Category: Uncategorized
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The Art of Witnessing
A Notarist is a witness. A Notarist is a human being who intentionally witnesses the action of another human being. The person being witnessed is the notaree. Notarists are artists. They serve no official capacity whatsoever. There is no central authority, no certification, and no governing body. As such, anyone can be a Notarist. Practically…
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Acknowledgement
How humans recognize each other. I’ve reached a point where I not only mistrust the sources of the emails I receive, I literally hesitate to read my email at all. The same is true of social media. A growing majority of what I see and read on the various channels are obviously and completely AI-generated,…
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Two Worlds, One Question
Digital systems can prove a record is intact and who created it. They cannot prove that what it describes actually happened. As AI makes convincing fabrications easy to produce, this distinction becomes critical. Human witnessing, presence, observation, and accountability returns as an essential way to establish truth in a synthetic world.
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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,…
