Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future

About Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future

Welcome to Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future. I’m Douglas Stuart McDaniel—author, innovation veteran, and accidental urbanist—exploring the forces shaping the cities of tomorrow. It’s not just a conversation—it’s a call to action. Here, we challenge assumptions, explore bold ideas, and rethink what cities can be—both now and in the future. multiversethinking.substack.com (https://multiversethinking.substack.com/s/citizen-one-exploring-our-urban-future?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

Douglas Stuart McDaniel

Category

science · technology

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

19 Feb 2025

Latest episode

17 Sept 2026

Latest episodes

35 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   17 Sept 2026

   Citizen One S3-E1: Fragments of the Inexhaustible Well

   Welcome back to Season Three premiere episode of Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future. I’m your host, Douglas Stuart McDaniel. I’m really excited to be back after a long hot summer full of research, consulting work in Australia and New York, and a lot of writing and some exciting book launches. More about that later. In this episode, I want to start with a sound. Last year, I was living in a riad in the Bab al-Bahr quarter of Tangier — the Sea Gate quarter, where the medina tilts toward the Strait of Gibraltar — and the riad had a fountain in its courtyard. Andalusian. Maybe sixteenth century. Carried across the strait piece by piece by Moriscos fleeing the final years of the Spanish Inquisition, people who had lost everything and chose, inexplicably, to carry a fountain with them across an inhospitable sea. It wasn’t running when I arrived. The khadima — the caretaker, a woman who had tended that house for decades — told me it had gone dry some time ago. She didn’t explain why. She just made tea and looked at me with the patience of someone who had watched conquerors arrive before. That fountain — dry, cracked basin, dust collecting where water once moved — became the image I couldn’t let go of. And la khadima, standing in a courtyard she’d tended for forty-three years without ever appearing on the deed, became the first character in a novel I didn’t know I was going to write. This episode is about those six weeks in Tangier. What I left to get there. What I learned from being there. And the book that is coming out of that experience. I’m calling it Fragments of the Inexhaustible Well. And I’m not sure I’ve written anything that matters more to me. Let me back up. As most of you know, for more than four years before Tangier, I was working adjacent to one of the largest construction projects in human history. NEOM. The Line. The cognitive dissonance of that work — the genuine ambition, the genuine human cost, the gap between the renderings and the reality — was something I processed very slowly. You do, when you’re inside it. The pace is relentless. The scale is numbing. And everyone around you is brilliant and committed and moving too fast to ask the questions that will catch up with the project later. The longer version is that I left carrying questions I couldn’t answer in the context in which I’d been living. Questions about who cities are actually for. About who gets to build them and for whom. About what we lose when we optimize for all of the smart city tech we can imagine without human relationships and everything except continuity — the slow accumulation of meaning that turns spaces, even deserts, into places, and places into something people will cross a desert to reach. I needed somewhere old. Somewhere that had already been through this — through empires and occupations, through development projects and displacement, through the arrival of people who thought they understood it and the quiet persistence of people who actually did. I chose Tangier almost arbitrarily. A short flight from my home in Barcelona. A riad someone recommended. Six weeks, no plan, no agenda. The plan arrived, however, when the fountain stopped working and the city of Tangier became my teacher. Tangier is not what most people expect. The medina is smaller than the mythology suggests. The cafés, like Cafe Baba, where the Beats dissolved are full of Europeans performing bohemia for each other. The famous literary ghosts — Bowles, Burroughs, Kerouac — are everywhere and nowhere, a legacy of men who used the city as a backdrop for their own dissolution and called it literature. I say this not to dismiss them — Bowles especially was a serious writer — but because one of the things Tangier taught me is that the most interesting story in any city is rarely the one the foreigners told. It’s the one being lived by the people who stayed. The khadima stayed. Let’s call her Layla, which is who she is becoming in a novel I am writing. She has tended that riad for forty-three years. She cleans hash pipes and blood and cum and the wreckage of other people’s late night epiphanies. She watches Western writers arrive with their notebooks full of big ideas and leave with their photographs and their metaphors and their stories that never quite get her name right. “The western writers were always the worst,” she says in the novel. They wanted to understand, to listen, to honor. But they always ended up doing the same thing: twisting the city into metaphors they didn’t understand. She says that about fictional writers. But she was saying it to me, too. I felt it every day I sat in that courtyard. I could feel the imposter syndrome twisting in me like a strangler fig tree. The honest question — the one this novel forced me to sit with for six weeks, and then for many more months after — is: what