Socio-political philosophical musings
After many requests to speak personally instead of relying on NotebookLM, I’ve pulled together some audiovisual content to introduce myself, share my AI workflow, and talk about some current and future projects.
As I say, I’ll be producing more of these on topics, but I need to wrap up my projects in the pipeline.
This will also be cross-posted on Spotify – I think. Fingers crossed.
I keep an eye on the metrics of my various social media outlets, but I don’t always click in. Today, I did, and I noticed a female-dominant listenership.
This is surprising for two reasons.
I am not going to make any assumptions based on these data, but I was, as I said, surprised.
Add to this the age chart, and it shows that the majority of these listeners were between 35 and 44, a majority of whom were female. This is the outlier spike. Other than this, listeners skew toward older males, especially between 45 and 59. This makes intuitive sense to me, given my age, content and interests.
This was an unplanned post. I just wanted to share my surprise. More on unicorns and perspectival realism to follow presently. Please stand by.
NB: Don’t blame me for the cover image. This is Midjourney’s idea of a male and female engaging in a tug-of-war. Are those outfits standard fare? I’m not so sure about the rope physics either. 🧐
Accusations of writing being AI are becoming more common – an irony so rich it could fund Silicon Valley for another decade. We’ve built machines to detect machines imitating us, and then we congratulate ourselves when they accuse us of being them. It’s biblical in its stupidity.
A year ago, I read an earnest little piece on ‘how to spot AI writing’. The tells? Proper grammar. Logical flow. Parallel structure. Essentially, competence. Imagine that – clarity and coherence as evidence of inhumanity. We’ve spent centuries telling students to write clearly, and now, having finally produced something that does, we call it suspicious.
My own prose was recently tried and convicted by Reddit’s self-appointed literati. The charge? Too well-written, apparently. Reddit – where typos go to breed. I pop back there occasionally, against my better judgment, to find the same tribunal of keyboard Calvinists patrolling the comment fields, shouting ‘AI!’ at anything that doesn’t sound like it was composed mid-seizure. The irony, of course, is that most of them wouldn’t recognise good writing unless it came with upvotes attached.
Now, I’ll admit: my sentences do have a certain mechanical precision. Too many em dashes, too much syntactic symmetry. But that’s not ‘AI’. That’s simply craft. Machines learned from us. They imitate our best habits because we can’t be bothered to keep them ourselves. And yet, here we are, chasing ghosts of our own creation, declaring our children inhuman.
Apparently, there are more diagnostic signs. Incorporating an Alt-26 arrow to represent progress is a telltale infraction → like this. No human, they say, would choose to illustrate A → B that way. Instead, one is faulted for remembering – or at least understanding – that Alt-key combinations exist to reveal a fuller array of options: …, ™, and so on. I’ve used these symbols long before AI Wave 4 hit shore.
Interestingly, I prefer spaced en dashes over em dashes in most cases. The em dash is an Americanism I don’t prefer to adopt, but it does reveal the American bias in the training data. I can consciously adopt a European spin; AI, lacking intent, finds this harder to remember.
I used to use em dashes freely, but now I almost avoid them—if only to sidestep the mass hysteria. Perhaps I’ll start using AI to randomly misspell words and wreck my own grammar. Or maybe I’ll ask it to output everything in AAVE, or some unholy creole of Contemporary English and Chaucer, and call it a stylistic choice. (For the record, the em dashes in this paragraph were injected by the wee-AI gods and left as a badge of shame.)
Meanwhile, I spend half my time wrestling with smaller, dumber AIs – the grammar-checkers and predictive text gremlins who think they know tone but have never felt one. They twitch at ellipses, squirm at irony, and whimper at rhetorical emphasis. They are the hall monitors of prose, the petty bureaucrats of language.
And the final absurdity? These same half-witted algorithms are the ones deputised to decide whether my writing is too good to be human.
I just received two proof copies in the post this afternoon.
I created a “Book Club Edition” of Propensity, a Ridley Park book of fiction primarily for the European market – specifically in the UK – though it’s available elsewhere. I altered the cover art. As an author, I also wanted to compare KDP and IngramSpark as printers and distributors.
I find the cover texture on this version interesting, but I don’t have a word to describe it. I like it. There’s a certain je ne sais quoi about it – the texture. I reworked the art to track the second section of the book. The original cover tracks the first section.
