[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":-1},["ShallowReactive",2],{"cms-topics":3,"$f379ywwfd2pw1e":34},[4,13,20,27],{"slug":5,"name":6,"intro":7,"introText":8,"seoTitle":6,"seoDescription":9,"essayCount":10,"indexable":11,"path":12},"trust-as-infrastructure","Trust as Infrastructure",null,"Signals, systems, networks, time, and resilience - and how they build on each other. The conventional wisdom on trust is wrong. This is the correction. Each article breaks down one assumption about authenticity, credibility, or signals... and rebuilds it from the ground up. Strategy for leaders who need credibility to actually hold.","The conventional wisdom on trust is wrong. This is the correction. Strategy for leaders who need credibility to actually hold.",17,true,"\u002Fwriting\u002Ftrust-as-infrastructure",{"slug":14,"name":15,"intro":7,"introText":16,"seoTitle":15,"seoDescription":17,"essayCount":18,"indexable":11,"path":19},"human-in-the-loop","Human in the Loop","AI won't replace your expertise. It will expose whether you had any. Personal essays from the professional middle: the judgment calls, identity questions, and uncomfortable moments that don't show up in the frameworks. For practitioners navigating the AI transition without a script.","AI won't replace your expertise. It will expose whether you had any. For practitioners navigating the AI transition without a script.",8,"\u002Fwriting\u002Fhuman-in-the-loop",{"slug":21,"name":22,"intro":7,"introText":23,"seoTitle":22,"seoDescription":24,"essayCount":25,"indexable":11,"path":26},"craft","Craft","The gap between what you intend to signal and what your audience actually receives is where trust dies. Practical reads on the visible layer: what your clients, readers, and critics see when they look, and how the thing got made that way. Because the strategy is only as good as what shows up on the other side.","The gap between what you intend to signal and what your audience actually receives is where trust dies. Practical reads on the visible layer, and how the work gets made.",12,"\u002Fwriting\u002Fcraft",{"slug":28,"name":29,"intro":7,"introText":30,"seoTitle":29,"seoDescription":31,"essayCount":32,"indexable":11,"path":33},"creative-technology","Creative Technology","Most of the interesting work happens at the seams between industries. The real-time engines built for games turn out to be what the water sector needed. Generative AI makes more sense as an org chart than as math. Notes from thirty years of pointing new tools at old problems, and watching what happens when someone aims them wrong.","Where new tools meet old problems. Real-time engines for the water sector, generative AI as an org chart, and how to aim technology at the right target.",5,"\u002Fwriting\u002Fcreative-technology",{"essay":35,"related":211},{"slug":36,"title":37,"subtitle":7,"excerpt":38,"publishAt":39,"topic":40,"heroId":41,"path":42,"body":43,"bodyText":133,"seoTitle":134,"seoDescription":38,"canonicalUrl":7,"dateUpdated":135,"citations":136},"bots-past-half","Bots now outnumber people online, and your metrics still count them as readers","Bots are now 53% of web traffic, so a reach number counts people, scrapers and AI agents together and can't tell you which is which.","2026-11-03T13:00:00.000Z",{"slug":28,"name":29},"2b87170c-c22a-4bba-9169-0f07b03b9c89","\u002Fwriting\u002Fcreative-technology\u002Fbots-past-half",{"type":44,"children":45},"root",[46,54,59,64,71,76,81,86,92,97,102,107,113,118,123,128],{"type":47,"tag":48,"props":49,"children":50},"element","p",{},[51],{"type":52,"value":53},"text","In September 2021, Apple shipped a privacy feature for its Mail app, and email open rates started looking better than anyone had thought they'd be. Mail Privacy Protection fetches each message in advance and loads its tracking pixel whether or not a person ever reads it. The \"open rate\", a number newsletter teams had reported upward every week for years, quietly began counting a piece of software as a reader. Plenty of dashboards didn't flag the change. The line went up, and people took the credit.",{"type":47,"tag":48,"props":55,"children":56},{},[57],{"type":52,"value":58},"That was one metric, bent by one company. This year it happened to all of them.",{"type":47,"tag":48,"props":60,"children":61},{},[62],{"type":52,"value":63},"Thales, which sells bot protection, puts bots at 53% of internet traffic in 2025 and people at 47%. Cloudflare said it in plainer words on 30 September: \"This year, for the first time, more than half of Internet traffic wasn't human.