gives any of us the right to tell a place’s story? What’s the difference between witness and extraction? Between documentation and appropriation? I don’t have a clean answer. I didn’t have one during my four years in Saudi Arabia. The novel doesn’t either. But it insists on asking, which I think is the minimum ethical requirement. Here’s what I was actually watching during those six weeks. Velocity. Tangier is a fulcrum city between continents — Africa facing Europe, Europe glancing back. Capital understands such cities. It arrives early. It arrives confidently. And it speaks the language of inevitability. Cranes over nearby hillsides. Luxury residential towers stepping toward the Strait. Marketing copy promising Mediterranean light and proximity to authenticity. Port expansions positioned as gateways to continental growth. You can stand on the edges of the medina and the kasbah and see the cranes of progress all around you. You can stand in a half-finished tower and look down at the tiled roofs and realize exactly what is being monetized. I’ve seen this pattern before. In Vancouver, a super-luxury residential tower was pre-sold to global investors at peak pricing — floor after floor marketed as scarcity in the sky. The narrative was simple: park capital in a stable city, ride the appreciation. Then the market shifted, and some early buyers found they could not resell without taking massive losses against their pre-sale contracts. When luxury housing becomes a financial instrument first and shelter second, volatility is inevitable. What’s less discussed is who absorbs the ripple effects. Construction labor is already paid. Local services have already scaled. Municipalities have already counted on projected tax flows. Meanwhile, the units sit dark or trade at a discount that destabilizes adjacent markets. In parts of Dubai, towers rise at extraordinary speed, financed by global capital seeking security and spectacle. Some succeed. Some stall. The skyline becomes a barometer of liquidity. Then a war happens, and all bets are off. In London, entire clusters of ultra-prime residential units have been marketed to overseas buyers as safe deposit boxes in the sky, while housing affordability for local residents continues to strain policy and politics. In New York City, Billionaires’ Row is a vertical indictment of progress: astonishing engineering, astonishing vacancy at certain price tiers, and years of owner litigation over the quality of what was actually delivered. Global capital searches for yield. It prefers regulatory gaps, emerging narratives, places described as “next.” It moves faster than local governance frameworks can evolve. It externalizes risk when possible and securitizes upside when convenient. And the language is always optimistic. Regeneration. Revitalization. World-class positioning. I am not anti-development. I’ve spent years around megaprojects. I believe cities need housing, infrastructure, jobs, ambition. I believe in growth. What I question is the sequencing. Who absorbs the early disruption? Who captures the late-stage upside? Who is visible in the pro forma? Who exists only in the footnotes? In Tangier, the juxtaposition is almost theatrical. A centuries-old neighborhood operating on dense, relational economics below. A hillside of speculative vertical capital above. Two systems layered on the same slope. I was thinking about cities across the Global South — from West Africa to Southeast Asia — facing demographic pressure, climate volatility, and the gravitational pull of international investment. Many of them are younger in regulatory terms. Their land governance systems are still forming. Their infrastructure is already strained. There is a narrow window in places like these. They can replicate the extractive template — build enclaves priced for external buyers, promise trickle-down effects, retrofit equity later — or they can hard-code value retention from the beginning. Land strategies that limit speculative hoarding. Water systems sized first for existing residents. Mixed-income housing embedded in the capital stack, not appended as a political concession. Public return requirements tied to private gain. It is accounting. Drinking water before luxury pools, equitable labour contracts before renderings, and recognition of the fact that once value is siphoned out of a place it rarely finds its way back to the people who anchored it. The cranes were signals. That this city, like Vancouver at peak pre-sale exuberance, like London in its offshore boom years, like Dubai during liquidity surges — is being folded into a global development logic that rewards speed and punishes hesitation. Tangier will grow. The question is whether it can grow without lifting itself off the ground that gives it strength, whether it can anchor capital to care, and whether it can insist that investment leaves behind durable systems. That is an inflection point, and not only for Tangier. It is a generation of cities deciding who they are willing to become. TANGER MED. There is something else about Tangier I keep returning to. The real port is no longer in the city. Forty kilometers east is Tanger Med Port. It is enormous. Concrete, steel, container stacks, rail lines cutting inland. Ships move in and out on tight schedules. Everything there feels calibrated. Efficient. It is Morocco plugged directly into global trade. It works. Back in Tangier, the old harbor has been reimagined. The heavy cargo is gone. The fishing fleet is smaller. Cruise ships dock where freighters once idled. Around the basin, new condominiums rise with uninterrupted sea views. Balconies face Spain. The marina is immaculate. The working port moved east. The image stayed behind. I walked the edge of the marina one afternoon. It was quiet in that curated way new