Chapter 1: The Shirt I Almost Turned Into a Battle

A few days ago, I looked down at the band T-shirt I was wearing and realized that something as ordinary as a piece of cotton had become a spiritual question. Someone had challenged me because some of the shirts I wear have dark artwork, and some of the bands have written songs that mention evil or difficult subjects. I had already been thinking about what Jesus teaches us about Christian freedom and the way we represent our faith, because that is also the heart of the associated video I made on this subject.

My first reaction was not especially noble. I wanted to defend myself. I knew why I wore the shirt, I knew what I believed, and I knew that the words coming out of my mouth were centered on Jesus. Part of me wanted to say that people should pay more attention to the message than the artwork on my chest. But another part of me remembered the deeper Christian lesson about freedom, conscience, and loving people well, and that made the whole thing harder to dismiss.

That is where this became more personal than I expected. The question was no longer whether the shirt was acceptable. The question became what was happening inside me when someone challenged it.

I think many of us know that feeling. Someone points at something in our life and suddenly we are not just thinking about the issue anymore. We are thinking about being judged. We start replaying the conversation in our head while driving home. We imagine what we should have said. We build our case. We gather verses. We quietly prepare an argument nobody has asked us to deliver.

I can do that faster than I would like to admit.

The person who challenged me pointed toward 1 Corinthians 8 and 1 Corinthians 9. At first, I was tempted to read those chapters like a lawyer searching for evidence. I wanted to know whether Paul supported my freedom. But when I slowed down, I realized Paul was asking a more uncomfortable question. He was not only asking whether a Christian had the right to do something. He was asking what love does with that right.

In 1 Corinthians 8, Paul is talking about food connected with idols. Some believers understood that an idol had no real power, so eating the food did not trouble their conscience. Others had a different history. For them, that same action could pull them back toward something from which they had been freed.

That matters because there is a difference between someone disliking what I do and someone genuinely being harmed by what I do.

If another Christian simply prefers that I dress differently, that does not automatically make their preference a command from God. But if I knew that something I was doing was truly creating a spiritual obstacle for a vulnerable person, I would have to take that seriously.

And that is where my T-shirt stopped being the main point.

The real issue was whether I loved being right more than I loved the person in front of me.

That is a hard question because freedom can become part of our identity. We can hold onto something not because it matters very much, but because somebody questioned our right to have it. Suddenly the little thing becomes symbolic. A shirt becomes independence. A meal becomes principle. A personal choice becomes a hill we are ready to defend.

I have learned that pride is very good at disguising itself as principle.

There is another danger, though. Fear can disguise itself as humility.

A person can spend years changing clothes, changing words, changing hobbies, changing opinions, and changing parts of themselves every time another Christian raises an eyebrow. That does not necessarily make someone more faithful. It can simply make them more controlled by other people's expectations.

Jesus did not live that way.

He was misunderstood constantly. Religious people questioned who He ate with, who He touched, when He healed, and why He spent time with people whose reputations made respectable people uncomfortable. Jesus never built His life around avoiding criticism. If He had, much of His ministry would have disappeared.

But He also never used freedom as an excuse to stop caring about people.

That is what I keep coming back to.

Jesus was strong enough not to be controlled by other people's opinions, and loving enough to give Himself away for other people.

Those two things belong together.

I can stand in my kitchen in a band shirt and tell myself that God knows my heart. That may be true. But if I stop there, I can miss the invitation to examine that heart. Am I wearing this because I enjoy the band and the shirt means nothing more than that? Fine. Am I defending it because I am angry that somebody questioned me? That deserves a closer look. Would I take it off in a situation where I knew it was genuinely getting between someone and Jesus? I hope I would.

Not because the other person defeated me.

Not because the shirt suddenly became sinful.

Because the person would matter more.

That is a very different kind of surrender. It is not weakness. It is not people-pleasing. It is not allowing another person to own my conscience. It is choosing love freely.

I think that is one of the quiet ways Jesus changes us. He takes a situation where we are focused on proving our point and turns our attention toward the condition of our heart.

Maybe that is why this whole thing has stayed with me.

I started with a shirt.

Jesus brought me to a mirror.

Chapter 2: The Freedom to Lay Something Down

The next morning, I stood in front of my closet longer than usual. It felt almost ridiculous. I had worn band shirts for years without giving them much thought, but now I was looking at them differently. Not with fear, and not with shame. I was simply asking myself a better question than the one I had started with. Instead of asking, “Can I wear this?” I asked, “What kind of person do I want to be when somebody questions me?”

That question reached much farther than clothing. It reached into the way I answer criticism, the way I protect my preferences, the way I react when somebody misunderstands me, and even the way I decide whether to explain myself or let something go. Most of us have small things in our lives that become strangely important the moment somebody tells us we should change them. It may be the music we listen to, the way we spend our free time, a tradition we enjoy, a social media post, or the way we express our personality. The thing itself may be small. What happens in our heart when it is challenged can be much bigger.

That is where 1 Corinthians 9 helped me see something I had missed. Paul was not a man who did not understand his rights. He understood them very well. He could explain them, defend them, and show why they were legitimate. Yet he was also willing to lay some of those rights down when doing so helped the gospel move forward. His surrender had purpose. He was not being pushed around. He was choosing to put the mission ahead of himself.

That difference matters to me.

There are times when giving something up can look like losing, especially if you are used to standing your ground. But Jesus showed us that voluntary surrender can be one of the strongest things a person does. He washed the feet of His disciples. He made room for people others ignored. He accepted inconvenience. He endured misunderstanding. Ultimately, He laid down His life. None of that happened because people controlled Him. It happened because love directed Him.

I think about that when I imagine a young Christian sitting across from me at a table, nervous about faith and unsure about what following Jesus is supposed to look like. Maybe this person has just walked away from a lifestyle that nearly destroyed them. Maybe music, alcohol, a certain crowd, or some other part of their old life still has a strong pull on them. If I knew one of my choices was making that struggle harder, I would not want to wave my freedom in their face and call that maturity.

I would want to care more about the person than the point.

But I also would not want that same person to grow up believing Christianity means living terrified of everybody else's opinions. Jesus did not call us into a life of spiritual nervousness. He called people to follow Him. That means our conscience should be shaped by Him, our love should be shaped by Him, and our courage should be shaped by Him too.

That balance is not always simple.

Sometimes love will ask me to give something up.

Sometimes love will ask me not to surrender something merely because another person is uncomfortable.

The wisdom is in knowing which situation I am actually standing in.

I have found that one of the best clues is what is happening inside me. If I feel a desperate need to prove that nobody can tell me what to do, pride may be driving. If I feel afraid that somebody will think less of me unless I change, fear may be driving. But if I can listen without panic, pray without rehearsing my argument, and make a decision without resentment, I am probably getting closer to freedom.

Real Christian freedom is quieter than I once thought.

It does not need to announce itself.

It does not have to win every disagreement.

It can wear the shirt or leave the shirt in the closet.

It can explain itself or remain silent.

It can stand firm or step aside.

The important question is whether Jesus is leading the decision.

That is what I want people to see in me more than anything printed on my clothes.

I want them to see a man who can be corrected without falling apart, who can disagree without becoming cruel, who can surrender without becoming bitter, and who can stand his ground without becoming proud. I will not always get that right. None of us will. But that seems much closer to the life Jesus modeled than spending all our energy proving who is allowed to wear what.

Maybe there is something in your own life that has become your version of my T-shirt.

Maybe somebody has questioned a harmless preference, and you are angry because it feels like they are judging your faith. Or maybe you know deep down that something you are defending has become more important to you than it should be. The answer may not be to surrender it, and the answer may not be to keep it. The first step may simply be letting Jesus ask why it matters so much.

That is where the smile comes back into this for me.

A shirt started the conversation, but the shirt was never powerful enough to define my faith. Jesus is.

So I can stop treating every disagreement like a courtroom.

I can stop acting as though changing my mind means losing.

I can stop believing that standing firm requires me to become hard.

I can listen. I can think. I can pray. I can love people. I can laugh at myself when I get too serious about something small.

And I can remember that if Jesus can use a band T-shirt to teach me something about humility, freedom, and love, then He can use almost anything.

That makes me smile.

Not because the question was silly.

Because grace has a way of finding us in ordinary places.

Sometimes it finds us in church.

Sometimes it finds us in a difficult conversation.

And apparently, sometimes it finds us standing in front of a closet.

Your friend, Douglas Vandergraph

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

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In November 2025, roughly 1,500 people paid at least 499 dollars each to spend five days at the Horseshoe in Las Vegas, in a conference centre off the Strip, learning how to sell books. The event was Author Nation, successor to the 20BooksTo50K gathering that had run in the same city for years. There were more than ninety sessions across tracks named Advertising and Marketing, Production and Workflow, AI and Automation. There were more than seventy-five exhibitors in the industry expo.

Seventy-five companies, on a carpeted floor, selling to writers.

That is the shape of the modern publishing economy in a single room. Not a printing press in sight, because nobody needs one. The single largest fixed cost in the history of the book, manufacturing physical copies before you know whether anyone wants them, has been reduced to approximately zero by print-on-demand and the ebook. And yet Reedsy, the largest marketplace for freelance publishing professionals, reckons from more than 230,000 quotes by its vetted freelancers that producing one self-published book to professional standard costs between 2,940 and 5,660 dollars.

Printing went to zero. Publishing did not get cheaper. Something moved into the space the printer vacated, and it is extraordinarily good at collecting money from people who have not yet earned any.

The Vanishing Cost and the Costs That Replaced It

Start with what actually disappeared. In the old arrangement, a publisher advanced the capital for a print run, a warehouse, a sales force and a returns liability, and in exchange took most of the revenue and most of the rights. The author's share was a royalty of roughly eight to fifteen per cent of cover price, because the publisher carried the manufacturing risk.

Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing dissolved that logic. An author who prices an ebook between 2.99 and 9.99 dollars receives seventy per cent of list price, minus a delivery charge of roughly fifteen cents per megabyte on that tier. Price outside the band, above or below, and the rate collapses to thirty-five per cent. Print-on-demand removed the warehouse. The capital requirement for putting a book on sale, worldwide, in perpetuity, is now nil.

But the seventy per cent is a royalty on sales that may not happen, and the alternative revenue stream is stranger still. Authors who enrol exclusively in KDP Select earn from Kindle Unlimited borrows, paid not per book but per page read, out of a monthly pot Amazon sets at its own discretion. According to Written Word Media's running tally of Amazon's announcements, the KDP Select Global Fund stood at 67.6 million dollars in July 2026, and the United States rate that month worked out at 0.004221 dollars per Kindle Edition Normalised Page. A four-hundred-page novel read cover to cover therefore pays its author about 1.69 dollars. The fund is not a contractual entitlement. It is a number Amazon picks each month, divided by however many pages the world happened to read.

That is the revenue side: uncertain, platform-controlled, denominated in fractions of a cent. Now the cost side, which is none of those things, and which is paid up front in real money.

Reedsy's marketplace data puts developmental editing of an 80,000-word manuscript at around 2,880 dollars, copy editing at 2,160, proofreading at 1,600, and a professional cover at an average of 930, with half of all cover projects falling between 630 and 1,200. Interior typesetting averages 800 if you pay for it. A single ISBN from Bowker in the United States costs 125 dollars, or 295 for a block of ten. In the United Kingdom, Nielsen charges 89 pounds for one and 164 for ten. In Canada and Australia, the national agencies give them away free, which tells you most of what you need to know about whether the 125-dollar price reflects a cost of production.

