los gepolst

jij bent zo eentje waarvoor sturen zijn gemaakt borden werden ontwikkeld geboden en wetten moesten worden geregeld verhalen verzonnen voor zingeving jij hebt stekkers nodig om te denken dat je werkt echt hier bent om iets te doen knopjes indrukken, aan hendels trekken kijken naar verbeelding een voorstelling voor oog en oor jij hebt stopcontacten nodig camera beelden microfoons en de gebruikelijke poederdosis voor jou zijn er apparaten, automaten, worden namen pas echt als ze op plastic zitten geplakt en je ze in kunt schrijven bij een kamer je hebt handelingen nodig voor jou moest alles worden omgezet en aan altijd aanzetten is het leven pas echt als het wordt opgemerkt gezien via de middelen waarvan jij afhankelijk bent anders ga je dood als je niet wordt gezien terwijl je iets doet al is het maar kijken naar anderen op een speciaal daar voor gefabriceerd zeteltje je hebt letters nodig voor je lijf instrumenten moeten je omringen anders leef je waarschijnlijk niet jij bent er zo eentje met externe behoeften waaraan anderen moeten voldoen voor jou aan het werk gaan naar je stem luisteren via 1001 via's op grote afstand tussen jou en hun waarvoor wegen moeten worden geasfalteerd, regelmatig hersteld remmen, rem- en stoplichten werden opgetuigd in de voertuigen die je nodig hebt om sneller dan je zelf kan ergens te komen om op knopjes te drukken jij moet een steel in handen hebben een stuk gereedschap een bijl of een boor je moet iets hebben met voorschriften bijwerkingen verplicht gesteld anders heeft het allemaal geen nut jij met je instrumentarium, orkestratie van de omgeving, altijd op een podium acteren om waar ook te kunnen zijn je hebt tubes nodig en kwasten middelen voor zelf expressie boven op anderen je hebt wedstrijden nodig stem rondes om het ego te strelen je eigen belang rijk kunstzinnige successen voor het behalen zodat je heel even tevreden kunt zijn slapen in je nep omgeving zelf ingevuld met spul om naar te kijken zodat je kunt denken dat je ergens bent je hebt lijnen nodig kabels masten torens en natuurlij k namen voor iedereen en alles zodat je kunt zeggen dat alles echt zo is daar voor jou om te benoemen daar bij jou en je machine waardoor je hier bent terecht gekomen in die stroom van rotzooi die nodig is voor jou levenswil of wat daar meer min dan meer voor door gaat

👋

There were nettles and I was running at the edge of the maize field, between the taller maize and the forest. There I could’ve disappeared, but I didn’t

I Emerged instead on the road and finally made it back home to my family including the cats

And yes of course I am thankful

I never pictured I would have any of this

There’s no place on earth I’d rather be and no life I’d rather live either

I didn’t picture anything, to be fair, but still

having all I got fills me with gratitude

And my neutral facial expression: a smile.

I had one of those days today where I just didn’t really want to get up off the couch. I had already gone to the gym, but I got pretty bad Tennis elbow and so I ended up taking it kind of easy and I was supposed to hang out with a friend for the first time in a while, but she flaked again. I just didn’t really have any motivation to do anything.

Ampersound creates audiovisual non-fiction stories with a particular emphasis on the power of sound. Founded by George Lavender, the company develops all of its material by collaborating with actual human creatives, a quality that became central to the company's graphic identity, which I had the pleasure of designing.

Kamilia is a boutique perfume and jewelry brand named in honor of the client’s mother. From its inception, the design process sought to establish a visual identity that would convey the brand’s deeply personal origins while communicating the refined craftsmanship behind its products.

And here's a little tease of my collab with Dominic Boyer for Elon Mag:

It would seem that being exposed to all those dumb toy ads in comicbooks all my life would eventually come in handy after all.

“He who does not read, at 70 years will have lived only one life, his own! He who reads, will have lived 5000 years: He was there when Cain killed Abel, when Renzo married Lucia, when Leopardi admired infinity... Because 'Reading is backward immortality.'” – Umberto Eco

#work #design #quote

A pug flying an aeroplane. That was the image, generated with an off-the-shelf model by a photographer who posts under the handle Horshack, and in September 2025 he persuaded a Nikon Z6III to certify it as a photograph.

The method was not sophisticated. He encoded the synthetic image into Nikon's raw NEF container, then used the camera's multiple exposure mode to graft it onto the skeleton of a legitimate capture. The camera, running firmware version 2.00 released on 27 August 2025, duly wrapped the result in a cryptographic manifest conforming to the specification published by the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity. Anyone inspecting the file would have found a valid signature attesting that a real Nikon camera had recorded the scene. Nikon confirmed the fault on 4 September, suspended its Authenticity Service, and later notified users that every certificate it had issued would be revoked. Early adopters who had spent the fortnight signing their work found their proofs retrospectively voided.

The more instructive part came next. Horshack pointed out that Nikon could not fully fix this alone, because the default behaviour of the widely used C2PA validation tools is not to check whether a signing certificate has been revoked. The revocation-checking code exists in the software development kit; it is simply not switched on by default. He filed a GitHub issue asking that the reference command-line tool change that. Until it does, a revoked certificate and a valid one look identical to most software that inspects them.

Hold that sequence in mind, because it contains the whole argument in miniature. Manufacturing a convincing fake cost one person an afternoon and no money. Certifying that something is real required a camera manufacturer, a firmware pipeline, a certificate authority, an industry consortium, a specification, a conformance programme and a public trust list — and it failed anyway, in a way only the consortium could repair.

This is the asymmetry that will define the next decade of the internet, and almost every optimistic account of the “trust economy” walks straight past it.

The Statistic Everyone Cites Cannot Prove Its Own Provenance

Writing in Modern Diplomacy on 16 August 2026, Yang Xite, a research fellow at ANBOUND, set out the case with unusual clarity. “Information used to be scarce, and access to it was a source of power,” he wrote. “Today, the problem is almost the opposite; there is too much information floating online.” His conclusion: “As the cost of producing information approaches zero, the value of finding, checking, filtering, and trusting information rises. The scarce resource is no longer content itself. It is confidence in the content.” And therefore: “In a market where consumers and businesses are increasingly exposed to fraud, proof of authenticity can itself become a product.”

That is correct as far as it goes. The trouble starts with the number recruited to support it.

You will have seen the claim that ninety per cent of online content will be AI-generated by 2026. It appears in policy briefings, keynotes and vendor decks, usually attributed to Europol, whose 2022 report Facing reality? Law enforcement and the challenge of deepfakes states that “experts estimate that as much as 90% of online content may be synthetically generated by 2026”.

In January 2023, Jesse Walker at Reason traced the chain. Europol's “experts” resolve to a single citation: Nina Schick's 2020 book Deepfakes: The Coming Infocalypse. Schick's source was one named individual — Victor Riparbelli, chief executive of Synthesia, a company that sells synthetic video. What Riparbelli said was that synthetic video may account for up to ninety per cent of all video content in as little as three to five years. A forecast about one medium, made by a vendor with a direct commercial interest in that medium's growth, generalised into a claim about the entire internet, laundered through a book into a police agency report and from there into the newspaper of record.

The most widely cited datum about information pollution is itself a specimen of information pollution. It is not a measurement. It never was.

The measurements that do exist tell a duller, more useful story. In October 2025 the search analytics firm Graphite published an analysis by Gregory Druck, Jose Luis Paredes, Bevin Benson and Ethan Smith covering forty-three thousand English-language URLs drawn from CommonCrawl between January 2020 and May 2025. They reported their error rates: a 4.2 per cent false positive rate against pre-ChatGPT articles, and a 0.6 per cent false negative rate against known GPT-4o output. AI-written articles overtook human-written ones in November 2024 and stood at just over half the sample by May 2025. Crucially, the proportion has been broadly stable for about a year. The wave crested; it did not keep rising toward ninety.

Graphite also noted something that cuts against the panic: these articles largely do not surface in Google or ChatGPT results. NewsGuard, tracking the sharper end of the phenomenon, had identified 3,749 AI content farm sites across sixteen languages as of 23 June 2026, more than double its count a year earlier. A real and growing problem. Not ninety per cent of the internet.

This matters beyond pedantry. Build a verification regime on the premise that nearly everything is fake and you will build something that treats unverified as guilty by default. Which is exactly what is being built.

What the Economics Paper Actually Says Is Worse

The arXiv paper usually invoked alongside the ninety per cent figure does not contain it. “The Economics of Information Pollution in the Age of AI: General Equilibrium, Welfare, and Policy Design”, submitted by Yukun Zhang and Tianyang Zhang on 17 September 2025 and revised on 4 January 2026, is a theoretical model rather than an empirical survey. It contains no census of what fraction of the web is synthetic.

What it does contain is a sharper claim. The authors argue that large language models represent “a fundamental shock to the economics of information production” because they collapse the marginal cost of generation asymmetrically — driving the cost of low-quality synthetic content towards zero while leaving high-quality production costly. Formally, AI substitutes for labour in low-quality output but complements it in high-quality creation. From this they derive a unique “Polluted Information Equilibrium”, and attribute its inefficiency to a threefold market failure: a production externality, a platform governance failure, and an information commons externality.

That framework explains something a raw percentage cannot. The problem is not the volume of synthetic content. It is that the cost gap between producing a plausible lie and producing a verified truth has widened, and every actor's incentives now point downhill. Zhang and Zhang propose an Information Pollution Index and an adaptive governance regime keyed to real-time readings — a proposal presupposing an instrument nobody operates.

“AI, Digital Platforms, and the New Systemic Risk” by Philipp Hacker, Lilian Edwards and Atoosa Kasirzadeh, submitted on 22 September 2025 and revised on 23 May 2026, comes at the same territory from the governance side. Drawing on finance, complex systems theory, climate science and cybersecurity, the authors argue that recent European legislation invokes systemic risk while relying on narrow or ambiguous characterisations of it. The Digital Services Act, they find, identifies systemic risk better than the more recent AI Act, and harms such as discrimination at scale and systematic hallucinations “may not fall under current legal definitions, given the AI Act's focus on frontier model capabilities”.

Put the two together and the diagnosis is precise. Generation has become cheap in a way structurally biased towards the low-quality end, and the legal instruments built to respond target frontier model capabilities rather than population-level degradation of the information commons. Neither paper says ninety per cent of the internet is fake. Both say something more troubling: the machinery for noticing and pricing the damage does not exist.

Seeing Stopped Being Enough Somewhere Around Last March

The abstraction becomes concrete fastest in medicine, where the readers are the most highly trained image analysts in the world.

On 24 March 2026, Radiology published a study led by Mickael Tordjman, a post-doctoral fellow at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, testing whether radiologists could distinguish synthetic X-rays from real ones. Seventeen radiologists at twelve centres across six countries assessed 264 radiographs, half authentic and half generated, using both a general-purpose commercial model and RoentGen, a diffusion model built at Stanford for chest radiography.