waterfronts often are. Stone paving. Clean lines. A row of yachts sitting perfectly still in water that used to hold trawlers and rusted hulls. I lifted my camera. A security guard appeared beside me almost immediately. “No photos.” I asked why. “Private.” He wasn’t aggressive. Just certain. His job was to enforce a boundary that did not used to exist. What struck me was the enclosure. The harbour had become something to look at. The fences were subtle, the access points controlled. The water was still there and the relationship to it had changed. Ports are usually messy places. They are about movement and labor. They smell like fuel and salt and effort. They belong to the city even when they are state-owned. You can feel the exchange taking place. Here, the exchange has been relocated to Tanger Med. Out of sight. Out of the urban fabric. The old waterfront now performs a different role. It signals prosperity. It reassures investors. It photographs well — if you are allowed to take the photograph. A city of Tangier’s scale needs a port like Tanger Med. The old harbour could not handle that volume forever. Infrastructure evolves. But when the functional heart of a city is moved away and the historic edge is refitted for capital storage, something shifts in the civic balance. The waterfront stops being a threshold and becomes a product. That afternoon, I kept thinking about who gets to occupy that edge without explanation. The yachts were empty. The balconies unlit. The security presence was the most visible sign of activity. It was quiet, and the quiet felt like the future if cities aren’t careful: engines pushed outward, value concentrated at the centre, public space slowly rewritten as private frontage. Just a sign that says: no photos. I need to say something here about the two countries on either side of that water, because I love them both, and this summer they were made to look ridiculous by people who love neither. Barcelona is where I live. Tangier is where I spent six weeks in a house with a dry fountain. From the roof of that house you can see Spain. It is fourteen kilometres. On a clear evening the lights on the other side come on before the ones on your own street do. Thirty kilometres east along that same coast is Ceuta. Spanish territory since the seventeenth century, on the African shore, with a fence around it and Morocco on the other side. On the thirtieth of July, somewhere north of seventy thousand people went into the water and swam for it. The Spanish government said fifty thousand at first. The press reported sixty. Spanish authorities later revised the figure to around seventy-two thousand, over roughly two days. The mayor of Ceuta, Juan Jesús Vivas, has said at least a hundred people died. The early reports said fifty-seven. It is the largest single arrival of its kind Europe has seen, and the number is still moving. Now here is why I am telling you about it in an episode about a courtyard in Tangier. None of those people were lied to by a government. They were lied to by a post. On the eighth of July, Spain’s Supreme Court ruled on a narrow procedural question: whether the summary return of migrants applies to people who arrive by sea rather than over a physical barrier. The answer was technical and it was mostly about what counts as a border. Within about two weeks, an Arabic-language version of that ruling was circulating in Morocco saying the Spanish courts had opened the door. The Spanish fact-checking organisation Maldita.es, working inside the European IBERIFIER network, traced how it moved. Facebook groups for recruitment. WhatsApp for the logistics. Some of the groups were already running before any of this, and some of them look connected to people who traffic human beings for money. One of the lines that travelled furthest was a sentence of five words: Ceuta is becoming an open door. Another said: on the thirtieth of July, we will launch an attack on Ceuta. A hundred people are dead because of a misreading of an administrative footnote, amplified by accounts that made money on the traffic. That is the first absurdity. Here is the second. Spanish Prime Minister Sánchez has accused networks linked to Russia, to Israel, and to the international far right of spreading and amplifying that disinformation. Both Russia and Israel deny it. He has also said his intelligence services found no evidence of direct Moroccan government involvement — which is notable, because the mayor of Ceuta has suggested the opposite, and Spanish officials have been quoted saying the usual Moroccan patrols were not on the other side of that border in the days before it happened. Reporting in the Guardian links that to Moroccan irritation at Spanish conversations with Algeria, which backs self-determination in Western Sahara. I want to be precise about which of those claims are which. The disinformation is documented by fact-checkers with receipts. The foreign-state attribution is an accusation by a government, denied by the accused, and I have not seen it independently established. Those are different classes of evidence and I am not going to launder one into the other. And then the third absurdity, which is the one that actually tells you what this was for. Within twenty-four hours, Italy suspended its Schengen arrangements with Spain. Spain suspended them back a week later. The Czech prime minister called for Spain’s Schengen membership to be suspended outright. Denmark’s prime minister wanted all options on the table. Twenty-two of the twenty-seven EU heads of government signed a joint letter — coordinated by Italy and Denmark — about instrumentalised migration and hybrid threats. Every one of those governments knew, because the European Commissioner for migration said so publicly on the thirty-first of July, that not a single