Yes, it has been a very long time since the last post…not that any of them ever came quickly to begin with…

So what’s been happening?

What I continue to see every day are articles and posts that continue to throw around the words ‘photography/photographic’ —and especially, ‘photo’ —with both ignorant and deliberate misapplication.

What “AI” and many of its most fervent users and abusers are doing is perpetrating fraud. Fraud is a word with legal defintions and consequences. Fraud is a word I have been using—very deliberately— in comments to posts I see that practice this deception. I intend to ensure that photography becomes fully understood by the public so that they can recognize fraudulent imagery, but more importantly, fraudulent narratives, nomenclature, and semantic blurring when they see and read it. When photography finally has a standardized legal definition, all fraudulent activities, linguistic associations, and catachrestic (please learn and use this word) use of terminology will have legal consequences..

So the question is, when will 2.4 post?

I now have over 4,000 hours of research under my belt. The vast majority is source review. Lots of it. I don’t know how many primary sources I have found. I have looked at thousands of secondary/tertiary or worse books, papers, and articles. This has resulted in finding a surprising number of miscitations in the existing literature, including academic papers, and, needless to say (but I must), endless posts that recycle the same …stuff…over and over again. There is an endless supply of content produced about complex subjects that have been condensed to a few lines as “research” to produce their endless streams of online posts to hold their audience. All of this has resulted in hundreds of hours of unplanned side excursions to find, catalogue, and correct, if possible.

And then there is the other class of miscitations. I don’t just mean misplaced or mistranscribed footnotes or endnotes. I mean citations that don’t match the source content. I’m talking about cites that have been passed along as references, obviously never actually consulted. This is the …stuff… beyond-disturbing, being created or assimilated into the corpus of material that is ending up in AI-assisted search (what has quickly become the prime subject on sister publication ThisOldGoat), and that will become part of next year’s training corpus. I have increasingly had to deal with wasted time catching, correcting, and “feedbacking” about truncated search, search summaries, and hallucinations. It’s bad enough when these issues are in English “sources,” but much of my research is in foreign language materials, made maddeningly difficult when the AIs hallucinate by creating non-existent sources in other languages that end up being found in assisted search and summaries that I then have to transcribe, translate, verify, and vet. I don’t trust them to assist in my work.

So yes, 2.4 and a related series of sideposts are coming. One sidepost will be a deep-dive diatribe against the continuing assault on language and the implications of that on this and other historically-based projects, and so many other aspects of civic living, commerce, law, and government. If you have been paying attention, you will have noticed many references I have made regarding issues of historical anachronism and how the problem is deeply rooted in language. The point will be made much more frequently in 2.4 (why it is time for the sidepost). Given the nature of defintions, legal and common, this is a parallel core subject of equal weight to all others.

2.4 will be an eye-opener, and eyebrow-raiser, and I hope, make some lightbulbs come on over our collective heads as we examine things “everybody knows.” Other posts and sideposts are also in parallel development, which is slowing me down now, but will help bring the next posts along more quickly.

This public project is open to anyone interested in what began with a new wave of AI products in late 2022. The emphasis here is on AI-generative technology as it affects photography and other visual media. Generative image creation has profound ethical and economic concerns with socio-political ramifications beyond simply making images. The way these products were produced is deeply disturbing with legal ramifications.

I suggest reading the posts in the About, Admin, and Backstory in the top menu sections on the Home page for background before proceeding to the Index item, which lists numbered posts in the order they were roduced and meant to be read.

Return to Home page

Being a reference means being a source or origin of primary principles, of fundamentals. The word ‘fundamental’ will appear often from this point forward in this core suite.

The intended process

Law is constructed from language; language is its primary tool. Law is created, recorded, and interpreted as words, as are historical narratives. Our legal system and its lexicon are based on precedent. A logical approach to producing a legal definition of photography would be establishing the (correct) historical provenance of essential concepts and the common and legal lexicons that developed around the invention of photography.

My initial process would be to:
1) identify the invention,
2) when it was achieved,
3) by whom it was achieved,
4) the name it was given,
5) the thought process of how and why it was so named and
6) the fundamental concepts encapsulated in the name.

These details would define the invention.