When the radiologists did not know the study's true purpose, only forty-one per cent spontaneously flagged the synthetic images. Told explicitly that the dataset was half fake, their mean accuracy reached seventy-five per cent, with individual performance ranging from fifty-eight to ninety-two per cent. Experience made no difference: the researchers found no correlation between years in practice and detection accuracy.

Read that again. Specialists, forewarned, missed roughly a quarter of fabricated medical images. The clinical implications are obvious — fraudulent insurance claims, manufactured litigation evidence, falsified trial data — but the epistemic implication is larger. A chest X-ray was, until recently, close to a paradigm case of self-authenticating evidence. It is not any more, and no amount of professional training closes the gap.

The financial sector has the loss figures. On 7 April 2026 the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center published its 2025 report: 20.9 billion dollars in reported losses, up twenty-six per cent from 16.6 billion, across 1,008,597 complaints — the first time annual complaints have exceeded one million in the centre's twenty-five year history. People aged sixty and over filed 201,266 complaints and accounted for roughly 7.7 billion dollars of the losses. For the first time, the report carried a section on AI-facilitated fraud: more than twenty-two thousand complaints and nearly 893 million dollars.

The archetypal case remains the engineering firm Arup, whose Hong Kong finance employee authorised fifteen transfers totalling roughly 25.6 million dollars in a single day after a video conference in which every executive on the call was a deepfake assembled from publicly available footage. Hong Kong police disclosed the incident in February 2024; Arup confirmed itself as the victim in May. Deloitte's Center for Financial Services, in an analysis published on 29 May 2024 by Satish Lalchand, Val Srinivas, Brendan Maggiore and Joshua Henderson, projected that generative AI could push United States fraud losses to forty billion dollars by 2027, from 12.3 billion in 2023. That last figure is a projection and should be read as one. The IC3 numbers are not.

Detection Is the Losing Side of an Arms Race It Cannot Leave

The instinctive response is to build a detector. The evidence says this will not work, and the best evidence is a benchmark designed specifically to test the claim.

Deepfake-Eval-2024, assembled by Nuria Alina Chandra, Oren Etzioni and eleven colleagues and first posted in March 2025, collected deepfakes actually circulating in the wild during 2024 — forty-five hours of video, 56.5 hours of audio and 1,975 images, drawn from eighty-eight different websites in fifty-two languages. The team then ran state-of-the-art open-source detectors against it.

Performance collapsed. Against the academic benchmarks on which these models report their headline accuracy, the area under the curve fell by fifty per cent for video, forty-eight per cent for audio and forty-five per cent for images. Commercial detectors and fine-tuned models did better, but still did not match human forensic analysts. The authors' conclusion is blunt: academic benchmarks are out of date and unrepresentative of real-world deepfakes.

This is not a temporary engineering shortfall. Detection is structurally the trailing party. A detector is trained on generators that already exist, and any published detector becomes a differentiable objective for the next generation to optimise against. Compression, re-encoding, screenshotting and platform transcoding degrade exactly the statistical residue detectors look for. Every step of ordinary internet distribution is, incidentally, an evasion technique.

Which means the question cannot be answered by looking harder at the artefact. You have to ask where it came from. And the moment you do, you have changed the subject from what is true to who is vouching — and created a market.

Provenance Changes the Question From What Is True to Who Signed

The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity is the serious attempt at that change. Its output, Content Credentials, is a cryptographically signed manifest travelling with a file, recording what device or software produced it and what edits were applied. The specification reached version 2.4 in April 2026 and is progressing through ISO as standard 22144, still an unpublished draft.

The steering committee is the tell. It comprises Adobe, Amazon, the BBC, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Publicis Groupe, Sony, TikTok and Truepic — the world's largest advertising conglomerate, the dominant mobile and desktop platform vendors, the two largest generative model providers, three major distribution platforms, one public service broadcaster and one verification vendor. A reasonable roster for building an interoperable standard. Also a list of the organisations that will decide what counts as authentic.

Before assessing who should hold that power, be precise about what the technology proves. It proves that a manifest was signed by a key traceable to a listed certificate, and that the file has not changed since. It does not prove the manifest's assertions are true. Photograph an AI-generated image displayed on a screen using a C2PA-enabled Leica and you get a cryptographically impeccable credential attesting that a real camera captured a real scene, which it did — the scene was a monitor. Nor does provenance say anything about context: an authentic photograph from one conflict, correctly signed, remains authentic when captioned as coming from another.

The independent security assessment is worse than the conceptual critique. On 27 April 2026, Enis Golaszewski, Neal Krawetz, Alan T. Sherman, Edward Zieglar and seven colleagues published what they describe as the first comprehensive independent security analysis of C2PA, including the first formal-methods analysis of its core protocols. Their finding: “the current C2PA specifications fail to achieve their claimed security goals”. Their recommendation is stark. C2PA “should not yet be relied upon for high-stakes uses such as financial disclosures, journalism, or legal evidence” — a fairly comprehensive list of the uses for which it is being promoted.

The Certificate Authority Is the Chokepoint

Here the asymmetry stops being conceptual and becomes an access-control list.

To emit a Content Credential validators will trust, you need a signing certificate from a certification authority on the C2PA Trust List. To obtain one, your product must have passed the C2PA Conformance Program, which assesses it against the specification, a certificate policy and a set of security requirements. The interim trust list that held the ecosystem together in its early years was frozen on 1 January 2026; the formal programme replacing it opened in mid-2025 and remains in early enrolment.

Consider what this means in practice. SSL.com, a conformant certification authority, introduced a free tier in June 2026 offering one Level 1 claim signing certificate valid for a year plus ten thousand trusted timestamps. Generous — except that applicants must present “a valid C2PA conformance record ID”. The certificate is free; eligibility to hold one is not something an individual can obtain at all. Conformance is a process applied to products and organisations, with legal agreements, security assessments and identity validation attached. A freelance photographer in Nairobi cannot pass it. A witness with a phone cannot pass it.

The World Privacy Forum, in a technical review published on 3 September 2025 by Kate Kaye and Pam Dixon, put the governance objection with precision: “the criteria used for inclusion on these lists, or who the arbiters deciding which entities are considered known, and by extension, trustworthy have not been made public”. The same review noted that C2PA's own harms modelling documentation concedes that “loss of control over personal information and enforced suppression of speech are possible through use of C2PA”, and that identity specifications were moved out of the core standard into a separate working group in January 2024, with identity claims aggregators now bridging government and commercial identity systems into provenance workflows.

So the architecture, stated plainly: generating a convincing fake requires a consumer graphics card or a free web account. Generating a credential that a verifier will honour requires membership of, or accreditation by, a consortium whose selection criteria are not published. One of those capabilities has been democratised. The other has been enclosed.

Every Platform Reads the Evidence and Then Deletes It

Even for the accredited, the infrastructure does not currently deliver.

In October 2025 the Washington Post ran a test that ought to be better known. Reporters produced an AI-generated video carrying Content Credentials and uploaded it to eight major social platforms. Only YouTube surfaced any warning, and that disclosure sat inside a description attached to the clip rather than on the video itself. No platform preserved the Content Credentials data in a form users could access.

The mechanism is mundane. Platforms re-encode nearly every image and video at upload — for file size, for format normalisation, and to strip EXIF data that routinely contains GPS coordinates and device identifiers. Metadata not deliberately carried through the transcode does not survive it. Some platforms do read the manifest before discarding it: TikTok began reading C2PA data in 2024 and applies its own “AI-generated” labels on that basis, adding an invisible watermark in November 2025 precisely because, in its own account, C2PA metadata can be removed when content is re-uploaded or edited.

That is the settled state of affairs. The provenance record is read by the platform, used for the platform's own labelling decision, and deleted from the file that everyone actually sees. Users receive a conclusion, not evidence. Whether to believe the label is a question about the platform, which is where we started.

The proposed remedy is “durable” credentials — soft bindings such as invisible watermarks and perceptual fingerprints that allow a stripped manifest to be recovered from a cloud registry. C2PA's own FAQ describes the approach. It also relocates verification from the file in your hand to a lookup against a database somebody else operates, and makes every verification a queryable event. Google's SynthID, embedded by default across Gemini, Imagen, Lyria and Veo, had marked more than one hundred billion images and videos by Google's own account in May 2026, along with roughly sixty thousand years of audio. Detection has until now run through Google's detector portal and the Gemini app. At the same announcement Google said SynthID detection and C2PA verification were being built into Google Search and into Chrome, so that a reader can right-click an image, or circle it on a phone, and ask whether it was generated with AI. On the same day OpenAI began attaching Google's watermark, alongside a C2PA manifest, to images produced through ChatGPT and its API; ElevenLabs, Kakao and Nvidia announced adoption too.

Verification offered at the point of reading is a real improvement on everything described above. It also changes nothing about the transcode. The credential still does not survive the upload; what the reader consults instead is not the file but a query, and the largest rival model provider has just adopted the same company's mark. The watermark is Google's, the detector is Google's, and the answer to “is this real” is a request to Google.

Brussels Set a Deadline and It Lands on the Compliant

Two weeks ago, on 2 August 2026, Article 50 of the EU AI Act became enforceable. Providers of systems generating synthetic audio, image, video or text must now mark outputs with “effective, reliable, robust and interoperable machine-readable marks”. Deployers of deepfakes must disclose them with a visible or audible label a person can understand without any detection tool — a hidden machine-readable mark does not satisfy the deployer obligation. Systems already on the market have until 2 December 2026 to comply with the marking requirement, and content generated before 2 August 2026 needs no retrospective labelling. Non-compliance carries fines of up to fifteen million euros or three per cent of worldwide annual turnover, whichever is higher.

This survived a serious attempt to slow the whole regime. The Digital Omnibus on AI, Regulation (EU) 2026/1744, entered into force on 27 July 2026 and deferred the high-risk obligations under Annex III to 2 December 2027 and those for product-embedded systems to 2 August 2028. It did not delay Article 50. Spain has gone further, creating a dedicated supervisory agency, AESIA, and legislating penalties of up to thirty-five million euros or seven per cent of global turnover for failure to label.

Now apply the asymmetry. Article 50 binds providers placing systems on the EU market and deployers operating within its jurisdiction — companies with legal departments, European entities and revenue worth three per cent of. It binds OpenAI, Google, Adobe and Meta. It does not bind an open-weight model running on a laptop in a jurisdiction with no equivalent statute, which is where a growing share of genuinely harmful material is produced. The fraudsters who took 893 million dollars from Americans last year were not weighing their exposure to European administrative fines.