\" In March, Cloudflare's chief executive, Matthew Prince, had told SXSW he expected the crossing in 2027. His own network reported it six months later, though a forecast and a blog post may not be measuring the same thing.",{"type":47,"tag":65,"props":66,"children":68},"h2",{"id":67},"reach-now-counts-machines-along-with-people",[69],{"type":52,"value":70},"Reach now counts machines along with people",{"type":47,"tag":48,"props":72,"children":73},{},[74],{"type":52,"value":75},"A reach number is now a weather reading. It tells you how much attention your site and your posts drew from anything with a network connection, and it says little about how many people were in that attention. Sessions, impressions, clicks and opens all add up visits the same way they did when nearly every visit had a person behind it. The crowd changed behind the math.",{"type":47,"tag":48,"props":77,"children":78},{},[79],{"type":52,"value":80},"The machines in that crowd work hard to look like us. Thales finds that 41% of bot attacks run through Chrome to appear legitimate, and the agents now arriving copy human habits closely enough that the old tells stopped working. PYMNTS, citing CNBC in its report on Reddit's crackdown, describes software \"mimicking conversational patterns, posting cadences and engagement habits that previously served as exclusive markers of human activity.\" The filters under a dashboard catch the clumsy ones. The rest still get counted.",{"type":47,"tag":48,"props":82,"children":83},{},[84],{"type":52,"value":85},"Some of the machines are working for people, and that's harder to sort out. Cloudflare calls AI agents \"a second audience,\" made of \"software acting on behalf of people,\" and says they \"sit somewhere between humans and traditional bots.\" Daily requests from agents on its network grew by more than 1,700% in a year. That agent traffic \"follows human routines, with a weekly rhythm and a dip over the summer holidays,\" because a person sent it to compare insurance quotes or book a table. A visit on your dashboard can be a scraper, a fraud run or a customer's errand, and all three draw the same line.",{"type":47,"tag":65,"props":87,"children":89},{"id":88},"its-in-the-numbers-you-pay-for",[90],{"type":52,"value":91},"It's in the numbers you pay for",{"type":47,"tag":48,"props":93,"children":94},{},[95],{"type":52,"value":96},"It would be comforting if this stayed in raw web traffic, where platforms and analytics tools filter out a lot of it before anyone sees a report. Some of it does stay there. Meta's own annual filing estimates that less than 5% of its daily active people in late 2025 consisted only of accounts that broke its rules, and it adds that the real number \"may vary significantly from our estimates.\" Inside a platform that filters hard, the problem looks much smaller than the raw web suggests.",{"type":47,"tag":48,"props":98,"children":99},{},[100],{"type":52,"value":101},"It doesn't stay out of paid media, though. Lunio, which sells click-fraud protection, watched 2.7 billion paid clicks across six ad platforms between August 2024 and July 2025 with its blocking switched off, and counted 8.51% of them as invalid. On TikTok the rate was 24.20%; on LinkedIn, 19.88%. Invalid covers more than bots (the figure includes accidental clicks), and each was a click an advertiser could be billed for and no genuine user meant to make.",{"type":47,"tag":48,"props":103,"children":104},{},[105],{"type":52,"value":106},"I don't know your number, and neither do these vendors. Thales, Cloudflare, Lunio and HUMAN Security each measure their own networks, and each sells their own cure, which is a reason to hold their figures loosely while taking seriously the direction they all agree on. HUMAN's data has automated traffic growing about eight times faster than human traffic in 2025: 23.51% against 3.10%.",{"type":47,"tag":65,"props":108,"children":110},{"id":109},"what-a-business-as-usual-metric-hides",[111],{"type":52,"value":112},"What a business-as-usual