Category Archives: Food

Food, History, Security

Why Peter Thiel Can’t Tell the Truth as Churchill Rolls in His Grave

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The other night I lay awake staring at the stars, contemplating Peter Thiel being catastrophically wrong about history. He was selling a giant bag of fraud, as people literally pay to hear his backwards history in talks, but why… why lie about Churchill?

His framing was so completely backwards, so obviously wrong, it had to be Thiel practicing intentional disinformation.

It got me thinking about the complexity of the 1943 Bengal famine, since Churchill is sometimes accused of unilaterally mishandling it, meaning he personally gets blamed for 3 million deaths.

It’s unfair to blame him entirely, but if someone wants to criticize Churchill for errors, Bengal is the most obvious avenue because it’s complicated, morally ambiguous, and shows how even “good” leaders can be complicit in systemic catastrophe.

Instead, Thiel went with a well known Stalinist statement and attributed it to Churchill, which either shows profound ignorance or… something else.

It would be like hearing that Thiel give an exclusive paid speech about Apple’s first computer being the Radio Shack TRS-80, as if such history errors are worth price of admission.

Gibberish. And probably intentional.

It’s also unfortunate, because the 1943 Bengal catastrophe is actually very relevant today, with direct parallels to the dangerous economics of Big Tech billionaires.

In short, bureaucratic rationality (efficiency metrics, cost control) and market-driven predation (hoarding, speculation) created a perfect storm in history. Churchill was hugely implicated in millions being killed not from an absolute supply shortage, but from what the economist Amartya Sen called an “entitlement failure” system, where people were gated to prevent access to food that exists.

Bengal is a case study of systems optimized for everything except human welfare, and how “rational” decision-making at every level can produce catastrophic outcomes. A decade ago I said this about Big Data platforms; these days it clearly applies to the AI industry, and very much applies to Thiel.

There were two fundamental, interrelated pathologies underlying the catastrophe of Bengal:

  1. Rent Seeking — Artificial Scarcity for Power and Profit: The Famine Inquiry Commission concluded that “a large part of the community lived in plenty while others starved” and noted that “corruption was widespread throughout the province and in many classes of society.” Gandhi has even been implicated in a calculated failure to act, using famine to undermine his political opponents. Enormous profits were made through speculation, war profiteering, hoarding, and corruption by the calculation that “profits for some meant death for others.” Food was deliberately stockpiled in village stores of wealthy landlords and tradesmen who were waiting for inflation to cause price increases. The beneficiaries were big farmers, merchants, and rice mill owners, whose incomes soared while the poor starved. Bengal’s Minister of Civil Supplies gave the import monopoly to his friend and political ally who had a large grain trading business. This was highly profitable when selling at black-market prices, as long as shortages continued. The extremely inelastic demand for food meant traders would lose money if they increased imports.
  2. Efficiency as Status/Virtue: After Temple’s “excessive” spending and immediate response had saved lives in 1873-74, he was criticized rather than celebrated. The subsequent British relief efforts implemented stricter standards with the justification that “excessive pay might promote dependency.” Lord Lytton had opposed famine relief reforms in the belief they would stimulate “shirking by Indian workers,” substantively ordering “there is to be no interference of any kind on the part of Government with the object of reducing the price of food” and instructing district officers to “discourage relief works in every possible way.”

The Toxic Synergy

What makes this particularly devastating is how these two pathologies reinforced each other in a vicious cycle.

Efficiency doctrine provided moral cover for profiteering. When officials invoked “market discipline” and “non-interference,” they justified refusing to disrupt the hoarding and speculation that was killing people. War Cabinet reports noted the Government of India was “unduly tender with speculators and hoarders”—the reluctance to “waste” resources on aggressive intervention meant the corrupt could operate with impunity. Meanwhile, the massive profits from artificial scarcity validated the efficiency ideology: markets were “working,” just not for human welfare.

Both prioritized abstract principles over human lives. Whether it was market efficiency, fiscal responsibility, or profit margins, the actual suffering and death became normalized for these systemic imperatives.

And that sounds to me a LOT like Palantir.

It also sounds like the SRE who forgets the R stands for reliability, and keeps causing outages by forcing “efficiency” in cloud systems by generating artificial scarcity.

Just as 3 million Bengalis died while food existed but was made inaccessible by system operators, Big Tech is building systems where resources, opportunities, and even basic rights may exist in aggregate while systematically withheld through centralized and optimized distribution failures.