The predictable effect is that compliant, well-resourced, largely benign generation becomes marked, while non-compliant, adversarial generation stays unmarked. Over time that inverts the signal. If the honest are labelled and the dishonest are not, then “unmarked” ceases to mean “probably human” and starts to mean “outside the regime” — a category containing both the criminal and the ordinary person with a phone and no accreditation.

Hacker, Edwards and Kasirzadeh anticipated the structural version of this. Their framework identifies four levels of AI-related systemic risk and warns that the AI Act's orientation towards frontier model capabilities leaves population-level harms outside its definitions. Marking obligations regulate the emitter. The pollution they were meant to address is a property of the commons.

Ten Dollars a Title Is What Being Believed Now Costs

The optimistic version of the trust economy holds that a premium will emerge on genuinely human work. It is worth looking at what such a premium looks like once someone actually builds one.

The Authors Guild operates a certification called Human Authored. A book qualifies if its text was written by one or more humans, with an exception for spelling and grammar tools; using AI for research, brainstorming or indexing does not disqualify a title. The programme opened to Guild members in 2025 and, as of March 2026, to any author published in the United States. Certification costs ten dollars per title for non-members and requires identity verification through a third-party service. Both the fee and the identity check are waived for Guild members.

Two features deserve attention. First, the Guild does not vet manuscripts for AI content before certifying them, and says so, on the reasonable grounds that no reliable detection method exists. Enforcement rests on self-certification, a licensing agreement and community reporting. What is certified is not that a human wrote the book. It is that an identified person has made a contractual assertion and is exposed to consequences if it is false. That is accountability, which is genuinely valuable — and a different product from truth.

Second, look at the price structure. Ten dollars and an identity check for outsiders; free and no identity check for members. That is a small, benign, entirely defensible example of exactly the mechanism at issue. Membership confers the presumption of good faith. Non-membership must purchase it, and surrender identifying data to do so.

Scale that logic to every claim anyone makes online and the phrase “authenticity premium” reveals what it describes. A premium is a price. Someone pays it and someone collects it. Yang Xite's suggestion that “people with established reputations, professional track records, and a history of making reliable judgments may become more valuable precisely because they are accountable for what they say” is almost certainly right, and not obviously good news. It describes a market in which credibility accrues to those who already have standing, and everyone else must buy accreditation from an intermediary or be discounted. A premium on being believed is, in distributional terms, a tax on being doubted. It falls hardest on those least able to pay it and with the weakest prior reputation to trade on — which is to say, most people.

Proof of Personhood Turns Out to Be a Subscription Business

The same shape appears in identity infrastructure, at greater scale and with fewer safeguards.

World, the network built by Tools for Humanity and co-founded by Sam Altman, verifies humanness by scanning irises with a device called the Orb, issuing a World ID that lets a person prove uniqueness without revealing identity. By April 2026, nearly eighteen million people had verified at an Orb. During 2026 the company has pivoted towards enterprise, expanding verification points into retail and introducing fees for applications that check a user's humanity, while keeping verification free for the end user. Reported partners include Tinder and Reddit.

Read that business model carefully. Users supply biometrics free of charge; relying parties pay for the right to trust them. The asset being monetised is the population of verified humans, and the revenue accrues to whoever operates the verification layer. This is not a criticism of the cryptography, which is thoughtful. It is an observation about who ends up holding the register of real people, and on what terms.

The public-sector alternative is further along than most people realise and less far along than its deadline requires. Under the revised eIDAS regulation, all twenty-seven EU member states must make a European Digital Identity Wallet available to citizens by 24 December 2026. Denmark's AltID went into production on 3 June 2026, the first member-state wallet to go live, and passed 230,000 downloads within seven weeks, though it is not yet certified; France Identité and Italy's IT-Wallet are live national services on the same track, and Germany has said its state-issued wallet will arrive on 2 January 2027, after the deadline. Across the twenty-seven the rollout is uneven: fewer than half the member states are on track, the Netherlands among others has signalled it will not meet the deadline, and Bulgaria has not begun work on a state wallet at all. A wallet issued by a state is a materially better arrangement than one issued by a venture-funded company, and it is arriving late into a vacuum commercial providers are filling now.

Meanwhile the enforcement apparatus for synthetic commercial speech is thin. The Federal Trade Commission's rule on consumer reviews and testimonials took effect on 21 October 2024, expressly covering AI-generated reviews, with civil penalties per violation running to tens of thousands of dollars. In December 2025 the agency sent warning letters, later posted publicly, and in January 2026 established a dedicated AI enforcement unit. Set that against NewsGuard's 3,749 content farms and the scale problem answers itself. Enforcement is retail; generation is wholesale.

Absence of Proof Is Becoming Proof of Absence

Everything above converges on a single failure mode, and the World Privacy Forum named it before it arrived.

Provenance systems classify. Content carrying a valid signature is marked as such; content without one is rendered “unknown” or “invalid”. In an interface, on a phone, glanced at for a second and a half, those categories collapse into one: not verified, therefore suspect.

Consider who is systematically unverified. A protester filming police conduct on a five-year-old handset with no provenance capability. A whistleblower who must strip metadata to survive. A journalist in an authoritarian state for whom a cryptographic link between a file and a device is a targeting package. A photographer in a country with no conformant certificate authority. The World Privacy Forum found precisely this risk: that the trust model penalises creators lacking C2PA adoption and disadvantages marginalised and at-risk communities — the very groups the technology's designers set out to protect.

There is a second-order effect. When authenticity becomes a live question, real evidence loses force. The liar's dividend — dismissing genuine recordings as fabricated — is available to anyone whose accuser lacks a certificate, and that accuser is usually the one with less money. Provenance infrastructure does not merely fail to help such people. It hands their opponents a rhetorical instrument: where are the credentials?

Nor is the burden evenly distributed geographically. The conformance programme, the certificate authorities, the steering committee and the standards process are concentrated in the United States, western Europe and Japan. The trust list is the operative boundary of the verifiable internet, and it was drawn by eleven organisations, none accountable to an electorate, according to criteria that have not been published.

What Would Actually Redistribute the Burden

None of this argues for abandoning provenance. Content Credentials are useful, and a signed chain of custody from a wire agency's camera to a newspaper's front page beats nothing. The argument is that provenance as currently constituted transfers the cost of doubt onto the people least able to bear it, and that this is a design choice rather than a law of nature.

Four changes would alter the distribution.

Make absence neutral by design. Interfaces should be prohibited from rendering unsigned content as suspect. The presence of a credential is information; its absence is not. This is a user-experience rule with constitutional weight, and the cheapest intervention available.

Open the trust list. If the conformance criteria and the identity of the arbiters remain unpublished, a private consortium is exercising a public function without accountability. Publishing the criteria, the appeals process and the removal grounds costs nothing. An individual pathway to signing — accreditation of persons, not only products and organisations, with the cost borne publicly — is the harder and more necessary step.

Fix revocation before scaling. The Nikon episode was contained because Horshack disclosed it, and could not be fully remediated because validators do not check revocation by default. A provenance ecosystem in which a revoked certificate validates is worse than no ecosystem, because it manufactures unearned confidence. Golaszewski and colleagues have supplied the formal analysis; the specification should be treated as pre-deployment until their findings are addressed.

Regulate the reader, not only the writer. Article 50 obliges emitters to mark. It says nothing about the platforms that strip those marks in transit. A distribution-side duty to preserve and display provenance data, enforceable against very large platforms under the Digital Services Act, would make the marking obligation meaningful. At present the EU compels the creation of evidence and permits its destruction seconds later.

The pug flying the aeroplane was never really about Nikon. It was about the discovery that the certificate and the thing certified had come apart, and that only the certifier could put them back together. That is the position ordinary people are being moved into across every domain where truth must now be demonstrated rather than observed. The ability to fabricate has been handed to everybody. The ability to be believed is being metered, priced and administered by a small number of hardware manufacturers, platforms, model providers and identity vendors, on terms they have not published, with an appeals process that does not exist.

Confidence is indeed becoming the scarce resource. Whether that is a market opportunity or a civil liberties emergency turns not on whether verification gets built, but on whether the people who cannot afford it are treated as unproven or as liars.

