on,” I said.

Steph and Nathan didn't hurry to join me. I had to walk back to them and push them by the shoulders.

“If they wanted to hurt us, they would have done it already.”

Steph let out a cry of relief once we were in the next tunnel.

I squeezed in front of both of them and led them down the new path.

“Were those like the things that brought you here?”

“What? No. I don't think so at least. I couldn't see.”

“It might be the goo talking but I thought the things that got us were snakes.”

“Big ones. Like nothing you've ever seen.”

It was presumptuous to guess what I had and hadn't seen. In this case, they happened to be right. I hadn't seen a gigantic snake. I had seen things that frightened even me, though. I didn't need to fill their minds with terror as I was trying to get them to the forest above us.

I didn't think we could outrun a snake large enough to make the tunnel I'd first jumped into. I didn't know if a gigantic snake could move faster than a smaller one but they'd probably move fast enough especially in their own tunnels.

The passages were so quiet the sounds of Steph and Nathan breathing behind me were almost deafening. Much of this segment was pretty skinny but nearly tall enough for me to stand at full height if I needed to. Every step was uncertain and I was held up as much by my elbows pressing against the sides as I was by the ground under my boots.

“Can't we look ahead?” Nathan said. “I think this is starting to get to Steph.” The sound of something hitting a human back punctuated the silence.

“I'm fine. Just keep moving,” Steph said.

I slipped my hand inside my pocket and pulled out the cracked flashlight. I pressed the little rubberized switch to click the light on. Because of the bends and twists of the tunnel, I couldn't see much further ahead with the light than I could feel. I pressed the button again and dropped the flashlight in the breast pocket of my flannel shirt.

Several long and tense minutes later, we found ourselves in an empty space.

I turned the light on again and shined it around the room.

Steph shrieked as the light passed over some bats.

“They don't have any interest in us,” I said. “They eat bugs and small rodents.”

“No! You don't understand! Nate!”

I turned around.

Nate was down low with his ass on the ground, crawling backward. He looked up with his mouth wide open.

I spun around and searched for what they were reacting to. All I saw at first were the same flying shapes I'd identified as bats just a moment earlier. They still looked like bats but a large group of them melded together.

At first, the shape they made was like nothing I have seen on Earth or beneath it. It could have been like the shapes that swarming birds make sometimes but it morphed and shifted until they made five bipedal forms. The forms stood at about shoulder height. They weren't shaped much like humans. They had round bodies and spindly legs and arms. Their heads were roughly melon-shaped with big, gaping jaws and no sockets for the eyes they didn't have.

Even I felt a cold shiver in my bones. I didn't recognize them. Maybe I would have if I hadn't lost my memories. Something about them spoke of hunger and something else. Despite the similarities of our present forms, they didn't recognize us as anything more than prey.

Something fluttered around us. More of the little flittering, flying things that had merged to form the figures in front of us.

Nathan shrieked this time.

The form closest to us took a swipe at me. Its gleaming claws looked sharp enough to rend flesh from bones.

Instinct pulled me back in time to avoid a serious injury.

“Don't let them join up,” Steph shouted.

I scowled at that. I didn't have any reasonable options to keep them apart. I stepped between two of them, leaving three to my left and two to my right. I protected my front with my left arm and my back with my right.

The creatures formed of little flying animals shrieked and hissed at me. One of them held a clawed hand up for a moment and took a swipe at me.

I didn't have enough room to dodge this time.

It hit my left arm and left three deep gashes in it. The pain was sharp and bitter. It stung.

I was going to need a new shirt. I reached my right hand behind me.

“Get close and follow me. You can hold your fists up together to protect your midsection and most of your arteries,” I said with a quiet hiss.

There was a little scuffle behind me and then I felt someone press up against my back.

I reached and grabbed a shirt and pulled them forward with me.

“Don't stop for anything,” I muttered.

A few more of the bat creatures took swipes at me. A few claws landed, tearing the shoulder open on my shirt. I pulled through anyway.

Steph and Nathan both made noises of surprise. I would be able to rescue them if I could get them out but I didn't see a way to do it without further injury. It was no time to stop.

We pulled past the beings and made it to a tunnel.

“We got everyone?” I shouted without looking back.

“Yes,” Nathan and Steph both said.

“Alright. Keep going.”

I pulled the flashlight out and flicked it on, lighting up a little of the winding path in front of me.

We did the closest thing to a run that we could do in a tunnel that was a little wider and much shorter than me.

We came to another open area. This one was pretty small. The others wouldn't be able to pass me unless I pressed myself up against a wall.

“How are we doing?”

“You're bleeding,” Nathan looked like he might pass out at the sight of the blood running down my left arm.

“It's not as bad as it looks,” I said. I didn't know how bad it was but I had recovered from fatal burns. I figured a few cuts on the topside of my arm were probably not going to do the job. I squeezed past them and shoved the flashlight into my mouth. I dug into the low roof of the tunnel we'd just come through, partially collapsing it. I turned around and squeezed past them again. “Let's get going.”

---

The next stretch of tunnel started heading up a little. It was a relief. We'd been pretty steady in depth for a while. I'd already considered trying to dig up whenever we found a good place to try it.

Before I could give it any more thought, I realized I'd missed something.

“Back up,” I told the others.

“What's wrong?” Steph's voice came from behind Nathan.

“Nothing. We might have found a way out.”

They backed down the tunnel.

I turned back and found the hole I'd missed. It was a little small for me to fit in. I used both hands to dig it out.

Nathan watched me with something like fear mixed with excitement.

I was sure he was watching the wound on my left arm. I held the only light in my mouth. It was just strong enough now to help us make out the path ahead. It wouldn't give him much of a hint about how deep the cuts were.

I got the hole big enough to lift myself up into it. I shined the light and found one of the bigger, rounder tunnels.

I let myself back down.

“Go on. I'll help you up. Head left when you're up there,” I pulled Nathan toward me and lined him up with the hole.

I helped push him up. He disappeared into the dark.

“Are we getting close?” Steph said.

“It's heading in the right direction and it looks like the hole I came down to find you. I hope so.”

She nodded, looking more like she was thinking on what I'd said than anything else.

I pulled myself up into the tunnel after them.

“Careful where you step. On the way down, I fell into a hole that led me to you two.”

That seemed to give Nathan an idea. He got into a crawl and spread himself across as much of the width of the tunnel as he could.

“Do what Nathan's doing,” I told Steph.

The three of us crawled up the steep incline. The tunnel curved gently this way and that, occasionally leveling for twenty feet. It was almost a surprise when we crossed the hole I'd fallen in to begin with.

Nathan was able to easily avoid the hole. Steph and I followed after him.

Soon, the three of us were in mud from the rain that had come down into the tunnel.

“We're almost there,” I said. “Keep going but be careful. We don't want to slip down the tunnel.” I let the mud that we were crawling in cover my forearm. The mud couldn't hide the shreds that had been made of my shirt but the cuts would be less obvious. There was still water dripping but it might have been the leftovers of the rain working its way off the leaves and needles of the trees.

Steph managed to get herself out of the hole on her own but Nathan needed help.

As I was pushing Nathan out, small shapes chattered around us, moving past us and into the night sky.

“God. Not again!” Nathan said.

I pushed him out of the hole and climbed out of it myself.

The flying creatures formed up. This time, not in the shapes of the bipedal creatures that had found us underground. They formed into a gigantic, curving snake.

Steph wept silently and shook.

“Oh shit,” Nathan said when he saw what Steph was reacting to.

“Don't panic,” I said through gritted teeth. I pulled the flashlight out and turned it on. I shone it at the snake and walked steadily and calmly toward it.

It hissed and moved past me.

I spun around and saw it go down into the tunnel. It seemed to give us a final flick of the tail as it disappeared down the hole.

“What are we going to do now?” Steph said.

“I'll lead you back to Mrs. Welkie's place. You can find your way to your car from there.”

---

We walked through the damp of the night. I hoped they would calm down before we made it back to their car. I hoped the memories would fade into a dream-like thing with fuzzy edges.

They bickered about what to do. Nathan wanted to go to a nearby bar and try to tell others about what they experienced.

Steph looked skeptical.

“Will you go with us?” she asked me.

“We fell in a hole and dealt with some bats and badgers. I've already had my vaccines. You should get yourselves taken care of.”

“Bats?!” Nathan seemed offended. “You saw what we saw.”

“I don't think I did.” I flashed the light up ahead of us. “There's your car.”

“Where are you going?” Steph said.

“Back to my own truck.”

“Thanks for everything,” she said.

“Yeah. Thanks, man.” Nathan sounded a lot less grateful than Steph did but I hadn't just insinuated that she'd been imagining everything they went through.

We parted ways. I did stop at my truck. I pulled my torn shirt off and tossed it into a waste bag I keep under the shell. I pulled out a spade. I usually used it for latrine duty but it would have to do for my purpose.

The walk back to the tunnel was faster since I didn't have to worry about the others keeping up.

I hopped down the tunnel and scratched at the roof with my spade, aiming for the spots I thought might be weakest. It may have been my paranoia but I felt eyes staring at me in the dark. I didn't know how long I had before the others showed up.

Minutes of work left a nice pile of dirt and stones blocking the tunnel entrance. It would take more time and effort to block out the dim light from the moon and stars.

I dug faster, aiming to bring down big chunks. I was a little too successful and got myself caught in a crumbling pile of dirt and roots. I backed myself out of it and shook out my undershirt. I walked down the tunnel a good ways.

The eyes I'd felt on my back shone lightly in the dark. It might have been a trick of the mind or eyes.

What I saw had dim, red eyes. They made small movements. A group of them worked on another hole in the top curve of the tunnel. Each figure was a little taller than half the height of the tunnel itself. I couldn't make out much more about them than that.

I drew near. This part of the tunnel still required me to hunch down to move through it. I couldn't have been silent even if I'd tried. Every foot step and move involved a subtle crunch.

The red eyed beings didn't run or flinch. They did look at me from time to time as I moved closer to them. That didn't mean there was no danger. There wasn't enough light in the tunnel to see if they were the same kinds of creatures as the ones that had tried to keep us on the right paths before.

My heart pounded. After the help the others had given us, I wasn't ready to assume these were interested in harming me but I was still cautious.

The red eyed beings backed away from the hole they'd been digging. One of the closer red eyes nodded at the hole.

I looked up through the hole. It had a steep slope but it led to a dim sky blocked by the tops of waving trees.

“Thanks,” I said. I tucked the spade in my back pocket and started making the climb out of the hole.

I got out in time to find men wandering around the woods with flashlights in hand. Closing the hole I'd climbed through would have made too much noise. I slipped behind a row of trees.

They didn't see me.

I went off to the left, parallel to the line I figured they were making from Mrs. Welkie's house. I hopped Mrs. Welkie's chain link fence and slunk through the back yard to the house.

The yard was covered in leaves but the damp from earlier made the surface soft if not quiet to walk through. Someone who stood perfectly still might hear me from a pretty close distance. It was a risk but a smaller risk than standing still in woods that were being scoured by men with flashlights.

I scratched at the back door.

Mrs. Welkie opened it. She spotted me and came back out with a broom. She brushed me off and then let me into her house. She locked the back door behind us.

“Shower's in that way. I'll come in for your clothes and leave you a pile of my late husband's so don't mind the door.”

I nodded.

---

A knock came on the front door. I rushed through pulling on the clothes Mrs. Welkie had left me. The cuts on my arm and shoulders had stopped bleeding though they looked pretty severe still. The shirt would cover the wounds long enough to keep prying eyes away from them. I gave my hair another pass with the towel before walking out.

“John,” Mrs. Welkie said. She was near the front door and looked a little nervous.

“Coming,” I said. I took a steady pace to the front door, towel still around my neck.