The Bengal famine shows that you don’t need malicious intent, only the right combination of profit motive, efficiency ideology, institutional inertia, and a willful blindness to complexity.

That last one is a particular worry in tech these days. The privileged techbro “move fast and break things” ethos—prioritizing velocity over human cost—echoes the kind of oppressive bureaucratic rationality metrics that enabled the worst atrocities of the 20th century.

Thiel preaching lies about history while building systems that replicate its worst pathologies isn’t just ironic, it’s structurally necessary for him to avoid accountability. Accurate historical analysis indicts his entire life’s work.

  • Concentration of compute resources creating artificial scarcity
  • “Alignment” framed as efficiency problem rather than power question
  • Regulatory capture via lobbying and government contracts
  • Suffering externalized and rendered invisible by optimization metrics
  • Rhetoric of “inevitability” and “market forces” preventing intervention

Palantir literally is in the business of sophisticated gating—determining who gets surveilled, who gets flagged, who gets deported, who gets targeted. The “food” (resources, freedom, safety) exists, but access is algorithmically controlled for very narrowly controlled profit.

That’s the Bengal famine system all over again, which Churchill criticized and opposed, yet ultimately still gets blame for because he was prime minister.

Where Bengal’s gatekeepers were corrupt officials and grain merchants (constraining options even for Churchill at the height of his power), today’s are engineers optimizing “engagement” and “efficiency” metrics that just happen to concentrate power and profit into Thiel’s pockets while externalizing harm.

Thiel’s confusion of Churchill and Stalin therefore is very revealing in proper context. Stalin intentionally engineered a famine (Holodomor). Churchill was complicit in systemic failure with multiple actors.

Thiel artificially conflates these two in a way that seems extremely self serving, beyond just historical malpractice:

  • Obscures how systemic optimization can kill without individual malice
  • Avoids the uncomfortable middle ground where “rational actors” produce catastrophe
  • Prevents examination of how market fundamentalism enables mass harm

Because that’s his business model.

Food, Security

Durian Fruit 3: German Fire Department 1

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The durian fruit has been banned in hotels across Asia, has evacuated buildings in Australia and Canada, and yet now seems to be conquering Germany one fire brigade call at a time.

The Southeast Asian fruit’s smell, which resembles that of gas, was noticed by visitors to a shopping center in the city, located in western Germany.

Welcome, Germany, to the “Durian Panic Club” that includes basically every other nation that accepted the nature of shipped fruit to supermarkets in the last 20 years.

Your membership card is in the mail. It smells like gas.

(It’s not gas. It’s durian.)

In what can only be described as Germany’s most efficient journey from hungry ignorance to fruitful enlightenment, the Wiesbaden fire brigade was called out four times on Saturday to investigate the same gas leak that turned out to be a single durian fruit at an Asian supermarket.

Four times.

Four. Times.

Leave it to Germany to encounter a problem, methodically measure it with high precision instruments, find no rational explanation, and then… call the fire brigade, three more times.

“Zere is no gas connection in zis building,” one can imagine them saying, staring at their equipment in confusion. “Ze measurements show nothing. And yet… ze smell persists. We must investigate again, Hanz. And again, Franz…”

Meanwhile, anyone used to pausing to smell the fruit at a market, or reading the news from countries that eat fruit, is thinking:

“Yes. We know. We’ve known since… around 300 BCE. It’s delicious.”

Food, History, Poetry, Security

Elon Musk Calls for Armed Rebellion in UK, Yet Fails the Simple God and Chocolate Test

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When British soldiers liberated Berlin in 1945, they encountered something both heartbreaking and illuminating: German children hiding in Nazi bunkers with weapons, terrified of the world, were unable to articulate what they were actually afraid of. These children had been indoctrinated through Hitler’s propaganda platforms to believe that Allied soldiers would kill them if they surrendered.

The battlefront solution, as one British veteran recalled, was surprisingly simple:

You put a bar of chocolate in their hands and it alters the whole war – as far as the children are concerned.

A Catholic priest who spoke German would calm these remaining Nazi adherents down, and suddenly the existential threat they’d been taught to fear dissolved completely in the face of basic human kindness coupled with overwhelming force.

This historical moment offers a crucial lens for understanding contemporary political rhetoric, in terms of parenting fundamentals, particularly Elon Musk’s recent inflammatory militant-like statements at a far-right rally in London.

