The Sigil of Assurance

You take a bit of wax and drip it over the em dash fresh out of the printer, working it over, building it up until it’s a little caterpillar crawling on the page, nestled between two words, perhaps burrowing into one—I’m so hungry—ready to eat and eat until it has a stomachache.

There. Done. 

That’s how you claim the em dash as yours, you think. If they accuse you of having used a machine to write this, you can just run your hand over the hardened wax, reassured that, like Emily Dickinson, you made your mark—

And meant every bit of it—
And if they will still accuse—
Well—you can wax more eloquently.

The Sigil of Solidarity

What does “taking a stand” mean, you wonder. How does one take a stand against machines?

Machines have no will, no agency. Machines stand for nothing, and you can’t stand against something with no standing.

The woman invited you to a meeting for collective action. You want to go—mostly for her, because there’s an energy about her that reminds you of early mornings in May, when the sun-warmed grass tickles your feet and the air shivers with lilac—but you’re not sure that’s enough. The machines are actually quite cute, you think. Who can be against machines that make up limericks about dancing queens and draw funny pictures of robots in love? They do what you want.

“That’s why they insist on calling their machines agents,” the woman said. “Agentic coder, agentic washing machine, buzz buzz, a beehive of reverse psychology passing as harmless marketing. Every declaration is a confession.”

You sit down on the ground. You grab fistfuls of earth and shape them into a lump, a lump that fits into your hands perfectly, not quite a sphere, not quite a double-cone that rolls uphill, the shape of potential, of hope and possibility. Nothing in the universe has ever taken on this particular shape, molded by the fork in your life line (you could have said yes that time and moved to San Francisco and even now, some mornings, you sip your coffee and feel a tinge of regret), smoothed by the bend in your heart line (yes I’ll try harder, you said to her ten years ago, and even though she left in the end you’re glad you tried). 

You let go of the lump. It falls to the ground, crumbles, but only partly. Dust to dust. You look at your hands. A pair of cupped shells, twin scoops shaped by the shaping.

“Humans are messy, selfish, and very confused,” she said. “Most of us aren’t very intelligent most of the time. But we stand. We stand for ourselves; we stand for each other; we stand together.”

Is that what we’re meant to do, you wonder. To shape the part of the universe we touch and be shaped by what we shape. We shape each other as we stand, and in that reciprocity is honey and milk and all the splendor.

The Saboteurs and Luddites didn’t stand up against machines; they stood up against men who thought they were lords. Maybe you can stand up against those who, because they have many imaginary zeros associated with their names, believe that they can shape us without being shaped, like senseless dough, pre-baked pain.

You think about would-be lords whose identities have merged with their zeros, the 0-naires who believe themselves in charge but live in terror, terror of their machine god and terror of the workaday human. Is there anything sadder? They’re shapeless, unshaped, as hollow as their appetites.

You get up. You stand.

The Sigil of Slop

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. 

You are drowning in words. They pour out of machines rather than minds. All this time, humans have been fixing their thoughts with ink on paper, pixels on screen, pits and grooves in plastic, electrons dancing in mazy circuits, and the machines have scanned all the words, sucked them all up, computed all the vectors for relating them to one another, tabulated which ought to follow which. Somebody pushes a button, and the words just gush out. One word. Another. Another after that. So predictable. So predictive. So predicted. What comes after lorem must be ipsum. Ad infinitum.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet—“ain itself pain is one loves”—is a fractured quote. Cicero actually wrote “dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet”—loves pain because it is pain. In the days of metal type, some printer took that page—with the first word guillotined by the page break—scrambled it, chopped up the words into tokens (tik • tok • ken • nings), dropped some and rearranged ipsum and spliced in a few English “ing”s and “and”s until the galley was filled to the brim so that they’d have a sample to show customers that looked good and sounded good but was actually nonsense so that, instead of being distracted by meaning, the customers would pay attention only to the typeface and the ligature and the kerning and the leading, all that shiny newness over technological slop, cheap copies spat out by machines that had taken the jobs of the scribes and monks in the scriptoria.