Then promotion, where the meter really starts spinning. A BookBub Featured Deal, the most coveted promotional slot in the business, is priced by genre and discount: Reedsy's 2025 figures for contemporary romance run from 665 dollars for a free giveaway to 966 at 99 cents and 2,417 for a book discounted to between two and three dollars. Amazon Ads and Meta Ads have no ceiling at all, and unlike editing they are not a one-off.

Add it up. The cost of manufacturing collapsed. The cost of everything that used to be bundled inside a publishing house, editorial judgement, design, metadata, publicity, did not. It was unbundled, itemised and sold back to the author, in advance, at retail.

The Layer That Grew Where the Press Used To Be

The services layer is not one thing. It is at least three, and conflating them is the most common error in this argument.

At the professional end sit freelancers who used to be, or could be, in-house staff at Hachette or HarperCollins: structural editors, line editors, cover designers, audiobook narrators. Their rates are set in a genuinely competitive market. Reedsy's average developmental rate of just over three cents a word is not a scam price; it is roughly what a skilled editor must charge to earn a middle-class living at realistic throughput. An author paying 2,880 dollars for a developmental edit is buying labour that exists, from a person who did the work.

At the other end sits the assisted-publishing industry, which has an unusually well-documented history. Author Solutions, the parent of AuthorHouse, iUniverse, Xlibris, Trafford and Palibrio, was acquired by Pearson for its Penguin division in 2012 for 116 million dollars. For roughly three years, one of the world's largest trade publishers owned the largest vanity operation in the English language. Penguin Random House sold it to the private equity firm Najafi Companies at the end of 2015, and Publishers Marketplace reported in March 2025 that Najafi had in turn sold it on to Center Street Ventures.

The litigation record is instructive precisely because of how it ended. A class action filed in the Southern District of New York in 2013 alleging fraud and deceptive practices was denied class certification in July 2015 and discontinued without prejudice the following month after a settlement. A second suit against Author Solutions was voluntarily dismissed in Indiana that September, each side bearing its own costs. No adjudicated finding, no precedent, no disclosure. The complaints did not stop; only the cases did.

Both of the organisations that monitor this space have been unambiguous since. Writer Beware, founded in 1998 by the novelists Ann Crispin and Victoria Strauss and sponsored by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association, exists specifically to document entities that generate revenue by misleading writers. The Alliance of Independent Authors runs a Watchdog Desk, led by John Doppler, which rates providers on pricing, contract terms, transparency and rights, and has assigned its lowest rating, Code Red, to the entire Author Solutions network, on the basis that it operates as a services and marketing business selling to authors rather than a publisher selling to readers.

And in the third category, below even the vanity presses, is straightforward crime. In December 2024, federal agents arrested Mike Sordilla and Bryan Navales Tarosa in San Diego and Gemma Traya Austin in Chula Vista. A grand jury in the Southern District of California indicted the three over a scheme running from September 2017 to December 2024, in which representatives working from a call centre in Cebu, in the Philippines, telephoned mostly elderly American authors posing as literary agents from outfits called PageTurner and WP Lighthouse, told them film studios and streaming platforms wanted their books, and took their money. The indictment put the losses at more than 44 million dollars. In May 2026 Sordilla became the first of the defendants to admit his role, pleading guilty to conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud and conspiracy to launder monetary instruments. The Department of Justice puts the losses at over 48 million dollars taken from more than 800 victims across the United States, with Sordilla agreeing to forfeit 2,725,951 dollars in proceeds and facing restitution of at least 48,719,156.38 dollars.

That is the layer. Real professionals, a legacy vanity industry with a laundered corporate pedigree, and an offshore fraud pipeline, all selling into the same pool of buyers and all describing themselves in roughly the same vocabulary.

Who Actually Writes the Cheques

Written Word Media has surveyed indie authors annually since 2016, and its 2025 survey of 1,346 authors produced the most quoted table in the business.

Forty-four per cent of respondents earned 100 dollars a month or less from their books. Eight per cent earned more than 10,000 a month. And marketing spend climbed in near-perfect lockstep with income: roughly 81 dollars a month among the lowest earners, then 152, then 275, then 478, then 1,362, and about 4,500 a month among those earning over 10,000. The survey average was 636 dollars a month.

The pattern repeats in the production budget. Among authors earning over 10,000 dollars a month, the majority spent between 250 and 1,999 dollars on editing per book. Among those earning 100 dollars a month or less, more than half spent between zero and 100. On covers, high earners mostly spent at least 250 dollars and often between 250 and 1,000; low earners, again, mostly under 100.

Read quickly, this looks like the answer to the question. Spend more, earn more. It is the chart that every course, every conference session and every services provider in that Las Vegas expo hall implicitly reaches for. Written Word Media's own 2024 analysis put it plainly, noting a clear correlation between low marketing spend and low income, and that authors with high marketing budgets tend to be high earners.

As evidence that spending causes sales, it is close to worthless.

The Direction the Arrow Actually Points

Take the strongest version of the pro-spending case first, because it is not stupid.

The argument runs: books are experience goods, readers cannot assess quality before consuming, and so signals of quality, principally the cover and the first ten pages, do most of the work of conversion. A book riddled with errors accumulates one-star reviews that permanently suppress its ranking. Paid discovery, on Amazon or Meta or through a BookBub feature, is the only mechanism by which a book with no publisher, no bookshop placement and no trade reviews can be seen at all. On this account, the 4,500 dollars a month is not a tax on hope; it is working capital in a business with a positive return on advertising spend, and the authors earning nothing are earning nothing partly because they refuse to invest.

Now the problems, in ascending order of severity.

The first is reverse causality, and it is fatal to the naive reading. An author earning 10,000 dollars a month can afford to spend 4,500 dollars a month. An author earning 80 dollars a month cannot spend 4,500 dollars a month, whatever the expected return. The Written Word Media ladder is at least as consistent with income determining spend as with spend determining income, and in a business where marketing is funded out of last month's royalties rather than external capital, the causal arrow almost certainly runs in both directions with the income-to-spend direction dominating.

The second is a confound so large it may account for the entire effect. In the same survey, authors with one to three published books were about eighty per cent likely to be in the under-100-dollars-a-month band. Authors with twenty-five or more books had a median income of about 3,000 dollars a month, and more than forty per cent of them cleared 5,000. Catalogue size predicts income spectacularly well, and it also predicts spend, because an author with twenty-five books has twenty-five products to advertise and a quarter of a century of backlist revenue to advertise them with. Strip out catalogue and years active, and it is not clear how much of the spending correlation survives. The Alliance of Independent Authors conceded the point in its own 2025 report, calling the link between income, books published and years since first publication unsurprising.

The third is genre. Romance was twenty-one per cent of Written Word Media's overall sample but roughly forty-four per cent of the authors earning over 10,000 dollars a month. Romance readers consume at volumes no other category approaches, which means romance authors both earn more and can profitably buy more advertising. A literary novelist copying a romance author's ad budget is not running the same experiment.

The fourth is the email list, which in this data does more work than money does. Authors earning over 10,000 dollars a month had an average of 18,327 newsletter subscribers. Those earning under 100 dollars a month averaged 902. Authors with a list earned a median of roughly 300 dollars a month against roughly 15 for those without, a twentyfold gap produced by an asset that costs almost nothing to build and everything in time.

And the fifth is the most uncomfortable, because it shows spending tracking resources rather than returns. The Authors Guild's 2023 income survey, the largest of its kind with 5,699 respondents, found that white full-time authors spent a median of 7,658 dollars on marketing while Black full-time authors spent 3,182. Their median book incomes were 10,985 dollars and 2,412 dollars respectively. Nobody thinks the second gap is caused by the first. Both are downstream of access to capital, contacts, publicity infrastructure and audience.

So what can the data honestly support? Something narrower and duller than the pitch. Production spending, editing and covers, plausibly clears a quality threshold below which a book is unsellable and above which further spending has sharply diminishing returns. Promotional spending appears to work as a multiplier on an existing asset, a catalogue and a list, and to do very little without one. The uncomfortable implication is that for the forty-four per cent earning under 100 dollars a month, the marginal advertising pound is close to pure loss, and it is precisely that cohort to whom advertising education is most aggressively sold.

Nobody has run the experiment that would settle it: a randomised allocation of marketing budget across comparable books. The industry has instead relied for a decade on a cross-sectional correlation in a self-selected survey, sold to beginners as a causal law.

Nor are the returns on paid discovery stable even for the cohort that can afford them. Written Word Media's 2026 mid-year survey of 582 authors found that Amazon's A10 algorithm change, arriving alongside the ACX audiobook royalty shift, materially degraded results for authors who had until then been running profitable ad spend. Of those 582, 23 per cent reported growing, 22 per cent holding steady, 30 per cent declining and 25 per cent still evaluating: more of them going backwards than forwards. A channel that can be reset by a single platform's ranking change is not working capital in any sense a lender would recognise.

The Reliable Business Is Telling People How

Here is the structural fact that explains the whole market. A book can only be sold to readers, and readers are scarce and getting scarcer. Advice about books is sold to writers, and writers are abundant and getting more so. The addressable market for the meta-layer is the entire pyramid, including everyone who will never sell a book, and it monetises them before any of them find out.

In April 2026 the Federal Trade Commission announced that Publishing.com and its principals would pay 1.5 million dollars to settle charges of deceptive earnings claims, illusory refund guarantees and undisclosed material connections in testimonials. The Commission approved the final order in July 2026. According to the FTC, chief executive Christian Mikkelsen and chief product officer Rasmus Mikkelsen represented that consumers could use their products to earn between 1,000 and 3,000 dollars a month in passive income, and that they had personally used the same system to become wealthy. Most purchasers, the Commission alleged, came nowhere close. The company's AI Publishing Academy course sold for up to 1,995 dollars. The add-on coaching programme, Publishing Accelerator, generally sold for 9,800.

Look at that price against the object level it purports to serve. Nine thousand eight hundred dollars is roughly double the entire high-end estimate for producing a professionally edited, designed and typeset book. It is more than seven years of the median UK author's writing income at the rate the Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society found in its 2022 survey of 60,000 writers. And it was, on the FTC's account, sold on a promise of monthly returns that most buyers never saw.

Publishing.com is the extreme, legally documented case. The broader advice economy is entirely lawful and priced accordingly. Mark Dawson's Self Publishing Formula, one of the longest-running and most reputable operations in the field, sells its core course at 497 dollars and its Ads for Authors bundle at 849 for lifetime access, according to a review published by SelfPublishing.com. Author Nation's tickets started at 499. Dave Chesson's Authorpreneur Academy is listed at around 497. These are real products, made by people who demonstrably know the business, and there is nothing dishonest about any of them.

That is exactly the point. The advice layer does not need to be fraudulent to be structurally more profitable than the thing it advises on. It has better unit economics for four reasons that have nothing to do with ethics.

It sells to a larger market, because aspiring authors outnumber successful ones by orders of magnitude. It sells a product with near-zero marginal cost and no inventory, which is also true of ebooks but with a crucial difference: the buyer of a course is motivated by a projected future, not by a completed reading experience, and projected futures are inexhaustible. It sells repeatedly to the same person, because there is always another platform, another algorithm change, another advertising channel to learn. And it captures value at the moment of maximum optimism, which is the moment before any evidence arrives.

Compare that to selling a novel. One reader, one purchase, a few dollars of royalty, and the reader has to want the book.

The Arithmetic That Makes All of This Inevitable

Now the supply and demand numbers, which make everything above look less like a conspiracy and more like a consequence.