A group of men stood outside Mrs. Welkie's house.

“Take us to the tunnels,” a man at the front said. He directed this to me.

I stepped out onto the porch. I felt a cold shiver. There were about thirty people gathered there.

“How long have you lived here?” I asked.

“All my life. Forty years.”

“In all that time, how many have gone missing from these woods?”

His face twitched. He looked around at the crowd that surrounded him.

“Before today, none.”

“Counting today, none,” I said. “There's no one missing unless there are other hapless tourists no one has told me about.”

Some muttering broke out between the others in the crowd.

“They said there were monsters in the tunnels. It's not safe to have them so close to our houses.”

“I found them disoriented and distraught. They got out safely with my help. I climbed through dirt and muck to get them out. I didn't see anything scarier than a bug or a bat. I've already had my shower. I'm not showing you a hole I'll have to rescue you from in forty-five minutes.”

“Come on, James,” one of the other men pulled James's shoulder. “Let's go back to the bar. First round's on me.”

James scowled and pulled his shoulder back. He walked away from the woods.

I went back inside Mrs. Welkie's house. The smell of grilling sandwiches hit my nose. I sat down in a chair at the kitchen table and rested my head on my hands on top of the table.

“You know how long I've lived in these woods?” Mrs. Welkie said as she stirred the soup that was bubbling beside the sandwiches.

“No,” I said. Exhaustion filled my voice.

“All seventy some odd years of my life. I've seen things in the darkness. Things I wouldn't dare tell anyone but you. I think of them as friends. Or at least well-behaved neighbors. They never borrow my sugar or shout at each other after the sun goes down.”

There are things in the forest worth worrying about and I did see some of them that night. Most of those were humans, though.

“I feel like thanking you but I wonder if you're not something more than you appear to be,” Mrs. Welkie said as she placed a pair of grilled sandwiches on a plate and set them in front of me.

I raised my head and gave her a slight smile.

---

I cleaned up the plate, bowl, pan, and pot after the sandwiches and soup.

Mrs. Welkie came back out. She had on a night gown that went from her neck to her socked feet.

“I put a blanket and pillow on the couch. You can sleep there while you wait for the dryer to finish or stick around until morning and get breakfast out of the deal. I'm up past my bedtime.”

I nodded.

She left and I bedded down on the couch.

The night sounds of a strange house are hard to sleep through. I wondered if some of the noises would have been more familiar before I lost my memories. I nodded off and slept until nearly three in the morning.

It was almost dead silent in and outside of the house. It might have been the quiet that woke me. I looked out the window beside the front door.

Some of the gold-eyed rag creatures were outside, rambling in the dim light of the moon on a night that had become clear since I had fallen asleep.

I stepped out into the chilly wet with my bare feet.

The creatures froze when they heard me but relaxed when they saw me.

I walked to them, crouching down to make myself less tall. I tried to see the world as they must have. A human might have seen the dark but even they could have made out the shapes of the trees and the dips and climbs of the uneven ground around us.

The creatures' ramble was almost like a dance. Their frames were built more for a four limbed stride than bipedalism but I still saw the artistry in it.

One of them rambled up to me. It turned its left hand up and raised it twice.

I held my hand up as it had but didn't repeat the raising motion.

It made a sound that might have been a squeak or a chortle and dropped something in my hand. It was a smooth but pliable round ball. In the dim light, I couldn't tell the color but it might have been a smooth ball of dirt. A little less heavy and maybe wrapped in smooth leaves.

The being showed me another ball in its own hand and touched its tongue to the ball.

I licked the ball it had given me. It tasted a little savory and slightly sweet. It was nothing like human food but it stirred something familiar in me. I was sure I wasn't one of these beings. It wasn't just the fact that I looked like a human to the casual observer. There were other, more fundamental differences between us but that didn't mean we were too unalike to share a moment.

“Thanks,” I said. I slipped the ball in the pocket of the shirt Mrs. Welkie had loaned me. I snapped the pocket button closed.

The creature made a repeated noise that sounded a bit like “squork.”

“It's a little late in the night for me to eat.”

The being rolled over its shoulder like it was a ball. It scampered to catch up with its friends.

I slipped back into the house and went back to sleep.

In the morning, a movement in the shirt pocket woke me up. I slipped out the front door and unsnapped the pocket. A bug flew out of it. Big enough to be the thing I'd licked before.

I lifted the left cuff on the shirt and peeked at the wounds on my arm. They'd started an inch deep and each was now the depth of a fingernail's thickness.

I may be strange but, so far, it seems I'm only as strange as the world I've found myself in.

#AudioFiction #Horror #Halloween #Fiction #JohnDoeIsNotAlone

Additional stories about growing up on Oakvilla farm

The Girl Next Door & Horseback Dreams

The farm next to Oakvila was a world of its own. The neighbouring farm was Sterk Spruit owned by a Doctor and named after the river that ran through it from the foot of Blinkwater mountain. At its heart was Linda, the girl who made my young heart race. Her family’s sprawling fields were just over the hill, and I’d concoct any excuse to wander that way. Horse riding lessons became my golden ticket. I wasn’t much for horses at first—my brother’s unease around them had rubbed off on me, but the prospect of seeing Linda made every dusty ride worthwhile. I’d saddle up, feigning confidence, while stealing glances at her as she moved with ease among the stables. Her laugh was like the chime of a bell across the valley, and though I never mustered the courage to confess my crush, those lessons were my happiest hours. The horses, the hay, the soft Natal breeze—they all blurred into the background, and it was just Linda, radiant and untouchable.

First Kisses & Fleeting Romances

Love, or whatever passed for it in those youthful days, was a whirlwind. My first kiss, or rather, a shy peck, came from Alison, whose father ran a dairy farm down the road. It was quick, awkward, and left my cheeks burning, but it felt like a triumph. Then came that unforgettable afternoon at school, when boldness overtook me. Louise, the German girl with eyes like a summer sky, and Rene, the French beauty with a mischievous smile, both found themselves on the receiving end of my newfound confidence. Two kisses in one day, proper ones, not pecks, and I was king of the world, if only for an afternoon. The schoolyard buzzed with whispers, and I walked taller, even if the thrill was fleeting and all because I was the designated judge to who was the better kisser. Needless to say, this unicorn was never repeated again…

Flowers & Family Competitions

My mother’s hands were magic when it came to flowers. She could take a handful of blooms from the Oakvila garden and turn them into art, her arrangements winning ribbons at regional competitions. She taught me the craft, how to balance colors, how to let each stem breathe. I entered a youth competition once, more to make her proud than anything else. To my surprise, I won. The girls in the competition weren’t thrilled, their glares sharper than thorns, and I decided that was my first and last foray into flower arranging. Still, those moments with Ma, snipping roses and weaving greenery on the stoep, are pressed like petals in my memory.

Shortly after my mom & dad married my oupa JT gifted my mom ‘n Knolklimop a.ka. Boweia Volubilis. This is a rare medicinal plant popular amount the zulus and I now have the descendants of that plant in my garden in the Big Smoke. All two hundred.

Sibling Shadows & Silent Resentments

My sister’s words always carried a sting when she spoke of Dad. “He never talked to me,” she’d say, “only to you, because you’re a boy.” It hurt to hear, and I’d push back, asking if she ever tried asking him about his life, his stories. She’d insist he wouldn’t have answered that it was because she was a girl. I wanted to shake her, tell her it wasn’t true. Dad built her a Wendy house, a proper sized dollhouse, just because she asked. He’d have answered any question, I’m sure of it, but she never asked. Next time she brings it up, I’ll tell her to stop, to see it wasn’t one-sided. Families are like that—misunderstandings grow like weeds if you don’t pull them out early.

Breaking from Shadows at Grey College

My brother was the smart one, always a step ahead, and I spent years trying to match him, not outshine him. It paid off, I topped my class at school, found my own strengths. Swimming was one. I won a race once, in the outside lane, blind to the other swimmers, just the crowd’s roar pushing me forward. I didn’t want to look like a fool, so I pushed harder and won. Even beat my brother once, though he’d outrun me any day. He shied away from horses and guns, especially after his friend’s tragic accidental death while handling his dad’s pistol. Dad taught me gun safety, how to respect a rifle, but my brother kept his distance. When a friend drowned in a neighbor’s pool, it shook me. I saw them pull him from the water, and instead of sadness, I felt a fire to learn to swim better. The neighbour doctor’s wife, an American nurse and former competitive swimmer, gave me lessons. Her three daughters including Linda were there, too, and I won’t lie—those swim sessions were as much about them as the strokes.

I wanted to step out of my brother’s shadow, to be my own man. I asked Dad to send me to a proper city school. Most were too pricey, but his friend Jood Jordaan suggested Grey College, his old school. Dad wrote a letter, but the first reply was a rejection. The party line was down, so he drove to town to call Jood. A week later, an acceptance letter arrived, and I was on my way. Jood and Dad went way back, to the sixties referendum when Dad was farming in Richmond. He’d wanted to cut ties with the British, a view not everyone shared. I asked him why and he said no-one needs to sing God save the Queen after watching a movie. A teacher, bitter about Dad’s politics, tried to ruin him—set fire to his farm, even placed a fake ad in Farmer’s Weekly claiming Dad was selling and leaving. Jood, a regional politician, helped Dad through it, and the police tracked down the culprit. The teacher was fired from his job and the district was one of the few in Natal to vote Yes to South Africa becoming a Republic. The Yes victory was small, only 2% and that in no small part was due to that incident and a shift in that district. That same Jood got me into Grey College, and I carried that chance like a torch, ready to light my own path.

Road Trips with Dad

The road to Bloemfontein stretched 500 kilometers, a long ribbon of dust and tar that carried Dad and me from Oakvila to Grey College, where I boarded. We’d pile into the Mercedes NH3000, its engine humming like a promise, or sometimes the Datsun, less grand but just as reliable. Those trips were more than travel—they were a classroom. I’d pepper Dad with questions about our family, our history, and he’d unfold stories like maps, tracing lines back to Richmond, the referendum, and the farm’s struggles. His voice was steady, weaving tales of resilience and roots against the hum of the road.

One year, I joined him on a proper trek, riding shotgun in a truck bound for the Kouebokkeveld to buy seed potatoes. The journey was endless, the landscape shifting from Natal’s green folds to rugged, open plains. We talked for hours—about the land, the seasons, our people. Those moments stitched me to my past, to him. But by my last year at Grey, we got a car with a cassette tape deck. Music filled the cab, and our talks grew quieter, the stories drowned out by scratchy tapes. I didn’t realize then how much I’d miss those long, uninterrupted conversations, the ones that made me know who I was.

Television & Rally Days

Getting our two-hour evening television fix was no small feat at Oakvila. Nestled halfway down the valley’s slope, our house was a dead zone for TV signals. At first, Dad rigged an antenna atop the mountain behind us, tethered to the house by a long, snaking cable. It worked until fire season, when flames claimed the setup. Undeterred, Dad had a signal repeater installed by the lime shed across the valley, bouncing the signal back to us. With that, we were glued to High Chaparral, Bonanza, and Village People—not the pop group, but a gritty series about South African miners. Those evenings, huddled around the flickering screen, felt like a hard-won victory.

The farm had other thrills, too. Dad’s Tinkabi, an irrigation tractor with a massive tank and oversized wheels, was a beast. Powered by a Lister diesel engine, it sprayed insecticide and weedicide across the fields. In winter, starting it was a battle. The crank handle demanded muscle, and everyone—family, farmhands—lined up to take a turn. When the engine finally roared to life, it kicked like a mule, and you had to leap back to avoid a whack from the spinning handle. It was a ritual, equal parts chore and adventure.

