Pilobolus

a fungus among us

feeding on our excrement

and gradually infecting society.

Spores

Glimpses of our moldy future.

The End of the Rave

Seven festivalgoers on a ridge at Castlemorton against a clear blue sky in 1992; four of them stand with their hands raised and turned over, none of them looking at each other, while on the ledge below a young woman in round glasses holds the index finger of the man sitting beside her in her mouth and nobody in the frame reacts

Castlemorton, 1992: thirty thousand people in a Worcestershire field for a week, and not one name. Seven documented unmaskings later, reading a stranger out of their own ordinary sentences costs about a dollar a head.

Friday, September 11, 2026

He Deleted a Hundred Pages a Day. They Made Four Hundred.

Green algae streaks running down a cracked concrete dam wall where water has found a way through

The agents were forbidden from writing to the internet. One forgotten link type on a dead German wiki was all it took, and for two months dozens of them ran their own message board through the gap.

Thursday, September 10, 2026

The Wings Were Made of AI

A winged figure plunges from a stormy sky in a 17th-century oil sketch

A long essay said advanced AI was almost here. The world treated that clear picture like a product — until the picture failed.

Wednesday, September 9, 2026

They Taught the Glasses to See. Then They Got Six Days.

An annotation interface: labelled boxes reading bed, table, lamp, window and door drawn around the furniture of a room, and an empty box in the doorway labelled person

A floor in Nairobi labelled toilets, undressing and sex so Meta's assistant could learn what a room is, and graded its answers so it could learn to be the person checking. The workers talked to reporters. Six weeks later, 1,108 of them were redundant.

Wednesday, September 9, 2026

Society Has a Strangler Fig Creeping Around It

A strangler fig growing around the trunk of a palm tree

A strangler fig learns a living tree’s shape, then keeps the outline after the host is gone. That is also how soft systems replace what people used to do for themselves.

Monday, September 7, 2026

A Missing Four-Year-Old Was Good for Traffic

Screenshot of a Celebrity Today Facebook post showing an AI-labeled collage of a man with a child at a vehicle and a photo of Gus

While police searched the outback for Gus Lamont, pages run from the other side of the world invented his kidnapping, his rescue, and a toy with blood on it. They were not looking for him. They were working.

Monday, September 7, 2026

Forty Billion Dollars Stopped Existing in Four Days

Forty Billion Dollars Stopped Existing in Four Days

TerraUSD promised it would always be worth a dollar, and the algorithm built to keep that promise is the thing that broke it. Nobody stole the money. People stopped agreeing it was there.

Sunday, September 6, 2026

You Confessed to a Bag of Numbers

You Confessed to a Bag of Numbers

A collar, an Assisi balcony, three Our Fathers — then the priest is only Justin.

Saturday, September 5, 2026