References

1. Yang Xite, “Information Pollution and the Rise of the Trust Economy,” Modern Diplomacy, 16 August 2026. https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2026/08/16/information-pollution-and-the-rise-of-the-trust-economy/
2. Yukun Zhang and Tianyang Zhang, “The Economics of Information Pollution in the Age of AI: General Equilibrium, Welfare, and Policy Design,” arXiv:2509.13729, 17 September 2025, revised 4 January 2026. https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13729
3. Philipp Hacker, Lilian Edwards and Atoosa Kasirzadeh, “AI, Digital Platforms, and the New Systemic Risk,” arXiv:2509.17878, 22 September 2025, revised 23 May 2026. https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.17878
4. Jeremy Gray, “Nikon Can't Fully Solve the Z6 III's C2PA Problems Alone,” PetaPixel, 22 September 2025. https://petapixel.com/2025/09/22/nikon-cant-fully-solve-the-z6-iiis-c2pa-problems-alone/
5. Europol Innovation Lab, “Facing reality? Law enforcement and the challenge of deepfakes,” Europol, 2022. https://www.europol.europa.eu/cms/sites/default/files/documents/Europol_Innovation_Lab_Facing_Reality_Law_Enforcement_And_The_Challenge_Of_Deepfakes.pdf
6. Jesse Walker, “That time we tried to make sense of a statistic in a 'New York Times' story on deepfakes,” Reason, 27 January 2023. https://reason.com/2023/01/27/that-time-we-tried-to-make-sense-of-a-statistic-in-a-new-york-times-story-on-deepfakes/
7. Gregory Druck, Jose Luis Paredes, Bevin Benson and Ethan Smith, “More Articles Are Now Created by AI Than Humans,” Graphite, October 2025. https://graphite.io/five-percent/more-articles-are-now-created-by-ai-than-humans
8. NewsGuard, “Tracking AI-enabled Misinformation: 3,749 AI Content Farm sites (and Counting),” NewsGuard AI Tracking Center, 23 June 2026. https://www.newsguardtech.com/special-reports/ai-tracking-center/
9. Mickael Tordjman et al., “The Rise of Deepfake Medical Imaging: Radiologists' Diagnostic Accuracy in Detecting ChatGPT-generated Radiographs,” Radiology, 24 March 2026. https://pubs.rsna.org/doi/10.1148/radiol.252094
10. Federal Bureau of Investigation, “2025 Internet Crime Report,” Internet Crime Complaint Center, 7 April 2026. https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/2025_ic3report.pdf/view
11. Heather Chen and Kathleen Magramo, “Arup revealed as victim of $25 million deepfake scam involving Hong Kong employee,” CNN Business, 16 May 2024. https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/16/tech/arup-deepfake-scam-loss-hong-kong-intl-hnk
12. Satish Lalchand, Val Srinivas, Brendan Maggiore and Joshua Henderson, “Generative AI is expected to magnify the risk of deepfakes and other fraud in banking,” Deloitte Center for Financial Services, 29 May 2024. https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/industry/financial-services/deepfake-banking-fraud-risk-on-the-rise.html
13. Nuria Alina Chandra, Hannah Lee, Ryan Murtfeldt, Lin Qiu, Arnab Karmakar, Emmanuel Tanumihardja, Kevin Farhat, Ben Caffee, Changyeon Lee, Jongwook Choi, Sejin Paik, Aerin Kim and Oren Etzioni, “Deepfake-Eval-2024: A Multi-Modal In-the-Wild Benchmark of Deepfakes Circulated in 2024,” arXiv:2503.02857, 4 March 2025, revised 27 May 2026. https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.02857
14. Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity, “C2PA,” c2pa.org, accessed 16 August 2026. https://c2pa.org/
15. Enis Golaszewski, Neal Krawetz, Alan T. Sherman, Edward Zieglar, Sai K. Matukumalli, Roberto Yus, Carson L. Kegley, Michael Barthel, William Bowman, Bharg Barot and Kaur Kullman, “Verifying Provenance of Digital Media: Why the C2PA Specifications Fall Short,” arXiv:2604.24890, 27 April 2026. https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.24890
16. Kate Kaye and Pam Dixon, “Privacy, Identity and Trust in C2PA: A Technical Review and Analysis of the C2PA Digital Media Provenance Framework,” World Privacy Forum, 3 September 2025. https://worldprivacyforum.org/posts/privacy-identity-and-trust-in-c2pa/
17. SSL.com, “C2PA Certificates for Media Authenticity,” ssl.com, accessed 16 August 2026. https://www.ssl.com/products/content-authenticity/content-credentials/c2pa/
18. Washington Post, “Tests show top social platforms don't disclose markers on AI videos,” 22 October 2025. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/10/22/ai-deepfake-sora-platforms-c2pa/
19. Google DeepMind, “SynthID,” deepmind.google, accessed 16 August 2026. https://deepmind.google/models/synthid/
20. European Commission, “Transparency obligations under Article 50 of the AI Act,” Shaping Europe's Digital Future, 2026. https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/faqs/transparency-obligations-under-article-50-ai-act
21. Gibson Dunn, “EU AI Act Omnibus Agreement — Postponed High-Risk Deadlines and Other Key Changes,” gibsondunn.com, 2026. https://www.gibsondunn.com/eu-ai-act-omnibus-agreement-postponed-high-risk-deadlines-and-other-key-changes/
22. The Authors Guild, “Human Authored Certification,” authorsguild.org, accessed 16 August 2026. https://authorsguild.org/human-authored/
23. Biometric Update, “World shifts from crypto identity experiment to enterprise proof-of-humanity,” biometricupdate.com, June 2026. https://www.biometricupdate.com/202606/world-shifts-from-crypto-identity-experiment-to-enterprise-proof-of-humanity
24. European Commission, “European Digital Identity Wallet,” ec.europa.eu, accessed 16 August 2026. https://ec.europa.eu/digital-building-blocks/sites/display/EUDIGITALIDENTITYWALLET/EU+Digital+Identity+Wallet+Home
25. DLA Piper, “FTC's 2026 enforcement approach to fake reviews takes shape: Takeaways for companies,” dlapiper.com, July 2026. https://www.dlapiper.com/en-us/insights/publications/2026/07/ftcs-2026-enforcement-approach-to-fake-reviews-takes-shape-takeaways-for-companies

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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

Freundinnen & Freunde der Weisheit! Kennst ihr das? Der Alltag fühlt sich eintönig an, und ihr fragt euch, ob ihr etwas ändern solltet? Oft wird uns vermittelt, dass Routine langweilig ist und das Leben aufregender sein sollte. Doch aktuelle Forschungen zeigen, dass gerade alltägliche Gewohnheiten unser Wohlbefinden fördern und sogar die Kreativität steigern können.

Der Anthropologe Thomas S. Weisner beschreibt eine Verbindung zwischen Chaos und Wohlbefinden: In einem strukturierten Alltag fällt es uns leichter, aktiv am Leben teilzunehmen und eine sinnvolle Routine aufzubauen. Zudem kann Langeweile den Geist freisetzen. Psychologe John Eastwood betont, dass in Momenten der Monotonie Raum für kreative Gedanken entsteht – sei es beim Joggen, Autofahren oder bei alltäglichen Aufgaben wie dem Vorbereiten von Mahlzeiten.

Wenn der Alltag also zu gewöhnlich erscheint, lohnt es sich, ihn neu zu betrachten. Strukturen und Wiederholungen geben Sicherheit, stärken Beziehungen und bieten die Gelegenheit, neue Ideen zu entwickeln. Wie S. Mann und R. Cadman in ihrer Studie zeigen, kann gerade aus der Langeweile heraus kreative Inspiration entstehen. Vielleicht liegt in der Routine mehr Potenzial, als wir denken.

Denkanstoss zum Wochenbeginn

„Kunst wäscht den Staub des Alltags von der Seele.“ – Pablo Picasso (1881–1973)

ProductivityPorn-Tipp der Woche: Schreibtisch aufräumen

Ein ordentlicher Arbeitsplatz reduziert Ablenkungen und macht es leichter, sich auf die Arbeit zu konzentrieren. Halte ihn sauber und übersichtlich.

Aus dem Archiv: Ziele setzen – aber richtig

Ziele begegnen uns überall: im Sport, in der Schule, im Beruf. Wir setzen sie uns selbst oder bekommen sie von anderen vorgegeben. Doch obwohl Zielsetzung als Erfolgsrezept gilt, wirken nicht alle Ziele gleich. Manche motivieren, andere frustrieren. Manche fördern Leistung, andere behindern sie sogar. Normalerweise bin ich zurückhaltend, wenn Befunde aus anderen Disziplinen auf Bildung oder Beruf übertragen werden. Die Kontexte unterscheiden sich zu stark: in Struktur, Zielrichtung und Dynamik. Doch die sportpsychologischen Erkenntnisse aus dem systematischen Review von Williamson et al. (2024) lassen sich schwer ignorieren. Zu deutlich zeigen sie, wie unterschiedlich Ziele wirken können und werfen wichtige Fragen für andere Lebensbereiche auf.

weiterlesen …

Vielen Dank, dass Du Dir die Zeit genommen hast, diesen Newsletter zu lesen. Ich hoffe, die Inhalte konnten Dich inspirieren und Dir wertvolle Impulse für Dein (digitales) Leben geben. Bleib neugierig und hinterfrage, was Dir begegnet!

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EpicMind – Weisheiten für das digitale Leben „EpicMind“ (kurz für „Epicurean Mindset“) ist mein Blog und Newsletter, der sich den Themen Lernen, Produktivität, Selbstmanagement und Technologie widmet – alles gewürzt mit einer Prise Philosophie.

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Disclaimer Teile dieses Texts wurden mit Deepl Write (Korrektorat und Lektorat) überarbeitet. Für die Recherche in den erwähnten Werken/Quellen und in meinen Notizen wurde NotebookLM von Google verwendet. Das Artikel-Bild wurde mit ChatGPT erstellt und anschliessend nachbearbeitet.

Topic #Newsletter

4. Lait de chèvre et cochon noir

Le climat du Viêt Nam change selon la latitude. À Hanoi en Octobre, c’est le début de la saison sèche, à mesure qu’on descend on tombe en saison des pluies (Hué) pour retrouver à Saigon, terminus, la saison sèche. On a donc pu apprécier les routes sous tous les climats, tous les aléas, toutes les variantes de chaleur, sèche ou poisseuse. Le bébé se porte comme un charme, il est le seul. Malheureusement, il ne me reste aucune impression, aucune image, de l’aventure.

Première image, premier souvenir : un ciel jaune éblouissant. Puis c’est le bruit terrible de la pluie, tambour incessant sur les toits, sous un ciel de pierre impénétrable. On était en 1951. Hanoï était tombé en février, le clan maternel abandonnant ses espoirs aux communistes de l’oncle Ho, il fallait s’organiser. L’argent heureusement arrivait de France, expédié régulièrement pas un grand-père resté en arrière, que je ne découvrirai que 4 ans plus tard. J’eus 1 an.

Ma mère, qui n’avait pas la vocation, avait délégué la charge de ce bébé si sage à une très jeune fille, s’appelait-elle Maï, s’appelait-elle Tô ? j’ai perdu son prénom, même si son visage apparaît encore parfois dans mes rêves confus d’un paradis perdu. J’ignore absolument ce que, dans la tourmente des 20 ans qui suivirent, elle est devenue. J’en éprouve un grand regret. C’est elle qui découvrit mon allergie au lactose et qui prit soin de la chèvre chargée de me nourrir. Je dormais dans un panier suspendu au toit afin d’être protégé des animaux. Première terreur: un cochon noir qui hanta longtemps mes cauchemars. Souvenirs très net : mon père accroupi à quelques mètres me tend les bras. Derrière moi quelqu’un, je ne sais qui, j’avance maladroitement en m’appuyant de temps en temps sur un meuble bas, à ma droite. Les racines d’un arbre immense entre lesquelles je me love comme entre des bras protecteurs. Une grande maison blanche, sans étage.

#nguolai

Dust and Breath

“Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” That’s what Priests and Pastors say when they put ash on your forehead. Actual ash, from last year’s Palms.

We are the same material that gathers on bookshelves and under beds. We’re also the same material as cosmic dust, planets, and comets. All of us subject to entropy. It’s the nature of being made of dust.

Psalm 39 feels appropriate today:

Show me, Lord, my life’s end

and the number of my days;

let me know how fleeting my life is.

You have made my days a mere handbreadth;

the span of my years is as nothing before you.

Everyone is but a breath…

Surely everyone goes around like a mere phantom.

In vain they rush about, heaping up wealth,

without knowing whose it will finally be.

But now, Lord, what do I look for?

My hope is in you.

A handbreadth. Four fingers. That’s the measure. All the rushing, accumulating, careful positioning, proving, and securing. Just the breathy dust of a phantom. (I am taking liberty. It’s too heavy otherwise.)

But notice this psalmist doesn’t ask for more time or victory. Doesn’t say, “Vanquish my foes. Save me, God, crush my enemies. Give me until next Tuesday.” They ask for clarity — Show me. Not fix it or guarantee me. Just show me. I want to know.

Honestly, Ash Wednesday clears the fog. “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

You’re not permanent. You were never meant to be. This is a relief.

If I’m just dust, then I don’t have to carry eternity on my back. If I’m just breath, then I can stop pretending I control the wind.

Psalm 39 pivots right where you think, “Am I reading the Bible or a Beatnik poem?”

“But now, Lord, what do I look for? My hope is in you.”