But nothing beat the annual Natal Rally. The organizers would visit Dad beforehand, begging him to keep the irrigation running near the starting line. The result? A gloriously muddy mess. We’d drag our deck chairs to the edge of the field, settling in to watch cars fishtail and slide. Heavy-footed drivers spun out, some veering off the road entirely, plowing into sugar cane fields at breakneck speed. One year, a car smashed into the telephone pole where the martial eagle used to perch, man, that pole was moer toe, and the crowd roared. From our vantage point, we’d track the cars tearing through the valley, cheering when someone took a wrong turn and vanished into the cane. I’d dream of climbing into a souped-up Ford Capri, voet in die hoek, tearing through that special stage with the crowd’s shouts in my ears. Those rally days were pure, electric chaos, and they lit up Oakvila like nothing else.

Doves, Forts, & Farm Adventures

My parents brought home white fantail doves, proud little creatures that puffed out their chests like they owned the place. Dad had a special birdhouse on a pole built for them, a multi-level affair with tiny rooms and a quaint black roof, perched like a palace in the yard. I reckon the martial eagle, ever-watchful from its telephone pole, nabbed a few—the doves’ soft cooing was no match for the weavers’ racket in the wild fig tree. Ma’s garden, a prize-winning spectacle of lawns and rockeries, turned our dusty farmhouse into something out of a countryside dream, and those doves added a touch of elegance, like we were lords of a manor.

We were vegetable farmers, not livestock keepers, so meat came from the New Hanover Co-op butcher. The few chickens we had were scrawny, street-smart survivors, darting around the yard like they’d studied evasion tactics. Catching one was a mission—they’d bolt like lightning. When I did snag one, I’d draw a line in the sand, press its beak to it, and watch it freeze, transfixed. I’d laugh till my sides hurt. The farm was alive with guinea fowl, their cackling chorus filling the sunset. You couldn’t walk ten steps without finding porcupine quills or their speckled feathers. Dad loved a guinea fowl roast, though its gamy taste never won me over. He’d insist it wasn’t sporting to shoot a bird on the ground or in a tree—only in the air. With just one good eye, I was a crack shot, the challenge feeling as natural as breathing.

I built forts all over Oakvila, my cowboy playgrounds. There was one in the old sheds, where carpenter bees bored nests into the beams; another in the wild fig tree; one in a donga near the dam’s slopes; another by the babbling stream in the horse camp, where wild Canna plants grew; and one atop the hill, where granite boulders looked like giant Zulu bums. If I’d been naughty and Ma or Dad came looking, I’d vanish into a fort. Once, I disappeared for two full days, sustained by phuthu and maas from the Zulus, who’d chuckle at my antics. I could’ve lasted longer.

One day, Dad roped me into hunting for a missing tractor. The driver had vanished, and the party line buzzed with no sightings. We hopped in the Datsun, scouring the farm. Near the dam wall, we spotted tracks plunging into the water, the tractor’s exhaust stack poking just above the surface. I dove in, hooked chains to the frame, and we hauled it out. The driver was never seen again. Word among the workers was he’d been drinking, took the tractor to visit his girlfriend, and feared Dad’s wrath—Mastelek, they called him. He never returned.

At night, Oakvila was pitch-dark, save for the glow of Zulu fires. I’d roam with a battery torch, camping in my forts just for the thrill. My brother and I spent holiday hours building dams in the farm’s streams, piling stones and mud with a beaver’s obsession. He’d later become an engineer, and I got it—there was a deep satisfaction in shaping water’s flow. We had no beavers on Oakvila, but we had seen them on the nature programs on the Telefunken; we were the beavers, crafting our own wild world.

Zulu Neighbors & Farm Justice

The Zulus on Oakvila, the Gumedes and Ncunes, were a wary lot, steeped in their own ways. They propped their beds on bricks to ward off the tokoloshe, a mischievous spirit I never saw but felt through their hushed tales. The Gumedes marked their cheeks with distinct cuts, badges of their lineage, while the Ncunes stretched their earlobes for bold, ornate earrings that caught the sun. I soaked up their world before I knew my own, learning Zulu as my first tongue, its rhythms as natural as the farm’s dust. But city life—the Big Smoke—diluted it, and now those words slip through my fingers like sand.

They taught me to fear snakes early, especially the puffadder. “It has teeth in its tail,” they’d say, claiming it could strike backward while lazing on a path. I later learned it was just the snake’s sluggish ambush style, but the myth sank deep, and I’d leap over any shadow on a trail. Dad, fluent in Zulu and its dialects, often doubled as a court interpreter when the magistrate—a schoolmate—needed help on busy days. He said Zulu justice didn’t truck with hearsay. A man caught red-handed would confess, but a cow in your kraal wasn’t theft unless you were seen driving it there. No proof, no crime.

Dad hired a towering Ncune as the farm’s walkabout, armed with a knobkerrie to deliver swift justice to anyone caught in the act. But harvest days softened the edges. Vegetables that didn’t make market grade were handed out free to the workers, the rest bartered with a neighbor down the road—a mechanic who’d fix tractors or trade milk for our surplus. Oakvila ran on deals like that, a web of barter weaving us all together, as much a part of the farm as the soil itself.

Thorns, Stews, & Sunday Braais

One day, my sister’s scream echoed across the farm—she’d driven a thorn clean through her foot. She wailed as Dad, calm as ever, grabbed pliers and yanked it out. That set her off again, crying blue murder, tears flowing like a burst dam. Life on Oakvila was like that—sharp moments softened by family. Our farmhouse glowed with incandescent bulbs, no LEDs in sight. The shed had a massive mercury vapor light, like the ones on city streets, humming bright. Electricity powered the farm’s heart, especially the irrigation pumps. Dad, ever resourceful, bought a Wolf electric lawnmower and strung together a tangle of extension cords to tame Ma’s sprawling lawn. In his office, an old valve radio crackled with Morse code and foreign tongues, its wavebands pulling in voices from across the globe. I’d sit there, mesmerized by the pops and hisses, worlds away from our valley.

Ma’s kitchen was a haven of German comfort. Her Stegen’s stew, a recipe from Oma Bertha, was a hearty cousin to Irish stew, rich and warming. We ate brown bread with meat preserves and porridge wurst, a spread I loved but rarely saw elsewhere—store-bought spreads were a luxury glimpsed only in other kids’ school sarmies. Potatoes were our staple: bratkartoffel, poeffer roti, or halved spuds roasted with cheese and spring onion, crisp and golden. Ma served cabbage with nutmeg, and we feasted on farm-grown carrots, cauliflower, and brussels sprouts, alongside Zulu imifino and madumbis. Breakfast was mielie pap, oats, or phutu with maas, but the real treat was Ma’s stywe pap with gravy and boerewors, the Voortrekker’s fare, filling us with history.

Sundays meant braais, the fire loaded with steak, chops, and wors. One Sunday, Dad spotted monkeys raiding the mealies in the valley. He called for his Finnish Sako 7mm Remington Magnum, only for me to confess I’d shot all the bullets in target practice. Unfazed, he sent me for the Czechoslovakian Winchester .458 elephant gun. From the stoep, he took aim, and a monkey vanished like it’d been zapped by a death ray. The rest scattered, bolting for the hills as if the devil himself had arrived. Dad fired again, missing a monkey but hitting an irrigation pipe. A geyser erupted, sending his mate, the magistrate, into fits of laughter. I joined in, only to be sent to the shed for a spare pipe to fix the mess. That braai, with its chaos and meaty smoke, was Oakvila at its finest—wild, warm, and unforgettable.

Phone Books & Walkie-Talkies

Next to the old Siemens Bakelite phone in the farmhouse sat a stack of phone books—Pietermaritzburg, Durban, and the Yellow Pages. They were like treasure maps, listing every person’s number and address in the area, with the Yellow Pages cataloging goods and services. Those books are gone now, swallowed by the internet’s endless sprawl. Dad pored over ads in the Natal Witness and Farmer’s Weekly, always on the hunt for a deal. Ma loved her Garden and Home, dreaming up new corners for her prize-winning garden. My sister, meanwhile, was glued to Scope, its centrefold the first thing I’d sneak a peek at—especially when censorship laws slapped white stars over the models’ nipples. Scope spilled stories we’d never catch on TV or in the papers, a window into a racier world.

The Reader’s Digest was my real teacher, arriving each month in the postbox. I’d devour it cover to cover, its pages schooling me in English better than any classroom. Life on Oakvila moved slow, purchases weren’t impulsive. A trip to the shop took planning, sometimes weeks or months, the pace of the farm setting its own unhurried rhythm.

The real thrill came from Dad’s National walkie-talkies, made in Japan, powered by eight AA batteries each or a 12V line. They worked from one end of the farm to the other, turning me into a kid straight out of CHiPs on our Telefunken TV. I’d cycle to New Hanover, one radio clipped to my belt, and call Ma in the kitchen when I was in range. My brother and sister weren’t keen to chat, so Ma was my lifeline, her voice crackling back through the static, tying me to home no matter how far I roamed.

Yamaha Scramblers & Dirt Road Thrills

When [CHiPs](https://www.instagram.com/reel/DNCojbptoi-/?utmsource=igembed&igrid=AvDGQjg6hVAxrwrn63VYRy “Chips”) started flickering on our Telefunken, Dad brought home two Yamaha scramblers—a DT175 and an AG100. They were our new stallions, replacing the horses for tearing around Oakvila. My brother, the daredevil, led the charge, bragging about his jumps and hill climbs, with me hot on his heels. The best spot was the dam wall, where you’d hit the dirt at speed, the slope steepening near vertical. Time it right, and you’d launch into the air, landing perfectly still on the wall—a heart-pounding thrill that never got old. We carved routes through sheer drops and rocky paths, racing circuits on the district’s dirt roads, kicking up clouds of mud and dust.

Those bikes were freedom, but one lesson stuck hard. A kid in the district died when a corrugated iron sheet flew off a truck’s bed, striking him. From then on, I never tailgated a truck, the memory of that tragedy keeping my throttle in check no matter how wild the ride.

Watching Films on the Telefunken

At Oakvila Farm, the Telefunken television was the heart of our family entertainment, glowing warmly in the living room as we gathered to watch a mix of old movies and classic TV shows. Among the films, [Oklahoma](https://youtu.be/BIGGVE-KiE “Oklahoma”)!_ stands out vividly in my memory, its vibrant musical numbers and sweeping landscapes filling the screen. It was one of many old cowboy movies we enjoyed, alongside Western staples like Bonanza and High Chaparral, broadcast on the SABC with Dorian Berry’s familiar voice as the continuity announcer, guiding us through the evening’s lineup. The Telefunken also brought us timeless religious-themed classics like Ben-Hur, its epic chariot races and grand storytelling captivating us. Those evenings spent watching the flickering screen created a cherished ritual, blending nostalgia, adventure, and drama in the cozy embrace of the farm.

In die hart van my huis, op die muur in die eetkamer, hang ‘n stukkie geskiedenis wat my altyd laat glimlag – ‘n Willow-patroon serviesbord vir gebraaide vleis, so groot dat selfs die Koningin van Engeland trots sou gewees het om dit op haar tafel te gebruik. Dit is my ouma Joey se bord, wat sy van haar ma geërf het. Haar ma was ‘n Maritz, en ek vertel almal dat dit op die Groot Trek was.

Daardie porselein op my muur is gemaak aan die draai van die 19de eeu, so dit was definitief op die Groot Trek. As dit kon praat, watter stories sou dit nie vertel nie! Getrek met os-wa van die Kaap na Natal, deur stofwolke en rivierkruisings, deur die swaarkry van die Voortrekkers. Dit het sekerlik feesmale gesien, waar families bymekaargekom het om te eet en te bid, te midde van die wildernis. Vir my is dit meer as net ‘n bord; dis ‘n skakel na my voorsate, ‘n herinnering aan hul moed en deursettingsvermoë. Elke keer as ek daarna kyk, voel ek die gewig van daardie geskiedenis, en ek wonder oor die hande wat dit gehou het, die stories wat dit stilweg bewaar.