metric hides",{"type":47,"tag":48,"props":114,"children":115},{},[116],{"type":52,"value":117},"That direction does the damage, because a total can hold steady while the people inside it leave. Cloudflare reports that in some of the most heavily crawled categories, retail, software and financial services among them, human traffic fell by as much as 40% in less than a year. A dashboard that showed flat sessions over that year would be showing a site trade its human readers for software, and calling it stability.",{"type":47,"tag":48,"props":119,"children":120},{},[121],{"type":52,"value":122},"This is where reporting reach as audience turns into a mistake with consequences. A media plan, a sponsorship rate or a head of marketing's bonus can rest on a number whose human share nobody in the room can state. When the share was 80% and holding, the error was small enough to ignore. At 47% and falling, the number has become a measure of how visible you are to machines, some of them working for your customers and most of them working for nobody you'd want to reach.",{"type":47,"tag":48,"props":124,"children":125},{},[126],{"type":52,"value":127},"The open rate went first, and the people who noticed in 2021 had a head start. Beehiiv, for one, now filters out the opens Apple's proxy inflates, to give its customers more realistic reports. Every other reach metric now needs the same suspicion, and most of them don't have a fix yet, since each one counts the same mixed crowd.",{"type":47,"tag":48,"props":129,"children":130},{},[131],{"type":52,"value":132},"The line on the dashboard still goes up. How many people are in it is now anyone's guess.","In September 2021, Apple shipped a privacy feature for its Mail app, and email open rates started looking better than anyone had thought they'd be. Mail Privacy Protection fetches each message in advance and loads its tracking pixel whether or not a person ever reads it. The \"open rate\", a number newsletter teams had reported upward every week for years, quietly began counting a piece of software as a reader. Plenty of dashboards didn't flag the change. The line went up, and people took the credit. That was one metric, bent by one company. This year it happened to all of them. Thales, which sells bot protection, puts bots at 53% of internet traffic in 2025 and people at 47%. Cloudflare said it in plainer words on 30 September: \"This year, for the first time, more than half of Internet traffic wasn't human.\" In March, Cloudflare's chief executive, Matthew Prince, had told SXSW he expected the crossing in 2027. His own network reported it six months later, though a forecast and a blog post may not be measuring the same thing. Reach now counts machines along with people A reach number is now a weather reading. It tells you how much attention your site and your posts drew from anything with a network connection, and it says little about how many people were in that attention. Sessions, impressions, clicks and opens all add up visits the same way they did when nearly every visit had a person behind it. The crowd changed behind the math. The machines in that crowd work hard to look like us. Thales finds that 41% of bot attacks run through Chrome to appear legitimate, and the agents now arriving copy human habits closely enough that the old tells stopped working. PYMNTS, citing CNBC in its report on Reddit's crackdown, describes software \"mimicking conversational patterns, posting cadences and engagement habits that previously served as exclusive markers of human activity.\" The filters under a dashboard catch the clumsy ones. The rest still get counted. Some of the machines are working for people, and that's harder to sort out. Cloudflare calls AI agents \"a second audience,\" made of \"software acting on behalf of people,\" and says they \"sit somewhere between humans and traditional bots.\" Daily requests from agents on its network grew by more than 1,700% in a year. That agent traffic \"follows human routines, with a weekly rhythm and a dip over the summer holidays,\" because a person sent it to compare insurance quotes or book a table. A visit on your dashboard can be a scraper, a fraud run or a customer's errand, and all three draw the same line. It's in the numbers you pay for It would be comforting if this stayed in raw web traffic, where platforms and analytics tools filter out a lot of it before anyone sees a report. Some of it does stay there. Meta's own annual filing estimates that less than 5% of its daily active people in late 2025 consisted only of accounts that broke its rules, and it adds that the real number \"may vary significantly from our estimates.