That’s the turn. If everything I can build is temporary, then hope can’t be built there. Nothing can. Wealth, security, reputation — it’s all just very organized dust. All this political nonsense and cruelty? Very noisy mean dust.

Hope is something else. Something never dependent on us. God help us if it were. (We are messy dust.)

See, Lent is about scale. I am dust. I am breath. My days are a handbreadth. But none of it contains my hope.

Or, more succinctly said:

Stop trying to scale infinity using IKEA instructions.

You are dust. Act accordingly.

And hope anyway.

No Shortcut

Thirteen years ago, I wrote:

1. Most of what goes wrong in your life is going to be your own fault. Don’t beat yourself up about it. You do the best you can with what you have at the time.

2. It’s like your life is a video game—it’s only after you clear a level that you realize there was a shortcut there the whole time. Don’t fret. Just remember it next time.

3. From time to time something really awful will happen that won’t be your fault, but through the intricate absurdity of the universe, know that this will be the thing for which you blame yourself. Try not to.

I wrote that in my thirties, as the starting words for a character named Mickey Madison, whom I still love, and who needs to find a place in the world. I wrote it with bold confidence because I’d just survived a dark night of the soul, was in between arcs in my life, and for once, the wilderness didn’t seem too bad. I owned nothing but my car, a Kindle, MacBook, and spent six months recuperating in a small room in my parent’s house with only my two dogs for company. It was when I accepted a job in New Jersey.

Later in the story, Mickey Madison said, “It’s a good thing you don’t know what’s going to happen because none of us would live at all.”

Mickey was a mess, but she was wise. Me? Well, the jury is still out.

At the time, I thought this list was about responsibility, maturity, and emotional hygiene. I thought it was a gentle corrective to self-pity, a reminder to stop catastrophizing, a way to keep moving forward without turning every mistake into a moral failure.

If I made the mess, I can fix it was my mantra.

What followed—then and since—has been the ongoing realization that I often know things intellectually long before my nervous system catches up. Since my nervous system has more impact on my day to day reality than my brain, this hasn’t always gone real well.

It’s as if there’s a highly rational upper floor in my brain calmly saying, This is what’s happening. Pay attention. It’s usually right. But down below—on the other floors—there’s a party, a panic attack, a doctor’s appointment, a work meeting, a Beth Hart song, and an inordinate amount of worry about a potentially infected hangnail. When is there time to pay attention?

So it’s strange, years later, to look back and realize how much insight I already had—and how thoroughly I ignored it. Not out of denial or stubbornness, but because knowing something and being able to live it are very different skills.

That third point? That one aged like a prophecy.

The worst things that happened later—the ones that cracked my life open, reordered my priorities, rearranged my faith, my body, my relationships—those were not things I caused. But they are the things I still interrogate myself over most relentlessly. What did I miss? What should I have seen sooner? Where did I fail to prevent the inevitable?

Turns out, my brain would rather indict me than accept the chaos. Self-blame feels like control. If it was my fault, then maybe I can stop it from happening again. Maybe suffering has rules. Maybe there’s a cheat code after all.

Spoiler: sometimes there isn’t. Sometimes there is no shortcut. Sometimes the level just hurts. Sometimes the lesson is not insight but endurance.

Why would we ever try to assume that suffering is deserved, proportional, or educational? That idea belongs to Job’s friends—and God explicitly tells them they’re wrong. They’d just spent days telling him those boils had to be his fault. Did he use a new detergent? Not wash his bed mat well enough? Job, in this moment, appreciated the back-up when God clapped back on it with thunder. Jesus did not take the shortcut. Could have called down legions of Angels, right? Didn’t. Remained. Died on the cross.

Because you see, the thing I’m finally learning is that the shortcut was never the point. RA welcomed me to incarnational spirituality at ground level. Mickey didn’t know it yet, because I didn’t, that the goal wasn’t understanding and philosophizing, but staying. Staying in the body. Staying in grief. Staying in love.

So this is me, almost fifteen years later, ground mostly under me. Not because I’ve mastered anything, but because I am still here. Still blaming myself sometimes. Still trying not to.

There may be no shortcut. But there is fidelity.

“Those who endure to the end will be saved.” — Matthew 24:13

In Memory of Junie B. Jensen

Originally written in June 2017, I can’t stand to not have this posted somewhere in her memory.

Junie B. Jensen

July 21, 2007 (Gotcha day ¾ years old)– June 29, 2017

AKA: My littlest. Bo-bittlest. The littlest, bo-bittlest of the bo-bittlest clan. Widdle Waddle. Bug. Buggest. Beagle butt

I got you almost 10 years ago from people who couldn’t see past your anxiety to understand your value. But I did. I saw the soul in your eyes. I knew you belonged with me. You ran out of their house and saw me and peed on their porch mat. I laughed and you jumped into my arms. You never looked back. I took you home and woke up the next day to find you’d destroyed every pair of shoes in my closet and a couch cushion.

It’s no surprise that as I mellowed these past five or six years so did you. Before that we both left a trail of destruction in our wake. We taught each other commitment, patience, and unconditional acceptance. Together we learned to be still. To be. We made our way through the darkness together and then we rested and just enjoyed each other’s company.

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How I enjoyed it! When you were younger we’d walk for hours and I’d laugh at your insolent refusal to be decent on a leash. You hated being constrained, stuck, or held back. (We are twin souls.) I laughed chasing you when you'd talk me into taking off your leash. You always had to test the limits. You were just so naughty and defiant. You knew what you wanted to do and didn't care what I thought you should do. (We are soulmates.)

You accepted every dog you met. You never resented all the dogs in and out of our house. You welcomed them, excited, and then taught them all how to Dog.

A wise woman told me earlier this week you were holding emotional space for me. You felt like you could move on now – I’m okay. You’re not going to be part of my next chapter here. You’ve got some other work to do somewhere else.

Your little body struggled so much these past few years. Finally, the pain was too much and at 14 years old, you told me today it was time for your story here to end. What a story it was!

I still remember the day I came home from work to find you sitting in the middle of the kitchen counter. You’d pulled the kitchen chair to the counter and climbed up. You opened every door in the kitchen. Had you not still been up there I might have thought a poltergeist had visited. You scattered plastic containers. Cereal boxes and spices lay on the ground. You looked so perplexed sitting there. I was so angry but then I saw the look in your eyes. Your anxiety was so uncontrollable you couldn’t understand what you’d done. I realized you were not so different from me and I picked you up and held you on my lap. You shook and whimpered. I cried too. We were both so self-destructive. Somehow, our own way, we managed to pull it together.

You were all DOG. I remember the time I tried to stop you from eating that gecko you caught and swallowed alive when I tried to take it from your mouth. Then you climbed on my lap with your sad, Bette Davis eyes as it wiggled in your tummy. I told you I wouldn’t feel sorry for you but you still insisted on stretching out across my lap, on your back, and I rubbed your tummy for you.

Thank you for all the mice, snakes, birds, and geckos you brought me as gifts. I love you too, even though you were not a vegan.

I’m sorry for the times I yelled at you for eating my books. I’d let you eat all my books if I you didn’t need to go now. It’s so silly the things we get worked up about. Anger is so silly.

Junie, I don’t know what this planet is because it can be awful. Being born and growing old and hurting along the way is stupid. There must be a better way to exist and I know that is where you’ve gone. I'm upset you must go without me because I know that scares you. I know you feel better when we are together. I do too.

I guess it’s time for us let go of our separation anxiety and surrender to this transition. I’ll always carry you in my heart. I know I’ll be in yours.

I will miss sharing my watermelon with you. Your snores. Your beagle bay – which shakes the windows and rattles the pictures. I will miss the tiny cries you offer when you see me after you’ve not seen me in a while. I’ll miss my driving co-pilot, best friend, and teacher.

I will miss your beautiful presence. Your energy filled up my life for 10 years and I am so lucky I got you.

Today you were in so much pain. You knew what was happening in the end and you peacefully settled. You kissed me and then rest your head in my hand. Then, just as we thought you were going, you lunged to me and kissed me and I felt your last breath on my face. Everyone gasped because they knew what you’d done. You told me it was okay, thanked me, and made sure the very last thing you did while you could was love me. It was like you said, “Oh, wait… not yet! Hold on! One more time…” Your heart wouldn’t stop beating until I whispered it was okay to let go.

I'm sure you've already found Scully & Penelope. Keep them safe until we are all together again. Play. Run. Kiss. Snuggle.

Until I’m ready to join you, Junie B. Jensen, I will never go a day without thinking of you.

Jen

Your Human

“And she'll tease you, she'll unease you

All the better just to please you

She's precocious, and she knows just

What it takes to make a pro blush

She got Greta Garbo's standoff sighs, she's got Bette Davis eyes” ~ Bette Davis Eyes

Kale Farts & Ikea

*I originally wrote this as a guest author post for a “Share your most embarrassing moment” series. I won.

Date: 2/2014

Location: New Jersey

You asked for my most embarrassing story, and you’re getting it. This is a cautionary tale about good intentions gone wrong with kale, a blender, and a trip to Ikea in Elizabeth, New Jersey.

I was living in New Jersey with my twenty-one-year-old nephew. He decided to get fit and took my credit card to buy a Ninja blender for the apartment. He started making smoothies every morning before he bounded off to the gym.

He then drank this smoothie every day for a week or two. I encouraged it. I was busy with work, not really paying attention to what he was doing. We’d also just begun to recover from an apartment flood. A fire sprinkler pipe had burst during an arctic blast and all our furniture floated away. I needed to wait for the insurance check so I could replace our furniture and toss out our air mattresses. It came on a Wednesday night, and I told Mick we’d need to make a trip to Ikea Friday night.

Hearing that he’d soon have a bed again made him generous. “Let me start making you a smoothie. You know, to help you. It’s been stressful.” So, I agreed. I mean, what could it hurt? I asked what was in the smoothie. He told me apple, banana, carrots, kale, spinach, ice, and water.

Looking back, I should have asked portions of each.

I was all in. I heard him blending my smoothie that morning before he left for class. He proudly told me it was waiting for me in the fridge.

It was amazing, and after, I was so full. But by late morning, air started leaking out of my butt against my will. I walked around all day, a tiny cloud of putrid air-puss floating behind me. People looked at me from the corners of their eyes. I could see their disdain and judgement. I heard someone whisper, “Is that her?”

It hurt so much to hold it in, but I was afraid of what would happen if I let it go. At lunch, I got in my car and felt the sweet relief of release. I had to roll down all the windows.

I texted Mick.

Jen: What did you put in my smoothie? Tell me exactly. I can’t stop farting!

Mick: Two Apples, banana, cup of carrots, three cups of Kale, two cups of spinach, some weird algae superfood I saw on a Netflix documentary, ½ cup of blueberries and strawberries, maybe a peach, protein powder, coconut milk, and ice.