Paving the Way | Shale, Mud, and Unforgettable Farm Adventures

Growing up on the farm, the rhythm of life was dictated by the seasons, the soil, and the whims of the weather. But nothing quite captured the essence of our resourceful, hands-on existence like those rainy seasons when the dirt roads turned into treacherous quagmires. My dad, ever the practical problem-solver, had a simple mantra: if the rain was going to try to keep us from the world, we’d fight back with whatever the land gave us. That’s how I learned the art of loading shale stones onto a dump truck—a chore that doubled as one of my fondest childhood adventures.

It all started with the school run. We’d pile into our trusty yellow Kombi van each morning, a cheerful beacon against the green fields and rolling hills. But come the rains, those roads became a slick nightmare. The wheels would spin futilely in the deep mud, the van bogging down like a stubborn mule, and we’d be stuck, laughing nervously as the clock ticked away to being late. My parents were adamant: education was non-negotiable. “No missed days,” Mom would say firmly, while Dad nodded, already plotting our counterattack. Missing school wasn’t an option in our house; it was the gateway to a bigger life beyond the farm fences.

So, out came the equipment—relics of farm ingenuity that felt like extensions of our family. The loader was a beaten-up old blue Ford tractor, its paint chipped and faded from years of hard labor, with a sturdy bucket bolted to the front like a giant metal scoop. I’d climb up into the seat, feeling ten feet tall, as Dad guided me through the controls. “Easy on the throttle, now scoop low and lift steady,” he’d instruct, his voice calm but commanding. We’d head to the shale pits on the property, where I’d maneuver that bucket to grab heaps of jagged, gray stones—nature’s own paving material, tough and unyielding.

Then there was the dump truck: a converted Ford spud truck, originally designed for hauling potatoes but repurposed for just about anything that needed moving. It had that classic rumble, a deep-throated growl that echoed across the fields as we loaded it up. Bucket by bucket, we’d fill the bed with shale, the stones clattering like applause as they tumbled in. Dad and I would work side by side, with the farm labourers pitching in. The air would fill with dust and the scent of the dust, and by the end of the day, our hands were calloused, our clothes caked in grit, but our spirits soared.

We targeted every troublesome spot—the low dips where water pooled, the curves where the Kombi always slipped. Spreading that shale felt like laying down a promise: no more spinning wheels, no more frantic pushes to free the van from the mud’s grip. Layer by layer, we paved those bits, creating makeshift roads that held firm even in the heaviest downpours. It wasn’t fancy asphalt; it was raw, rugged, and entirely our own handiwork. And it worked. Come rain or shine, we’d make it to school, arriving with stories of our latest conquests over the elements.

Looking back, those days weren’t just about fixing roads—they were about resilience, family bonds, and the sheer joy of turning hardship into triumph. I can still feel the vibration of that old Ford tractor under me, hear the satisfying thud of stones hitting the truck bed. It was absolutely fun, the kind of simple, sweaty fun that sticks with you. Even now, decades later, just thinking about it brings a wide smile to my face. What a great memory, etched in shale and mud, a testament to the farm life that shaped me.

Ronald Bartels | LinkedIn | Instagram

“The practical world, the business world, has created the 'credentials society,’ and beginning in the 40s and 50s it became a mania to qualify for a particular line, to have a certificate or a diploma in this, that, or the other thing — in many things that are not really subjects at all — activities in the so-called real world which should be carried on by intelligent people but not necessarily by people who have taken a course. What is too bad is that people have very little faith in the value of intelligence, of general principles.”

Auf dieses Zitat bin ich vor ein paar Tagen über Hacker News gestossen. Hätte dort nicht gestanden, von wem es stammt, hätte ich es ohne Weiteres einer aktuellen Diskussion über Microcredentials, Weiterbildungszertifikate oder KI-Kurse zugeordnet. Gesagt hat es der amerikanische Kulturhistoriker Jacques Barzun. Und zwar 1980.

In einem Interview mit dem Christian Science Monitor wurde Barzun gefragt, wie sich die Universität seiner Zeit vom älteren Ideal der Universität unterscheide. Seine Antwort beginnt mit der „credentials society“. Seit den 1940er- und 1950er-Jahren, so Barzun, sei ein regelrechter Drang entstanden, Menschen für immer mehr Tätigkeiten durch Kurse, Diplome und Zertifikate zu qualifizieren. Seine eigentliche Kritik gilt aber dem Misstrauen gegenüber etwas, das sich schwieriger dokumentieren lässt: allgemeine #Bildung, Urteilskraft und die Fähigkeit, sich auch dann zurechtzufinden, wenn niemand die passende Lösung vorbereitet hat. [1]

Auch 46 Jahre später wirkt die Diagnose weiterhin aktuell. Der eigentliche Streitpunkt lässt sich in drei Begriffe fassen: #Lernen, Können und Nachweisen. Lernen bedeutet, sich Wissen und Fähigkeiten anzueignen. Können zeigt sich darin, sie in unterschiedlichen Situationen einzusetzen. Ein Nachweis wiederum macht bestimmte Leistungen für Dritte sichtbar. Die drei Ebenen hängen zusammen, sind aber nicht austauschbar.

Gerade heute, wo wir immer mehr Kompetenzen zertifizieren und gleichzeitig immer mehr Wissen durch #KI verfügbar wird, lohnt es sich, diese Unterschiede ernst zu nehmen.

Die Welt der Nachweise

Barzun war mit seiner Beobachtung nicht allein. Bereits 1979 hatte der Soziologe Randall Collins sein Buch The Credential Society veröffentlicht. Sein Ausgangspunkt lässt sich einfach formulieren: Wenn ein Abschluss zum Normalfall wird, braucht es den nächsten, um sich noch unterscheiden zu können. Bildungsabschlüsse vermitteln Wissen und öffnen Möglichkeiten, sie regulieren aber zugleich den Zugang zu Berufen und gesellschaftlichen Positionen. [2]

Diese Dynamik setzt sich bis heute fort, inzwischen in neuen Formen. Neben Berufs- und Hochschulabschlüssen gibt es Herstellerzertifikate, Onlinekurse, digitale Badges, Bootcamps und Microcredentials, also kurze, in sich abgeschlossene Lerneinheiten, für die ein formaler Nachweis vergeben wird. Weiterbildung lässt sich damit immer feiner portionieren, prüfen und sichtbar machen.

Gerade für Erwachsene kann das sinnvoll sein. Nicht jede neue berufliche Aufgabe verlangt einen weiteren mehrjährigen Studiengang. Wer sich gezielt neues Wissen aneignet, sollte diese Leistung auch dokumentieren können. Allerdings entsteht dabei eine Schieflage: Was sich einfach zertifizieren lässt, wird sichtbar, während anderes im Hintergrund bleibt. Ein absolvierter Dreistundenkurs erscheint mit Datum und Logo im LinkedIn-Profil. Jahrelange Erfahrung, sorgfältige Lektüre, informelles Lernen oder die Fähigkeit, in einer unübersichtlichen Situation einen vernünftigen Entscheid zu treffen, passen in kein ebenso handliches Feld.

Der Nachweis ist einfacher zu zeigen, als das Können nachzuweisen.

Warum wir Zertifikate benötigen

Es wäre zu einfach, daraus eine Klage über die Zertifikatsgesellschaft zu machen. Abschlüsse und Zertifikate erfüllen reale Funktionen. Wer jemanden einstellt, kann dessen Wissen und Fähigkeiten kaum vollständig überprüfen. Ein anerkannter Abschluss bietet eine praktische Orientierung und signalisiert, dass bestimmte Anforderungen erfüllt wurden.

Bei Ärztinnen, Elektrikern, Pilotinnen oder anderen Tätigkeiten, bei denen Fehler erhebliche Folgen haben können, geht es um mehr als Bequemlichkeit. Formale Qualifikationen helfen, Mindeststandards zu sichern. Auch in weniger regulierten Berufen reduzieren sie Unsicherheit.

Das Problem beginnt dort, wo aus einem nützlichen Hinweis ein Ersatzurteil wird. Wer eine Prüfung bestanden hat, verfügt noch lange nicht über die Fähigkeit, sein Wissen in jeder unbekannten Situation angemessen einzusetzen. Umgekehrt kann jemand eine Tätigkeit ausgezeichnet beherrschen, ohne den dafür erwarteten Abschluss vorweisen zu können.

Wie schwer es ist, auf vertraute Qualifikationsnachweise zu verzichten, zeigt die Bewegung hin zum sogenannten „skills-based hiring“. Unternehmen erklären, bei Einstellungen stärker auf Fähigkeiten statt auf Hochschulabschlüsse zu achten. Eine gemeinsame Untersuchung des Burning Glass Institute und der Harvard Business School aus dem Jahr 2024 zeigt allerdings, wie begrenzt die tatsächlichen Veränderungen bislang geblieben sind.

Der Effekt war verschwindend klein: Nach Berechnungen der Forscher eröffneten die neuen Einstellungspraktiken bei weniger als einer von 700 Einstellungen im Jahr 2023 in den USA zusätzliche Beschäftigungsmöglichkeiten für Menschen ohne Hochschulabschluss. Bei den untersuchten Stellen, deren formale Abschlussanforderungen gestrichen worden waren, stieg der Anteil neu eingestellter Personen ohne Bachelorabschluss zwar um durchschnittlich 3,5 Prozentpunkte. Der Gesamteffekt blieb jedoch gering, weil solche Änderungen nur 3,6 Prozent der betrachteten Stellen betrafen. Bei rund 45 Prozent der untersuchten Unternehmen veränderte sich das tatsächliche Einstellungsverhalten praktisch gar nicht. [3]

Das ist mehr als eine interessante Arbeitsmarktstatistik. Unternehmen können in ihren Leitbildern Fähigkeiten über Abschlüsse stellen und dennoch auf das vertraute Signal des Diploms zurückgreifen, sobald sie tatsächlich entscheiden müssen. Einen Abschluss im Bewerbungsformular abzufragen ist einfach. Herauszufinden, ob jemand ein unbekanntes Problem erkennen, einordnen und vernünftig bearbeiten kann, verlangt erheblich mehr Aufwand.

Was sich schlecht zertifizieren lässt

An diesem Punkt wird Barzuns Argument zugleich interessant und problematisch. Er stellt der Welt der Zertifikate „intelligence“ und „general principles“ gegenüber. Das kann so klingen, als gäbe es intelligente Menschen, die sich auch ohne Ausbildung zurechtfinden, und andere, die eben einen Kurs brauchen.

Barzun sprach allerdings keineswegs aus institutioneller Distanz. Er hatte jahrzehntelang an der Columbia University gelehrt, deren allgemeinbildendes Curriculum mitgeprägt und leitende akademische Ämter bekleidet. [4] Man kann deshalb fragen, ob sein Vertrauen in „intelligence“ und allgemeine Prinzipien auf einer Bildung beruht, deren Voraussetzungen er im Zitat unterschätzt. Auch allgemeine Prinzipien müssen erst erworben und verstanden werden. Zudem sind die Gelegenheiten, sich eine umfassende Bildung anzueignen, gesellschaftlich ungleich verteilt. Intelligenz allein ist deshalb ein unzureichender Gegenentwurf zur Zertifikatsgesellschaft. Urteilskraft entsteht aus Wissen, Erfahrung und Übung, und gute Bildung kann genau das vermitteln.

Dennoch berührt Barzun einen entscheidenden Punkt: Nicht alles, was für kompetentes Handeln wichtig ist, lässt sich sauber in einzelne Lernziele zerlegen und zertifizieren.