The process begins

I dug into books, papers, journals, postgraduate theses, and institutional presentations. I spent time and money getting at and examining primary and other sources cited in those resources, which were, in most cases, likely never examined, but merely re-quoted and re-cited, as these theses are derivatives of previous works. And I endured the agony of reading hundreds of quick-hit “history” posts online.

Despite my oft-stated distaste for “dogsled” retro over-extensions attempting to establish the beginnings of photography, there was and is an innate human desire to create representative imagery in tangible form.⁠ All methods are based on technical means, even as basic as digging a crude representation of something in the dirt with a stick or scratching into stone with another stone. And yes, there were those cave drawings.

However, to avoid creating a “dogsled” timeline, I needed to define a set of references that were directly, technically precursive to what would become photography. I will lead with the following 60-second survey to provide a sense of historical inertia leading to a reference point.

A brief survey

The study of optics began in antiquity with serendipitous observations in various and widely distanced places around the ancient world that a natural scene outside a darkened tent or room that had a small hole or slit was projected onto the opposite side of that darkened space with peculiar and particular visual characteristics. Those same observations were later applied to new observations, experiments, and theories about light passing through polished glass or crystals shaped in particular ways. Combined, these observations and optical experiments led to the invention of various optical devices, including two that are relevant to recording visual images.

Around the mid-16^th century, alchemists attempted to convert base metals into precious and noticed that some of the chemicals they used were affected by the action of light. Those observations, being irrelevant to their dream, were discarded.

It took a considerable period, but eventually, someone (or more) familiar with both parallel histories had the idea that it might be possible to combine optics and chemistry in a way that would achieve “the dream.”

I assumed that once the academicians had sifted through the ancient, medieval, Renaissance/Enlightenment-era manuscripts and treatises, identified pertinent names, places, observations, discoveries, hypotheses, experiments, and inventions, and then organized them into cohesive, linear narratives, they would have written a veritable smorgasbord of authoritative texts from which to glean the relevant background information needed for my purpose. As it turns out, that was just a dream.

There are many books written on the history of photography. M-A-N-Y. Some are alleged to be “authoritative” due to their depth, breadth, and the authors' academic pedigrees. But claims to be a “complete” history of such a broad general topic—even subtopics—can’t ever be true. For a secondary diversion proving the point, see here.

Setting the stage

Scarcely has the period of an average life passed away since the labours of the successful experimentalists began; yet, how few of the present generation of workers can lay their fingers on the dates of the birth, christening, and phases of the delightful vocation they pursue. Many know little or nothing of the long and weary travail the minds of the discoverers suffered before their ingenuity gave birth to the beautiful art-science by which they live.1 ^⁠

That passage was written in 1890, referring to the 1830s, before the professionalization of science, when educated gentlemen with backgrounds and interests across multiple disciplines had been working in several countries on various scientific inquiries into the behavior of light. While doing so, some made (re)discoveries about optics and light-sensitive chemicals that led to observations and experiments of a different nature, spurring new research and incremental developments toward a goal that eventually became widely and generally understood within the philosophic community.

The telephone had yet to be invented, and telegraphy was in its early days of introduction. Knowledge was disseminated in the scientific academy through personal meetings, personal correspondence, and attendance at meetings of natural philosophy societies or through their journals.

The general public learned of such things through newspapers and periodicals, which often reported on the proceedings of these societies, usually as personal accounts and commentary. However, they might also publish synopses, abstracts, or even complete papers as presented.

Despite the difficulties of understanding the scientific details of the articles, the general public, primarily in England, France, and Germany but not exclusively so, had a hazy awareness of advances toward a “dream” that not so long before could only be imagined by fictionists.

These less-than-instant methods of communication about activities occurring simultaneously over wide distances meant declarations of who did what, when, and where first were open to later analytic challenges—as some are to this day. But even with these impediments, scientific news was known to travel across Europe in a week or less and reach America in three.

Finding the reference point

Some historians have noted that 1839^⁠ was a year of “particularly interesting occurrences”—an “annus mirabilis”—and declared it the year of photography’s birth.

I would cautiously describe it as a year of concentrated significance—and stop there.

Barely had the New Year’s celebrations subsided when the first event relevant to my purpose occurred.

On Monday, January 7, Dominique François Jean Arago, a physicist, mathematician, astronomer (Director of the Paris Observatory), member of the Chamber of Deputies (lower house of the French parliament), and Permanent Secretary of l’Académie des Sciences in Paris, rose to address that assembly about a subject he said the public had “only erroneous notions about.”