According to Bowker's annual figures as reported by Publishers Weekly in March 2026, total book output with ISBNs passed four million titles in 2025, a 32.5 per cent rise on the previous year. Self-published titles accounted for more than 3.5 million of that, up 38.7 per cent from 2.5 million in 2024. Traditional publishers produced 642,242, up 6.6 per cent. Over the period from 2022 to 2025, traditional output rose ten per cent and self-published output rose 43.5 per cent.

Against that, demand. The National Endowment for the Arts found in its 2022 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, sampling 40,718 adults, that 48.5 per cent of American adults had read at least one book for pleasure in the previous twelve months, down from 52.7 per cent in 2017 and 61 per cent in 1992. Only 37.6 per cent had read a novel or short story, the lowest rate in three decades. In Britain, the Reading Agency found just fifty per cent of adults described themselves as regular readers in 2024, down from 58 per cent in 2015, recovering to 53 per cent in 2025, with 44 per cent of 16-to-24-year-olds now classed as lapsed readers.

And of the reading that does happen, most of it pays nobody. A study conducted for the Authors Guild found that only 25 per cent of print books and ebooks read in the previous month had been bought new or accessed through a paid subscription. Nineteen per cent were new purchases, six per cent came through subscriptions, ten per cent were bought second-hand, 29 per cent came from libraries and 35 per cent from personal collections, friends, family or other sources.

Titles up by more than a third in a single year. Readers down by a quarter in a generation. Paid consumption a quarter of the whole.

Then generative AI arrived and poured accelerant on the supply side. Imke Reimers of Cornell and Joel Waldfogel of the University of Minnesota, in a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper revised in July 2026, sampled more than 330,000 Amazon ebook titles and ran AI detection on nearly 50,000 of them. Monthly new releases nearly tripled between 2022 and late 2025, and rose almost tenfold in some categories. Detected AI content was near zero through 2022, then hit monthly peaks of thirty per cent in 2023, 45 per cent in 2024 and over sixty per cent during 2025. Using a calibrated demand model, the authors estimate the entire AI influx raised consumer surplus by 0.44 per cent in 2023, 3.26 per cent in 2024 and 7.23 per cent in 2025. More than doubling the volume of books produced a single-digit percentage gain in reader welfare.

A parallel study by Tuhin Chakrabarty, Xinyue Liu, Jane C. Ginsburg and Paramveer Dhillon, posted to arXiv in July 2026, ran full-text detection across 14,419 self-published genre-fiction ebooks matched to daily sales records through June 2026. Their finding is the one that matters for the economics: the number of books recording sales in a quarter grew 19.2-fold while quarterly revenue grew only 8.9-fold. Revenue per selling book fell across most genres. Human-authored books lost the most ground in genres with high AI diffusion, and most of all where Kindle Unlimited availability was high.

That is a market where the denominator is exploding and the numerator is not. Amazon's response, capping new KDP uploads at three titles per account per day, is a rate limiter on a firehose.

This is what makes the picks-and-shovels comparison more than a lazy analogy. The distribution of outcomes in the creator economy is not merely unequal, it is a different kind of distribution. Ilan Strauss, Jangho Yang and Mariana Mazzucato, analysing Patreon earnings data in work revised in July 2026, found a Pareto exponent of around two across years and platforms, a concentration closer to capital income than to labour income, driven by compounding attention. In markets like that, the median participant's expected return is not a slightly smaller version of the winner's return. It is a rounding error. And the reliable business, as in 1849, is selling equipment to the people going up the river.

The Case for Paying, Which Is Real

None of this means indie authors are fools to spend money, and the counter-evidence deserves its own space.

The professional-services argument is simply correct on its own terms. Editing and cover design are production costs, not marketing costs. Every traditionally published book has them; the only question is who pays. A publisher covers them out of the pool it retains most of. An indie author pays directly and keeps seventy per cent of list. That is a financing decision, not a scam, and for a book that sells it is a very good one.

And books do sell. The Alliance of Independent Authors' 2025 income survey, with 1,520 qualified responses from authors spending at least half their working time on writing and publishing, reported a median annual income of 13,500 dollars, up six per cent on the 12,749 recorded for 2022. That compares with the 8,600 dollars ALLi found for equivalently screened traditionally published authors, and with the 7,000 pounds median the CREATe study for the Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society found for UK primary-occupation writers in 2022, down 38.2 per cent in real terms since 2018. The Authors Guild's 2023 survey found full-time self-published authors reporting a median book income of 12,800 dollars against 10,000 for full-time authors overall.

The professional indie cohort is real, and it has a recognisable shape: large catalogue, genre fiction, high publication cadence, an owned mailing list, and reinvestment. Written Word Media's 2026 mid-year survey of 582 authors found newsletter usage rising from 39 per cent among those just starting out to 73 per cent among those with traction, and Amazon Ads usage from eighteen to 59 per cent. Among authors reporting growth, 43 per cent were producing human-narrated audiobooks and 43 per cent publishing box sets, against 28 per cent of the sample. Roughly half of those earning over 10,000 dollars a month sold direct to readers from their own storefronts, against thirty per cent overall.

Note what that cohort is buying. Production, distribution, format expansion, list-building infrastructure, and advertising against a catalogue that already converts. Assets, in other words. It is a materially different shopping list from the one sold to a first-time author with a single manuscript, which tends to be dominated by promises: publicity packages, submission services, film-rights representation, and courses about all three.

Three Different Things Wearing the Same Coat

So: market failure, or the predictable equilibrium when writers vastly outnumber readers?

The honest answer is that the question bundles three phenomena that have to be judged separately, and answering it as one thing is how the argument goes wrong in both directions.

The first is a competitive market in genuine professional services, and it is not a failure by any definition economics recognises. Editors, designers, narrators and typesetters sell scarce skilled labour at prices set by open competition on transparent marketplaces. Reedsy's rate data is public. Nobody is extracting rent. That some buyers will never recoup their outlay is no more a defect in the market for editing than amateur musicians who never fill a stadium are a defect in the market for guitars.

The second is a genuine market failure, and it is severe, specific and fixable. It is not high prices; it is information asymmetry about expected outcomes. The seller of a 9,800-dollar coaching programme knows the distribution of client results. The buyer does not, cannot easily find out, and is systematically shown the right tail. That is the precise economic condition under which markets fail, and it shades continuously into fraud: from unsubstantiated earnings claims at one end, through the Author Solutions model of selling marketing with no plausible return, to a call centre in Cebu telling an eighty-year-old that Netflix wants her memoir. The remedy is equally specific, and the FTC has just demonstrated it. The Publishing.com order does not cap prices or ban courses. It requires that earnings claims be substantiated. Extend that principle, require sellers to disclose the actual distribution of customer outcomes rather than testimonials from the top one per cent, and a large fraction of the harm evaporates without touching a single legitimate transaction.

The third is neither, and it is the largest by volume. Call it the hope premium. Most people who publish a book are not making a failed investment decision, because they are not primarily making an investment decision. They are buying authorship: the object, the identity, the proof, the thing they can hand to their children. The Alliance of Independent Authors deliberately screens this cohort out of its income survey, excluding, in its own words, people publishing a one-off book for friends and family. Written Word Media found only forty per cent of its respondents named making money as their primary motivation; the rest cited wanting the story told, wanting to be known, or enjoying the hobby. Judged as a business, that spending is irrational. Judged as consumption, it is no more irrational than a home cinema, and considerably cheaper than a boat.

The category error runs in both directions. Critics treat hope-premium spending as if it were failed investment and conclude the market is predatory. Sellers treat it as if it were investment and price it accordingly, which is where consumption quietly becomes exploitation, because the sales pitch for a consumption good does not usually involve a projected monthly return.

What the Oversupply Is Actually Telling Us

Which leaves the final judgement. It should not be a shrug.

The services layer is overwhelmingly not a failure of the market. It is what a market looks like when the binding constraint moves. For five centuries the scarce resource in publishing was manufacturing and distribution capacity, and the institutions that controlled it captured the value. That constraint is gone. The scarce resource now is reader attention, and attention cannot be bought at scale by an individual, only rented in small increments at auction prices set by everyone else renting it. When the scarce input becomes unbuyable, the money flows instead to the inputs that can be bought, which are the ones adjacent to the bottleneck rather than through it. Editing, covers, courses, conferences, software and coaching are all purchases you can definitely complete. Readers are not.

The oversupply is the whole story, and it is worth stating without euphemism. In 2025 the world produced more than 3.5 million self-published titles. Fewer than half of American adults read a single book for pleasure in the most recent year the National Endowment for the Arts measured, and three-quarters of what they did read was not bought new or accessed through a paid subscription. There is no regulatory fix and no platform reform that reconciles those numbers. A market cannot fail to allocate a resource that does not exist.

But there is a real failure inside the larger non-failure, and refusing to name it is its own kind of dishonesty. It lives in the gap between what sellers know about outcomes and what buyers are told, and it is addressable with the tools already in the FTC's hands and already demonstrated in the Publishing.com order. Substantiation requirements. Outcome disclosure. Support for Writer Beware and the ALLi Watchdog Desk, which currently do the industry's consumer protection voluntarily. None of that is exotic. Financial services have lived with far stricter versions for decades, on the reasonable ground that selling someone a projected return without evidence is a different act from selling them a chair.

Underneath both, the hope premium will persist, because it is not an error. People will keep paying to become authors in a world running out of readers, the way they pay to run marathons in a world with cars.

The last thing worth noticing about that room in Las Vegas is that almost everyone in it was telling the truth. The freelancers really do edit. The software really does find categories. Mark Dawson really does sell a lot of books. The exhibitors were not, for the most part, running a con.

They had simply all found the same thing, which is that in a market where three and a half million products chase a shrinking audience, the only participant with a predictable revenue line is the one selling to the producers. That is not a scandal. It is arithmetic, and the arithmetic has been on the wall since the day the printing cost hit zero and everyone discovered that printing had never been the hard part.