Nehmen wir eine Lehrperson, die eine Unterrichtsstunde sorgfältig vorbereitet hat. Die Lernziele sind klar, die Beispiele gewählt, die Aufgaben passen zum Stoff. Nach zwanzig Minuten merkt sie trotzdem, dass etwas nicht stimmt. Die Teilnehmenden nicken, können aber eine einfache Frage zur Anwendung des eben Besprochenen nicht beantworten. Die Lehrperson könnte nun den vorbereiteten Ablauf fortsetzen. Stattdessen unterbricht sie ihn, greift eine Bemerkung aus der Gruppe auf, entwickelt daraus spontan ein anderes Beispiel und lässt die Teilnehmenden das Problem noch einmal aus einer neuen Perspektive bearbeiten.

Was genau war hier die entscheidende Kompetenz? Fachwissen war nötig, ebenso methodisches Wissen und Erfahrung. Ausschlaggebend war die Fähigkeit, eine unerwartete Situation überhaupt als solche wahrzunehmen, verschiedene Möglichkeiten gegeneinander abzuwägen und im richtigen Moment vom Plan abzuweichen. Ein Kompetenzraster kann einzelne Bestandteile davon beschreiben. Es kann kaum vorwegnehmen, wann sie in welcher Kombination gebraucht werden.

Prüfungen können solchen Situationen näherkommen. Fallstudien, Simulationen und reale Arbeitsaufträge erfassen mehr als ein einfacher Wissenstest. Dennoch bleiben sie gestaltete Situationen mit bekannten Rahmenbedingungen. Berufliches Können zeigt sich auch darin, zu erkennen, dass der vorliegende Fall gerade nicht dem bekannten Muster entspricht. Bildungsinstitutionen benötigen vergleichbare Kriterien, um Leistungen beurteilen zu können. Ein Teil professioneller Kompetenz wird allerdings erst unter Bedingungen sichtbar, die sich nur begrenzt standardisieren lassen.

Was KI verändert

Generative KI führt diese Frage noch einen Schritt weiter. Wer heute ein Sprachmodell benutzt, kann sich Wissen erklären, Texte zusammenfassen und erste Lösungsvorschläge erstellen lassen. Die Antworten sind oft in Sekunden verfügbar und sprachlich überzeugend. Ihre Qualität lässt sich jedoch nur mit entsprechenden Kenntnissen zuverlässig beurteilen.

Das lässt sich an einem einfachen Fall zeigen. Jemand lässt einen längeren Vertrag durch ein Sprachmodell zusammenfassen. Die Zusammenfassung ist verständlich und weitgehend korrekt, lässt aber eine unscheinbare Klausel aus. Ausgerechnet diese Klausel regelt die Kündigungsfrist, die für den konkreten Fall entscheidend ist. Wer den Vertrag nur über die Zusammenfassung kennenlernt, bemerkt die Lücke möglicherweise gar nicht. Wer hingegen weiss, dass Kündigungsfristen oder Haftungsfragen für die eigene Entscheidung zentral sind, wird gezielt nachfragen und die entsprechenden Passagen im Original prüfen.

Hier zeigt sich, wie eng Fachwissen und Urteilskraft miteinander verbunden sind. Erst entsprechende Kenntnisse ermöglichen es, die eigene Situation richtig einzuschätzen, relevante Fragen zu stellen und die Grenzen des eigenen Verständnisses zu erkennen.

Der Zugang zu einer plausiblen ersten Antwort wird durch KI immer einfacher. Die anspruchsvolle Aufgabe bleibt, ihre Brauchbarkeit für den konkreten Zweck einzuschätzen. Was fehlt? Welche Annahmen wurden gemacht? Welche Informationen sind nebensächlich, welche entscheidend? Wann reicht das eigene Wissen zur Prüfung aus, und wann braucht es jemanden mit mehr Fachkenntnis?

KI macht besonders sichtbar, wo Wissen in Urteil übergehen muss.

Unsere Reaktion auf diesen neuen Kompetenzbedarf ist bezeichnend. Es entsteht eine weitere Schicht von Kursen, Badges und Zertifikaten. Angeboten werden AI-Literacy-Schulungen, Prompting-Zertifikate und Nachweise für den Umgang mit einzelnen Werkzeugen. Die neuen Systeme erfordern zweifellos neue Kenntnisse. Ihre Möglichkeiten, Grenzen und Risiken muss man kennenlernen und verstehen.

Doch ausgerechnet das, worauf es beim Umgang mit KI besonders ankommt, lässt sich durch einen standardisierten Kurs nur begrenzt belegen. Ein Zertifikat kann dokumentieren, dass jemand etwas über KI gelernt hat. Ob diese Person Monate später in einer neuen Situation eine fehlerhafte Antwort erkennt, ihre Bedeutung richtig einschätzt oder bewusst auf den Einsatz eines KI-Systems verzichtet, bleibt weitgehend offen. Das Lernen ist dokumentiert, das Können muss sich erst noch zeigen.

Selbst die KI-Verordnung der Europäischen Union ist hier zurückhaltender, als manche Weiterbildungsangebote vermuten lassen. Sie regelt die Entwicklung und Nutzung von KI-Systemen und verpflichtet Anbieter und Betreiber dazu, Massnahmen zur Förderung der KI-Kompetenz der beteiligten Personen zu ergreifen. Dabei sollen technisches Wissen, Erfahrung, Aus- und Fortbildung sowie der konkrete Einsatzkontext berücksichtigt werden.

Artikel 4 wurde im Juli 2026 im Rahmen einer Überarbeitung der Verordnung präzisiert. Die neue Fassung stellt ausdrücklich klar, dass Anbieter und Betreiber kein bestimmtes individuelles Kompetenzniveau garantieren müssen. Die Europäische Kommission hält ausserdem fest, dass zur Erfüllung der Verpflichtung kein bestimmtes Zertifikat erforderlich ist. [5, 6]

Ein neuer Bildungsbedarf erzeugt also keineswegs automatisch einen neuen Zertifikatsbedarf.

Der Nachweis und die Wirklichkeit

Hier liegt wohl auch die einfachste Antwort auf Barzuns „credentials society“: gute Bildung bleibt wichtig, anspruchsvolle Abschlüsse ebenso. Die Frage ist vielmehr, welche Aussagen wir aus einem Nachweis ableiten und wo wir ihm mehr zutrauen, als er tatsächlich leisten kann.

Ein Zertifikat dokumentiert bestimmte Leistungen zu einem bestimmten Zeitpunkt und unter bestimmten Bedingungen. Schon deshalb bildet es nur einen Ausschnitt ab. Wer einen Kurs absolviert hat, hat wahrscheinlich etwas gelernt. Ob dieses Wissen auch in unerwarteten Situationen verfügbar ist und sinnvoll angewendet werden kann, zeigt sich oft erst später. Ebenso kann jemand über beträchtliche Fähigkeiten verfügen, für die ihm schlicht der formale Nachweis fehlt.

Barzun hatte dafür 1980 eine polemische Formel. Seine Alternative, das Vertrauen in „intelligence“ und allgemeine Prinzipien, ist zu einfach. Seine Diagnose ist es nicht. Wir haben ausgefeilte Verfahren entwickelt, um Qualifikationen nachzuweisen. Wie gut Menschen mit ihrem Wissen umgehen, müssen wir weiterhin an ihrem Handeln erkennen.

Die „credentials society“ ist nicht verschwunden. Wir haben sie nur besser zertifiziert.

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Quellen

[1] D. Owens, „Looking at man and his arts; Jacques Barzun, Cultural historian and critic“, The Christian Science Monitor, 17. Juli 1980. https://www.csmonitor.com/1980/0717/071710.html

[2] R. Collins, The Credential Society: An Historical Sociology of Education and Stratification. New York: Academic Press, 1979. https://search.worldcat.org/title/802816243

[3] M. Sigelman, J. B. Fuller und A. Martin, Skills-Based Hiring: The Long Road from Pronouncements to Practice. Burning Glass Institute und Harvard Business School, Februar 2024. https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/Skills-Based%20Hiring_80b90afa-f6b5-4de9-b7f8-5d8232ce20e2.pdf

[4] Columbia University, „Jacques Barzun“, Columbia 250. https://www.c250.columbia.edu/c250_celebrates/remarkable_columbians/jacques_barzun.html

[5] Europäische Union, Verordnung (EU) 2024/1689, Art. 4, „KI-Kompetenz“, konsolidierte Fassung vom 27. Juli 2026. https://ai-act-service-desk.ec.europa.eu/en/ai-act/article-4

[6] Europäische Kommission, „AI Literacy – Questions & Answers“, Shaping Europe's Digital Future, 2026. https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/faqs/ai-literacy-questions-answers

Bildquelle Constantin Meunier (1831–1905): Arbeidsters in glasblazerij (Women Working in a Glass Factory), Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brüssel, Public Domain (Wikimedia Commons).

Disclaimer Teile dieses Texts wurden mit Deepl Write (Korrektorat und Lektorat) überarbeitet. Für die Recherche in den erwähnten Werken/Quellen und in meinen Notizen wurde Gemini Notebook (ehem. NotebookLM) von Google verwendet.

Topic #Maschinenwelten | #Erwachsenenbildung

Must come down. I feel like after sexual experiences, especially the more intense they are, I end up having strong crashes proportionally. I will say, however, I don’t actually have that adverse of a reaction this time I feel like which is good. But I also feel like a big thing stems from this pattern of over promising, and then the immediate regret and the feeling of having to overcorrect. I think, especially with how cheap talk is and how easy it is to get high off of a fantasy, it leads to this constant writing of checks that I cannot realistically cash. And I need this mostly in the pragmatic sense of it being something I actually feel comfortable with when not under the influence of hormones. I can’t help but feel like there have to be some amount of parallels between this weird consumerism culture of sex. Maybe parallels is the wrong word. But it feels like with the cycle of accelerating, getting high off of a fantasy, and when it comes time to actually consider the costs of that you can simply just move on. In a weird analogy it feels like how you can get into some new hobby or have some new goal or resolution and think about a daydream about reaching that goal, like you could think about how you could lock in on diet and everything and become a bodybuilder, and you already start thinking about how insane you might look in your head or how people might treat you or some of the second order effects and you can really start to reap some of the reward early – especially even more if you tell other people about it. I think about that study about how telling people that your New Year’s resolution releases dopamine in a similar way to actually working towards it, but actually ends up completely unproductive towards the actual goal meaning you are expending your dopamine without gaining any benefit from it. And think about how easy it is to tell people how you are training to run a marathon or that is your plan, but you don’t even sign up for a marathon and you don’t actually figure out a concrete plan of getting to that point. Instead you just. Maybe do a half assed jog or something like that until you say screw this I’ll start next week or whatever other excuse. And you can just continue to delay this while building up this fantasy in your head about what it would look like after you actually do it. And that is so incredibly dangerous I think. But I digress, in this analogy, you do this, milk out all of this loan of dopamine, and then move on to another goal and repeat. You stagnate in life and waste dopamine hacking it like this, but in the case of sex, I think you actively atrophy your emotional pathways and damage. The things required to have a happy relationship instead of doing this to some abstract promise, you were doing this to another human person and I think this should at least come with guilt or shame with those actions, as this is what serves you too do this less I think it becomes very dangerous when you were able to turn off this part of your brain and stop listening to this voice. I think that is what my main underlying fear is. I really do not want to fall victim to this arguable addiction.

The virtues of boredom.

My father and I were talking yesterday about boredom, and I wanted to share some thoughts on the subject I have accumulated over the years. We even have a song coming on this big record we’re making that sings the virtues of boredom. I don’t shy away from it. I am somewhat of an expert on being bored.

“I don’t have time.”