person had crossed from Ceuta to mainland Europe. Ceuta is not in the Schengen area. It never has been. Spain has kept identity checks on the boats and planes out of it since 1991. So a country was threatened with expulsion from a zone the incident did not touch, over a border that does not connect to it, on the strength of a lie about a court ruling, while a hundred bodies were still being recovered from the strait. Sánchez called the response driven by prejudice, fake news, ignorance, or political interest. I would not have been that generous. Two governments that need each other more than either likes to admit spent August blaming each other, while a third set of actors, some of them European heads of state, monetised the embarrassment for domestic consumption. Nobody involved in that argument was in the water. And then there was my inbox. In the ten days after the thirtieth of July, nearly a dozen Americans I know sent me direct messages asking whether Barcelona was safe, whether the city had been overrun, whether I was thinking about coming home. Several sent the same video. One asked in earnest whether I had somewhere to go. Nobody crossed from Ceuta to mainland Spain. The European Commissioner for migration said so publicly on the thirty-first of July. My street in the Raval that week was what it is every week in August, which is too hot, half-shuttered, and full of people who live here. The footage did its work anyway, eight thousand kilometres from the water, on people I know who now believe a Spanish invasion is happening. By the middle of August, the same accounts and a batch of new ones were promoting the fifteenth as the next window. Everything will become clear on this day. Hundreds went to the border anyway. There is a photograph from the second of August, taken at Bab Ceuta, near the village of fuh nay dek. It is families of missing migrants, standing at the fence, looking through it at the other side. That is fourteen kilometres of water and two thousand years of crossing it, and this summer we managed to make it a con tent problem. This is the novel’s central infrastructure argument: development as slow violence. The quiet severing — the aquifer drained, the drainage clogged, the connections cut between a place and the systems that sustained it. The mythic version comes from my draft Prologue, where the city of Tangier speaks in her own ancient voice — as Tingi, daughter of Atlas, named for the Berber goddess who predates the Greek mythology the colonizers layered on top. She invokes Antaeus. The Libyan giant who drew his strength from the earth itself, who could not be defeated while his feet touched the ground. Hercules defeated him by lifting him into the air. That, the novel argues, is what development does to communities. Lifts them from the ground that sustained them. And calls it progress. A good novel begins with people. Here’s who I was watching. There was a young man — I call him Youssef in the novel — who lived in Bir Chifa, an informal settlement six kilometers from the medina on roads that went from pavement to gravel to dust. He walked it twice a day when he had work in the old city. He was twenty-three years old, caring for his grandmother who had walked across the Sahara to reach him, managing her insulin on a budget that left nothing for error. He had been approached by men at the port who offered him a way out of that box — if he’d carry things he wasn’t supposed to carry. The character of Youssef becomes the novel’s argument about persistence made physical. His six-kilometre walk, every day, is the shape of his life. And watching him make it — watching the daily endurance of someone who has no good options and chooses the hard one anyway — taught me more about urban resilience than any report I’ve ever read. Another character, Margot, is a British journalist who had broken important stories about labor exploitation in Gulf megaprojects, watched nothing change, and come to Tangier to write a book she couldn’t seem to start. The paralysis of the witness who no longer believes witnessing changes anything. I knew this paralysis. I’d felt it. She became the novel’s self-examination — the meta-commentary on its own project. And there was the American. An infrastructure director who had left a Gulf megaproject carrying a folder of photographs he’d never opened. Seventeen names from a construction accident he’d been senior enough to sit in the room for, not senior enough to prevent. He carried this guilt to Tangier — to a city that had its own accumulation of foreign decisions and their consequences — and he had to figure out what to do with it. I don’t want to be too transparent about which character carried which fragment of my own experience. Fiction doesn’t work that way. But I will say: all four of the novel’s main characters arrived in Tangier carrying something they couldn’t put down and didn’t know how to carry. Six weeks is not enough time to understand a city. It is enough time to begin to understand what you don’t understand. Tangier taught me several things I’ve been unable to unlearn. Cities accumulate. The medina contains Roman drainage beneath Andalusian water channels beneath Ottoman additions beneath French modifications beneath Moroccan independence beneath global capital’s current claims. At any given moment, you are standing on all of it. Development that ignores this, that treats a place as a clean site for a new vision, always fails to account for the weight of what it’s building on. The ground remembers. The second: care is a form of knowledge. Layla knew that riad in ways that no engineer’s survey, no developer’s assessment, no architectural rendering could capture. She knew where the plaster failed in wet winters and where it held. She knew the drainage the city forgot. She knew