Engineered Fears Lack Specificity

An AFD (Nazi Party) rally in Germany was headlined by Elon Musk

Speaking via video link to a “unite the [white] kingdom” rally organized by political extremist Tommy Robinson, Musk deployed weaponized disunity language that follows a familiar pattern.

Musk… told the crowd that “violence is coming” and that “you either fight back or you die”.

He said: “I really think that there’s got to be a change of government in Britain. You can’t – we don’t have another four years, or whenever the next election is, it’s too long.

“Something’s got to be done. There’s got to be a dissolution of parliament and a new vote held.”

On the face of it he is calling for an end of government. It is the most anti-unifying tactic possible.

And also note the overt ignorance displayed with “four years, or whenever” and “something” as his demand for immediate action.

Such statements of weaponized disunity represent the systematic deployment of rhetoric designed not to reform government policies or win electoral victories, but to collapse the shared foundations that make democratic governance possible.

Normal political opposition seeks to change who governs or how they govern within existing institutional frameworks. Musk’s call for “dissolution of parliament” bypasses democratic processes entirely – he’s not advocating for policy changes, candidate support, or even constitutional amendments, but for militant extremists to immediately destroy Britain’s elected government.

This call to arms mirrors the text of Golding’s famous novel Lord of the Flies, when institutional authority collapses, the result isn’t liberation but an intentional state of chaos that inevitably exploits anyone vulnerable to abuse by a small authoritarian cabal. Just as Ralph’s democratic leadership in the novel protected Piggy until the system broke down and constant violence took over, democratic institutions – however flawed – provide a framework within which peaceful conflict resolution remains possible.

Lord of the Flies, by William Golding. Russell Square, London: Faber and Faber, 1954.

Musk’s rhetoric encourages people to abandon safe protective structures without offering any viable alternative governance model, creating the very power vacuum that historically leads to authoritarian capture or societal breakdown.

The “weaponized” aspect thus lies in using democratic freedoms (free speech, assembly) to advocate for democracy’s elimination – exploiting the system’s tolerance to promote intolerance, precisely what Popper so clearly warned against in his paradox of tolerance.

This intentional abuse of language has in fact been studied extensively by historians of disinformation warfare (e.g. social engineering attacks):

  • Existential Threat: “Violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die, that’s the truth.”
  • Urgent Timeline: “We don’t have another four years… it’s too long. Something’s got to be done.”
  • Vague Enemy: References to “the left,” “the woke mind virus,” and unspecified forces threatening British society.
  • Call to Extraordinary Action: Demanding “dissolution of parliament and a new vote.”

This rhetoric creates what security experts might call a “crisis of meaning” to bypass unity and falsely generate feelings of existential threat despite the lack of concrete, specific dangers that would justify the extreme responses being advocated. “They” are coming to get “you” is how bogus “caravan” rhetoric was used in 2016 to drive national security fraud (illegal redirection of funds) for Americans involved in the disasterous Maginot-like “wall” campaign.

Historical Basis in Today’s Nazi Endgame

The parallels between Musk’s rhetoric and Nazi Germany’s final propaganda push reveal identical patterns. After 1942, when military defeat became inevitable, Nazi messaging abandoned rational policy arguments for purely apocalyptic themes designed to prevent surrender.

The regime’s massive construction projects exemplify this delusional mentality. Structures like the absurd Boros bunker in Berlin were built by Nazi slaves in 1943 as “shelters,” yet it functioned more like an above-ground prison, where thousands of Germans were crammed to cower in fear rather than meaningfully protect them. The Nazi propaganda sold death camps as freedom, entrapment as safety, total desperation as preparation for victory.

General Erwin Rommel exemplified this tragic mindset of self-destruction – when given the choice between suicide or having his entire family killed in front of him, he chose the poison pill instead of a fight, telling his family he could not bear to live under Allied occupation while condemning them to it. This selfish binary thinking – death or dishonor, with no middle ground and totally devoid of care for others – became the genocidal regime’s final message.

German children were indoctrinated with binary thinking in order to force an unnatural and inhuman choice. Hitler estimated that any ray of sunshine at all would disinfect even the youngest minds and so the binary was absolutist: fight to the death against liberation or face annihilation. And this, when Allied soldiers actually arrived offering chocolate, fresh air and daylight instead of violence and isolation, the entire ideological framework collapsed instantly.