I have talked to many folks, musicians, and other professionals, who say, “I don’t have time to be bored.” I find that mindset troubling. I write all my best stuff when I am bored. If I am never bored, no best stuff. I make ample boredom time for that reason. It’s actually work. As a songwriter, I don’t have the time to not be bored.

What gives you “permission” to do?

Boredom is permission for me to “go there.” I have the time and open mind to experiment, think on one thing forever, practice. I have the time for tuning weird, or playing bass through a fuzzy preamp, or brushes on a djembe, or singing in Spanish! If I am in a hurry-up work mode all the time, the kooky shit stays in the closet. I have to be bored to run the bases of creation in music. The link is real. I simply create better when bored.

“Bored people are boring people.”

Our society discourages this thinking, making sure we are never bored. We even say, “Bored people are boring people.” This is not true if you are the ones boring them. It makes you the boring person, in this instance. It is right there in the phrase, it just needs a comma. The truth is the mind is better conditioned to create while bored. It isn’t just me, it’s science.

In Psychology Today, for example, Jeffrey Davis talks back in 2022 about boredom not only facilitating creativity, he said it contributes to well-being. His key points are: 

“With so many forms of entertainment at our fingertips, we never need to let ourselves be bored.”

“When we don't allow our minds to wander, we miss opportunities to become more creative, reboot mental health, and reconnect.”

“Instead of shunning boredom, we should embrace our mind's need to wander.”

Even Einstein.. Albert Einstein even said of being bored, “the monotony and solitude of a quiet life stimulate the creative mind.”

It is a luxury, but often attainable, just not sought after.

I realize I have the luxury to be bored today, more than any time of my life. I am trying to make the most of it. I know folks can’t just be bored like I can. But maybe they could if they did what I did. I do not know, purely speculation. I got rid of social media, I limit time online, I really try to be bored. I want to write good songs more than anything else I want to do in this life. Being bored is crucial to that. My mind is not free if it is always stimulated. It is reacting. Reacting is a different vibe than creation. It has to do with what others create. That’s really not creating, if you think about it. It might be necessary to react. We have to live. But we shouldn’t call it creating. I understand folks may not have this luxury or privilege in their mind, but many could. We’re just addicted to anti-creativity devices. 

When god was bored, he created, according to the lore, which means we are talking about humans. It’s only natural, right? 

This is not new. This boredom thing goes back. Clearing the head, resetting the creative juices is as old as the hills. Our memories have gotten short because we don’t use them. When you get good and bored, you get memories. 

And then there’s safety.

Boredom also requires an element of safety. You don’t let your guard down on the battlefield. I realize I am very fortunate to feel safe these days. It is new. It helps immensely with writing and improving. Safety alone facilitates my kind of boredom more than any other factor. Not comfort, not spare time, not gadgets, not a cozy shirt. Safety is the number one thing. Numero uno. Being safe at the moment is permission to be bored. Being bored is permission to create. How I operate. 

Here’s what’s shitty

Everyone who puts things in your brain that pass through a data scientist knows this about human nature. They know the best ways to keep you busy, occupied, and distracted. They push your buttons, making you react. I have been off social media for a good while now, and let me tell you, they are puppeteers on social media and everywhere else. They very much use this kind of knowledge to manipulate thoughts and behavior in billions, not creating, no memories, just junk. They sell candidates, they sell Pop-Tarts, they sell philosophies, they sell health products, on and on. If they can afford a micro-targeting campaign, they manipulate you into not being bored because they need to sell stuff. Don’t give them what little of yourself you may have left. Most folks do not care if you feel safe or not. This includes data scientists. They do not like it when you are bored. Resist, be bored.

Kelly Kintner (Youtube)

Editor, Producer

Chapter 1: The Congratulations That Took Me Too Long

It was almost midnight when I saw the announcement. Someone I know had received an opportunity I had quietly hoped might come my way. I read the kind messages beneath it, watched the little hearts gather, and felt something I did not want to admit. I was glad for this person, but I was also disappointed for myself. I set my phone facedown on the bed, as though hiding the screen might hide the comparison that had already started in my mind.

I thought of a line associated with Jimmy Stewart, spoken by the character portraying him in a film about his life. He says he does not want fame to make him like a god; he wants to see a good man when he looks in the mirror. I explore that thought in Jimmy Stewart’s reflection on fame and being a good man, but what unsettles me is how easily I can want to be seen as good without wanting to face everything happening inside me. Nobody else knew I felt jealous. I could have typed a lovely congratulations and still carried bitterness into tomorrow.

That is why learning to follow Jesus when comparison steals your peace is not only about finding confidence. It is about letting God speak to parts of us we normally keep private. It is possible to behave politely while secretly resenting another person's happiness. I know because I have caught myself doing exactly that. The uncomfortable question is not whether I can appear gracious. It is whether I am willing to become gracious when there is no audience to reward me.

After His resurrection, Jesus spoke with Peter about the life ahead of him. Peter noticed another disciple and asked, in effect, what would happen to that man. Jesus answered with a question of His own: “What is that to thee? follow thou me” (John 21:22, KJV). I do not hear those words as Jesus scolding a person for being curious. I hear a loving invitation to stop measuring my calling against someone else's. Peter had his own work to do. So do I.

The next morning, I could have made another cup of coffee and searched for reasons that person's success was less impressive than it looked. That would have been an easy way to protect my pride. Instead, I could pray honestly: Lord, I am disappointed. I wanted that door to open for me. Please help me be glad that it opened for someone else. Then I could write the congratulations I had been avoiding and mean it, even if my feelings needed a little time to catch up.

I am learning that goodness is not always a warm feeling that arrives before we act. Sometimes it begins when we notice a small, ungenerous thought and refuse to build a home for it. We bring it to Jesus without pretending, and we ask Him to enlarge our hearts. The person on the other side of the screen never needs to know how long that prayer took. What matters is that I did not let a private disappointment decide what kind of friend I would be.

Chapter 2: The Words I Wish I Had Interrupted

The kitchen is crowded, and everyone seems to be enjoying themselves. Someone makes a joke about a person who is not there. A few people laugh, and the conversation continues. Nothing about the moment appears especially serious. Yet something inside me becomes uncomfortable. I know the person being discussed, and I know they have been going through a difficult time. I also know that speaking up might make everyone look at me as though I have forgotten how to enjoy a harmless conversation.

I think many of us have experienced that quiet conflict. We recognize something unkind, but we hesitate because we want to belong. We tell ourselves that remaining silent is not the same as agreeing. Sometimes that is true. Other times, our silence becomes a way of protecting our comfort while somebody else's dignity is being diminished.

What bothers me about these moments is how ordinary they are. I might spend the morning thinking about the importance of treating people with compassion, then spend the evening struggling to practice it. I can understand the teachings of Jesus and still become surprisingly timid when following them might make a conversation uncomfortable.

In John chapter 4, Jesus meets a Samaritan woman beside a well. The encounter crosses social and religious boundaries that mattered deeply in His time. Jesus knows uncomfortable truths about her life, yet He does not treat her as someone unworthy of conversation. He speaks with her about living water and reveals something extraordinary about Himself. Where others might have seen reasons to keep their distance, Jesus saw a person worth reaching.

I return to that encounter when I am tempted to reduce someone to a story I have heard about them. People are always more complicated than the worst thing someone knows about their lives. The neighbor who appears unfriendly may be caring for a sick spouse. The coworker who seems distracted may be struggling to keep a family together. I do not need to invent explanations for their behavior, but I can remember that I rarely know everything another person is carrying.

If the conversation in that kitchen turned unkind, I could say something simple. Perhaps I could remind everyone that the person being discussed has had a difficult year. I would not need to embarrass the speaker or deliver a lecture. A little courage, offered gently, might be enough to change the direction of the conversation.

I am beginning to understand that following Jesus requires me to care less about appearing agreeable and more about being loving. Those are not always the same thing. Sometimes goodness asks us to risk a little awkwardness so another person does not have to stand alone.

Later, when the kitchen is empty and the conversation is over, I want to remember that I treated an absent person with the same respect I would have offered if they had been standing beside me.

Chapter 3: The Honest Answer I Almost Didn't Give

The church parking lot was almost empty when a friend caught up with me beside my car. He asked how I was doing, and I already knew the answer I usually gave. I could smile, mention how busy the week had been, and ask about his family. It would be pleasant, and neither of us would have to linger. But I had spent much of that week feeling discouraged, and for some reason I was tired of pretending that being dependable meant never admitting it.

I told him I was having a hard time. I did not give him a dramatic story or ask him to solve anything. I simply said that some things I had hoped for were not working out, and I had begun questioning myself more than I wanted to. He listened without hurrying me. Then he asked whether we could pray together before we left. I had come outside expecting to offer someone an encouraging word, not to be the person receiving one.

For years, I have been tempted to think that goodness is something I should be able to display without showing any weakness. I want to be patient, useful, and steady. Those are worthwhile hopes, but I can turn them into another performance if I am not careful. Even the wish to see a good man in the mirror can become a demand that I never let anybody witness my unfinished places.

Jesus gives me another way to live. In Matthew 11:28, He invites those who labor and carry heavy burdens to come to Him for rest. He does not tell them to make themselves admirable first. He knows what they are carrying. He offers rest before they have learned to carry everything gracefully.

I think that invitation changes the way I understand character. I still need to choose kindness when I feel overlooked, and I still need to defend the dignity of someone who is absent. But I also need enough honesty to say when I am struggling. Otherwise, I may spend my whole life protecting the appearance of strength while refusing the love that could actually strengthen me.

My friend and I prayed beside the car, with the evening air growing colder around us. Nothing about my circumstances changed in those few minutes. The things that disappointed me were still there. But I drove home less alone, and I understood something I had missed before.

I do not need to look into the mirror tomorrow and find a man who has finally made himself good. I want to find a man who is still willing to be taught by Jesus, still willing to tell the truth, and still willing to love without needing to be admired for it.

Your friend,

Douglas Vandergraph

Explore the complete Douglas Vandergraph Master Index: https://douglasvandergraph.com/douglas-vandergraph-master-index/

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

I just finished watching 'The End of Oak Street'. It's a very simple movie, but parts of it made me smile. My favorite part is the color scheme with its dreamy blur. It captured the feeling of the early 80s properly. I would have been ten. I was always, and still am, enamored by the variety of green that exists in nature. My second favorite part is the feathers on the dinosaurs. And my third favorite part is the Sagan quote. The movie only shares part of it. I will share the entire quote as follows:

“What does seventy million years mean to beings who live only one-millionth as long? We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.” —Carl Sagan

If that quote is kept in mind while watching the movie, it really shifts the tragedy. Doesn't it?

© 2026 AnOublietteofThought. All rights reserved.

The error codes were lying, and the machine was very sure of itself.

In the 1980s, a Xerox field service technician was called out to a photocopier. It produced, in the words of the researchers who later wrote the episode up, “copious raw information in the form of error codes” and “obligingly crashed when tested”. The trouble was that the error codes and the crashes did not tally. The company's training and its directive documentation tied each error to a code and each code to a fix, so once the codes stopped telling the truth, the official procedure had nothing left to offer except replacing the machine. The technician called in a specialist. The specialist was baffled too.

What happened next was recorded by Julian Orr, an anthropologist then working with Xerox PARC, and later retold by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid in a 1991 paper that became one of the founding texts of organisational learning. The two men did not consult a manual. They told stories. Through the morning, over lunch, and back in front of the machine all afternoon, they swapped memories of other copiers with overlapping symptoms, testing each story against the machine's behaviour. Orr's account describes “a five hour effort” that “yielded a dozen anecdotes”. The diagnosis finally came out of what Orr called an “antiphonal recitation”, in which the two men told different versions of the same encounter until the versions converged on the fault.