The appearance of sense instead of sense.

We’ve been doing that since the day we dreamed of a machine that could weave, print, copy, generate. Faster, cheaper, sometimes (occasionally? how often?) even better. Because we love pain. Because it is pain. (B)read, copies, sum.

The pain shapes us, and pain, pain-is, panis, can be sustenance. 

But maybe it’s too much.

The Sigil of Hide-Out

You write something: a poem, a song, a silly story about yourself kissing Mr. Big Star, and then you have to save him because, as it turns out, he has a paralyzing fear of dust bunnies and you own a vacuum.

You don’t type it out. Anything digital is at risk of being vacuumed up by the hungry models, leviathans with sinews of tensor and back-propagating ichor. Instead, you write it out longhand on paper. You dribble wax over the em dashes anyway, just in case someone wants to make an accusation (someone always wants to make an accusation; we’re messy).

But there are cameras everywhere. The 0-naires have ten thousand eyes, flocks of lenses, a hydra that never sleeps. All you need is attention.

They are always watching, always recording, always ready to recognize, digitize, assimilate your originality into that great data center in the cloud so that it can be tokenized, pulverized, sponged into embeddings to feed that spigot of slop, that firehose of flimflam, that babbling bubbler of bullshit.

But no need to fret. That is why we have the hide-out. You spray it over the page. The content becomes invisible to the lenses, readable only by our eyes. All the machines will ever see is visual noise, the blankness of Wite-Out.

The Sigil of Clumsy New Speech

Language itself has become shapeless, hollowed out. Once, the machines learned from us; now, we speak like machines.

Stop believing smooth patter. Disregard fluency. Trust not the honeyed tongue of the transformer. All you need is attention—except it’s not really attention, is it? No bandage? No problem. The machine says you can use some super glue and toilet paper. The machine is never wrong. It’s not rocket surgery; it’s pocket perjury.

If you don’t want to drown in a sea of mindless words, of clickity-clackity clanking-clanging emoji, of metaphors that slither about like sixty-four two-bit worms in a human suit, of PowerPoint slides filled with polished turds of McKinseyese, a tale told by an idiot that complies with the content guidelines aligns with the values fulfills the dreams and hopes of the 0-naires—I’m sorry, but surely you know that the only thing that matters is to make the pie even bigger, like a very very hungry zero-pillar, no?

If you don’t want any of that, embrace nonfluency. Learn a new language, adopt an old script, take up anything messy, inefficient, clumsy, the very opposite of optimizable. Stumble over your words; make mistakes; entangle yourself in an unfamiliar grammar until you’ve bent your mind into a new shape. Tell your story in Old Icelandic; make your point in Middle French (more pain); reform English spelling with hangul; try on newborn words with Anglo-Saxon roots (you shall outlive the gearwrack yet with your heart-hoard whole); pride yourself on that halting Classical Mayan with no help from a translation app. Calque instead of calcify; stretch the old words and combine them anew. 

When you have few words, every one counts more. Your silences will roar.

Or even better, invent a new language, devise a new alphabet, hack hanzi to say what could never be said before. Anyone worth reading has to invent their own tongue anyway.

The Sigil of Poison

On the third anniversary of your hire date, you are issued a headband. It’s bright green, durable, capable of taking a beating. There’s a camera mounted on the headband, one with a good lens and an even better sensor, so it can see what you see, hear what you hear.

“What is this?” you ask.

“Your work companion,” Patty, your boss, tells you. “It’s there to help. Think of it as a friend.”

It’s not there to help; it’s there to watch. It tracks your eyes, observes your hands, listens to you mutter to yourself. It makes you feel like you’re not human, just a part of the machine, so that you can be more productive. Oh sure, that is a kind of help, but not helping you.

That’s not all. It’s also there to digitize you.