Again, the Nazi propaganda used known effective social engineering:

  • Emotional appeal (life or death stakes)
  • Timing appeal (no time to think)
  • Vaguery appeal (allowing people to project their own fears)
  • Absolute appeal (only two options, false choice in total extremes and driven by above emotional-timing-vaguery)

Musk Grew Up on a Diet of Hitler Propaganda

Musk’s rhetoric follows this template with remarkable precision. We know his Grandfather was arrested in WWII Canada for sympathies with Hitler, and fled to South Africa to lead apartheid. We also know from Musk’s father that Elon was raised in an environment promoting Nazism. It should come as little surprise that Musk statements still create a sense of imminent civilizational collapse while remaining frustratingly non-specific about actual threats or solutions. What exactly is the “violence” that’s coming? Who specifically represents “the left” that he claims celebrates murder? What concrete policies justify dissolving an elected parliament? Isn’t this all just like South African apartheid or Nazi German rhetoric all over again?

Indeed, as with Nazi messaging that terrified German children into taking up arms, this rhetoric again asks people to believe the Hitler doctrines to act on fear rather than evidence, urgency rather than deliberation.

A God and Chocolate Test of Our Time

The British soldiers’ success in Berlin suggests we know a powerful antidote to extremist messaging: persistent human decency protected by rule of law (or overwhelming force) that contradicts the propaganda narrative of fascism. When people discover that the supposed monsters are actually offering genuine acts of kindness, the entire fear-based worldview can collapse. Is the human mind open to receive help if being trained on imposed scarcity to react always in trauma mode?

The question isn’t about ignoring real political disagreements or legitimate concerns about social change, it’s about enabling safe disagreement. That’s why Popper describes the healthiest boundary development as an intolerance paradox, where ideas can be encouraged by flagging ideas of intolerance for restriction. It means recognizing when rhetoric crossed from political argument into known propaganda techniques that have been designed to bypass rational thought in order to cause intentional discriminatory harms.

Think of it as a test not whether someone is racist, but whether someone exhibits genuine anti-racism. Claims of population decline and “white genocide” from intermarriage, also claims of color blindness, are proto-typical proofs of someone failing to demonstrate genuine anti-racism.

The “chocolate test” for contemporary political messaging might ask: Does this rhetoric encourage people to see fellow citizens as fully human and deserving of human rights? Does it promote specific, achievable solutions? Does it allow for complexity and nuance? Or does it demand immediate, extreme action against vaguely defined existential threats, dehumanizing specific targets?

Breaking the Pattern

The children in Berlin weren’t inherently extremist, given that they were responding to a traumatic narrative that told them the world was ending and only violence could save them. When that narrative was gently contradicted by reality, they could return to being children.

The tactics of using children as weapons weren’t limited to Nazi Germany’s final days. After Rhodesia lost its colonial war in 1979, white supremacist forces shifted to covert destabilization operations in neighboring Mozambique, where British-trained SAS units supported Renamo rebels in a campaign that killed over one million people – 60% of them children.

These operations deliberately targeted schools and kidnapped children, forcing them to murder their own families before being used as child soldiers in raids against civilians. The psychological warfare under the regime adopted by Musk’s Grandfather was identical to Nazi methods: create absolute terror, destroy normal social bonds, and force impossible choices between violence and death. Over 250,000 children were separated from families, 200,000 orphaned, and half the country’s schools destroyed – all under the false flag of “protecting” civilians from the legitimate government.

The parallel is unmistakable: white supremacist forces consistently use children as both weapons and victims while claiming to be their saviors.

The same pattern appears across many conflicts, from Canadian General Roméo Dallaire defusing a child soldier with an AK-47 at his nose in Rwanda by offering chocolate, to Dutch children receiving their first taste of chocolate from liberating Canadian soldiers in 1945.

WWII poster by Nestle promoting their Type D chocolate ration. Source: Western Connecticut State University

I’ll say it again, that people drawn to apocalyptic political messaging aren’t necessarily lost causes. They’re often responding to injected anxieties about normal social change, regular economic uncertainty, or predictable cultural shifts. The challenge is addressing the many underlying concerns with concrete solutions and social science rather than exploiting them with fear-based mobilization. The Fabians understood this intimately when they responded to industrialization by laying the groundwork for modern data science.