\" Inside a platform that filters hard, the problem looks much smaller than the raw web suggests. It doesn't stay out of paid media, though. Lunio, which sells click-fraud protection, watched 2.7 billion paid clicks across six ad platforms between August 2024 and July 2025 with its blocking switched off, and counted 8.51% of them as invalid. On TikTok the rate was 24.20%; on LinkedIn, 19.88%. Invalid covers more than bots (the figure includes accidental clicks), and each was a click an advertiser could be billed for and no genuine user meant to make. I don't know your number, and neither do these vendors. Thales, Cloudflare, Lunio and HUMAN Security each measure their own networks, and each sells their own cure, which is a reason to hold their figures loosely while taking seriously the direction they all agree on. HUMAN's data has automated traffic growing about eight times faster than human traffic in 2025: 23.51% against 3.10%. What a business-as-usual metric hides That direction does the damage, because a total can hold steady while the people inside it leave. Cloudflare reports that in some of the most heavily crawled categories, retail, software and financial services among them, human traffic fell by as much as 40% in less than a year. A dashboard that showed flat sessions over that year would be showing a site trade its human readers for software, and calling it stability. This is where reporting reach as audience turns into a mistake with consequences. A media plan, a sponsorship rate or a head of marketing's bonus can rest on a number whose human share nobody in the room can state. When the share was 80% and holding, the error was small enough to ignore. At 47% and falling, the number has become a measure of how visible you are to machines, some of them working for your customers and most of them working for nobody you'd want to reach. The open rate went first, and the people who noticed in 2021 had a head start. Beehiiv, for one, now filters out the opens Apple's proxy inflates, to give its customers more realistic reports. Every other reach metric now needs the same suspicion, and most of them don't have a fix yet, since each one counts the same mixed crowd. The line on the dashboard still goes up. How many people are in it is now anyone's guess.","Bots passed half of web traffic, and your metrics missed it","2026-10-21T02:54:02.431Z",[137,145,148,156,159,162,165,168,176,179,186,193,201,204],{"role":138,"relevance":139,"citation":140},"anchor","Thales's own data sets the 53% bot and 47% human split for 2025.",{"rId":141,"title":142,"byline":143,"year":7,"url":144},"R5011","AI Bots are Changing the Rules: 2026 Thales Bad Bot Report","Thales Cloud Security Products","https:\u002F\u002Fcpl.thalesgroup.com\u002Fen-gb\u002Fnode\u002F52621",{"role":138,"relevance":146,"citation":147},"The 41% Chrome figure shows bots built to pass as ordinary browsers.",{"rId":141,"title":142,"byline":143,"year":7,"url":144},{"role":138,"relevance":149,"citation":150},"Cloudflare reports non-human traffic passed half in 2026, from its own network data with no method given.",{"rId":151,"title":152,"byline":153,"year":154,"url":155},"R5004","The Internet has a second audience","Matthew Conroy",2026,"https:\u002F\u002Fblog.cloudflare.com\u002Fagentic-web\u002F",{"role":138,"relevance":157,"citation":158},"Agents are named as a separate audience working for the people who sent them.",{"rId":151,"title":152,"byline":153,"year":154,"url":155},{"role":138,"relevance":160,"citation":161},"The 1,700% growth sizes how fast the agent audience arrived.",{"rId":151,"title":152,"byline":153,"year":154,"url":155},{"role":138,"relevance":163,"citation":164},"Agent traffic behaves like the people behind it, which is why a dashboard can't tell it apart.",{"rId":151,"title":152,"byline":153,"year":154,"url":155},{"role":138,"relevance":166,"citation":167},"Gives the ceiling for human traffic