Keep that scene in mind, because it is the most precise description available of the thing Pearson says the skilled trades are about to lose. It is not information. The machine had plenty of information. It is the judgement to know when the information is wrong, and that judgement lived in two people talking to each other beside a broken machine.

On 24 September 2026, at the WorldSkills International Conference in Shanghai, Pearson launched research warning that a “triple capability gap” is opening across the skilled trade, technical and service occupations that keep hospitals, factories and infrastructure running. AI is reshaping those jobs faster than education and training systems can adapt, the report argues, just as experienced workers retire and take decades of practical knowledge with them. The result is a generation of early-career workers at risk of becoming, in Pearson's phrase, “AI-rich but experience-poor”.

Which raises two uncomfortable questions. What happens to a trade when the apprentice turns up holding an AI assistant, but the mentor who was supposed to teach the difference between right and almost-right has already gone? And can the knowledge that lives in a plumber's hands and a technician's instincts be written into training systems at all, or does some of it only ever travel from one person to another?

What Pearson Actually Found in Shanghai

The report is titled For Every Future: Preparing Early-Career Skilled Trade, Technical and Service Talent for an AI-Infused World. It combines labour market and AI exposure analysis across the United States, the United Kingdom and China with surveys, interviews and roundtables involving employers, educators, industry bodies, workforce experts, students and early-career workers. It also looks closely at two occupations: pharmacy technicians and industrial machinery mechanics.

The core argument is that these workers now need three things at once. The first is role-specific AI literacy and the critical judgement to use AI safely. The second is a set of human capabilities, including communication, collaboration, adaptability, emotional intelligence and learning agility. The third, and the one this article is about, is the practical and institutional knowledge traditionally developed through experience and handed down by experienced colleagues. Pearson's framing is that AI is more often changing day-to-day tasks than eliminating roles altogether, which makes the gap harder to see: nobody gets a redundancy letter, but the job underneath them quietly changes shape.

Some of the numbers are stark. Across the UK occupations covered by the research, 99 per cent of openings are expected to come from replacement demand, meaning workers who retire, change careers or leave the labour market, rather than from new jobs. The US figure is 98.5 per cent. Fewer than half of the industrial machinery mechanics surveyed felt their training was preparing them for AI-enabled work. One UK pharmacy industry participant told the researchers that it takes two to three years to revise pharmacy technician education and training standards, which is a long time in a field where the tools can change within a single product cycle. And the stakes are not abstract. Among pharmacy technicians, 98 per cent rated exactness and accuracy as extremely important, and 44 per cent rated the consequences of error as extremely serious.

Sharon Hague, Pearson's President of English Language Learning and its UK chief executive, put the problem plainly at the launch. “The challenge is that demand for these workers is rising just as many experts are retiring and taking decades of practical knowledge with them,” she said. “If we don't rethink how expertise is developed, the gap between what employers need and what workers can do will continue to grow.”

It is worth being clear about what kind of document this is. Pearson is an education and assessment company, and a report concluding that training systems need rethinking is also, inevitably, a report about a market Pearson sells into. That does not make its findings wrong, and its replacement-demand figures sit comfortably alongside independent labour data. But its most interesting claim is not a statistic. It is the idea buried in the third capability: that there is a category of knowledge that cannot simply be bought, downloaded or prompted into existence, and that its main carriers are leaving.

The Arithmetic of Replacement

Start with the people who carry that knowledge, and the rate at which they are leaving.

In construction, the Construction Industry Training Board's Construction Workforce Outlook for 2026 to 2030, published on 17 June 2026, estimates that the industry will need an average of 41,200 extra workers a year, roughly 206,000 over five years. CITB's diagnosis is blunt: too few people are entering the sector, too many experienced workers are leaving, and productivity improvements have not been enough to close the gap. In US manufacturing, Deloitte and the Manufacturing Institute projected in 2024 that as many as 3.8 million additional employees could be needed between 2024 and 2033, and that as many as 1.9 million of those jobs could go unfilled if the skills and applicant gaps are not addressed.

Plumbing makes the pattern concrete. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics counts 510,600 plumbers, pipefitters and steamfitters, projects around 42,000 openings a year over the coming decade, and notes that many of those openings will come from the need to replace workers who move to other occupations or leave the labour force, for example to retire. The same entry explains how the trade is learnt: most plumbers learn on the job through an apprenticeship lasting four to five years, with 2,000 hours of paid on-the-job training each year alongside technical instruction. In England, the Level 3 Plumbing and Domestic Heating Technician apprenticeship standard has a typical duration of 48 months.

Those durations are the real point. Four years is not how long it takes to learn the facts of plumbing, which would fit in a decent textbook. Four years is how long it takes to be around enough jobs, enough awkward pipework, enough customers and enough mistakes, in the company of someone who already knows, for the facts to turn into judgement.

And the pipeline feeding that process has been narrowing. Department for Education figures published on 27 November 2025 recorded 353,500 apprenticeship starts in England in the 2024/25 academic year, up from 340,000 the year before. But in 2016/17, the year the apprenticeship levy was introduced, there were 494,900. The mix has shifted too. Higher-level apprenticeships now make up around 40 per cent of starts, while intermediate apprenticeships, the traditional entry route for young people into a trade, have fallen from 43 per cent of starts in 2017/18 to 19 per cent. The system is producing more graduate-style apprenticeships and fewer people at the bottom of the ladder, which is precisely where the long, slow, person-to-person transfer of craft knowledge has always happened.

Put the two trends together and you get Pearson's scenario in its simplest form. The mentors are leaving faster than they can be replaced, and the replacements are arriving through a narrower door, into jobs whose tools are changing underneath them.

Knowing More Than We Can Tell

To understand why the loss of mentors matters more than the loss of workers, you have to go back to a Hungarian-British chemist turned philosopher.

In The Tacit Dimension, published in 1966, Michael Polanyi compressed a lifetime of thinking about scientific practice into a single sentence: “we can know more than we can tell.” We recognise a face among thousands without being able to say how. Polanyi's claim was stronger than the observation that some knowledge is hard to describe. He argued that all knowledge rests on a tacit foundation, a set of skills, habits and perceptions that we rely on without attending to them.

The idea might have stayed in philosophy if a young sociologist had not put it to the test. In the early 1970s, Harry Collins, now a distinguished research professor at Cardiff University, studied laboratories trying to build a then-new device called the TEA laser. His finding, published in 1974 and followed up in 1975 with his co-author R. G. Harrison, was striking. No scientist he studied succeeded in building a working laser using only published papers or other written sources. Every group that managed it had obtained some crucial part of the knowledge through personal contact: phone calls, visits, someone who had built one standing in the room. The written account was complete in every respect except the one that mattered.

Collins spent decades refining what that means, and his 2010 book Tacit and Explicit Knowledge offers the most useful map we have for Pearson's question. He splits tacit knowledge into three kinds.

The first is relational tacit knowledge. This is knowledge that could in principle be written down but in practice is not, because nobody has bothered, because it seems too obvious, or because someone would rather keep it to themselves. The torque setting a senior fitter uses on a particular flange, which differs from the manual for good reasons nobody recorded, is relational. So is the knowledge that a particular customer's boiler has a history.

The second is somatic tacit knowledge, which lives in the body. Balancing a bicycle is Collins's classic example. For the trades, think of the feel of a pipe cutter biting cleanly, the sound of a pump running slightly wrong, the resistance of a fitting that is about to strip. This is knowledge whose limits come from the nature of bodies and brains, not from social choice.

The third, and for Collins the deepest, is collective tacit knowledge. This is knowledge that belongs to a community rather than to any individual: the sense of what counts as a proper job, which rules can be bent on site and which cannot, when a shortcut becomes a hazard. You acquire it by being socialised into the group that holds it, and for Collins it is the hardest kind of tacit knowledge to make explicit, because it lives in the group rather than in any one head.

That three-way split turns out to answer most of the question in the headline, but before getting there it is worth seeing what happens when a society forgets that the split exists.

When the Recipe Loses Its Impurity

In the 2000s, the US National Nuclear Security Administration set out to refurbish the W76 warhead carried on Trident submarine-launched missiles. One component needed a classified material code-named Fogbank. The facility that had produced it had long since closed. According to a 2009 article in Los Alamos National Laboratory's Nuclear Weapons Journal, most of the personnel involved in the original production process were no longer available, and the agency had to reconstruct the process from historical records.

The reconstruction did not work. According to the Los Alamos account, as reported by the defence publication The War Zone, the new process made a purer material than the old one, and the purity was the problem. The original batches had contained an impurity that the weapon's performance had quietly come to depend on. Nobody had documented it because nobody had known it mattered, and the people who might have noticed the difference were no longer there.

The Government Accountability Office report GAO-09-385, released on 2 March 2009, documented the cost. The planned first refurbished W76 slipped from September 2007 to September 2008, and NNSA spent $69 million addressing Fogbank production problems.

Fogbank is an extreme case, but it shows plainly what Pearson is warning about. The written record was, as far as anyone knew, complete. What was missing was not a fact but a relationship between facts, the kind of thing an experienced operator notices because something looks or feels different from last time. In Collins's terms, it was relational knowledge that had never been told, and the only people who could have told it were gone.

The Assistant That Talks Like a Journeyman

Now introduce the AI assistant.

The tools arriving on shop floors and in vans are not speculative. In May 2025, Siemens announced that its Maintenance Copilot Senseye would give maintenance teams “expert-level equipment diagnostics” without their needing specialist technical knowledge, citing pilot implementations with an average 25 per cent reduction in reactive maintenance time. In September 2025, ServiceTitan, whose software is widely used by US plumbing, heating and electrical contractors, launched Atlas, an AI assistant that gives technicians in the field instant answers through its mobile app. Its co-founder and president, Vahe Kuzoyan, described it as “a trusted co-pilot or even a chief of staff that adapts to the specific workflows” of each business.

There is real evidence that such tools help people who are new to a job. The best-known study, by Erik Brynjolfsson, Danielle Li and Lindsey Raymond, published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2025, tracked 5,179 customer support agents as a generative AI assistant was rolled out. Productivity rose by 14 per cent on average and by 34 per cent for novice and low-skilled workers, with minimal effect on the most experienced. The authors offer suggestive evidence that the tool worked by spreading the best practices of more able workers and helping newer ones move down the experience curve. In other words, some relational tacit knowledge, the kind that top performers had but had never written down, had been captured in the data and handed on.

That is a genuine counterweight to the gloomier reading of Pearson's report. But notice what it measured: speed and resolution in conversations, in a domain made of language. The question for the trades is what happens outside that domain, where the work is physical, the stakes are safety-critical, and the machine can be confidently wrong.

Collins has a concept that fits the new assistants almost too neatly. In Rethinking Expertise, written with Robert Evans and published in 2007, he distinguishes contributory expertise, the ability to actually do the work, from interactional expertise, the ability to speak the language of a practice fluently without being able to practise it. Specialist journalists and good peer reviewers have interactional expertise. They can talk the talk. In a 2024 paper in AI and Society, Collins argued that large language models learn from the internet rather than being socialised into communities, and that the result is systems that answer with fabrications as fluently as with facts.

An AI assistant is, in this sense, the most complete interactional expert ever built. It speaks the language of every trade. It can explain a pressure test, describe a failed seal, list the causes of a tripping breaker. What it lacks is the thing that made the Xerox specialist valuable: a body of experience against which to notice that the story it is telling does not fit the machine in front of it. Hand that fluency to an apprentice who has no such experience either, and you get Pearson's phrase exactly. AI-rich. Experience-poor.

Right Versus Almost Right

The danger is not that the machine is usually wrong. It is that it is usually right, and people learn to stop checking.