As William Wordsworth wrote, “The Child is father of the Man.” How we allow outsized characters claiming paternal authority to speak to people’s fears – whether nurtured with artificial scarcity into extremism or offered surplus and conversation – shapes the society we’ll inhabit today into tomorrow.

History has already run this experiment many times. We know how Musk propaganda ends, just like he does and refuses to believe. The question is whether he can learn before he generates another global disaster of hate.

Many people struggle to articulate why certain rhetoric feels dangerous beyond normal political disagreement, so I hope to have provided some expert vocabulary and historical context to make the threat identification clear.

Famous picture of 16-year old Nazi “Volkssturm” Hans-Georg Henke upon his 1945 surrender to aid, humanitarian care and feeding.
Food, Poetry, Security

Let Them Eat Cake Recipes: Why Consciousness Will Never Be Code

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Security professionals are intimately familiar with the tension between formalization and practice.

We can document every protocol, codify every procedure, and automate every response, yet still observe the art of security requires something more. Things made Easy, Routine and Minimal judgement (ERM) depend on a reliable source of Identification, Storage, Evaluation and Adaptation (ISEA).

A recent essay by astrophysicist Adam Frank in Noema Magazine explores a similar tension in consciousness studies, one that has profound implications for how we think about all intelligence, both human and artificial.

The tension here is far from new. Jeremy Bentham’s ambitious attempt to create a mathematical model of ethics—his utilitarian calculus—ultimately failed because it tried to reduce the irreducible complexity of moral experience to quantitative formulas. No amount of hedonic arithmetic could capture the lived reality of ethical decision-making. His codified concept of “propinquity” was never made practical, foreshadowing the massive deadly failures of driverless AI hundreds of years later.

In sharp contrast, Ludwig Wittgenstein succeeded in understanding language precisely because he abandoned the quest for mathematical foundations while being one of the best mathematicians in history (yet not a very good WWI soldier). His practical and revolutionary language games emerged from what he called “forms of life”—embodied, contextual practices that resist formal reduction. We depend on them heavily today as foundational to daily understanding.

Frank’s central argument is that modern science has developed what he calls a “blind spot” regarding consciousness and experience. The idiocy of efficiency means a rush to reduce everything to computational models and mathematical abstractions has totally forgotten something fundamental to success:

Experience is intimate — a continuous, ongoing background for all that happens. It is the fundamental starting point below all thoughts, concepts, ideas and feelings.

The blindness of the efficiency addict (e.g. DOGE) isn’t accidental. It’s built into the very foundation of dangerously lowering the safety bar for how we practice science. As Frank explains, early architects of the scientific method deliberately set aside subjective elements to focus on what Michel Bitbol calls the “structural invariants of experience“—the patterns that remain consistent across different observers. That may be a baseline, a reductive approach, that drops far too low to protect against harms.

The problem emerges when abstractions are allowed to substitute for reality itself, without acknowledging fraud risks. Frank describes this as a “surreptitious substitution” where mathematical models are labeled as more real than the lived experience they’re meant to describe.

Think of how temperature readings replaced the embodied experience of feeling hot or cold, to the point that thermodynamic equations became regarded as more fundamental than the sensations they originally measured.

Meta is Fraud, For Real

This leads to what Frank identifies as the dominant paradigm in consciousness studies: the machine metaphor (meta). From this perspective, organisms are “nothing more than complicated machines composed of biomolecules” and consciousness is simply computation running on biological hardware.

And of course there’s a fundamental difference between machines and living systems. Machines are engineered for specific purposes, while organisms exhibit something far more substantive in what philosophers call “autopoiesis“—they are self-creating and self-maintaining. Meta is extractive, reductive, a road to death without a host it can feed on. As Frank notes:

A cell’s essence is not its specific atoms. Instead, how a cell is organized defines its true nature.

This organizational closure—the way living systems form sustainable unified wholes that cannot be reduced to their parts—suggests a different approach to understanding consciousness. Rather than asking how matter creates experience, we might ask how experience and matter co-evolve through embodied symbiotic healthy interaction with the world.

You Can’t Eat a Recipe

To understand this distinction, consider consciousness within the act of cooking to eat rather than just computation. The recipe captures the structural patterns and relationships—the “how” and “what” that can be systematized and shared.

Actual cooking involves embodied skill, responsiveness to the moment, intuitive adjustments based on how things look, smell, and feel. There’s a tacit knowledge that emerges through the doing itself.