References

1. Publishers Weekly, “Book Output Topped Four Million in 2025”, 17 March 2026. https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/99943-book-output-topped-4-million-in-2025.html
2. Reedsy, “How Much Does It Cost to Publish a Book in 2026?”, based on data from more than 230,000 marketplace quotes, covering developmental editing, copy editing, proofreading, cover design, typesetting and ISBN pricing. https://reedsy.com/blog/guide/how-to-self-publish-a-book/cost-to-self-publish/
3. Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing, “Royalties in Kindle Unlimited”, KDP Help Centre. https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G201541130
4. Written Word Media, “Up to Date List of KDP Global Fund Payouts”, monthly tracker of Amazon's KDP Select Global Fund and per-page rates. https://www.writtenwordmedia.com/kdp-global-fund-payouts/
5. Written Word Media, “2025 Indie Author Survey Results: Insights into Self Publishing for Authors”, survey of 1,346 authors. https://www.writtenwordmedia.com/2025-indie-author-survey-results-insights-into-self-publishing-for-authors/
6. Written Word Media, “2026 Mid-Year Author Survey: What's Working for Indie Authors Right Now”, survey of 582 authors. https://www.writtenwordmedia.com/2026-mid-year-indie-author-survey/
7. Alliance of Independent Authors, “The Big Indie Author Data Drop 2025”, including the 2025 ALLi Indie Author Income Survey, 1,520 qualified responses. https://www.allianceindependentauthors.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/The-Big-Indie-Author-Data-Drop-2025-UPDATE-PAGES.pdf
8. The Authors Guild, “Key Takeaways from the Authors Guild's 2023 Author Income Survey”, 5,699 respondents, published 27 September 2023. https://authorsguild.org/news/key-takeaways-from-2023-author-income-survey/
9. The Authors Guild, “New Authors Guild Study: Only 25 Percent of Readers Paid for a New Copy of a Print Book or Ebook Read in the Previous Month”. https://authorsguild.org/news/new-authors-guild-study-only-25-percent-of-readers-paid-for-a-new-copy-of-a-book-or-audiobook/
10. Amy Thomas, Michele Battisti and Martin Kretschmer, “UK Authors' Earnings and Contracts 2022: A Survey of 60,000 Writers”, CREATe, University of Glasgow, for the Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society, December 2022. https://www.create.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/ALCS_AuthorsEarningsReport_accessibleformat.pdf
11. National Endowment for the Arts, “Federal Data on Reading for Pleasure: All Signs Show a Slump”, 2024, reporting the 2022 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts. https://www.arts.gov/stories/blog/2024/federal-data-reading-pleasure-all-signs-show-slump
12. The Reading Agency, “The State of the Nation's Adult Reading: 2025 Report”. https://readingagency.org.uk/the-state-of-the-nations-adult-reading-2025-report/
13. Imke Reimers and Joel Waldfogel, “AI and the Quantity and Usage of Creative Products: Have LLMs Boosted Creation of Valuable Books?“, NBER Working Paper No. 34777, January 2026, revised July 2026. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w34777/w34777.pdf
14. Tuhin Chakrabarty, Xinyue Liu, Jane C. Ginsburg and Paramveer Dhillon, “Generative AI Floods and Dilutes the Market for Books”, arXiv:2607.20349, 22 July 2026, revised 3 August 2026. https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.20349
15. Ilan Strauss, Jangho Yang and Mariana Mazzucato, “'Rich-Get-Richer'? Platform Attention and Earnings Inequality using Patreon Earnings Data”, arXiv:2509.26523, 30 September 2025, revised 15 July 2026. https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.26523
16. Federal Trade Commission, “Publishing.com, In the Matter of”, case file 242-3055, including the complaint, the 1.5 million dollar stipulated order announced in April 2026 and the final order approved in July 2026. https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/cases-proceedings/242-3055-publishingcom-matter
17. United States Attorney's Office, Southern District of California, “Three Indicted and Internet Domain Seized in $44 Million Nationwide Book Publishing Scam”. https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdca/pr/three-indicted-and-internet-domain-seized-44-million-nationwide-book-publishing-scam
18. United States Attorney's Office, Southern District of California, “Defendant Pleads Guilty in $48 Million Nationwide Book Publishing Scam Targeting Hundreds of Seniors”, May 2026. https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdca/pr/defendant-pleads-guilty-48-million-nationwide-book-publishing-scam-targeting-hundreds
19. Writer Beware, “Pearson Buys Author Solutions”, 19 July 2012. https://writerbeware.blog/2012/07/19/pearson-buys-author-solutions/
20. Publishers Lunch, “Najafi Sells Author Solutions”, March 2025. https://lunch.publishersmarketplace.com/2025/03/najafi-sells-author-solutions/
21. Mick Rooney, “Second Class Action Lawsuit Against Author Solutions is Dismissed”, The Independent Publishing Magazine, 15 September 2015, covering the Indiana dismissal with each side bearing its own costs and the 1 July 2015 denial of class certification and discontinuance without prejudice of the New York action. https://independentpublishing.com/second-class-action-lawsuit-against-author-solutions-is-dismissed
22. Alliance of Independent Authors, “Watchdog Desk: Monitoring the Self-Publishing Services Industry”. https://www.allianceindependentauthors.org/watchdog/
23. Reedsy, “BookBub for Authors: How to Reach a Million+ New Readers”, including 2025 Featured Deal pricing by genre and discount. https://reedsy.com/blog/bookbub/
24. SelfPublishing.com, “Mark Dawson's Self-Publishing Formula Review for Authors”. https://selfpublishing.com/mark-dawson/
25. Author Nation, official conference site, listing venue, session tracks, exhibitor numbers and ticket pricing. https://www.authornation.live/

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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

Listen to the free weekly SmarterArticles Podcast

I am getting more and more impatient with the waiting. I am seeing movement, but no approval yet. It is horrible to have your life put on hold because of what feels like bureaucratic bullshit.

Overall it was a fine day, emotionally I feel a little better and more rested. I took a shower, which helps. I went to therapy and vented about a lot of things that have built up the last few weeks, but didn’t have time to get into much more. I grocery shopped and cooked. Unsurprisingly I then took a nap. I don’t normally nap much, but recently it has felt more necessary than optional.

My friend’s baby shower is in two days so I also took actionable planning steps and made a grocery list. I will be cooking and baking most of tomorrow and the next morning. It feels good to have a task at hand.

I also started dog sitting today and through the next few days, so that will at least get me out of the house for a while.

All while waiting for a simple email with a simple message.

Thank you for your message. I am currently out of office with no set return date. I will get back to you when the time is right.

“Peace isn’t found. It’s chosen, one breath at a time.”

Peace doesn’t just happen. It’s not something that drifts in one morning and stays forever. It’s something I have to choose, Sometimes a hundred times a day.

There are mornings when I wake up calm, even the air feels still and my heart feels light. And then there are mornings when my mind wakes before my body does, racing through thoughts I didn’t invite, Trying to replay the past or predict a future I can’t control.

That’s when I have to remind myself, I don’t have to relive every thought that visits me. I can let them pass like clouds, Noticing them, Naming them, But not giving them the power to storm.

I’m learning peace isn’t found in perfect circumstances. It’s found in the pauses I create, The moments I breathe before I react. The times I forgive myself for falling apart and then gather myself up again.

Every day, I have to make quiet choices that build peace,

A walk instead of an argument with my thoughts.

Writing instead of worrying. Small things, But they add up. This has become my armor, Soft, Steady, And my own.

Peace sometimes feels like silence. Other times, it feels like laughter that escapes before I realize I’m smiling again. On the days that are hard, it feels like not giving up, Like whispering, “Try again tomorrow,” even when today was heavy.

I mistook peace for a destination, now it’s practice. It’s the way I talk to myself when I make mistakes. It’s the boundaries I set, The people I let close, The things I no longer explain to those who not to understand.

Peace doesn’t mean that everything is fixed. It means I’ve decided not to let everything break me anymore.

There will be times fear knocks on my door, The memories will creep in time to time, I’m learning to let them knock, Let them fade, Then return back to myself.

Peace doesn’t come from the world around me; it’s coming from what I’m building inside. From the women who is choosing not to stay buried in the heartbreak. From the mother who will stay strong and show up, Even on the hard days. From the survivor who decided that healing is her own kind of rebellion.

Every day I am choosing peace, not because it’s easy, But because I know what my life is like without it.

And even when my world feels uncertain, even when I cross paths with the past, even when I don’t know what comes next, I will continue to choose peace.

Peace is freedom, And freedom is the truest form of becoming.

“Healing isn’t forgetting. It’s remembering without reliving.”

It always happens when I least expect it, A quick glance through the windshield, A truck or car that looks to familiar, A flash of a face I know like a memory that still lives in my bones.

For a moment, Time stops. My stomach drops. My chest tightens. My pulse forgets how to keep a steady rhythm. And I am right back there, In all the places I promised myself I’d left behind.

It’s not hatred I feel, It’s something far more complicated. A mix of shock, Sadness, And the deep, unexplainable ache of seeing a ghost who’s still alive. It’s the kind of pain that doesn’t make sense to anyone who hasn’t loved that deeply and lost that completely.

I try to tell myself to breathe, To remember that it’s just a moment, That he’s just another person on the road now. Not my story, Not my responsibility,

Not my future anymore. But my body doesn’t listen. It reacts before my mind can reason. Because healing is a process, And sometimes the body remembers faster than the heart forgives.

Driving past him feels like seeing a place of a life that still lingers in the rearview mirror, Close enough to recognize, But too far to reach. And in that split second, I wonder if he saw me too. If his heart stutters for a moment like mine does. Or if I’ve simply become another face in traffic.

Afterward, I carry it for the rest of the day, That heavy, Hollow feeling that sits just under my ribs. The urge to cry, Though there’s no reason left to. The frustration that I can be doing so well. Feeling so strong, And one passing moment can unravel me.

And what about the then there’s the part no one sees, not just in traffic or by accident, But in real moments. When our daughter will graduate High School, Birthdays, Milestones that belong to our daughter.

How am I going to feel when I have to sit across from someone, you once built a life with. And now no contact at all. To smile for the sake of your child, While your heart remembers every silence, every betrayal, Every time you begged for honesty and got nothing.

I’m learning how to keep my voice steady, how to nod politely. How to protect my daughter’s joy without letting my own pain spill into the room. A quiet strength, The kind that doesn’t get applause,

But still matters.

I won’t pretend it’s easy, Because this is anything but that. Seeing him still stirs something in me, not longing, But a kind of ache that has nowhere to go. A reminder that some wounds don’t bleed anymore, but they still throb when touched.

But I know I can be the parent who stays steady, who shows love without condition, Who teaches my daughter that healing is possible, even when the story didn’t end the way we hoped.

The next moment when our paths must cross, I’ll breathe. I’ll stand tall. I’ll remember who I am becoming now. Not the women he left, But the mother who stayed.

But I’m starting to understand something, These moments don’t mean I’ve gone backward. They mean I’m still human.

That the love, The pain, The memories, They still exist somewhere inside me, but they don’t control me anymore.

I used to think healing meant forgetting. That if I still felt something, it meant I hadn’t healed. But now I know better. Healing isn’t erasure. It’s integration. It’s learning how to carry the memory without letting it carry me.

I’m unsure if I will always feel something when our paths cross. The sting might never go away. Like touching a scar that’s healed but still tender. And that has to be okay. Because the goal isn’t to walk around and feel nothing. The goal is to let the feeling pass through without letting it take root. To remind myself that seeing him doesn’t undo the progress I’ve made. It’s just a reminder of how far I’ve come. That I can still see him, Survive the moment, and still keep driving.

So, when it happens again, And I know it will.

I will take a deep breath. I will keep my eyes on the road. And I’ll whisper to myself; you’ve already lived this once. You don’t have to live it again.

I am not defined by the moments that break me, I am defined by the way I rise after. By the way I choose softness over bitterness. By the way I continue to show up even when it hurts. And that, that quiet, steady return to myself, Is the kind of strength no one can take away.

This is my quiet revolution. To be soft in a world that taught me to be hard. To be kind to myself in a body that remembers pain.

Maybe someday the sight of him won’t make my stomach drop. Maybe I won’t notice him at all, Just another car on the road, another moment passing by. And if that day never comes, that’s okay too. I know who I am now. And I know that I can keep going.

(NEXT – CHAPTER: 9)

Pimeintos

Coloring Peppers

It took all day, but got the coloring pages done!

Wendell Berry – 1934-2026

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When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

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#poetry

Part 2: Anomalies and Frames

“Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.” —Walter Benjamin

We never encounter anomalies in isolation. We always encounter them as part of larger structures and mechanisms.

More specifically, several elements shape experiences we call anomalous, directly affecting their potential framing, interpretation, significance, and integration: the witness, the place, the account, and the observer.

The witness is the person who experienced the event and often becomes suspect before the event is fully heard or understood. Various factors affect not only how they experience an event, but also how they remember it, and if or how they retell it.

The place is the setting where the event occurred: a road, a sofa, an open field, a store, or an empty hallway that only later gains significance. Place should never be dismissed as only circumstantial or incidental to the event.

The account is the witness’s narrative of the event. It changes with retelling, as memory, language, audience, fear, and time impose their own revisions. Yet its inconsistencies may reveal what a merely perfect record could not: the pressure the event continued to exert upon the witness.