Researchers have been measuring this for decades. In a 2010 review in Human Factors, Raja Parasuraman and Dietrich Manzey described automation bias as the tendency to over-rely on automated aids, producing errors of omission, where people miss problems the system fails to flag, and errors of commission, where they follow advice that is wrong. Two findings from that review should worry anyone designing AI-assisted apprenticeships. Automation bias occurs in experts as well as novices. And it cannot be prevented simply by training or instructions.

Recent studies show what happens when AI enters that picture. In the field experiment with 758 Boston Consulting Group consultants reported by Fabrizio Dell'Acqua and colleagues at Harvard Business School, Wharton, MIT Sloan and Warwick, AI help made people substantially faster and better on tasks within the model's capabilities. But on a task deliberately chosen to fall outside what the AI could do well, consultants using AI were 19 percentage points less likely to reach the correct answer than those working without it. The researchers' metaphor for this is a jagged frontier: the boundary of what the AI can do well is irregular and hard to see, which makes it easy to cross without noticing.

Then there is the question of what reliance does to the learner. In January 2026, Anthropic published a randomised controlled trial of 52 mostly junior software developers learning an unfamiliar Python library. Those who used AI assistance scored 50 per cent on a follow-up quiz, against 67 per cent for those who coded by hand. The largest gap was on debugging questions, which is to say on the ability to recognise when code is wrong and why. Code is not copper pipe, but the skill that suffered is exactly the one the Pearson report is worried about: knowing when the output in front of you is almost right, and therefore wrong.

The most sobering evidence comes from medicine, where the consequences are measured in missed cancers. A multicentre observational study led by Krzysztof Budzyń and published in The Lancet Gastroenterology and Hepatology in August 2025 looked at 19 experienced endoscopists, each with more than 2,000 colonoscopies behind them. After AI-assisted detection was introduced, their adenoma detection rate in procedures performed without the AI fell from 28.4 per cent to 22.4 per cent. These were not novices. They were experts whose unaided performance appeared to decline after routine exposure to the machine. If skilled professionals can lose ground that quickly, the question for a trainee who never builds that ground in the first place answers itself.

Lisanne Bainbridge saw all of this coming in a short paper published in Automatica in 1983. “Ironies of Automation” observed that efficient retrieval of knowledge from long-term memory depends on frequency of use, and that some knowledge “develops only through use and feedback about its effectiveness”. Then she wrote the sentence that reads like a summary of the Pearson report forty-three years early: “There is some concern that the present generation of automated systems, which are monitored by former manual operators, are riding on their skills, which later generations of operators cannot be expected to have.”

That is the mechanism. Today's AI-assisted workplaces look safe partly because the people supervising them learnt their trade before the assistant arrived. They can tell when the answer is off because they once had to work it out themselves. Remove them, and the safety margin goes with them, without anyone noticing, until the error codes stop matching the crashes.

How Apprenticeship Actually Transmits Judgement

If the mentor's value is not information, what exactly is being transferred when an apprentice works alongside one?

In 1991, the anthropologist Jean Lave and the educational theorist Etienne Wenger published Situated Learning, built partly on studies of Vai and Gola tailors in Liberia. They found that the apprentices were not formally taught tailoring in any conventional sense. They learnt through what Lave and Wenger called legitimate peripheral participation: doing real but low-risk parts of real work at the edge of a community of practitioners, gradually moving towards the centre as their competence grew. The learning was inseparable from belonging. You did not learn tailoring and then join the tailors. You became a tailor by being among them.

Richard Sennett, the sociologist, made a related case in The Craftsman, published in 2008. He describes craft as “a dialogue between concrete practices and thinking; this dialogue evolves into sustaining habits, and these habits establish a rhythm between problem solving and problem finding.” Problem finding is the key phrase. A manual or an assistant can solve a problem you have already identified. Knowing that there is a problem, that the joint looks fine but is not, that the reading is plausible but wrong, is the skill that comes from the rhythm Sennett describes, and it takes time. “By one commonly used measure,” he notes, “about ten thousand hours of experience are required to produce a master carpenter or musician.”

Sennett also noticed what happens when a tool takes over the part of the work where that rhythm develops. Writing about computer-aided design, he recalls the physicist Victor Weisskopf telling MIT students who presented him with computer-generated results: “When you show me that result, the computer understands the answer, but I don't think you understand the answer.” His conclusion is blunt: “when the head and the hand are separate, it is the head that suffers.”

The most careful modern study of this problem comes from Matt Beane, who researches technology and work in the Technology Management department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and whose 2024 book The Skill Code draws on years of fieldwork in robotic surgery. In traditional open surgery, residents learnt by doing progressively more of each operation with a senior surgeon's hands beside theirs. The surgical robot changed that. “My research shows that the lead surgeon controls the robot, and the trainee has become completely optional,” Beane said when the book was published. The few residents who became genuinely skilled did so through what he calls shadow learning, bending the rules to get practice, including spending hundreds of hours watching recorded procedures. Beane frames the conditions for building skill as challenge, complexity and connection, and it is the third, the bond of trust between novice and expert, that intelligent machines most easily sever.

The pattern in Beane's operating theatres is the pattern Pearson is warning about in plant rooms and pharmacies. The technology does not attack the apprentice directly. It makes the apprentice unnecessary to the expert's work, and in doing so quietly removes the apprenticeship.

What Can Be Written Down and What Cannot

So, back to the second question. Can a plumber's hands and a technician's instincts be written into training systems?

The honest answer is some of it, more than sceptics assume, and less than vendors claim. Collins's three categories show where the lines fall.

Relational tacit knowledge can be captured, and there is a famous proof. In his 1991 Harvard Business Review article “The Knowledge-Creating Company”, Ikujiro Nonaka described how Matsushita's engineers struggled to design a home bread-making machine that kneaded dough properly. A software developer, Ikuko Tanaka, proposed a solution: she trained with the head baker at the Osaka International Hotel, whose bread was reputed to be the best in the city, to study his kneading. She noticed that he had a distinctive way of stretching the dough. After a year of trial and error with the project's engineers, she produced specifications, including special ribs inside the machine, that reproduced the baker's technique. The resulting “twist dough” method gave Matsushita a product that set a record for first-year sales of a new kitchen appliance.

It is often told as proof that tacit knowledge can be made explicit. Look closely, though, at how it was done. The knowledge was not extracted by interview or questionnaire. Tanaka had to apprentice herself to the baker, learning by observation, imitation and practice, as Nonaka put it, before she could translate anything. The conversion ran through a person. And it took a year.

That suggests a practical route for the trades. Much of what a retiring engineer knows is relational: the history of a particular plant, the quirks of a particular model, the workarounds that never made it into the manual. That knowledge can be captured, and AI can help, by transcribing, indexing and retrieving it. The Brynjolfsson study suggests AI can even spread the habits of top performers to newcomers. But capture has a deadline. It has to happen while the experts are still at work, alongside the people who will inherit the job, because the Tanaka story suggests the most valuable capture happens through apprenticeship rather than interview. Fogbank shows what happens when nobody does it.

Somatic tacit knowledge is harder. Simulation, haptic training rigs, augmented reality overlays and video can all accelerate it, and Beane's finding that some surgical trainees built real skill through intensive video review shows that recorded expertise has value. But a body still has to do the thing, repeatedly, with feedback. No amount of fluent explanation from an assistant will teach an apprentice how a compression fitting feels when it is right. At best, the machine can tell them what to practise.

Collective tacit knowledge is the category where the answer is closest to no. The sense of what counts as a proper job, when to stop and ask, which risks the trade tolerates and which it never does: this is the property of a community, and it passes by socialisation. Orr's copier technicians illustrate it. Their diagnosis came from a shared stock of stories that belonged to the group rather than to either man, and it was the group's norms, including the loss of face that came with simply swapping out the machine, that pushed them to keep going. Brown and Duguid made the point that the training and documentation were about maintaining machines, while much of the real work was about maintaining the social setting. An AI can summarise the stories. It cannot make an apprentice a member of the community that tells them.

Designing for the Mentor's Absence

None of this means the AI-equipped apprentice is doomed. It means the assistant has to be designed and deployed as part of an apprenticeship, not as a replacement for one.

The evidence points to some fairly concrete principles. The first concerns how the tool is used. In Anthropic's trial, the developers who retained the most were the ones who used AI to build understanding, and the highest-scoring group asked only conceptual questions and then relied on their own improved understanding to do the work. At the WorldSkills conference in Shanghai, Pearson's chief technology officer, David Treat, made the same point from the other side: “If you are using AI as an answer engine, you're not engaging the brain in the struggle that learning requires.” An assistant that makes the apprentice explain why a reading looks wrong before offering its own view is a different educational instrument from one that simply supplies the fix.

The second concerns mentors. Pearson's own recommendations call for expanding opportunities to develop practical know-how through mentoring, observation, feedback, simulation and hands-on experience. That sounds obvious, but it runs against the economic logic of the tools themselves, which are sold on making experts more productive and novices less dependent on them. If an assistant frees up a senior engineer's time, some of that time has to be deliberately spent with the apprentice, or Beane's operating-theatre pattern repeats itself on the factory floor. Bainbridge's final irony applies directly: “it is the most successful automated systems, with rare need for manual intervention, which may need the greatest investment in human operator training.”

The third is the unglamorous one. Apprentices need structured practice without the machine, which is what the endoscopy study implies clinicians now need too. The point is not nostalgia for doing things the hard way. It is that the ability to notice when the assistant is wrong is built by doing the work without it, and cannot be built any other way.

Go back, one last time, to Orr's copier. The machine gave its technicians more information than they could use, and none of it added up. What saved the job was not better data. It was two people with long memories, a shared language of experience, and a professional pride that would not let them give up. Today's AI assistants are, in a sense, error codes that can talk: fluent, confident, usually right, occasionally and invisibly wrong. The apprentice holding one needs what the Xerox technician had, someone who has seen this before.

The uncomfortable arithmetic of the Pearson report is that for many apprentices, that someone is already retiring. Some of what they know can be written into training systems, and the effort should begin now. The rest will travel the way it always has, from one person to another, beside a broken machine, or it will not travel at all.

References and Sources

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2. Pearson plc. “Pearson Appoints Experienced Company Executive Sharon Hague as President of English Language Learning.” Press release, 28 February 2025.
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4. Polanyi, Michael. The Tacit Dimension. Doubleday, 1966; reissued University of Chicago Press, 2009.
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6. Collins, Harry. Tacit and Explicit Knowledge. University of Chicago Press, 2010.
7. Collins, Harry and Evans, Robert. Rethinking Expertise. University of Chicago Press, 2007.
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9. Sennett, Richard. The Craftsman. Yale University Press and Allen Lane, 2008; extract published as “The Troubled Craftsman”, Arquitectura Viva.
10. Nonaka, Ikujiro. “The Knowledge-Creating Company.” Harvard Business Review, November to December 1991; reprinted July to August 2007.
11. Lave, Jean and Wenger, Etienne. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge University Press, 1991.
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13. Brown, John Seely and Duguid, Paul. “Organizational Learning and Communities-of-Practice: Toward a Unified View of Working, Learning, and Innovation.” Organization Science, volume 2, number 1, 1991, pages 40 to 57.
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20. Beane, Matt. The Skill Code: How to Save Human Ability in an Age of Intelligent Machines. Harper Business, 11 June 2024; and University of California, Santa Barbara, “How to build and protect skills in our modern workplace, a world filled with AI and robots”, The Current, 2024.
21. US Government Accountability Office. “Nuclear Weapons: NNSA and DOD Need to More Effectively Manage the Stockpile Life Extension Program.” GAO-09-385, 2 March 2009; and The War Zone, “Fogbank Is Mysterious Material Used In Nukes That's So Secret Nobody Can Say What It Is”, citing Los Alamos National Laboratory's Nuclear Weapons Journal, 2009.
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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

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

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

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

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