Jen: You are trying to kill me! Do you know how tender my intestines are? I have Celiacs! That’s three days of servings in one smoothie!

Mick: Dude, it’s the kale. It’s good for you.

I held it together as much as I could at work, but driving home, my car filled with gases so noxious they wouldn’t be welcome on Venus.

I texted Mick: Oh my f-ing Gawd!! My guts are on fire! What did you do to me?

I got home and sounded like a marching band as I walked the dogs. Each step expelled more of the gas festering inside of me. The smell was pure evil mixed with a dark descent into the abyss. My guts felt like I was listening to alt-right talk radio.

When Mick got back home, around eleven, he said, “Oh my god, dude. I had to hold this fart for the whole class. I thought I was going to die! I’m not kidding. It’s still coming.” It was too. As he stood talking to me, air leaked out of his butt. It sounded like air seeping from a balloon when you pull it tight after blowing it up. (Do you know what I’m talking about? I used to do it all the time as a kid. I’d inflate the balloon, and then grab both sides of the air entry way, and let it hiss. Sometimes, I’d let it go so it flew around the room.)

I laughed hysterically, my eyes watering from the laughter and the smell. “I got to my truck and let it out and it was so sick. It wouldn’t stop. It went on and on.” He made the sound for me.

I heard it coming out of his mouth and his butt the same time.

“Oh my god, go away,” I said, throwing a pillow at him. “Slow down on the smoothies. It’s too much.”

He disagreed. “Dude, it’s the kale.” He said this as the noxious gas leaked slowly from his butt, steady in its release. I don’t think he even realized it was still happening. It was totally involuntary.

The next day at work, I had a bit more control, but not much. I hadn’t eaten at all because I was so afraid of adding to the chaos inside my body. I told Mick to meet me at the office with his truck so we could go to Ikea. It had snowed heavily the night before and everything was buried under at least ten inches of snow. I was cold, tired, miserable, homesick, and the smoothie was rotting inside me.

He showed up, oddly on time, still farting. I could hear it as I stood by the truck window while we discussed our plans. He followed me to Ikea. I hate shopping. I really hate shopping at Ikea. But I dig the furniture, so did what I must.

We walked through the sliding glass doors, and I began farting again. It was a combination of stress, anxiety, and the prospect of navigating miles of Ikea. Their floorplan traps you. You can only move forward. Turning around is impossible. The yellow arrows on the floor demand you only walk deeper into the cavern of prefabricated modernity. It comes with the promise of well styled, cheap home decor, but that comes with a price. Maybe you leave a piece of your soul at the mid-point to help fund such a monstrosity.

By the time we finished, I felt like I’d just completed Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s journey. I was changed and had met many helpers along the way. A married couple with three kids were our companions on our long trek. I really wonder what happened to them. I’d overcome anxiety, over-stimulation, and overwhelming options and selected furniture.

We checked out, pushing two large and loaded carts.

I told Mick to run and get my car and then his truck. I’d wait with the stuff. I really wanted to just stand outside and enjoy the fresh air. In a few dark moments, deep in the heart of Ikea, I was worried I’d never see the light of day again.

Mick brought my car around first and I loaded it while he went to grab his truck. I saw him zoom around the corner and throw it into reverse, backing right up the loading dock where I waited. He is such a show-off. He jumped out, opened the tailgate, and the back of his truck was full of snow.

When I saw it, I farted so loud someone three cars away said, “Oh my god, what was that?”

Mick said, “Anything in your pants?”

“It’s all your fault. And I told you to scoop the snow out of the back of your truck this morning!”

“You did not,” he said.

“Well, I thought it. Anyway, you knew we were coming here? It didn’t occur to you to push it out?” I farted again. It felt like a baby dinosaur was hatching inside me. Or an alien. Something was breaking free, stretching out its arms and legs after long confinement. I feared what was happening inside me at this point.

“Dude, it’s the kale,” Mick said, pointing at me.

“It’s all the fiber you put in that smoothie. Who the hell does that?”

He shrugged. “You drank it dude.”

“Just clean out the snow,” I said. I had to walk away from the smell where I was standing. I was dying inside.

I leaned against the glass window by the door and watched him push the snow out with the brush I’d bought him to use to clean off the truck windows. He piled it right behind the truck, in two piles on either side of the tailgate and a small one in the middle. I pointed.

“So now we have to lift everything up and over the snow,” I said.

“It’s fine,” he said. “I’ll do it.” He lifted a long piece of furniture up and couldn't get it to clear the pile of snow. He tried a different angle and still couldn’t get it in the truck.

“Want help?” I walked forward.

“Will you fart while doing it?”

I ignored him and lifted the other side. We slid it into the back of the truck but as I stepped forward to help him push it all the way in, my foot slipped off the loading dock and I slid from where I stood down the incline of snow in the middle of the tailgate. I looked like a tobogganer. Had I been in the Olympics, I would have won at least a Bronze medal. I careened under the tailgate and slid until I was under the truck.

I farted the whole time. I think it might have propelled me forward some.

When I finally came to a stop, I heard Mick laughing. I closed my eyes and just held still for a few minutes. When I opened them, Mick was hanging over the side of the truck. His face was upside down and he laughed so hard there were tears.

“You okay?” He didn’t really care if I was okay. “Did you poop your pants because it sounded like it.”

I twisted and stuck my legs out from under the truck, near him. “Please pull me out.” I heard him jump over the side of the truck. He grabbed me by an ankle and drug me out like that. A crowd of bystanders had gathered on both sides of the truck. Someone went to get the Ikea store manager, who rushed toward me, holding a walkie-talkie. I heard him say, “I’m on scene.”

I waved everyone away. Mostly, I didn’t want anyone that close if I had to fart again. I reassured the manager I was fine. They helped Mick load the rest of the furniture. I got in my car and drove away.

I never went back.

It took a week to recover from the smoothie.

The Collapse of Computational Density of American Popular Music

The proposition that American popular music has become simpler over time is usually treated either as self-evident cultural decline or as the complaint of an aging listener who has mistaken familiarity with the music of his youth for evidence of its superiority. Both responses are intellectually unsatisfying. “Complexity” is too imprecise a term to support the first claim, while the second too conveniently dismisses a hypothesis that can, at least in substantial part, be measured. A more rigorous question is available. Rather than asking whether contemporary popular music is worse, less artistic, or less technically accomplished than the music that preceded it, we can ask how much nonredundant compositional information a popular song communicates to its listener per unit of time. Call this quantity computational density. On this narrower and more defensible criterion, the evidence points in an uncomfortable direction: over the past several decades, commercially successful American popular music has increasingly economized on information. Its lyrics repeat more readily, its melodic structures have become more predictable, its pitch transitions occupy a narrower possibility space, and its commercial ecosystem increasingly rewards songs whose essential architecture can be apprehended quickly and represented compactly. Popular music has not merely changed. In several measurable dimensions, it has become easier to compress.

This claim requires no aesthetic judgment. Computational density is not beauty, profundity, musicianship, or artistic merit; it is the rate at which a composition requires its listener to incorporate information that cannot simply be inferred from information already received. Music can therefore be considered as a hierarchy of probabilistic sequences: pitches follow pitches, chords follow chords, words follow words, rhythmic events follow rhythmic events, sections follow sections, and motifs either recur or mutate. Information theory gives us a useful way of thinking about these relationships. An event that is highly predictable from what preceded it contains relatively little new information, whereas an unexpected event contains more. Consequently, a composition in which the next chord, lyric, melodic contour, and structural section are highly predictable has a lower informational rate than one in which the listener must continually revise an internal model of what the composition is doing.

This immediately exposes the inadequacy of counting musical events as a proxy for complexity. Sixteen notes are not necessarily more informative than eight; five hundred words are not necessarily more informative than three hundred. A sequence consisting of the letter A repeated sixteen times contains the same number of characters as a sequence of sixteen unrelated letters, but almost any lossless compression algorithm will represent the repeated sequence more economically. Once the rule has been inferred, subsequent instances of A contribute progressively less new information. Music operates according to the same basic logic. A chorus that repeats the same phrase sixteen times may be busy, loud, rhythmically forceful, and commercially irresistible, but none of those properties alters the fact that it contains comparatively little novel linguistic information.

This is not merely a theoretical analogy. Madeline Varnum and colleagues analyzed 14,661 songs appearing on the Billboard Hot 100 between 1958 and 2016 and used lossless compression to quantify lyrical repetitiveness. Compression provides an unusually elegant measure because it avoids much of the subjectivity inherent in deciding whether one lyric is “sophisticated” and another is “simple.” A compression algorithm does not care about prestige, genre, reputation, or nostalgia; it merely asks how much of a sequence can be reconstructed from material encountered previously. Varnum and her colleagues found that popular-song lyrics became increasingly compressible across the period studied, which is another way of saying that they became increasingly repetitive (Varnum et al., 2021, “Why Are Song Lyrics Becoming Simpler?”, PLOS ONE).

The result deserves to be stated more forcefully than it usually is. A substantial component of American popular music has undergone measurable informational impoverishment at the lyrical level. This does not mean that every contemporary songwriter is a worse lyricist than every songwriter of 1960, an absurd standard that no population-level argument requires. It means that when thousands of commercially successful songs are treated as data rather than anecdotes, later lyrics contain more exploitable redundancy. A computer can describe them more economically because the songs themselves reuse more of their linguistic material.

Repetition at the level of individual words makes the phenomenon especially conspicuous. A chorus consisting of “tonight, tonight, tonight, tonight” produces four vocal events but does not convey four independent units of information. Once the listener recognizes the pattern, the probability of another “tonight” rises dramatically, and each subsequent repetition contributes less novelty than the first. A song can therefore maintain a high syllabic rate while transmitting relatively little new linguistic material. The mouth remains busy while the informational channel idles.

The same historical tendency appears in melody. Madeline Hamilton and Marcus Pearce examined melodies from American chart music spanning 1950 to 2023 and identified a long-run decline in melodic complexity, including particularly substantial changes around 1975 and 2000 (Hamilton and Pearce, 2024, “Trajectories and Revolutions in Popular Melody Based on U.S. Charts from 1950 to 2023,” Scientific Reports). Their most revealing finding is not simply that melody became less complex, but that this occurred even while note density increased during portions of the historical record. Contemporary melody can therefore do more while communicating less.

That distinction demolishes one of the easiest defenses of modern popular composition: the observation that contemporary recordings are extraordinarily busy. Busyness is not complexity. A computer performing the same operation ten billion times is not necessarily executing a more complex program than one performing a thousand heterogeneous operations connected by elaborate dependencies. Likewise, a rapid succession of predictable notes does not become informationally rich merely by accelerating. If each event is strongly constrained by the preceding sequence, event density can rise while information per event falls. A song can become faster, louder, thicker, and more densely populated while its underlying grammar becomes easier to predict.