The observer is the person who receives the witness’s account and who interprets their account through their own knowledge, experience, role, and institutional affiliation, including families, houses of worship, courts, physicians, scholars, police, employers, archivists, and so forth. The observer determines which interpretations become publicly credible or institutionally actionable, including how it will be named or labeled: grief, delusion, folklore, trauma, fantasy, revelation, pathology, error, or evidence.

In all, the classification of anomalous experiences is never neutral.

Calling an experience a dream may comfort the witness, but it may also unintentionally silence them or suggest their experience was insignificant. Calling it a visitation may help preserve meaning, or smuggle in too much of it. Calling it illness or disease may open a path toward care, or become a method of misdiagnosis or exclusion. Calling it supernatural or paranormal often only trades one obscurity for another.

Anomalology, then, begins by asking what each naming of an event permits us to see, and what it obliges us to ignore, hide, or keep invisible to ourselves and others. And cloaked in that invisibility or exclusion may indeed include distress, error, grief, trauma, or the unresolved. But it should not be mistaken for nothing.

#Anomalology

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What is Anomalology?

• Part 1: Defining the Undefinable
• Part 2: Anomalies and Frames

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By D. Bowman Nomina Numina is a journal of reflections, moments, and meaning-making between worlds. Reply by email.

The deal that sent organic traffic to your website for free has almost entirely collapsed. It is gone. It is not coming back. And the sooner we come to our senses and stop wasting time and effort on futile optimisation, the sooner we can focus on more productive things.

In a famous scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, King Arthur comes upon a bridge guarded by the Black Knight. In the ensuing fight, the Black Knight steadfastly refuses to yield, even after being dismembered, insisting “‘tis but a scratch!”

I recalled this as I received the latest of many similar emails. This one invited me to a webinar called “From Backlinks to Frontlinks”. Apparently, I would learn “what organisations should actually measure in the AI era”, and that “the brands that win over the next few years won't simply rank higher. They'll become the brands AI trusts enough to recommend.” All of which is, to put it politely, complete horseshit.

This latest missive crystallised my ongoing misgivings about this new phase of SEO (GEO?, AEO?, pick an acronym), something I've spent my whole career working on in various capacities. The scales finally fell from my eyes, and I realised that the entire premise of organic search optimisation is not changing; it is broken beyond repair.

One admission before I start. Most of the data I am about to cite comes from companies that sell search or AI visibility tooling. Ahrefs, Semrush, SE Ranking and BrightEdge all have a commercial interest in how large and how tractable this channel appears. I use their numbers because, at this scale, there is nothing else, and I have tried to indicate where the commercial incentive lies in each case. Apply the same suspicion to my argument that I am asking you to apply to theirs.

The Faustian pact

For a quarter of a century, organic search ran as a kind of implicit barter. You produced content at your own expense, let the search engine crawler index it, dutifully marked it up as specified, and in return, mostly Google (other search engines were available!) sent some number of visitors back. The only costs were producing the content, maintaining the site, and any additional efforts you made to optimise it.

Much time and effort were expended on the optimisation part, trying to move up the organic search rankings through fair means and, occasionally, foul. Because even a single place improvement could deliver a meaningful increase in traffic, some portion of which would convert or buy or do whatever the thing you wanted them to do was.

Less sophisticated organisations saw this traffic as free. Others saw it for what it was and mapped it to things like human effort and agency expenditure, so any benefit could be assessed alongside other traffic acquisition channels with more directly measurable costs. But this world has now fundamentally changed with the migration of search to AI agents.

Pew Research tracked 68,879 searches from 900 US adults in March 2025 and found that 18% triggered an AI summary. When the summary appeared, users clicked a traditional result 8% of the time, versus 15% without one.

SparkToro and Similarweb put the US zero-click rate at 68% for the first four months of 2026, up from 60.45% in 2024. Bain's February 2025 consumer research put the consequence at a 15% to 25% fall in organic traffic across many sectors. Chartbeat data covering more than 2,500 news sites, shared with Axios, found Google Search referrals down 34% year-on-year, with small publishers losing 60% of search referrals over two years, versus 22% for large ones.

So your side of the organic search bargain has not changed at all. You still write the content, still ship the schema, still let the crawler do its prosaic work. Only now, the other half of the bargain, the traffic received in return, has collapsed dramatically. The natural reaction is to panic and look for a quick fix, which is what has brought the usual shysters out of the woodwork, claiming easy solutions and techniques.

Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode are now default features of Search. They run on Googlebot, and the Search index, and the only levers that affect them are nosnippet and max-snippet, which also remove your ordinary search snippets and destroy your click-through rate. You cannot leave the AI layer without leaving Search altogether (you can exclude your content from Gemini training without a search penalty, however).

If this is not your first rodeo, you may recall E-A-T, a previous era where we spent a great deal of time and effort convincing ourselves it was a dial we could turn, a score we could improve by demonstrating Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness so the algorithm would bestow additional blessings. You'd be forgiven for noticing the eerie similarity to current “optimise for citation” advice.

Such was the noise, Google was forced into a rare comment in December 2022, that these kinds of quality rater guidelines “don't directly influence ranking”. Gary Illyes, then a Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, had already explicitly told PubCon Las Vegas in October 2019 that there is no internal E-A-T score and no E-A-T element correlates meaningfully to the algorithm. Yet much of the SEO field kept its fingers in its ears and pushed on regardless, desperate for some variable, any variable, to optimise.

The tiny little prize

For argument's sake, let's pretend the current AI search optimisation industry is right and you can successfully manipulate your way into being consistently cited in AI answers. Before you break out the champagne, look at what that citation is worth. In the same Pew dataset linked above, among visits in which a Google AI summary appeared, the share of visits in which a user clicked a source cited in the summary was 1%. That’s one in a hundred, and Pew only counted the first three cited links.

True, that number is specific to Google AI Overviews in March 2025, and other assistants do behave differently. ChatGPT referrals jumped sharply after clickable brand links shipped in May 2026. But the overall direction of travel is not in dispute. Just put it beside the channel it is supposed to replace. SE Ranking's analysis of 101,574 sites measures AI referral traffic at 0.32% of all website visits for January to April 2026, compared with 42.75% for organic search of all kinds. Around 134 times more visitors from search than from every AI platform combined.

Two important caveats: SE Ranking's number sits at the low end of the published range. Conductor, analysing 13,770 enterprise domains, put AI referral traffic at 1.08%, roughly three times higher. And referrer-based measurement and attribution are structurally blind to most of what an AI answer does, because a visitor who reads about you in ChatGPT and then types your name into Google arrives tagged as branded organic or direct, breaking the attribution. But even if you take the highest credible figure and grant the measurement problem in full, it is still a rounding error compared to search.

Despite this, Rand Fishkin estimated in January 2026 that over $100m a year was already going into AI visibility tracking alone. It is just an estimate, but it sits alongside agency retainers, consultants and the usual conference circuit suspects and LinkedIn Lunatics, all telling you this problem is both traceable and solvable.

Let's look at a known positive for a moment: AI referral visitors do genuinely seem to convert well. Semrush's June 2025 study across more than 500 digital marketing and SEO topics found that the average AI search visitor was worth 4.4 times that of a traditional organic visitor, measured by conversion rates. Note the base: one industry vertical, chosen by a company that sells AI visibility tooling and owns Search Engine Land.

But you do not need a Fields Medal to calculate that a 4-to-5x conversion multiplier on a channel delivering around 1% of visits is still a minuscule absolute number. What often follows is the hand-waving argument that it's all very new, and that low volume with strong growth and high conversion quality is the profile of a promising early channel.

And here is where we get to the nub of the issue: every user an AI answer engine sends off-platform is a missed opportunity for an ad, a follow-up prompt, or a subscription upsell. For Google, AI Overviews are designed and optimised specifically to create a broader advertising surface rather than send traffic out to your site.

[With AI Overviews] free organic traffic from search fell by 40%. Paid traffic held steady. If your free visitors from Google are disappearing, the route Google left open is the one you pay for, and that was clearly not an accident.

For OpenAI, which is building an increasingly sophisticated ad business of its own and burns money on every query, the incentive is even starker. These companies are not distribution platforms that happen to summarise. In search terms, they are answer engines whose economics depend on not referring a user away. Most other platforms work the same way. Including an external link on X or LinkedIn posts is a sure-fire way to get buried.

I find the hardest part of all of this is accepting that the Google of 2026 is a fundamentally different beast from the one we have lived with for a generation. It’s like we’ve been in a long-term relationship with a partner who, despite their flaws, we’ve generally coexisted with quite happily.

Now that partner has left us, it’s easier to see the patterns of their behaviour that should have been obvious for years. Featured snippets, knowledge panels, “People Also Ask” boxes, shopping units, and four stacked ads. Each iteration squeezed the truly organic links. AI Overviews are not so much a departure from this trajectory as its zenith.

Even the remaining organic share is rapidly eroding as Google expands its own AI layers. Every study measuring click-through rate when an AI Overview appears has found a steep decline, though the magnitude depends heavily on the method and the type of search. Ahrefs measured a 34.5% drop for top-ranking pages in April 2025 and 58% by February 2026. Seer Interactive, tracking 25.1 million impressions across 42 organisations, found that organic CTR on AI Overview queries fell by 61%, from 1.76% to 0.61%. Amsive, across 700,000 keywords, found around 15%. Pick your methodology, and the answer moves by a factor of four, which tells you something about the validity of any platform claiming to be able to reliably monitor this space.

The damage to publishers is easier to see. Growtika's analysis of ten major tech titles found combined US organic traffic falling from 112 million monthly visits to 47 million, with Digital Trends dropping from 8.5 million monthly Google clicks in March 2024 to 264,861 in January 2026. The figures are Ahrefs traffic estimates rather than publisher analytics, and Google called the analysis fundamentally flawed. Digital Trends also laid off most of its full-time staff in early 2025, so its 97% is not a clean read on AI Overviews. The Verge, How-To Geek, and ZDNet each losing more than 85% over the same period is harder to explain away as flawed methodology.

So any growth curve for organic AI referrals (if there is one at all) appears to have an inbuilt ceiling set by the platform owners. It will only be allowed to exist at whatever level they decide, based on their commercial goals, and nothing you can do will change that. How many entities on the open web survive this transition remains to be seen, but based on current data, it does not look promising.

Say what you like about Meta, but when they decided to dramatically throttle brands' organic reach on Facebook between 2014 and 2016, at least the direction was unmistakable (which is not the same as transparent). Others are now belatedly following suit.

It is particularly awkward for Google, a company that built itself on the open web and harvested great riches, to be playing such an active role in destroying it. Small wonder they hide behind complexity, weasel words and methodological quibbling. It’s not a good look so they just hope it’s all too confusing or boring for most people to care until it’s too late.

Nobody knows how AI sources get chosen

Suppose you accept the bad maths. Suppose you argue that aggregators like Google will let organic referrals grow over time, even though that runs directly counter to their commercial interests. Suppose, then, that there is some value in spending your time trying to influence your appearance in this mythical future organic AI search segment.

You still need a mechanism — something you can do that reliably changes where, or whether, you appear in the answers. SEO had more than its fair share of snake oil, tricks, and techniques, but it eventually boiled down to “have a well-structured, performant site with helpful, unique content that solves problems for users.” That still applies. When it comes to appearing in AI search results, there is no other evidence-based method that moves the needle.

