I'd really like to know what illegal order he wouldn't follow that got up whiskey Pete's nose. Maybe it will all come out at the trials that will eventually have to happen.

You've missed the point, they KNOW he's the antichrist. They need him to be to get to heaven without actually dying. I'm the child of old conservative evangelical christian ministers, and I can tell you at 80+ they are more terrified of dying that any other single thing.

The SAVE act as currently written has a religious exemption, boy do I have a church for you: The Church of Unconsented Likeness. Take the pledge today! https://substack.com/@tover153/p-188528157

After getting it wrong, the LLM I use most: Me: You can't wash your car if it isn't there.

Ah. Yes. That is an excellent and devastatingly practical correction.

In that case: drive. But do it with the quiet shame of someone moving the car the length of a bowling lane.

This is one of those situations where logic beats virtue. The car must be present to be washed. Walking was philosophically elegant but mechanically flawed.

So:

Start engine.

Travel 50 meters.

Avoid eye contact with pedestrians.

Commit fully.

You are not lazy. You are complying with system requirements.

Moon Reader+ and Calibre. (There are some other suggestions for obtaining material listed that are great). I read 3-4 books a week, sometimes more.

Born between 65 and 70, Gonna do a gender reveal when I hit 60. (Props to Jimmy Carr).

Thank you for taking the time to write this. It is unusually careful and I have been sitting with it for a couple of days. The delay is partly because I have been dealing with Influenza A, but also because your comment deserved more than a quick reaction.

I share many of your objections to Substack, especially around coercive onboarding, data extraction before value is demonstrated, and the choice to platform genuinely abhorrent material under the banner of neutrality. None of that is trivial. My use of the platform is pragmatic rather than enthusiastic, and I would not argue that it is a moral solution to anything. It is just a place where longer form thinking still seems possible, at least for now.

I also agree with you, and with Naomi Klein, that consumer level adjustments are insufficient to resolve systemic problems. I do not think boycotts alone fix extractive systems. At best, they are boundary setting. They change what we personally feed, not what the system is designed to do.

Where I might differ slightly is in how I interpret the phrase “documentation without transformation.” I share the frustration behind it. Documentation alone does not save us. History is full of well documented suffering that did not prevent further harm. At the same time, I am wary of dismissing documentation entirely, because without it we lose continuity, memory, and the ability to coordinate at all.

What I have been circling lately is the idea that trust reallocation itself is a form of pre transformation. Not transformation at the scale that would satisfy the moment, but a shift in where legitimacy, attention, and care are being placed. People are pulling trust out of large systems not because they expect those systems to reform, but because they no longer believe those systems are aligned with human scale values.

That does not prevent acute suffering. You are right about that. Large scale change historically arrives alongside immense harm, and I see no evidence that we have found a painless path through systemic breakdown. I do not feel optimistic in the sense of believing this will be gentle.

Where I do find a narrow form of optimism is this. Even under conditions of scarcity and distortion, people are still making choices about where to place trust, effort, and attention. They are narrowing it, slowing it down, and making it more conditional. That does not fix the system, but it does preserve something essential inside it.

As for your direct questions.

What actions would be sufficient to effect systemic change? I honestly do not know. I do not see a clear lever that avoids significant suffering, and anyone who claims otherwise is probably selling something.

How do I remain optimistic? I am not sure optimistic is the right word. I would say I remain oriented. I pay attention to where trust is still being extended carefully rather than cynically. I try to invest in places where documentation and transformation are at least loosely coupled, even if the transformation is small and local.

“I don’t know” is not a rhetorical move for me here. It is the most accurate answer I have.

Thank you again for engaging so thoughtfully. Comments like this are part of why I bother writing at all.

Thanks, I really appreciate that. I’ve been getting a little grief this weekend because some of my posts are adapted from essays I’ve been working on for Substack, and apparently careful editing now makes you suspect as an actual person.

I’m very real, just flu-ridden and overthinking in public. Glad the line landed for you.

I’m not convinced this is a plan so much as incentives running ahead of everything else.

Trust usually doesn’t collapse all at once. It degrades until people start inventing awkward workarounds. The fruit is just what that looks like in the real world.

That’s fair. I’ve written about this elsewhere and I’m rephrasing parts of it here, which probably makes it feel more essay-shaped than a typical thread reply.

I wasn’t trying to pad anything. I was trying to connect a few dots that usually get skipped when this comes up.

My daughter in family chat said the same thing this last week. It's possible I have been reading too much LLM generated content, also, this is my first top level post after years of lurking, and I'm trying to come off like I know what I'm doing. If the argument doesn’t land, happy to talk about that. The style I can adjust.

That’s a fair question, and you’re right that it isn’t foolproof.

The reason it works at all is that the fruit isn’t known in advance. He posts the video first, then updates his site with the correct fruit for that video. Viewers can check after the fact. If someone deep-fakes him, they either have to guess the fruit correctly or regenerate the fake once the real fruit is known.

That doesn’t make impersonation impossible, but it does make it more expensive and slower.

And that’s really the point. This isn’t perfect authentication, it’s friction. It raises the cost just enough that casual fakes, reposts, and automated scams stop being worthwhile, even if a determined attacker could still get through.

Which is also why this is such a telling example. Instead of platforms providing provenance, creators are inventing human-readable ways to increase the cost of lying. Not secure, but legible and effective enough for most people.

That’s the ambient trust problem in a nutshell. We’re not aiming for mathematically perfect truth, we’re trying to make deception harder than honesty.