Large-scale empirical work on pitch and timbre reinforces the point. Joan Serrà and colleagues analyzed roughly 464,000 recordings from 1955 through 2010 and found increasing restriction in pitch transitions as well as increasing homogenization of timbral palettes and the familiar historical rise in loudness (Serrà et al., 2012, “Measuring the Evolution of Contemporary Western Popular Music,” Scientific Reports). The restriction of pitch transitions is particularly significant because complexity does not reside merely in the number of musical states available but in the network of possible transitions among them. A vocabulary of twelve pitches can generate radically different informational environments depending upon how freely one pitch can lead to another. When transitions become more stereotyped, the listener’s predictive task becomes easier.

Harmony illustrates the principle even more intuitively. Imagine a song organized around the same four-chord progression repeated throughout most of its duration. The first traversal provides substantial information because it identifies the harmonic environment and establishes a sequence. The twentieth traversal provides very little new information. The physical production of another four chords should not be confused with the informational production of another four-chord progression. Once the listener has inferred the loop, enormous stretches of the composition can be represented by a very short instruction: repeat the previous four measures.

Contrast this with a composition that modulates among tonal centers, substitutes harmonies, alters cadential expectations, transforms its progression between sections, or deliberately establishes and violates harmonic predictions. Even if the two songs contain precisely the same number of chord changes per minute, their informational demands differ substantially. The second requires a larger model to describe its behavior. The first substitutes iteration for development.

The same distinction operates at the level of musical form. A verse-chorus-verse-chorus arrangement deliberately recycles large informational blocks. A composition containing introductions, contrasting themes, bridges, developmental passages, solos, modulations, altered reprises, codas, metric changes, and thematic transformations continually forces the listener’s internal model to accommodate new states. Again, none of this establishes aesthetic superiority. Repetition can be extraordinarily effective, and entire musical traditions have exploited it deliberately. But aesthetic relativism cannot erase a mathematical distinction. Repeating information is not equivalent to generating new information simply because both consume time.

Research on instrumentation suggests that the commercial environment may actively reward this economization. Gamaliel Percino, Peter Klimek, and Stefan Thurner constructed quantitative measures of instrumentational complexity across musical genres and found that commercially successful styles tended toward relatively low instrumentational complexity; changes in complexity were negatively associated with sales (Percino, Klimek, and Thurner, 2014, “Instrumentational Complexity of Music Genres and Why Simplicity Sells,” PLOS ONE). This does not prove that simplicity mechanically causes commercial success. It does, however, make it increasingly difficult to maintain the comforting fiction that the popular-music marketplace is neutral with respect to complexity. It is not. Commercial selection pressures can favor musical forms that are rapidly intelligible, easily remembered, and cheaply encoded by the listener.

In principle, these different properties could be combined into a single measure of compositional computational density. Such an index would incorporate the information rates of lyrics, melody, harmony, rhythm, and large-scale form, while accounting for the fact that these streams interact with one another. Melody and harmony, for example, cannot simply be treated as independent quantities because knowledge of the harmonic progression often makes the melodic continuation easier to predict. A sufficiently sophisticated model would therefore ask how compactly the entire composition could be represented or reconstructed without losing its meaningful structure. The shorter the description required to reproduce the song, relative to its duration, the lower its computational density.

No existing dataset allows such a measure to be calculated across seventy years of American popular music with anything approaching the precision of a physical measurement. That limitation should prevent false precision, not intellectual paralysis. We do not need a universal “complexity meter” before drawing conclusions from convergent measurements of constituent dimensions. Lyrics have become more compressible. Melodic complexity has declined. Pitch transitions have become more constrained. Commercially successful styles have exhibited relatively low instrumentational complexity. These findings were produced by different researchers using different datasets and methodologies. Their convergence makes the hypothesis of declining compositional information density considerably more plausible than the reflexive insistence that every perception of musical simplification must be nostalgia wearing a lab coat.

The strongest objection comes from production. Contemporary recorded music is, technologically speaking, capable of astonishing complexity. A producer can manipulate hundreds of parameters unavailable to musicians even a few generations ago: frequency spectra, dynamic compression, stereo position, reverberation, delay, distortion, synthesized timbres, samples, microtiming, pitch correction, automation, and innumerable other properties of recorded sound. A contemporary dance track containing two chords and a six-word chorus may involve more studio manipulation than an entire album recorded in 1965.

But this objection does not refute the argument. It changes the subject.

A sophisticated recording of a simple composition remains a sophisticated recording of a simple composition. Conflating production complexity with compositional complexity is analogous to claiming that a sentence has become linguistically more sophisticated because it is printed using a more advanced printing press. The production system may be extraordinarily complex while the symbolic structure it realizes remains elementary. A harmonically static loop does not acquire additional harmonic information because its synthesizer has forty automated parameters.

Indeed, production technology may help explain how compositional density could decline without making recordings perceptually barren. Complexity has not simply disappeared; some of it has migrated from symbolic composition into acoustic engineering. A producer can maintain listener interest while melody, harmony, and lyrics remain nearly stationary by changing timbre, spectral balance, spatial position, dynamics, percussion, vocal processing, and texture. The sonic surface evolves while the underlying symbolic structure repeats.

Auto-Tune provides a useful example. Pitch correction does not intrinsically simplify music and can obviously be applied to melodies of arbitrary complexity. Used aggressively, it can itself function as an expressive timbral device. Yet the broader technological environment of which it is part reduces the burden placed upon composition to generate novelty. A repeated phrase can be doubled, filtered, pitch-shifted, spatialized, chopped, reverberated, distorted, compressed, and reintroduced after a drop. The listener encounters continual acoustic variation without requiring continual compositional variation. Production can manufacture perceptual novelty from symbolic redundancy.

This distinction explains why contemporary popular music can feel simultaneously hyperstimulating and simple. There is no contradiction. A recording can bombard the auditory system with transient events, bass energy, dynamic manipulation, changing textures, and engineered timbres while requiring the listener to maintain an exceedingly compact model of its melody, harmony, lyrics, and form. Sensory density can increase while computational density decreases.

The economic environment provides powerful reasons for precisely this configuration to emerge. The modern popular song competes not against the handful of records sitting beside a listener’s turntable but against effectively the entire recorded history of music, available instantly through a device whose interface makes abandonment effortless. Under such conditions, comprehension must occur quickly. A hook learned after one exposure is commercially advantageous. A familiar harmonic loop imposes little cognitive startup cost. Repeated lyrics become memorable before the song ends. A stable pulse facilitates immediate entrainment. Structural predictability assures the listener that the pleasurable event encountered thirty seconds ago will return.

The selection pressure is obvious. In an attention economy, music that demands less attention possesses an evolutionary advantage.

This should not be confused with the insulting proposition that contemporary listeners are unintelligent. Markets optimize products for environments, not for the maximum capacities of their consumers. A brilliant person still prefers a webpage that loads in one second to one that loads in thirty. Likewise, a listener capable of appreciating a harmonically demanding composition may nevertheless choose a song whose reward arrives immediately while driving, exercising, socializing, working, or scrolling through an algorithmically generated feed. The modern musical marketplace increasingly selects not for the maximum amount of information a listener can process, but for the minimum amount of cognitive investment required before the listener receives a reward.

This dynamic creates a feedback loop. Easily processed songs attract attention quickly; attention determines streams; streams influence recommendation systems, playlists, label investment, imitation, and subsequent production; successful conventions become increasingly familiar; familiarity further reduces processing costs. What begins as accessibility can therefore become selection for redundancy. The commercial system does not need an executive committee to decree that popular music shall become simpler. Evolutionary processes require no planner. Differential reproduction is enough.

Human predictive cognition makes the resulting music pleasurable rather than merely tolerable. The brain is not a passive recorder of auditory events but a prediction engine continually constructing probabilistic models of what comes next. Music derives much of its force from the interaction between prediction and surprise. Yet repeated exposure shifts that balance. Once a pattern has been learned, prediction becomes inexpensive, allowing attention to migrate toward groove, microtiming, timbre, anticipation, bodily synchronization, and the satisfaction of having an expectation fulfilled. A chorus can therefore become more pleasurable precisely as it becomes less informative.

This exposes a crucial error in the claim that repetition cannot represent simplification because listeners enjoy it. Enjoyment is irrelevant to the informational question. Humans enjoy numerous predictable phenomena precisely because they are predictable. The resolution of a cadence is satisfying because an expectation has been created and fulfilled. A dance beat becomes physically compelling because its temporal regularity permits synchronization. Familiarity can increase pleasure while decreasing informational novelty. There is no law requiring aesthetic pleasure to increase with informational complexity.

Nor should “less computationally dense” be lazily translated into “bad.” Punk demonstrates how violently effective three chords can be. Hip-hop can be harmonically sparse while achieving extraordinary rhythmic, phonological, and lexical complexity. House music can exploit repetition with extraordinary sophistication. Minimalism can turn redundancy itself into the object of attention. None of these observations threatens the central argument because artistic value and computational density are different variables.

But neither should those qualifications be allowed to become an escape hatch through which every empirical claim about simplification disappears. Contemporary popular music does not receive immunity from quantitative description merely because simplicity can sometimes be artistically powerful. A brilliantly designed simple object remains simple. Calling simplicity intentional does not make it complexity.

The historical argument should therefore be stated without embarrassment. Across important measurable dimensions, mass-consumed American popular music has undergone a decline in compositional computational density. Its lyrics have become increasingly compressible; its melodies have become statistically less complex; its pitch transitions have narrowed; and the commercial environment rewards forms that reduce the cognitive cost of apprehension. At the same time, increasingly sophisticated production technologies have allowed sonic surfaces to become richer, more manipulated, and more stimulating. These processes are not contradictory. They are complementary.

What has emerged is a musical economy increasingly capable of producing maximum perceptual stimulation from minimum compositional information.

That may be the defining transformation. Earlier popular traditions more often generated novelty by changing what the music said: introducing another melody, another harmonic relationship, another lyric, another instrumental voice, another formal development. Contemporary production can repeatedly alter how a comparatively small quantity of musical information sounds. The distinction resembles the difference between increasing the complexity of a computer program and repeatedly rendering the same program with more elaborate graphics. Both can produce richer experiences, but they are not computationally equivalent.

The familiar accusation that popular music has been “dumbed down” is therefore crude, culturally loaded, and difficult to operationalize, but it may be pointing clumsily toward a phenomenon that is quite real. The more precise claim is not that contemporary musicians lack talent, that contemporary listeners lack intelligence, or that the past was an artistic golden age. It is that the commercially dominant American song increasingly accomplishes its purpose with a smaller vocabulary of nonredundant compositional information, repeated more efficiently and surrounded by an increasingly elaborate apparatus of production.

A computer would notice the difference even if a critic refused to.