Worse, the waters between optimising for traditional search engines and AI search agents have been muddied, but they work in fundamentally different ways. Ahrefs sketches the retrieval process in its own research. An AI assistant rarely searches for the question you typed. It expands your prompt into a spray of related sub-queries — the fan-out — retrieves documents for each, then merges the resulting lists. Ahrefs offers Reciprocal Rank Fusion as one plausible mechanism for that merge, a formula that rewards pages turning up consistently across several retrievals. Google has confirmed the fan-out; nobody has confirmed the fusion, which is at best educated guesswork.

Surfer found that when an AI Overview cites something that does rank, it is ranking for a fan-out and not the main query 29.2% of the time, against 19.6% the other way round. So fan-outs appear to matter more than the head term.

But that still does not give you a target list. The expansion is not stable, which is why Fishkin’s volunteers received the same set of recommendations less than once in a hundred. Reading it once gives you a sample of one from a distribution nobody has published. The queries are long-tail enough that most have no measurable volume, so they do not exist as rows in a keyword tool. And each engine runs a different index, so “rank for these” needs a WHERE clause. Ahrefs found Perplexity overlapping Google’s top ten around 29% of the time, compared with 7 to 8% for ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot.

What you can get is a map of the topic space an answer drew on. That is a content gap diagnostic, and it is worth something. But it is not a ranking strategy, even though it is being sold as one.

There is a deeper problem with what follows from this. The merge step itself doesn't assess your credibility. But the candidate documents it merges arrive from ranking systems saturated with quality and authority signals, so the credibility assessment has not disappeared; it has moved upstream and out of sight.

That is worse for you, not better. The judgement you are being sold tools to influence is happening in a layer nobody will describe, at a distance from anything you can observe. So any talk of “becoming a brand AI trusts enough to recommend” is utter bollocks, because there is no trust register to influence or enter.

Alongside the theoretical fragility, the measurement evidence is worse than incomplete. In March 2026, Ahrefs analysed 863,000 keyword SERPs and 4 million URLs, reporting that 37.9% of AI Overview citations came from pages ranking in Google's top 10. In February 2026, BrightEdge measured the same surface and the same relationship, but put it at around 17% and said it had been flat for months. Same quarter, same question, a factor of two apart, and neither publishes a confidence interval. Basically: pick a number, any number.

Cross-engine, it is worse still. Kevin Indig's analysis of 20,000 prompts found that only 2.37% of cited URLs appeared in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews for the same prompt, while 91% appeared in only one. These are not three rankings of one pool. They are three largely disjointed pools, which makes any single composite visibility score meaningless by construction.

Then there is the question of whether one answer tells you anything at all. A variance-components study published in July 2026 broke down 12,933 LLM responses about 20 brands across eight languages and three models. When measuring sentiment polarity, brand identity accounted for 1.5% of the variance in a single response. The language of the query accounted for 26.5%. Resampling noise accounted for 34.8%. Brand-ranking reliability from a single answer was near 0.01, meaning a single answer carries almost no brand-discriminating signal.

Even read generously, the conclusion is still awkward. There is a real distinction between tracking your position in an answer, which the evidence says is close to pure noise, and heavily sampled aggregate brand measurement across many prompt variations, models and languages, which has a kernel of rigour. The second is what Żatuchin's decision-study allocation describes, which is defensible in principle. Żatuchin's decision-study allocation sets out how to do it, though on sentiment rather than on the visibility metrics that the tools typically report.

It is also expensive; it tops out at a reliability of 0.36, and it is not the product most people are buying. Almost every dashboard on the market reports a position, and even Avinash Kaushik, who is about as thoughtful an advocate for this discipline as exists, names Average Position as one of his three headline KPIs and treats it as the priority opportunity. Fishkin's research says a position in an AI recommendation list is a statistically meaningless snapshot of a probabilistic output. They cannot both be right, and the primary data does not support the dashboards.

So you are trying to optimise for a moving target whose selection rules are unknown, whose outputs are non-deterministic, whose measurements do not replicate across engines, and whose vendor studies disagree by a factor of two within a single quarter. Trying to optimise against those structural realities is panicked madness.

But you do not have to take my word for the last part. Kaushik, in the middle of a detailed methodology walkthrough for a tool he has invested in, reaches the point where the numbers move and he writes: “Coach went down by 3, probably not significant. Kate Spade went up by 11; that is massive. Why? No idea. We have such little visibility into LLM black boxes, we can only pray to Krishna and Jesus that the next set of weights being used favours our brands.” He also warns his readers that there are lots of magic beans around, and that two tools can both report a Visibility Score while measuring entirely different things.

I wrote about the measurement problem in detail, and here is the short version. The category has raised roughly $300m since mid-2025. The leading platform's own research shows that most cited sources change over time; nobody publishes confidence intervals; and the tools usually measure through an API that does not match the consumer product. What you are paying for is at best a tiny signal in a sea of noise.

The decision that was already made

Maybe you’re a hardened marketer who rode o’the choppy waters of the Penguin and Panda algorithm updates. Maybe, like me, you spent 18 months of your life recovering from a Google de-listing because your predecessor thought it was a good idea to buy £30,000 of backlinks with some spare end-of-year budget. That makes all of this very hard to accept as anything other than another hump in the long road, another challenge to work around.

We become hyper-focused on fixing the agentic search “problem”, because that’s what we’ve always done. And of course, there are no shortage of people trying desperately to flog services and tools that are mostly thinly rebadged SEO approaches desperate to stay relevant. But I sense that perhaps, at some level, even the LinkedIn Lunatics realise their days are numbered.

It’s a lot to process. So step back and return to the fundamentals. Bain's September 2025 work found 85% of B2B buyers purchase from their “day one” list, the vendors they had in mind before searching anything. 6sense's 2025 Buyer Experience Report, based on more than 4,000 buyers, found that the vendor preferred before any seller contact still wins around 80% of deals, and that buyers now purchase from their day one shortlist 95% of the time.

So if we’re scrupulously honest, the search query was never the moment of persuasion. It was the point at which a decision already taken was executed through a search bar, because that was the easiest way to reach a site whose name you already knew. The entire attribution model that credited search with the conversion was misattributing a navigation step as a discovery event. Now that the navigation step has effectively been removed, it is plain to see.

There is a counterargument that if day-one lists determine the outcome, and those lists are formed before anyone searches, then a citation that produces no clicks could still be doing work. Appearing in the answer might seed the list. Clicks would therefore be the wrong yardstick. I think this is partly true, and it is the strongest thing the search optimisation industry currently has.

It is also what makes any product unsellable. If the value of a citation is brand memory formed off-platform, months before a purchase, then you cannot attribute it, you cannot measure it on a dashboard, and, based on the evidence above, you cannot reliably steer your position in it. You are being sold a whizzy dial, but there is no wiring behind it.

There may well be an effect, and if there is, the sensible response to an unattributable, unsteerable brand-memory effect is not to buy a subscription. It is to do the things that build brand memory, which we have understood for about seventy years.

People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn't believe in that. Tomorrow wasn't getting ready for them. It didn't even know they were there.” Cormac McCarthy, The Road

The only sane reaction is not to cling to the hope that you can somehow master this new world through clever techniques and expensive tools that will staunch the bleed of organic referrals.

Build an audience you can reach without an intermediary, because direct is the only distribution channel where nobody can pull the rug from under you. Publish for humans who will remember your name in a procurement conversation eleven months from now, not for a crawler that keeps the click for itself. Show up in the places those day-one lists get formed: peer networks, communities, review sites, and other people's podcasts. That is much easier said than done. it requires really hard work and focus over a long time. It requires being interesting and different and providing something unarguably excellent.

Or you could spend your time learning the ways that AI is transforming paid advertising with technical tools of a power that was previously unimaginable. In fact, do anything other than try to preserve the flow of organic referrals because you’ve got used to seeing them. Those are permanently gone.

The dismembered torso of Monty Python's Black Knight shouts “I'll bite yer legs off!” defiantly after King Arthur. It is an amusing and enduring emblem of the search optimisation industry steadfastly refusing to give up when the battle is very clearly lost.

I’m feeling at ease, even more relaxed, because what’s meant for me won’t pass me by. I used to say that blindly, but now I know it. Woke up too late and missed a thing? I was supposed to miss it. Took the wrong turn and ended up somewhere else? That was the destination for now. Felt too tired at someplace fun? I was asked to rest. Communication unusually slow and quiet? It’s making space for something new. A friend didn’t follow through on their word? It’s not the time. What’s meant for me comes to me effortlessly. Without me trying. Without me saying a word. If I have to force it, I don’t want it. It’s all good.

In Summary: * When I woke this morning I was pleasantly surprised to find my home wi-fi operating normally. After speaking with a tech guy from my ISP last night I was resigned to having another day without good Internet access. Nice to have things back to normal.

For the last few days I've been able to spend time doing yard work early in the morning before the heat gets intolerable. I'm going to try that again tomorrow morning.

Counting on college football to relax my mind and send me to bed with a good attitude, I'm following a game now between the UMass Minutemen and the Rutgers Scarlet Knights. Rutgers is a Big Ten Conference school now, so I'll be cheering for the Scarlet Knights tonight.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night.

Health Metrics: * bw= 224.1 lbs. * bp= 141/81 (69)

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

Diet: * 05:30 – 1 banana * 06:10 – saltines crackers and cheese & meat sauce * 07:10 – 1 slice of lemon meringue pie * 11:45 – lasagna * 14:10 – 1 fresh apple

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 04:15 – listen to local news talk radio * 05:00 – bank accounts activity monitored . * 05:25 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, listen to musc, nap * 10:00 – yard work, picking up and breaking up fallen front yard branches * 11:45 – eat lunch * 12:40 – review correspondence * 14:00 – listen to relaxing music * 15:00 – listening to The Jack Riccardi Show on local AM radio * 17:00 – now following a college football game on WRSU 88.7 FM, Rutgers Radio, the UMass Minutemen vs the Rutgers Scarlet Knights.

Chess: * 08:35 – moved in all pending CC games

Dear Aunt Martha,

When I moved back to the valley, much of my savings went into renovating the old house.  I added central heat and air conditioning, insulated everything,, and upgraded both the kitchen and bathroom, replaced the roof and windows and gutters.  It took months to get everything done and I have only recently settled into it enough that I no longer feel like I am camping out. I suppose you would say that city life spoiled me and I admire the way you lived your life without all the conveniences I feel necessary for comfort.

Then severe storms shut down everything in the valley for several days and I was helpless.  No phone service, no electricity at all, no internet. I had not unpacked the crates of books I shipped here, but found a few Zane Grey novels and a copy of “Smokey the Cowhorse “in the attic.  When I grew tired of reading, I came across the tattered cards you used to teach me Patience when I was in the second grade.

I lit an oil lamp as more thunderstorms boomed outside and spent an evening reminiscing about the quiet times I played the game while you did needlework by lamplight.  I wonder if it originated as symbolic of life and I learned why it was once called”  Patience”.  It’s the same game popularized by Microsoft and now called Klondike Solitaire.

The original layout can be the circumstances we are in or the life we are handed at birth.  We don’t know what is there until we turn them face up.  This reminds me of the Zen attitude of not knowing. The stock pile cards are options we may have and it will change as the contents of the stock pile diminish.

That is a fantasy that we are given in Western capitalist society. If we follow all the rules, we will end up with all our cards in tidy little piles in the Aces’ corner.  Frustration arises when we can’t uncover the cards we want or need and are stuck with incomplete piles. It takes time, observation, and patience to decide where to place cards and when.

