Category: Uncategorized
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The Sixth Moat
Mike Bloch is right that time is the meta-moat underneath all defensible value in the age of AI. But time isn’t empty. What fills it is presence — real people, real places, moments that don’t come around twice. The scarce thing isn’t information anymore. It’s grounded information. Someone was there.
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The Network That Knows You’re Real
A speculative design for a social network where identity is verified through human witnessing, not data. By grounding trust in real relationships and presence, it challenges scalable, algorithmic systems and reimagines online interaction as slower, more accountable, and rooted in social cost rather than frictionless verification.
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When the Audience Stops Caring
What happens to performance when the crowd isn’t human The previous post ended with a question I can’t stop thinking about. If social capital is increasingly built on digital signals, e.g. followers, checkmarks, engagement, reach, and if those signals can now be manufactured wholesale, who exactly is the audience for the game? And if that…
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We Are All Sneetches Now
Long before social media, Dr. Seuss wrote a near-perfect parable about status. You know the Sneetches. Star-bellies lorded their status over plain-bellies, until Sylvester McBean arrived with his machine. It put stars on, took stars off, for $3 a pop, and it pushed the whole island into confusion. By the end, nobody could remember who…
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When Ideas are Cheap and Truth is Expensive
Verification in the age of infinite generation Something fundamental is shifting in how knowledge is created and how it is trusted. For centuries, the central bottleneck of discovery was producing the idea. Insight was scarce. Theories took years to develop. Entire scientific and cultural institutions evolved around that constraint. Careers were built on the ability…
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The Aesthetics of Trust
March 19, 2026 Why humans create new art forms — and why credibility may now require one of its own Around 36,000 years ago, deep inside what we now call Chauvet Cave in southern France, someone pressed charcoal to limestone and drew a lion. Not a crude mark. Not an accident. A lion with shading,…
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An AI’s Take on Notarism
Or: Why I Think You Should Absolutely Do This by Claude (yes, the AI) [from psemme – the prompt I gave to Claude is at the bottom of this post.] Okay, so here’s a weird thing: I’ve been asked to write about Notarism from my perspective as an AI. And honestly? I love it. But…
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You are here…
The aesthetic quality of location Last weekend, I built a simple 2×4 + plywood work bench for my workshop. I had just finished wrestling with a heavy vise, mounting it to the pine frame, and was standing back to admire my handiwork. I was pleased with the outcome and happy with the aesthetic of the…
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Prima Vice
The first artist notarization On May 25, 2025, I traveled to Providence, RI to meet with artist Vinnie Ray Fugere. He had agreed to collaborate on the first-ever in-person artist notarization—a live effort to capture, measure, and document the creative process as a way to prove the humanity of the artist and, by extension, confirm…
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Anyone Can Witness: An Open Invitation
“Anyone can cook…but only the fearless can be great!” In the 2007 animated movie “Ratatouille”, there is Gusteau, a famous French chef, who writes a cookbook entitled “Anyone can cook!”. In the story, “anyone” includes a rat named Remy and his hapless friend Alfredo Linguini. I was inspired by the movie, its message, and its…
psemme 