At least in this proof version, the black ink is not 100% and is streaky. The KDP version is 100% K and solid black. I mightn’t have noticed except that some section division pages were mostly black, and it is quite evident. I don’t discern a difference in the quality of the text itself.
The Illusion of Light is a cloth version of a book also available in paperback. I like the cloth-bound. There is a nostalgic elegance about it. It feels durable – more so than a paperback for sure. I’m not sure about versus the case laminate versions. They come off like textbooks to me – not the vibe I am aiming for.
Je travaille à la traduction de The Illusion of Light : Thinking After the Enlightenment (L’Illusion de la lumière : Penser après les Lumières) en français, avec l’aide de quelques outils linguistiques et d’un peu d’intelligence artificielle. J’ai bon espoir que le processus sera fructueux. Souhaitez-moi bonne chance.
Je dois beaucoup aux penseurs français, d’hier comme d’aujourd’hui. Traduire ce texte est donc, à ma manière, une forme de reconnaissance. Mon plus grand défi sera de préserver un français à la fois contemporain et fidèle à ma voix – moins prosaïque que poétique.
Mes excuses d’avance aux Québécois.
In English, I am translating The Illusion of Light into French, so I’m leaving just this short note today.
I don’t know any other languages well enough to attempt a translation myself, but with a few capable software partners, I’m confident the process will end well.
For the record, I’m using these tools:
Whilst I’m sure these tools could manage other languages, I want to be able to evaluate what they’re doing. In French, even if I don’t know a particular word, I can verify it, and I understand the grammar. With other languages, I’d simply be trusting a black box.
Besides, French culture and philosophy have influenced me so deeply that the least I can do is offer something back. As this translation is an overview of my English-language essays, I hope it provides some in-language context.
I know how difficult translated works can be to read, so if I’m overseeing the process, at least there’s one fewer filter between my thoughts and the reader.
This is not the announcement of a new book – The Illusion of Light: Thinking after the Enlightenment.
“Have the courage to use your own understanding.”
— Immanuel Kant, ‘What Is Enlightenment?’ (1784)
I hate the business of business. I am wrapping up another book project, but it’s been delayed by the government shutdown in the United States. I want a Library of Congress number (LCCN), but submissions must wait for an employed person to assign it.
Too clever by half and smarter than the average bear, I thought I could release an audiobook version first; audiobooks don’t need an LCCN. To be honest, neither do books. As some do with ‘Patent Pending’, I could follow suit. The book receives an LCCN, but it isn’t printed on the copyright page with the other administrivia.
My idea worked – partially. I rendered an audio version and published it – though it won’t be available until the start of November. Even so, I need distributors. It’s always something.
Meanwhile, I’m sharing an excerpt for your listening pleasure. Read along if you please.
Preface – Reading by Residual Light
To read these essays is to move slowly from the glare into the dimmer spaces where things regain texture. The Enlightenment taught us to equate light with truth, but illumination has always been double-edged: it clarifies outlines whilst erasing depth. What disappears in the brightness are the gradients – the in-between shades where thought and feeling meet, where contradiction still breathes.
The half-light is not a retreat from knowledge; it is where knowledge stops mistaking itself for salvation. It is the hour before dawn and after dusk, when perception is most alert, and everything seems both clearer and less certain. That is the discipline these essays practice: a sustained attentiveness to what persists when certainty burns away.
This project does not ask readers to abandon reason, only to notice what it has excluded. It invites a kind of intellectual night vision – the patience to see without spotlight, the willingness to sit with what does not resolve. In the half-light, the world no longer arranges itself around the human gaze; it reveals itself as unmastered, partial, alive. Here, we will learn to dwell in that half-light – not as a retreat from knowledge, but as a discipline of seeing what the Enlightenment’s glare erased.
The Enlightenment promised that truth would make us free. Perhaps it made us efficient instead. What these pages attempt is smaller and slower: a freedom measured not in control but in composure – the ability to live with what cannot be fixed, to keep tending meaning after its foundations have collapsed.
If there is light here, it is not the triumphant blaze of discovery but the ambient glow that remains after something ends. It’s the light of screens left on overnight, of cities at rest, of the mind still thinking long after certainty has gone to sleep.