Observing my inner world as I played was interesting.  The repetition and steady movements were almost like a ritual as I laid out the cards and drifted into a meditative headspace. I didn’t analyze or build strategy, just watched what arose and dissolved as I played the game, allowing them to settle just as we did when sitting on the cushion during formal meditation.

I was tempted to “cheat” by looking at the facedown cards beforehand and became frustrated when wanting/needing a certain card and it was not available. I was distracted by the interplay of colors and patterns when my need for controlling outcomes became unbearable. Sometimes I noticed the distraction and reminded myself to concentrate on the cards again, drumming up determination to do it correctly instead of wandering off into la-la land and missing obvious openings for card placement. Sometimes I stared at the layout, wondering how the cards would fit, unable to see moves and I was reminded of Roshi telling me to sit more, to keep sitting, when life circumstances were difficult. Eventually, I would see a move that felt obvious once I recognized it.

The desire and need for control were interesting to watch as I chafed against “the rules”. Too often I have tried to play by my own rules and have ended up with a mess.

Roshi and I have often talked about the need for rules and structure to provide parameters within which to work. There is a certain security that comes with observing and respecting boundaries as long as everyone involved agrees on them. Being the lone player in Solitaire is a way to observe our reaction to restrictions without the distraction required to cooperate with a partner or a team.

Electronics has produced a version of Solitaire that is combined with dopamine stimulation and gambling. I wonder what you would have to say about it if you were here for me to show it to you. There are bright colors, animation, and splashy screens as well a tinny, boppy music. Cheating by turning over cards ahead of the ability to play them is impossible. It is designed to entice people to put more money into their accounts to purchase more chances at winning and to induce a fugue state in which discernment and logic are minimized.  I confess to playing it often over the past few years and have wondered if outcomes are deliberately manipulated based on the amount of money in your account. After thousands of games I have played on my phone, I have noticed changes I can only blame on artificial intelligence.  Programmers tell me the cards are shuffled at random, but I tend not to believe it.  Perhaps that is my over perceptive paranoid pattern recognition kicking in.  I haven’t taken the time to record observations and screenshots.

The phone game does not allow for the introspection that manual play with an old deck on a tabletop does.  I hope that by upgrading the old house that I have not done to our history what electronics have done to this card game. I suppose I could justify it by saying that times change and my needs differ from what yours were.  Electronics have expanded my worldview in contrast with yours, which was limited to the immediate county.  This may drift into a contemplation of having no preferences and sameness and differences, too. There are the same rules with different presentations. Is it worth the time and energy to tally up the number of differences that have evolved as social mores have changed? I wonder what you would think of social media.  I don’t dare ask Caleb. I know what his reaction would be, complete with swear words.

I can’t set up a shrine to the past and refuse to change anything, but neither can I overlook current circumstances.  I wonder how many people would be content playing with plain cards versus the electronic game.  And how many younger people these days have ever been taught to play manual games. I remember talking about rules, restrictions, and rebellions with you one time when I was an angsty pre-teen.  You told me that the answer is always somewhere in the middle of two extremes and turned back to mixing up biscuit dough.

I know, I know. I said I would stop writing about this. But I have a couple of updates to share.

One is that the photos of Danny Hillis next to some rocks and Danny Hillis posing puckishly on the bed in the Lolita Express plane that were in the first drop of the Epstein files seem to be from 2002. I had thought the relationship between Hillis and Epstein only dated to 2012, but that’s just as far back as the emails go. So since I am, as far as I can tell, the only person in the world writing about this, I wanted to enter it into the record.

Also, someone else pointed out to me that Danny Hillis took his then-teenage daughter to Epstein’s ranch in 2016. (Keeping track at home? That’s 7 years after Epstein became a convicted sex offender! Would you take your daughter on such a visit?) After their visit, Hillis emailed Epstein to say his daughter enjoyed the visit. Epstein replied “she’s always welcome,” which could of course just be a banal pleasantry. Or it could be something more sinister. I wonder how Hillis took it at the time? Epstein then follows up with “Is she a biological daughter?” which I’m sure we can all agree is an extremely normal thing to ask that certainly doesn’t have any weird implications.

I’m not linking to these emails because the DOJ did not redact the name of Hillis’ daughter from them. My feeling is that if she has something she wishes to say about this visit, she will say it, and otherwise she should be left alone.

Those are the updates. Except for this: I tried editing Hillis’ Wikipedia page to reflect his relationship with Epstein. My edits were rejected, and they patiently explained to me that Wikipedia doesn’t use primary sources. They are a tertiary source by design. In other words, it doesn’t go in Wikipedia until a reliable source writes about it.

So Hillis’ Wikipedia remains pristine because nobody but me has written about his association with Epstein, except for this blink-and-you’ll-miss-it mention in a Scientific American article. I did a search for Hillis’ name, and on the third page of results, there’s a page that inaccurately says Hillis appears in only 4 documents in the Epstein files. So even if you do keep clicking “more results,” after searching for Danny Hillis, the info you’ll get is inaccurate.

Here’s my question: what the hell is going on here? I mean, this is clearly not unique to Hillis; he just happens to be the person I’m interested in because I used to work for him.

There are a lot of people whose names are all over the Epstein files. Some have faced consequences for their association, but most haven’t, and this is at least in part because the media seems to be treating this as a story about Jeffrey Epstein rather than a story about the people he associated with. Which is weird because Epstein is dead and a lot of these other people are still with us.

Sure, sure, nobody but Epstein and Maxwell (well, and the President of the United States) have been accused of a crime, but I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: if you’ve built a public profile on being a smart person, the fact that you have a yawning void where your ethics should be out to be part of your public profile. It ought to be part of what people know about you.

But it’s not for Danny Hillis. Unless you are already aware of the association and find one of my blog posts, there’s almost no way to find out about it.

A lot of Epstein’s network was here in Boston. He cultivated relationships with folks affiliated with MIT (Including Danny Hillis) and Harvard in order to give himself a patina of respectability. Why hasn’t the local media done a deep dive into all these people’s association with Epstein?

Why do we have to search through the Epstein files ourselves to find this stuff out? I never would have learned about Danny Hillis’ decades-long association with Epstein if I hadn’t looked at the photos in the first drop. Because nobody’s writing about all the people who were involved, even if, as in the case of Danny Hillis, they are a public figure. (an obscure public figure to most of the general public, but very well known in certain circles.)

Why is the media not holding people’s feet to the fire about their association with a sexual predator and sex trafficker, even if said people weren’t involved in the crimes? Why is no one even asking these people why they hung out with Epstein?

Because journalism is broken and most of our journalists are toadies so thrilled at proximity to power that they don’t want to do anything to mess that up.

Prove me wrong. Please.

Inbetweeners Part 12- Protectors of the Weave

I've been trying to decide chronologically where to place the Protectors of the Weave, because they are the ever-present antagonist throughout the story, so there isn't one logical place to put them over another. I suppose now is as good a time as any.

In most Dungeons and Dragons campaigns, the Protectors of the Weave would be the “good guys” or at the very least a neutral group the players interact with. However, when the protagonists have been brought back by a Far Realm entity that seems intent on running experiments throughout the multiverse, the arithmetic is quite different. The Protectors of the Weave is an organization based in Mechanus that, as its name suggests, protects the integrity of the Weave. The Weave is the magical force that permeates the multiverse and allows spellcasters to use spells in 5e, for those who are unfamiliar. An event like the Spell Plague would be the very type of crisis the Protectors of the Weave are designed to avoid. That said, the Spell Plague was a far smaller deal in my universe than in standard 5e, and was more the result of a clerical error in Mechanus than Cyric killing Mystra. He did, but the gods are more figure heads. Primus, lord of Mechanus and ultimate arbiter of law, really manages magic, the weave, etc. The gods are more middlemen that distribute magic. All the different factions and warring parties are part of the balance. Even the Blood War serves as a constant flux vent to keep the machine moving. So the Protectors are there to ensure the integrity of Primus' grand design.

In such a way, anything from the Far Realm is immediately on their radar. Most Far Realm incursions are little more than curiosities. Tentacled aberrations that can distort reality locally but pose no existential threat. The Protectors simple exterminate these threats as an exterminator handles insects. More powerful Far Realm entities though must be handled differently. Beings like the Interloper exist outside Euclidean 3d space, and such “killing” them is no easy task. A 3 dimensional representation can be destroyed, but that can barely harm the entity as a whole. So instead, containment becomes the primary objective. Once the entity is contained, deletion or ejection can be done methodically, and carefully. The worst case scenario is that the entity must be contained until it runs out of energy. Even though Far Realm entities defy many of the laws of physics and magic that govern the multiverse, some concept of the conservation of energy must apply. Nothing is an infinite well... if it was the universe would've been consumed by entropy eons ago. That said, the amount of energy they can leverage may be orders of magnitude greater than any archmage of deity can muster. These sorts of threats are exceedingly rare, but when they happen it is all hands on deck.

Primus runs a tight ship with the Weave and ordering existence, so incursions are rare. As such, the Protectors mostly spend time monitoring potential breaches. Most are false positives, rogue wizards messing around with spells they don't understand, strange monsters, or just natural anomalies. As such they've developed a complex, layered bureaucracy to deal with it. Initial reports are reviewed by a field office. If credible, agents are deployed to examine directly. An escalation ladder then occurs depending on the severity of the phenomenon. What's important to realize is that the Protectors are specifically worried about the integrity of existence itself. An evil warlord, lich, demon prince, or dragon causing a mass casualty event isn't something they would intercede in so long as it follows the rules of existence. However, if a mage tries to open a portal to the Far Realm, the Protectors would be on that immediately. Their agnosticism towards most matters has not earned them love among the general populace. More importantly, few even know if their existence or would have cause to interact with them. Institutions like Mage Colleges, interplanar trade organizations, high level wizarding guilds, etc may interact with them. Most organizations, good or evil, tend to cooperate with the Protectors with the hope of getting them out of their hair as quickly as possible. The Protectors are exacting and myopic, and will not relent until a task is completed. Their resources are essentially boundless relative to any other planar organization. No one sane or informed would make war on Mechanus.

The Protectors escalation ladder starts with agents investigating. Agents have the authority to bring in low level constructs like Modrons to support them. I believe when the players encountered them first they summoned Tridrones to help. Here is a statblock, a variation of the mage statblock from the Monster Manual, for an agent:

Agent (2900 XP)

This spellcaster is a standard field agent sent out by the order to investigate things that damage the Weave. Wears white and grey robes with symbol of a gear on them.

Use “Mage Statblock” but with the following adjustments:

10 HD AC 15- Permanent Mage Armor 65 HP Con is 14, Intelligence is 18, Wisdom is 15

Saving Throws: INT +8, WIS +7, CON +2 Prof Bonus: 4 Spell Save DC 16

Additional Spells: Forbiddance- blocks teleportation and plane shifting, deals 5d10 Radiant Damage to anything trying to violate the magical ward. On the player characters it hits them if they try to leave.

Teleport and Plane Shift (only to their field office, either on Mechanus or other location)

Geas (to usually take someone into custody)

Actions:

Shocking Prod: Melee Attack- +6 to hit, 1d6 dmg + 2d6 shock dmg Call Backup: Summon up to 10 HD worth of Modrons. Cool Down 5.