the crack that had been spreading since the 1960 earthquake and how fast it moved. This knowledge — accumulated through decades of daily tending — is not recorded anywhere. It disappears when the caretaker is displaced. And it cannot be rebuilt. It can only be recognized before it’s lost. The third, and hardest: persistence is not the same as winning. The novel’s central philosophy — one I’m still working out — is that care without outcome is still meaningful. That you tend the fountain even when you know the aquifer is being drained. That you walk six kilometers even when the job might not be there. That you write the story even when you’re not sure it changes anything. That is a different definition of what matters. The cities that survive — still there, still lived in, still argued over, still loved — are the ones where people kept going when going made no obvious sense. They refused to stop. The novel’s closing image is the fountain, running again. Thinly. Uncertainly. On borrowed time. But running. The khadima knows it’s borrowed time. She tends it anyway. Fragments of the Inexhaustible Well is a novel about Tangier — specifically the medina, the Bab al-Bahr quarter, the fictional Horizon development project on the hillside, and the approaching Mediterranean storm that forces all its plots toward each other. Four main characters: Layla the khadima, Truman the American infrastructure director, Margot the British journalist, Youssef the young man from Bir Chifa. Plus Aminata, Youssef’s grandmother, who crossed the Sahara and may be the wisest character in the book. Plus the city itself — Tingi, speaking in the Prologue and Epilogue in her own ancient voice, reclaiming her Berber identity from the layers of mythology colonizers deposited on top of it. It’s a climate fiction novel — a medicane, a rare Mediterranean double hurricane, hits Tangier at the novel’s center and tears everything open. But it’s climate fiction without polemic. The storm is catastrophic and observed. The infrastructure failures are systemic. No one gives a speech about it. It’s a migration novel — Youssef and Aminata’s journey across the Sahara sits in the background, surfacing in fragments. Truman’s complicity in Gulf construction deaths. Margot’s journalism about labor exploitation. The novel is full of people who have been moved by forces larger than themselves and are trying to find where they belong after. And it’s an ethics-of-witness novel. Margot’s paralysis — the journalist who broke the story and watched nothing change — is the novel’s most direct examination of what writing can and cannot do. The city’s Epilogue directly addresses the Beats: “They thought they could write me down and carry me away, pressed between pages like a flower dried and preserved. But I am not a flower\... I am not their metaphor. I am my own meaning.” I wrote that line thinking about myself. About everyone who comes to a place with a notebook and leaves with a manuscript. This show is called Citizen One. Exploring our cities, ourselves, and our uncertain yet extraordinary future. Here’s what six weeks in Tangier contributed to that project. We talk a lot about smart cities. About cities of the future. About what urban life will look like when AI and climate change and global migration have fully remade the conditions we thought were permanent. Tangier is a city that has already been through this. Phoenician, Roman, Vandal, Byzantine, Arab, Portuguese, Spanish, French, British, and finally Moroccan — each wave arriving with its technologies and its certainties, its plans for what this place would become. Each wave eventually receding. The city persisting. What persisted was the infrastructure of daily care, which is not what anyone planned. The drainage channels. The water systems. The riad’s knowledge of its own plaster. The khadima’s accumulated understanding of what holds and what fails. When we imagine cities of the future, we tend to imagine new systems. New technology. New forms. What Tangier argues, quietly, through a dry fountain and a tended courtyard, is that the most resilient thing in any city is the knowledge embedded in the people who stayed and kept going when going seemed futile. That knowledge is not valued in how we build. It is not in the models or the renderings, and it barely appears in the reports. The novel is, among other things, an argument that it should be. The fountain was running when I left. Not strongly. Youssef — the real person who became Youssef — had found the blocked connection, cleared it, and the aquifer was still depleted but enough water was getting through to make the basin move. The khadima stood in the courtyard watching it. She didn’t smile. She just watched. I asked her whether she thought it would last. She thought about this for a long time. Then she said something my translator rendered as: “It will last as long as it lasts. And then we’ll tend it again.” I’ve been thinking about that sentence for fourteen months. Fragments of the Inexhaustible Well is still a work in progress. If you want to follow the manuscript’s journey toward publication, that story will unfold here on Citizen One as it happens. First drafts. Agent submissions. Rejections, hopefully acceptances, and whatever comes after. And if anything in this episode connects with your own work on cities, on infrastructure, on the ethics of development and witness — I’d like to hear from you. This is the conversation I came to Tangier to start. It didn’t end when I left. It’s barely beginning. This has been Citizen One. Exploring Our Urban Future. Welcome to Season Three. I’m Douglas Stuart McDaniel. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit multiversethinking.substack.com (https://multiversethinking.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