And, unlike the critic, the computer can compress it.

once more into the silly breach

Ladies and gentlemen, Mister Tom Gauld!

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#comic #art

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2025-05-11 12:00:00

Albert Wendland 235 pages Dog Star Books (2014)

tl;dr summary: Discovery of ancient technology leads to murder and sends an eccentric poet on a series of increasingly epic investigations and adventures. 

Read this if you like: space mysteries, Dan Simmons, Isaac Asimov

See the book on Bookshop

 

The opening chapter of The Man Who Loved Alien Landscapes is a masterclass in how to hook a reader into a speculative world. A spaceship crew suddenly drops out of lightspeed in the vicinity of two derelict ships and the crew makes an exciting discovery when exploring them. Exactly what the reader doesn't know yet, but we're eager to find out. In the second chapter, we're introduced to the protagonist, reclusive writer Mykol Ranglen, and learn that one of those characters who explored the derelict ship, Henry Ciat, has been murdered. From there, Mykol takes on the role of amateur investigator, trying to locate his ex-girlfriend—another of the crewmembers, who are all missing save the dead one—and figure out who killed Henry while keeping people from learning about his secret link to the alien technology known as the Clips. The layers of intrigue compound into one of those books you just can't put down.

The genre-blending in this novel is incredibly smooth. It hits all the beats you'd expect from a mystery, but pairs them with the arc and worldbuilding of a sci-fi adventure. It's not quite space opera—I'd say it's too much on the “hard sci-fi” side for that, with a unique solution to the question of faster-than-light travel that I especially appreciated. But it has similarly epic adventure plot beats to the golden era sci-fi writers, written with a modern voice and pacing that made it an incredibly enjoyable read. 

From a craft standpoint, I was particularly impressed with how the character and world history was distributed in the book. This actually felt like one area where Wendland blurred genres very effectively, because he used the worldbuilding to drop clues about the mystery. He does this so subtly that you don't even realize you were given clues until much later on, when Ranglen starts to figure out what's going on. And the world itself is a fascinating one, playing on a new twist on a familiar thought experiment. Much of the technology used within the world was discovered in Clips, remnants left by now-dead civilizations that were much more advanced. Using one of these, humans were able to start exploring the galaxy. But they don't fully understand how the technology functions, having taken a leap over the intervening levels of technological development that would have naturally led to such a discovery. The world in the book directly addresses the likely social impacts of this type of rapid development. This adds layers to the conflicts and makes it feel like a very rich, fully realized landscape for the story to inhabit. 

The characters were also overall enjoyable to spend time with. The character of Ranglen feels like another place where mystery crept into sci-fi land, because he fits a certain thriller archetype. He's a loner, unlucky in love but scrappy and resourceful otherwise, who suddenly finds himself at the center of a potentially deadly conspiracy. The dry humor in the voice makes Ranglen endearing despite his faults, and he's an easy character to root for. The villain (when he's eventually revealed) was nicely hate-able in a very Bond villain-ish kind of way, which felt like the right choice for the story. If I had one critique of the book, I suppose it would be that there are a lot of intriguing characters in this story and some of them didn't feel like they necessarily got their full due. There were a few times a character name would be mentioned and I had to check back to remind myself who they were, which admittedly could have been a me problem. Nonetheless, it didn't seem like some characters were used to their full potential.

That said, that's a very minor nitpick of what is, in the end, a highly enjoyable and well-crafted story. It's a smart story set in an immersive world, with a plot that mixes the page-turning tension of a mystery thriller with the sense of exploration I love in sci-fi. I'm excited to read the rest of the books in the series, because this is definitely a world I'd be happy to spend more time in. 

See similar posts:

#BookReviews #SciFi

“You don’t know who you are until you’re in a fight for your soul.”

In Matthew chapter 4, we get a recounting of Jesus' experience in the wilderness after his baptism. It's an interesting experience:

Then Jesus was led by the spirit up into the wilderness to be tempted by the Devil. After he had fasted for 40 days and 40 nights, he felt hungry. And the Tempter approached and said to him: “If you are a son of God, tell these stones to become loaves of bread.” But he answered: “It is written: ‘Man must live, not on bread alone, but on every word that comes from Jehovah’s mouth.’”

Then the Devil took him along into the holy city, and he stationed him on the battlement of the temple and said to him: “If you are a son of God, throw yourself down, for it is written: ‘He will give his angels a command concerning you,’ and, ‘They will carry you on their hands, so that you may not strike your foot against a stone.’” Jesus said to him: “Again it is written: ‘You must not put Jehovah your God to the test.’”

Again the Devil took him along to an unusually high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. And he said to him: “All these things I will give you if you fall down and do an act of worship to me.” Then Jesus said to him: “Go away, Satan! For it is written: ‘It is Jehovah your God you must worship, and it is to him alone you must render sacred service.’”

Then the Devil left him, and look! angels came and began to minister to him.

It is an incredible account.

First Temptation – The Need for Bread

Man must live, not on bread alone...

The enemy's timing is a thing of genius. Jesus is no doubt physically reeling from what was the largest data download in history after having his memory of prehuman life restored and spending more than a month just processing that all. And I will always marvel at the idea of fasting for so long.

I probably need to research that a little deeper because I didn't realize we could go without nourishment for such an extended time. It is true that he was physically perfect, at the peak of what the human body and mind can achieve, but still, that's a lot.

Satan first appeals to a NEED. He knew Jesus needed nourishment, but rather than provide it, he tried to use that normal functional need as a weapon to ruin him. Insidious.

Jesus wisely and quickly points out that Jehovah is the only source we need and that no selfish pursuit can bring escape or happiness. It recognized the lie and relied on our God.

That's a good lesson for anyone. The source of most people's troubles comes from actions that they took to acquire something they felt they NEEDED: money, affection, drugs, lust—on and on. But I'll hazard a guess that we never need precisely what we think we do.

Second Temptation – An Appeal to Hubris

Do not put Jehovah to the test...

This one’s always struck me as strange—why would Jesus jump off a building just to prove he was protected? But maybe that’s the point. Faith isn’t a stunt. Satan was asking him to misuse God’s promise for a selfish show of power. But Jesus didn’t play that game. He reminded the enemy—and us—that trust in God isn’t about making him prove himself.

It is just a blatant attempt to get God's son to do a trick. 'Throw yourself off'. Satan clearly knew the prophecy that indicated Jesus would be attended to. But he thought maybe he would appeal to Jesus' pride? As in, 'yeah, it does say that and don't you forget it!'

But God's son didn't give him the pleasure. Instead he turned attention back to his Father with ‘You must not put Jehovah your God to the test.’

Third Temptation – The Power for Change

Jehovah your God you must worship...

And finally... the offer of the kingdoms of the world. If you think about it, this would potentially be a real test for Jesus. He knew what people were suffering and how the rulers were making it challenging. If he had seized that, he could have thought he would effect change. But, as in the last two tests, he kept the long view in sight.

Eventually, Jesus would be ruler of it all anyway. By waiting, he and every other human would suffer indescribable pains. But, eventually, that would all end and replaced with paradise with Jesus as King. What a powerful reminder to us to be ready to deny what seems like a potential short-term solution.

Lessons

Leaky vessels need the most filling

And the final line: Then the Devil left him, and look! angels came and began to minister to him.

I always overlooked that. It wasn't until Jesus firmly closed the door on any possibility of giving and even refusing to dwell on the possibilities of the temptations that Jehovah sent those angels to minister. To comfort, care and support.

When temptation comes—any temptation—it’s not enough to hesitate or say 'maybe not.' Jesus shows us the power of a firm 'no.' Only then did comfort arrive. And it’s the same with us: the faster we slam the door on distraction, the sooner we’ll feel Jehovah’s peace again.

It is a beautiful example of how to trust in our God and why we should.

Just a little while longer and this will all be wiped away. If you're like me, it can't come soon enough.

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#memoir #journal #biblereading

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2025-06-12 18:00:00

Reclaiming “Nakkali”

A Nepali word. An adjective used specifically for a female. It can be a term of endearment or one of criticism. And even when it is said affectionately, there is often a tiny bit of judgment tucked inside. In essence, it means someone who is flashy. Someone who does “too much”. It could be the clothes she wears or the jewelry she piles on. It could be the way she talks, the way she draws out her words, the expressions that cross her face, or the way her eyes grow wide and dart around as she tells a story ( if you know me , you know), her gestures .

Those who follow my blog may have read my recent piece about moving back to Nepal from the United States as a teenager. I returned as a girl who wore bold colorful clothes and expressed herself in every way; from her fashion to her mannerisms. My earrings were humongous. My face was expressive. No doubt the “ foreign” way I spoke was noticeable.I wasn’t a loud person, per se. But I also wasn’t afraid to be seen.

I was as confident as a newly minted fourteen-year-old girl could be. And for the first time in my life, I began hearing myself described as nakkali. Sadly, somewhere between the teenage hormones and the transition into a completely different environment, I began to make myself a little less conspicuous. I chose darker hues-the blacks and the blues, the smaller stud earrings, and trying to blend in a little bit more.

The word followed me through the years , as I grew older, evolved, and moved through different phases of my life. Even now, I like to think that I keep things fairly simple. But I suppose that is all relative. I remember having lunch with one of my best friends one day. She is Chic and beautiful. She  stacks her jewelry effortlessly, wearing the kinds of clothes I always compliment. She regularly tells me I can borrow anything I want. She is truly a sister from another mother. I told her that, in the past, I would never have worn that much jewelry. Even when I wanted to, I worried it would look like “too much” on me, as though I were trying too hard or starving for attention. She laughed as I explained the meaning of nakkali. Now it has become a running joke between us, and she proudly calls herself nakkali too.

And you know what? As the years have gone by, I have become less and less willing to shrink myself.

Let me be overdressed.

Let me wear the jewelry.

Let me express myself.

Let me be seen.

To be unapologetically myself.

I think society and perhaps especially Asian culture often trains us girls to do the opposite. Be quiet. Be simple. Be pleasant. Be easy. Be compliant. Don’t draw too much attention to yourself. Don’t take up too much space. But decades later, here I am. Wearing the gold jewelry. Wearing the bling. Putting on the makeup. Getting my nails done. Not because these things determine my worth, and certainly not as a declaration to anyone else of my value. I do them because they are a form of expression. A way of taking care of myself. A small, visible celebration of a woman who is finally proud of who she is and no longer afraid to show it.

I have talked to my daughter about this word. We laugh about it, and now we tease each other with it too.But beneath the teasing, I hope she understands what I am really telling her:

It is okay to be expressive.

It is okay to wear the colors, the jewelry, the makeup…or none of it at all.

It is okay to take up space.

It is okay to be seen.

So, my dear friends, I am taking this word once used to make me self conscious and reclaiming it, not only for myself, but for our daughters and for the little girls still living somewhere inside all of us.

It is okay to be nakkali:)