Money, as far as I can tell, is effort that has changed hands. The singer puts it in, the buyer pays for it, and a student pays in a different currency, attention and time. That's why I think knowledge should be free and education should cost. A book can arrive in the mail for nothing.

So I measured my work by other people. Everything I made went out to be graded. When the grade was good, I lived on it for a day. When it was quiet, I decided the work had no value. I called myself an impostor. I told myself I was not good enough, and I said it so often it stopped sounding like an opinion.

I've got two jobs. One of them, nobody would call a job: I load a van with equipment, drive to a room full of strangers, and read that room in real time for four hours. Get it wrong and the floor empties, and I know it before anyone tells me. Nothing about that is passive. The other is smaller (a store, some shirts, some books), but it works the same muscle: something has to be made, made better, then put in front of people who owe me nothing and can say no. Both cost me something every time. The scroll never has.

That argument is finished, and it was never the interesting one. AI is a tool. Fine. The question that isn't finished, the one people are actually fighting about underneath all the noise, is not whether an artist used a tool. It's how much of the finished work is his.

For years I made things alone. I'd sit at a station, wrestle an idea around, and try to shape it into something I could share. What I wanted was somebody on the other side of the desk. I didn't have that.

The problem was never the desire. It was never the ideas. It was always the machinery.

Yesterday I pulled everything out. Photography gear, video equipment, SD cards, cables, the physical evidence of years I hadn't sorted through since before everything changed.