2. 

   22 Jul 2026

   Citizen One S2-E16 – Suburb City

   There’s a gospel choir on the record I’m releasing this month. Consider this podcast episode the release party. Sixteen voices, brass underneath, a room you can hear the size of. It comes in about two-thirds of the way through a song called “F**k That Family,” which is about the people who chose you back — the ones who aren’t blood and set a place for you anyway. That choir doesn’t exist. I typed a description of what I wanted at my kitchen table in Barcelona at four in the morning, and waited about ninety seconds. I’ve spent years on the other side of the glass, producing music videos for working regional acts. I know what a record costs at that level. A sixteen-piece choir with a horn section is a five-figure day before anyone has mixed anything. No regional act in Europe can afford it. Not one. I didn’t hire anything. This week’s episode is about what happens next. And I should say at the top what I say at the top of the episode: I’m not a neutral party in this. Normally on this show I’m at some distance from what I’m covering — somebody built a thing, somebody sold a thing, somebody got displaced, and I go find out what happened and why it matters. Not this time. This time I’m the one who did it. I’m putting myself on trial here. What I made Eight songs. About forty hours. It’s called Suburb City, by 50 Minute Hour. It’s a concept album — one narrator, multiple voices, one town, eight chapters. It’s heavy on Gen-X angst, anthems, and catharsis. And it is very personal to me, made with love and care — by me and the machine. That’s the contradiction. There’s a Music Man patter parody about the therapy industry, sung by a huckster selling wounds instead of pool tables. A waltz in three-four where every argument resolves into you misremembered. An orchestral lament about three attempts to leave a marriage, each one interrupted. A gospel showstopper. A rockabilly strut about resigning from the position of designated family failure. Glam rock. Pop punk. And a rock opera anthem set in a tower where everyone who ever damaged you lives on a different floor, and you’re the one paying the heating bill. Every word is mine. Every arrangement decision is mine. I knew exactly what I wanted each song to do and I iterated until it did it. And every single performance on that record was generated. All of it. There is not one human being on it besides me, and I don’t sing. It was made with love, passion, and commitment — and it would not exist otherwise. No budget, no band, no time. I’ve wanted to write music since I was fifteen, which is also the year I won a national poetry prize for a parody of Shakespeare. Act Two, Scene Seven of As You Like It. The one about all the world being a stage. What it replaced Here’s the part I haven’t heard anyone in my position say out loud. That record replaced a session drummer. It replaced a bass player. A guitarist. A horn section. A sixteen-member gospel choir. A tracking engineer. A mix engineer. A mastering engineer. Nine or ten paid jobs. Forty hours. Zero pounds, euros, or dollars. I want to be precise about the verb, because it matters. I didn’t evaluate those people and decide I could do without them. I didn’t audition anyone and find them wanting. I couldn’t. I skipped them, because skipping them was available. That’s the real story of the last three years, and almost nobody is telling it straight — least of all people like me. The wrong question In November of last year, Deezer and Ipsos ran the biggest study anyone’s run on this. Nine thousand people, eight countries. They played them music and asked whether it was made by a human or a machine. Ninety-seven percent got it wrong. That number has been in every article about this for eight months. It’s in open letters. It’s in policy submissions. It gets cited by the people worried about all this as proof of a crisis, and by the people building these tools as proof of arrival. Both sides love it, which should be your first clue that something’s off. Because here’s what that study actually measured: detection. Can you tell? And I’d ask you — when have you ever chosen music that way? Think about the last song you loved. Did you love it because you correctly identified the production chain? Did you put it on and think, ah yes, session players, analogue desk, human hands? Or was there autotune on it? Pitch correction? Stem separation? AI plug-ins in Logic or Pro Tools or Ableton that plenty of musicians use and nobody discloses? The questions people actually ask are much older and much simpler. Did you like it. Was it any good. Did whoever made this work hard at it. Nobody has tested any of those. Not once. Every blind test that’s been run compares different songs, by different writers, and asks people to spot the machine. Which leaves the biggest variable in music — the writing — completely loose. If a listener prefers the human track, was that the performance? Or did they just prefer the song? Eight months of argument, thousands of pages of policy, platform bans, lawsuits. And the entire evidentiary basis is a study that answered a question nobody asks. The books on the shelf I’ve watched this happen before. Several times. I started using Photoshop at version one, in 1989, before it had layers. Then PageMaker, QuarkXPress, Freehand, Illustrator, InDesign. I watched nonlinear editing arrive and empty out the flatbed rooms — rooms full of people who cut film with their hands, and then those rooms were storage. I watched desktop publishing kill typesetting. I used Linotronic typesetters, wax, and brayers in print shops when I was fifteen, doing paste-ups for my high school paper at the Landrum News Leader in Landrum, South Carolina. An entire skilled trade, with apprenticeships and specialists and decades of accumulated knowledge, gone in about ten years. Nobody voted on that. Nobody consulted the typesetters. But here’s the part of that history I’ve never heard anyone bring into this argument. The design annuals. If you worked in a corporate graphics department any time between about 1975 and 2005, you know exactly what I