A skilled chef can follow the same recipe as the unskilled one and produce something entirely different. Ratatouille, the animated film, wasn’t about a rat as much as the lived experience; the kind of analysis of an environment that I like to call in my AI security work “compost in, cuisine out” (proving that “garbage in garbage out” is a false and dangerously misleading narrative).

A lightning strike enlightens this animated film protagonist like Frankenstein turned chef

The consciousness-as-cooking isn’t just about following instructions—it’s about lived engagement with materials, real-time adjustments, the way experience shapes perception which shapes action in an ongoing loop. OODA, PDCA… we know the loop models of audit and assessment as fundamental to winning wars.

Frank’s emphasis on “autopoiesis” fits here perfectly. Like cooking, consciousness might be fundamentally about self-creating and self-maintaining processes that can’t be fully captured from the outside. You can describe the biochemical reactions in bread rising, but the seasoned baker’s sense of when a proper bagel is ready involves a different kind of knowing altogether.

AI Security is Misunderstood

The necessary perspective has serious implications for how we think about artificial intelligence and its role in information security. When we treat intelligence as “mere computation,” we risk building systems that can process information but lack the embodied understanding that comes from being embedded in the world.

Everyone using a chatbot these days knows this intimately when you ask about the best apple and the machine spits back the fruit when you want the computer, or vice versa.

Frank warns that the deceptive reductionist approach “poses real dangers as these technologies are deployed across society.” When we mistake computational capability for intelligence, we risk creating a world where:

…our deepest connections and feelings of aliveness are flattened and devalued; pain and love are reduced to mere computational mechanisms viewable from an illusory and dead third-person perspective.

In security contexts, this might mean deploying AI systems that can detect patterns but lack critical contextual understanding that comes from embodied experience. They might follow the recipe perfectly while missing the subtle cues that experienced practitioners would notice.

Palantir is maybe the most egregious example of death and destruction from fraud. They literally tried to kill an innocent man, with zero accountability, while generating the terrorists that they had begged millions of dollars to help find. I call them the “self licking ISIS-cream cone” because Palantir is perhaps the worst intelligence scam in history.

Correct Approach: Embedded Experience

Rather than trying to embed consciousness in physics, Frank suggests we need to “embed physics into our experience.” This doesn’t mean abandoning mathematical models, but recognizing them as powerful tools that emerge from and serve embodied understanding.

From this perspective, the goal isn’t to explain consciousness away through formal systems, but to understand how mathematical abstractions manifest within lived experience. We don’t seek explanations that eliminate experience in favor of abstractions, but account for the power of abstractions within the structures of experience.

Cooking School Beats Every Recipe Database

This might be why the “hard problem” of consciousness feels so intractable when approached mathematically—it’s like trying to capture the essence of cooking by studying only the recipe. The formalization is useful, even essential, but it necessarily abstracts away from the very thing we’re most interested in: the lived experience of the cooking itself.

Perhaps consciousness studies—and by extension, our approach to AI and security—needs more public “cooking schools” and fewer Palantir “recipe databases.” More emphasis on cultivating the capacity for analysis and curiosity for lived inquiry rather than just dumping money into white supremacist billionaires building racist theoretical machine models.

This is the opposite of abandoning rigor or precision. It means recognizing that some forms of knowledge are irreducibly embodied and contextual. The recipe and the cooking are both essential—but they operate in different domains and serve different purposes.

For those of us working in security, our most sophisticated tools and protocols will always depend on practitioners who can read the subtle signs, make contextual judgments, and respond creatively to novel situations. The poetry of information security written here since 1995 lies not just in the practice of developing algorithms, but in the lived practice of protecting systems and people from harm in an ever-changing world.

The question isn’t whether we can build machines that think like humans, but whether we can create technologies that enhance rather than replace the irreducible art of human judgment and response. Like Bentham’s failed calculus, purely computational approaches to intelligence miss the embodied nature of understanding. But like Wittgenstein’s language games, consciousness might be best understood not as a problem to be solved, but as a form of life to be lived.

Perhaps the poet Wallace Stevens captured this tension best in “The Idea of Order at Key West,” where he writes of the sea and the singer who shapes our perception of it:

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.

The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard,
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.

Consciousness, like the singer by the sea, is neither reducible to its material substrate nor separate from it. It emerges in the dynamic interaction between embodied beings and their world—not as computation, but as the lived poetry of existence itself.