Reith lecture this morning on the commute
Albert kicked the snowdrift outside the old server farm
and muttered that the machines had finally learned
to gossip worse than people.
Marin just shrugged — she’d known that for years.
The platforms weren’t evil, she said,
just overeager dogs chasing whatever smell
was strongest: fear, envy, loneliness,
that sickly-sweet scent of validation going stale.
Albert grunted.
He hated anything that rewarded stupider versions of himself.
He’d spent half his life trying to be better
while the algorithm begged him to be worse.
Inside, the servers hummed like guilty drunks.
Marin tapped the casing and said,
“Imagine if these things amplified coherence
instead of whatever screamed the loudest.”
Albert snorted.
“Yeah, and imagine if reindeer delivered the mail.
Nice idea, but the world doesn’t run on nice ideas.”
But he didn’t walk away.
The lights flickered, as if the machines were listening —
not repentant, just bored with their own chaos.
Marin leaned in:
“Shift the incentives, shift the story. Even code gets tired of noise.”
Albert sighed the way Norwegians do
when they’re secretly agreeing.
He scraped frost from the glass and said,
“So we build something better because no one else will.”
Marin nodded,
eyes reflecting that cold half-light the North gives
when it’s thinking about hope but refuses to admit it.
“Exactly,” she said. “Let’s change the message before it changes us.”
And outside, the wind rearranged the snow
like it always does —
quietly, persistently,
the way new things begin.
Ceteris Paribus 