mean. Every January the department ordered the books. Communication Arts. Print. The Type Directors Club annual. The AIGA annuals. Beautiful, hardbound, ninety dollars a pop, full of the year’s award-winning work. Nobody bought them to be inspired. You bought them so that when a client needed a quarterly newsletter by Thursday, your in-house designer could open to page eighty-four, find the layout that won a gold medal in Chicago, and rebuild it with the client’s logo on it. That was the job. That was how in-house design got made, at scale, across an entire industry, for thirty years. The award-winning designers knew. Everybody knew. The annuals kept selling. So let’s call it what it was: a training corpus with a spine and a dust jacket and a purchase order attached. And we called it professional development, and nobody in forty years called it theft. Now — here’s where the analogy breaks, and I don’t skip past it in the episode, because if I did the whole thing would be a cheap shot. Scale and consent. The annuals were a transaction. Somebody got paid. The designers submitted their work knowing what the book was and what it was for. Ninety dollars changed hands and everybody understood the arrangement. What happened with these models is neither of those things. Nobody submitted. Nobody was paid. The scale isn’t a bookshelf — it’s most of recorded human output. That difference is real and it’s the strongest argument the other side has. I’m not waving it away. What Bowie saw In June of 2002, David Bowie told the New York Times that music was about to become like running water, or electricity. A utility. That copyright would no longer exist in ten years, and the only unique situation left would be showing up and playing it in a room. You’d better be prepared, he said, for doing a lot of touring. That’s four years before Spotify was founded. Everybody treated it as the eccentric talking. He was mostly right, and very early. Copyright didn’t die — he got that part wrong, and I’ll own it on his behalf. But the utility, and the touring, and the collapse of the recording as the thing you sell: all of that happened. And he’d already acted on it. In 1997 he raised fifty-five million dollars against his own future royalties — twenty-five albums, two hundred and eighty-seven songs, everything before 1990. Took the money up front. Used it to buy back his masters from his former manager. Napster launched two years later. By 2004, Moody’s had cut the rating to one notch above junk. He wasn’t predicting AI. He was predicting something more useful: that the recording was never going to be the valuable part. The room was. The part nobody’s campaigning about Almost all of the public argument about AI and music is about voices. That’s not an accident — vocals are the part a non-musician can point at, and there’s a real emotional charge to a synthetic person singing to you about their feelings. But the work that’s actually disappearing is quieter and further down. It’s the second guitarist who came up with the part that made the chorus work. It’s the drummer who played it four times and the fourth one was the one. It’s the engineer who’s been mixing for twenty years and knows, without thinking about it, that the second chorus needs the snare pulled back four milliseconds or the whole thing sits wrong. None of that is legible to a listener. All of it is why records sound like records. There’s no open letter about the person who knew which room to book. So here’s what I want to do about it The album is licensed Creative Commons, attribution only. All eight songs. Free. Any musician, any band, any producer who wants to take one of these songs and rebuild it with human beings — players, singers, tracking, mixing, mastering, the whole chain — it’s yours. The words are mine and the structure is mine. Everything else is negotiable. Change the melody. Change the tempo. Change the genre entirely. Turn the waltz into a dirge. Turn the gospel number into a punk song. I’m not precious about anything except the words, and honestly I’ll argue about those if you make a good case. Credit me as the writer and it’s yours. Record it, release it, sell it, play it live. I’m not asking permission back. Then both versions go up. Same page, same player, level-matched, unlabeled. And listeners answer one question. Not can you tell. Which one would you play again? That’s it. That’s the whole idea. And the reason it’s worth doing is that it controls for the thing every previous test left wide open — same words, same songs, same writer. The only variable that changes is who, or what, performed it. Whatever difference shows up is the value of human musicianship, measured. Not asserted in an open letter. Measured. And whatever comes back, I publish. If the human version is better, that goes up. If it isn’t, that goes up too. Why I actually care There’s a song on this record about a woman who died. She was my wife for a long time, and then she wasn’t, and then eighteen months after I finally got out, the phone rang. There’s another song with a spoken passage in the middle of it. It’s a sentence somebody said to me across a kitchen table, more or less word for word, and I put it in because it was true and because I’d never been able to explain it to anyone otherwise. The machine sings both of those beautifully. Pitch is perfect. Phrasing is right. Every note where it should be. It doesn’t mean it. And I honestly don’t know whether that’s a real thing I’m hearing, or whether it’s sentiment — whether I just know what’s underneath those songs and I’m supplying the weight myself. Nobody knows. That’s the whole point. Nobody has checked. Bowie said the room was the thing. I don’t have a room. The songs are yours — Creative Commons, attribution only. I’d like to hear somebody mean it. 🎧 Listen to the full episode above. 🎵 The album is here: www.citizenone.world/suburbcity (https://www.citizenone.world/suburbcity) Citizen One — Exploring Our Urban Future. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit multiversethinking.substack.com (https://multiversethinking.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