loss in the most crawled categories, set against the article's point that a flat total can hide it.",{"rId":151,"title":152,"byline":153,"year":154,"url":155},{"role":169,"relevance":170,"citation":171},"context","Prince's forecast shows the crossing arrived sooner than Cloudflare's own chief expected.",{"rId":172,"title":173,"byline":174,"year":154,"url":175},"R5026","Reddit Wants Users to Prove They Are Human","PYMNTS.com","https:\u002F\u002Fwww.pymnts.com\u002Fcybersecurity\u002F2026\u002Freddit-wants-you-to-prove-you-are-human\u002F",{"role":169,"relevance":177,"citation":178},"Shows agents copying human posting habits, so the old tells for spotting bots stop working.",{"rId":172,"title":173,"byline":174,"year":154,"url":175},{"role":138,"relevance":180,"citation":181},"Lunio's customer data puts invalid clicks, machine and accidental, inside paid media at 8.51% on average.",{"rId":182,"title":183,"byline":184,"year":7,"url":185},"R5053","The Global Invalid Traffic Report 2026","Lunio","https:\u002F\u002Fwww.lunio.ai\u002Fhubfs\u002FGlobal%20Invalid%20Traffic%20Report%202026.pdf",{"role":169,"relevance":187,"citation":188},"A fourth vendor, measuring growth rather than share, points the same way.",{"rId":189,"title":190,"byline":191,"year":7,"url":192},"R5047","The 2026 State of AI Traffic & Cyberthreat Benchmark Report","HUMAN Security","https:\u002F\u002Fwww.humansecurity.com\u002Fwp-content\u002Fuploads\u002FHUMAN_Report_2026-State-of-AI-Traffic-and-Cyberthreat-Benchmark.pdf",{"role":194,"relevance":195,"citation":196},"counterpoint","Meta's own estimate for a platform that filters hard is far smaller than the raw-web figures.",{"rId":197,"title":198,"byline":199,"year":154,"url":200},"R5059","Meta Platforms, Inc. Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2025","Meta Platforms, Inc. (filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission)","https:\u002F\u002Fwww.sec.gov\u002FArchives\u002Fedgar\u002Fdata\u002F1326801\u002F000162828026003942\u002Fmeta-20251231.htm",{"role":194,"relevance":202,"citation":203},"Meta concedes its own small figure is uncertain.",{"rId":197,"title":198,"byline":199,"year":154,"url":200},{"role":169,"relevance":205,"citation":206},"Apple's 2021 change is the earlier case of a reach metric that started counting machines.",{"rId":207,"title":208,"byline":209,"year":210,"url":7},"R0510","Impact of Apple MPP on Open Rates (And What To Track Instead)","Beehiiv",2025,[212,221,230],{"slug":213,"title":214,"subtitle":215,"excerpt":216,"publishAt":217,"topic":218,"heroId":219,"path":220},"propublica-strike-right-to-say-no-ai-tool","ProPublica's reporters struck for the right to say no to a tool","ProPublica's union walked out partly for the right to refuse an AI tool. It came back with a committee and a policy, and the difference lands on whoever signs the work.","ProPublica's reporters struck partly for the right to refuse an AI tool and came back with a committee. Only refusal protects the name on the story.","2026-10-27T12:00:00.000Z",{"slug":28,"name":29},"b0819707-ae0b-4381-8286-55cb7d48d651","\u002Fwriting\u002Fcreative-technology\u002Fpropublica-strike-right-to-say-no-ai-tool",{"slug":222,"title":223,"subtitle":224,"excerpt":225,"publishAt":226,"topic":227,"heroId":228,"path":229},"the-wrong-half-of-healthcare-got","The Wrong Half of Healthcare Got Automated","What happens when AI takes the clipboard instead of the conversation","Physicians spend twice as long on documentation as on patients. AI can change that — but only if we point it at the right problem.","2026-05-02T13:08:03.772Z",{"slug":28,"name":29},"8d5c2e1d-97f9-4739-af0b-ffce62c10cca","\u002Fwriting\u002Fcreative-technology\u002Fthe-wrong-half-of-healthcare-got",{"slug":231,"title":232,"subtitle":233,"excerpt":234,"publishAt":235,"topic":236,"heroId":237,"path":238},"beyond-the-surface","Beyond the Surface","Why ‘Blue Tech’ is the Next Frontier for Digital Twins and Spatial Computing","The real-time engines and digital twins built for games and film are exactly what the water sector needs, and almost nobody is working at that intersection. The gap is the opportunity.","2026-04-15T20:53:36.893Z",{"slug":28,"name":29},"0dd5224d-af91-4fb9-bb4d-ce11540adf27","\u002Fwriting\u002Fcreative-technology\u002Fbeyond-the-surface"]