By watching you from the moment you turn on the monitor to the moment you log out, nine hours later, it learns how you do your job. Click here; highlight that; make this line thicker, but shrink down that box; say this is good; say that is bad; put a little warning checkmark after this column because the data needs to be double-checked.

You can see where this is going. Someday, maybe six months from now, maybe tomorrow, they’ll call you into that office, the one with a door that shuts and the blinds lining the walls. They’ll tell you, thank you very much, but we don’t need you anymore. We have agentic cursors and large action models and an endless supply of tokens and, in the worst case, anonymous humans on distant shores who are grateful for pennies, and together they can now do everything you do.

So here’s what you decide. You click here; you swear into the microphone, pleasantly, a smile on your face; you type into that textbox, but you make sure that you put a comma where there’s supposed to be a point, and a point where there’s supposed to be a comma; you highlight what needs to be highlighted, except you make sure to cut out the first part of the word, so that lorem is all that remains of dolorem; you make this line thinner, but expand that box; say this is really bad, and that one is even worse; draw—very carefully and lovingly, because this is serious work—a little hand next to the checkbox, with the middle finger sticking up (drawing that with the mouse is so much more satisfying than just picking the emoji).

Oh, you don’t do this alone. You get everyone in the office in on it. If you do something different, you’re an outlier and a problem. But when all of you do things that way, you’re just training data. The machine loves data. So you give it more delicious data.

Someday—you hope soon—when you’re called into that office, before Patty can even get out a word, you hold up a finger, indicating that she should wait, and take off your headband. You put the headband down so that the camera points at Patty’s confused face. Then you begin to write on the notepad in front of you. You’ve been thinking about this for a while, so the words flow—no, not the way tap water comes out of a spigot, more like the way the flood bursts from a broken dam. The words flow and flow. It’s not a limerick. It’s not a funny picture. It’s not the end. It’s just the beginning.

Patty makes as if she wants to speak. She leans forward, her lips parted, “Thank—”

You hold up your finger, insistent. “Just a second.”

You finish. You take out the spray can and cover your words in hide-out. That’s the key, isn’t it? You want Patty to read what you wrote, her boss, and the boss’s boss, and the boss’s boss’s boss, ad infinitum, or at least until you get to someone with a lot of imaginary zeros. But you don’t want the machines to read your words; you are done giving them training data.

You turn the notepad around so that Patty, with her mouth open in a shocked zero, can read, and while she does, you smash the lens of the headband camera. The journey to break ten thousand eyes begins with this one.

The Sigil of the Beginner

You can’t always run and hide. At some point, you must make something. We’re meant to shape and be shaped.

You stop and draw something, a puppy, a house, a bunch of balloons, a design based on a hanzi you made up, pronounced like a word that doesn’t exist. It’s very clumsy. The strokes are amateurish, the proportions wrong, the perspective all off.

You resist the urge to ask a machine to help you, even though it will make it smoother, more fluent, much “better” (but in all the irrelevant ways). The minute you ask the machine to take over for you, you’ve given up the idea. Telling someone (or something) to make a thing for you is not the same as making that thing. In art, idea is inseparable from expression, and doing the thing is the only thing.

Someday, you think, you may even decide to try drawing with a machine, a model, an elaborate cascade of tensors flowing along channels carved out over the thousands of years since we walked out of the smoky caves of Lascaux. The machine can be a barge into the collective unconscious, no different than any other tool: chisel, brush, carving knife, stylus. But you’ll have to be actually steering the craft, not just telling a machine what to do, and it can’t be a model controlled by people consumed by zeros.

Someday.

Meanwhile, you keep at it with the pen and paper; you’ll get better.

[Author’s Note: I thank Professor Richard McClintock for details on the history of “lorem ipsum.” For more, see Cibois, Philippe. “Lorem ipsum : nouvel état de la question.” L’intelligence du monde, Hypothèses, https://idm.hypotheses.org/2354. Accessed 14 May 2026.]

(Editors’ Note: Ken Liu is interviewed by Caroline M. Yoachim in this issue.)

© 2026 Ken Liu