3. 

   1 Jul 2026

   Introducing the Book Trailer for Scions of the Last Hope, by M. Van Shamrai

   Friends, I want to tell you what we just pulled off, because most of you have watched me build toward it for a while and I think it finally matters. Premium Pulp Fiction, my indie traditional publishing startup within the Citizen One World ecosystem, just brought our first Ukrainian novel into English. The new novel is Scions of the Last Hope by M. Van Shamrai, launching August 1. You can pre-order the book today at www.scionsofthelasthope.com (http://www.scionsofthelasthope.com) . Maks wrote it in the Eastern European literary SF tradition: think Glukhovsky as the near comparison, the Strugatskys and Lem as the ceiling. This is not Anglo-American genre fiction wearing a translation. It’s the real thing, and Kirkus saw it. Their Indie review called it “a vividly imagined multi-dimensional intergalactic romp of a space novel” — and then delivered the line I can’t stop grinning about: “(Van) Shamrai’s characters are a lot more grounded than the menagerie of spacefaring malcontents George Lucas populated the Mos Eisley cantina with.” More grounded than George Lucas. For an indie debut in translation, that’s the review you hope for and rarely get. But the review isn’t really the point I want to make to this group. You know how challenging the book world can be. What I want you to see is the next-gen machine I am building within it. Start with the book itself, because this is where most presses cut corners and where I refuse to compromise. Every PPF author gets the full editorial chain, fully funded: developmental edits, line edits, copyediting, and proofreading, then layout and interior design and original cover design. And here’s what I think is genuinely unique — I’m in it with them while they’re still drafting. Writing coaching and AI-assisted research through the draft and the rewrite, not just cleanup after the manuscript lands on my desk. I’m a creative partner from the blank page forward. Then the apparatus around the finished book, all of it at no cost to the author: trailers cut in-house. A companion wiki — a full Field Guide wiki companion web site with 150+ illustrated glossary entries, character pages, the works. A training program for launch and ongoing Instagram and TikTok carousel campaigns, nearly a hundred custom slides on a locked visual spec. A blurb operation reaching leading authors in the field. Trade review submissions. Award pathways. A PR and marketing ecosystem a debut novelist could never assemble alone and most small presses simply don’t support. I built this the hard way — on my own books first. Ghost Emperor was the canary in the coal mine, the first live test of the systems. The Southern civic noir trilogy (Bloodwater, Defiance, and The Dark Water Gospel) stress-tested the rest. I chose to make the mistakes on my own titles, including overpaying for obsolete book marketing programs, so I wouldn’t make them on someone else’s. My AI-powered publishing, PR, marketing and back-end royalty reporting systems are finally in place, proven, and running. That’s the model: IP-first, adaptation-second, full funding, never charging an author for production or distribution, and staying in it for the long haul with à la carte marketing systems rather than one launch week window. A real alternative to both the Big Five and the pay-to-play hybrids. Here’s my ask. I have new authors I have yet to announce — in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. But I’m always looking for the next one. If you know an emerging writer looking for a publishing partner who will actually build the whole apparatus around their work — and be in the room from the first draft — send them my way. Always glad to talk it through with any of you directly. Doug This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit multiversethinking.substack.com (https://multiversethinking.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

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• Ryan Short
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• Eunjeong Seong
• Olivier Pron
• Marcella del Signore

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