Most importantly, agents are focused on controlling the environment. Blocking teleportation and also Geas to take players into custody. The Inbetweeners protagonists teleported into the courtyard of a Mage's College. They interacted with a few students who then got their professors to come who were fascinated by the phenomenon. The players were supposed to return once the professors gathered equipment and supplies to be studied and try to find a solution to their non-linear form of travel. Sometimes its frustrating to not be able to go from point A to point B. However, by the time the players had returned, the Protectors of the Weave had caught wind. My thought, though this was never explicitly divulged to the players, was that the mage faculty ran it up the chain of command to admin. Someone high up at the college, perhaps a dean, would have contact info for a Protector field office. Perhaps the college had some sort of financial dealings with the Protectors, donations in return for information. Initially, teleporting adventurers didn't really pique their interest. But when they discovered that the players looped, if they tried to move too far in one direction they appeared on the other side, and couldn't break out of this by any other means other than leaving, this was interesting. A localized reality distortion at the very least, enough to justify a formal investigation.

I should note at this point the one thing the Interloper seemed to fear was being discovered by the Protectors of the Weave. He had close calls in the past, and knew they had the resources to undo his work and potentially him. He made sure the players knew never to tell anyone about his existence directly, to instead come up with a backstory. I think what they came up with was that they had been cursed by the god “Mask.” The Interloper even modified some of their memories so they could pass mind reading checks, but a few of the players refused the modification so they had to roll deception checks.

Anyway, the players return to the mages college at some point later, it was part of a linear path of rooms so you had to go through it to get to the next room in the sequence. Suddenly, walls of force appeared and blocked their exit on either side. Two agents of the Protectors of the Weave then questioned the players. Some cooperated more than others, but all held back important details. The Protectors used various noninvasive equipment to test the players, and determined their condition was not magical, divine or psionic in nature. This warranted further inspection, because with those three explanations ruled out Far Realm influence becomes more likely. Cervi, one of the players, absolutely refused to cooperate so one of the agents cast Geas on him. At that point, he was incredibly helpful, explaining the Interloper and giving the agent an amulet that allowed him to travel with Cervi. At this point, protocol dictated that the agents immediately report up the chain and wait for further orders. However, this particular agent wanted to make a name for himself and track the Interloper directly in order to make rank. He had no idea of the magnitude of this being or its power, and figured he could locate it, call it in, and be rewarded career wise. His plan was to go with Cervi to the source, call in a supervisor and other constructs from there and capture whatever it was. On the path their, they had to fight a Gibbering Mouther (created when Rotlog used an Interloper spell to destabilize a half dragon veteran). Meanwhile, the other Agent kept the remaining players detained in the mages college.

The other players managed to summon a Chuul which attacked the Agent, allowing them to kill the agent and escape. They sent Dolly ahead to warn the Interloper, who hid when the agent arrived. The party arrived and though they sustained great damage, managed to kill the other agent. In my notes I wrote that Uzo “mulched” him, so their may have been a critical hit from a Hobgoblin Samurai involved. He also had his cursed bow at this point so there may have been some power from there. With both agents killed, no one had a direct line to the Interloper. As a result, the Interloper opted to prune an entire branch of rooms, cutting off the hallway that led to th crab shack that led to the courtyard that led to the dog house that led to the pirate ship cabin that led to the circus that led to the bakery that led to a battlefield. The players never made it as far as the battlefield. With those rooms pruned, a new door appeared to fill the void... one that the Interloper did not create. More on that in a separate post. So that was the players first encounter with the Protectors of the Weave. They managed to stay safe, but one agent killed and another vanished without a trace certainly put them on high alert. It was only a matter of time before the players crossed paths with them again.

Since the Protectors of the Weave operate in an arena of ultimate law, the more lawful an area the more dangerous it was for the players. So any major metropolis, mage council, etc ran the risk of reaching the information network of the protectors. Also, using certain Interloper “gifts”, like temporal duplicate, was like a straight up signal flare, visible across planes. This meant the players had to be strategic about when to use such powers and how to interact with different factions and forces. Backstories were important, and the less they could divulge the better. However, in remote areas, or dangerous areas like Hades, they could move about, speak and act more freely as there was less Protector presence there. Still, a spell like temporal duplicate would trigger them even in these locations. The only area truly safe from the Protectors is Sigil, but more on Sigil in a later post.

Had the players not taken out the second agent so quickly, he would've locked down the Grey Room, summoned his supervisor and a number of more powerful constructs. The supervisor:

Supervisor (10000 XP)

Use Archmage Statblock but with the following adjustments

HP: 135

Con: 14, Wis 18 Saving Throws: Int +9, Wis +8, Con +2

Additional Spells: Plane Shift, Geas, Dominate Monster, Powerword Stun, Imprisonment, Hold Monster

Actions:

Juiced Up Shocking Prod: Melee attack +6, 1d6 + 3d6 Shock Damage, Con DC 15 or be stunned for a turn. Call Backup: Summon up to 20 HD worth of Modrons. Can be used as a bonus action. Cool down 3.

Again, all about control. Dominate Monster, Stun, Imprisonment, Hold Monster, and a stunning shock prod are all meant to neutralize threats. Summoning Modrons is more to provide additional bodies and hitpoints to tank damage. If a threat was really severe they could summon a special agent:

Elite Special Agent of the Protectors of the Weave Medium humanoid (any race), lawful neutral Armor Class 20 (Arcane Mantle, magical defense protocols) Hit Points 240 (32d8 + 96) Speed 40 ft., fly 30 ft. (hover, via spell)

STR 12 (+1) DEX 20 (+5) CON 16 (+3) INT 22 (+6) WIS 16 (+3) CHA 18 (+4)

Saving Throws Int +12, Wis +9, Dex +11 Skills Arcana +12, Stealth +11, Investigation +12, Insight +9, Perception +9 Damage Resistances force, psychic, lightning; bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing from nonmagical weapons Damage Immunities radiant (Arcane Weave Cloak active) Condition Immunities charmed, frightened, restrained Senses truesight 60 ft., passive Perception 19 Languages Common, Elvish, Draconic, Thieves’ Cant, Telepathy 60 ft. Challenge 17 (18,000 XP) Proficiency Bonus +6

Features Legendary Resistance (3/Day). If the agent fails a saving throw, it can choose to succeed instead. Spellcasting. The agent is a 17th-level spellcaster (Intelligence is the spellcasting ability; spell save DC 20, +12 to hit with spell attacks). It has the following spells prepared:

Cantrips (at will): minor illusion, prestidigitation, ray of frost, mage hand, mind sliver 1st level (4 slots): shield, mage armor, detect magic, absorb elements 2nd level (3 slots): mirror image, misty step, suggestion 3rd level (3 slots): counterspell, dispel magic, fireball 4th level (3 slots): greater invisibility, dimension door 5th level (3 slots): wall of force, synaptic static 6th level (2 slots): disintegrate, globe of invulnerability 7th level (1 slot): forcecage 8th level (1 slot): maze 9th level (1 slot): wish (used for a prepared contingency-like spell or emergency escape only)

Innate Items Arcane Mantle (Recharge 6). As a bonus action, the agent activates a shimmering field granting +2 AC and resistance to all damage types for 1 minute. While active, the agent floats 1 inch off the ground (hovering). Chronoshift Ring (3/Day). As a reaction, the agent can force a reroll of any d20 roll made within 60 feet. Voidstep Boots. As a bonus action, the agent can teleport up to 30 ft. and become invisible until the start of their next turn (or until they attack/cast a spell).

Actions Multiattack. The agent makes two spell weapon attacks or uses a combination of attack and control (e.g., Ray of Frost and Force Detonation). Arcane Blade (Magical). Melee Weapon Attack: +11 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 21 (4d6 + 5) force damage. If the target is concentrating on a spell, they make the save with disadvantage. Force Detonation (Recharge 5–6). The agent releases a 20-foot-radius blast centered on itself or any point within 60 feet. All creatures in the area must make a DC 20 Constitution saving throw, taking 45 (10d8) force damage on a failed save, or half as much on a success. Creatures who fail are also pushed 15 ft. away and knocked prone. Summon Weavebound Juggernaut (1/Day). The agent summons a Weavebound Juggernaut, a Large construct with devastating melee and anti-caster capabilities. It lasts for 10 minutes or until slain.

Legendary Actions (3/round) The agent can take 3 legendary actions, choosing from the options below. Only one legendary action can be used at a time, and only at the end of another creature’s turn. Teleport (Costs 1 Action). The agent teleports up to 30 feet to an unoccupied space it can see.

Cantrip (Costs 1 Action). The agent casts a cantrip.

Disrupt Spell (Costs 2 Actions). The agent targets a creature concentrating on a spell within 60 feet. The creature must succeed on a DC 20 Constitution saving throw or lose concentration.

Again, spells focused on control but the Special Agent was particularly talented at disrupting other magic users. Counter Spell, Disrupt Spell and Chronoshift Ring all serve to disrupt other players actions. They can also summon a Weavebound Juggernaut. These are constructs that come in when Modrons alone won't do the trick.

Weavebound Juggernaut Large construct, unaligned AC 20 (reinforced armor) HP 140 (17d10 + 51) Speed 40 ft. STR 22 (+6) DEX 10 (+0) CON 17 (+3) INT 3 (-4) WIS 10 (+0) CHA 1 (-5)

Damage Immunities psychic, poison; bludgeoning, piercing, slashing from nonmagical weapons Condition Immunities charmed, exhaustion, frightened, paralyzed, poisoned Senses darkvision 60 ft., tremorsense 20 ft., passive Perception 10 Languages understands commands of the summoner Challenge 9 (5,000 XP)

Actions Multiattack. The Juggernaut makes two slam attacks. Slam. Melee Weapon Attack: +12 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 24 (4d8 + 6) force damage. Anti-Magic Pulse (Recharge 5–6). The Juggernaut releases a disruptive pulse in a 30-ft radius. Creatures concentrating on spells must make a DC 18 Con save or lose concentration. Magical effects in the area flicker and fizzle until the end of the Juggernaut's next turn (treat as anti-magic field for spell attacks and concentration checks).

They are potent combatants, but their biggest advantage is they are tanky and can use antimagic pulse. Dozens of them can neutralize a pretty dangerous threat. When dimensional anchors are used to lock down a 4-dimensional being, Weavebound Juggernauts tend to carry them and deploy them.

If even a Special Agent and team of Weavebound Juggernauts are not enough to neutralize a threat, The Protectors have a number of other escalation options. They can summon Maruts, which if you don't know look them up, the most powerful constructs in the game. Later on the players encounter some specialized Maruts with custom statblocks. At a challenge rating of 25, they are ranked as more dangerous than an Ancient Red Dragon... and Mechanus has a lot of them under its employ. Alternatively, or as a supplement, they have a number of powerful third party contractors they can use. Zane is one such contractor who will get his own post. But Mechanus has the resources were they can hire essentially any mercenary or powerful figure willing to take payment for services. As such, they can turn the entire multiverse against an adversary.

If all of that doesn't work, they have ancient, forbidden weapons locked away in their vaults of unimaginable destructive power. These weapons were used to wipe out most of the Titans eons ago and turned entire planes into endless deserts of white powder. Towards the very end of the campaign these weapons are seen again. Overall, with this escalation ladder, no one sane would consider taking on the Protectors of the Weave. The next time the players encounter them, the Interloper, being that can bend reality at a whim, has one word for them. “Run”

•••••••••••••••

I think I am a person of great emotion... not great intellect.

That is not to say that I think myself unintelligent.

Just more interested in the temperature in the room than in how the building is constructed.

More interested in feeling wet cheeks at the tender beauty of a flower

than in knowledge of it's genus or species.

YES! Give me that scent that tickles and delights.

If I had a choice... I think I would choose this.

Or, I suppose, it might be better to be equal of both.

I wonder if being a person of great intellect

without the fire of wild abandon burning in you is easier.

It seems in some way, yes, it would be.

But how would I know? I've never visited that particular garden.

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