Step carefully. Let your eyes adjust. The world looks different when it stops pretending to be illuminated.
I consider The Illusion of Light to be a sort of capstone project to the Anti-Enlightenment Project. It provides both a perspective and insights into the essays that constitute it.
The proofs have arrived. Two small volumes, both titled Meditations on Nothing: one subtitled Notes Before Existence, the other A Critical Companion.
They are, in some sense, twins—one aphoristic, one expository. The first speaks in fragments; the second replies, with slightly more patience. Together they form the quiet beginning of what I now call The Anti-Enlightenment Project—a long experiment in writing without faith in reason’s permanence.
This is not yet an announcement. The books aren’t public, and I haven’t decided whether to call their eventual release a publication, a disclosure, or a mistake. For now, they simply exist, bound and silent, sitting on the table where the idea of meaning once lived.
When they are released, I’ll post details here. Until then, consider this the sound a thought makes before it commits to paper.
—BW
WordPress has just informed me that my blog is having an anniversary. Technically true, though a little misleading: this blog has been around since 1 January 2017, but I’ve been loitering on the platform since 2006. Before that I dabbled in the great blog diaspora of the early internet—Google, Yahoo! 360, Blogger, and a few others that have long since evaporated into the ether.
Each space had its own flavour. One I recall from around 2010 was devoted to an experiment in World of Warcraft: levelling a pacifist character. The premise was simple—no violence allowed. My Human Priest, suitably named Passivefist, managed to crawl his way to level 7 before stalling out. The challenge was never to attack other NPCs, only to survive by gathering, healing, or sneaking through hostile terrain.
This was my grand opening statement back then:
I am creating this account to track my progress as a pacifist in World of Warcraft. Others have done this before me and are, in fact, way ahead of me. Nonetheless, it is the challenge I am setting. I have created a Human Priest on Kael’thas named Passivefist.
Of course, in later expansions Blizzard eventually added pacifist-friendly content, making my small crusade somewhat redundant.
As for this blog, it’s taken a different path. I’ve recently crossed the 100,000-word milestone—101.4K, to be precise. Not that I’ve been counting obsessively, but it’s a nice marker, even if much of my writing also leaks into other projects: other blogs, manuscripts, and workaday scribbling.
The intent here remains the same as when I started in 2017: to keep a space for philosophic musings, digressions, and the occasional provocation. I’ll continue publishing when I have something worth saying—or at least something worth testing out in public.
Here’s to the next 100K.
Famous last words, I know.
I was working with ChatGPT, discussing various concepts. We chatted for several hours over the course of a few days, and we came to, let’s say, a conclusion. What ChatGPT 5 did next was something I had never seen. In fact, I’m sharing the actual response.
I won’t share my thesis here, but this is one of the field verification projects it recommends.
tl;dr: £120k
Project title
Provenance First: Testing provenance packages & slow-mode deliberation to improve municipal decision quality
Lead investigator
Bry Willis — Independent Researcher (contact: [REDACTED])
Summary (1–2 lines)
Test whether mandatory, machine-readable provenance packages plus a 60-day slow-mode and rapid adversarial audits improve decision quality (DQI), reduce reversal rates and increase public legitimacy in municipal planning decisions.
Problem statement (why fund this)
Policy decisions are frequently hijacked by headline pressure and low-provenance inputs; municipalities lack lightweight, testable protocols that make inputs traceable and give deliberation time. This pilot operationalises the “provenance-first + slow-mode” institutional fix and measures whether design moves increase robust decision outcomes rather than performative actions.
Objectives
Design & methods (12 months)
Budget (indicative)
£120k total —audit teams (£40k), portal & tooling (£15k), staff/fellow (0.5FTE, £35k), survey & evaluation (£15k), admin/contingency (£15k).
Deliverables
Success criteria (pre-registered)
Risk & mitigation
I’m just curious now. Have you ever had a generative AI process end with a cost of goods and services?
David Guignion describes Derrida’s Deconstruction in under three minutes.
The confusion he mentions is why I chose a different term – dis-integration – to describe “deconstructing” communication to discover underlying metanarratives.
I am busy editing my next novel, so that’s all the time I want to allocate to this matter, but David is a trusted resource of mine. Meantime, check out my deconstructed cover image.
Philosophics 