An announcement

My synopsis and commentary that follows derive from the article published in the Académie’s publication, Compte Rendu des Séances de l’Académie des Sciences, in the Applied Physics section, titled, Fixation des images qui se forment au foyer dune chambre obscure: Fixation of images formed at the focus of a chamber obscure.
Quoted content has been translated from the original French.
Words in brackets are translation variations.
Words italicized were italicized in the original text:

“Everyone knows2 the optical device called {a/the} chambre obscure or chambre noir”3… “everyone has observed the clarity, with what truth of shapes, color, and tone with which external objects are reproduced” at the focus of the lens, but that “after admiring these images, everyone is left to regret that they could not be made permanent.”

“There is {no longer/there is no need} for regret {or regret is now irrelevant}, an inventor, M. Xxxxxxxx [I’m temporarily obscuring it], a subject of the kingdom, “has {devised/discovered} {particular screens/specialized plates} on which the optical image leaves a perfect imprint; ... where everything contained in the image is reproduced down to the most minute details, with {incredible accuracy/unbelievable exactitude} and finesse. In {truth/fact}, {it would be no exaggeration/not be an exaggeration} to say that the inventor {discovered/has discovered} {the means/the way} to fix the images,4 if his method preserved the colors; but, it must be quickly said “in order not to disabuse part of the public, that in these {pictures,/paintings}5 in the copies of [M. Xxxxxxxx], as in a black pencil drawing, as in an engraving, or, better still (the assimilation will be more exact), as in a mezzotint or aquatint, only white, black and gray, only light, darkness and half-{tones/tints}.”

On this inventor’s screens, “the drawing and the object correspond: the white is white, half-tints are half-tints, black is black,” which “distinguishes it from imperfect attempts previously made to draw silhouettes on a layer of chloride of silver.” ^⁠

His {screens/plates} are coated with a substance more sensitive to light than any other known, that after being placed at the focal point inside the sealed device, “light itself reproduces the forms and proportions of external objects, with almost mathematical precision; the photometric {proportions/relationships} are retained exactly for this method produces drawings, and not {paintings/pictures}.”

Arago was clear that “the extreme sensitivity of the preparation” was not the only distinguishing quality. The inventor also found a way “of removing this property at his will” so that “when his drawings are finished, the plates could be “{exhibited in/exposed to} full sun {without being altered by it/receiving any alteration}.”

An instant analysis

Arago identified the inventor who had solved the problem of retaining the image created within the camera obscure and did so with simultaneously stunning and limited results.^⁠ There is a descriptive explanation of what “it” is or does, but it provides no technical details of how it was achieved, with a very specific, albeit peculiar statement that it produces drawings and, specifically, not paintings.

This momentous declaration, hastily orchestrated, was made to the assembled academy by an authority in political and scientific circles, knowing the effect would spread far beyond the hall's walls.

The effect on the general public

As was usually the case after these scientific society sessions, the news was duly reported in the press to the general public. It had the effect of a massive lightning strike. The Parisian press, pre-primed by a propitiously published “scoop” the day before—it and the announcement sharing some suspiciously exact words and syntax—spread the news like rolling thunder immediately across France, which spread across Europe within two weeks.

The announcement provided limited but intentionally titillating information for the general public. Only Arago and selected associates had viewed samples of the images before the announcement. However, that did not impede unrestrained, embellished reports of Arago’s descriptions, often with significant errors.

A sampling of what was reported:

Let our readers fancy the fidelity of the image of nature figured by the camera obscura, and add to it an action of the solar rays which fix the image… [French newspaper]

…their fixed and durable impress, which may be removed from the presence of those objects like a picture or an engraving… [French arts journal]

…the precision with which external objects represent themselves…the clearest idea one could give M. Xxxxxxxx’s discovery would be to say that he has succeeded in fixing on paper this faithful drawing. [German newspaper]

…the invention of the camera obscura drawings… [German newspaper]

…all these drawings created by the action of light… [French newspaper]

…fixing the effects of light… [German newspaper]

…10-12 minutes to produce a drawing in which all the gradations of tone are perfectly distinct, like in a pen and ink drawing. [German newspaper]

… An invention has recently been made public in Paris that seems more like some marvel of a fairy tale or delusion of necromancy than a practical reality. It amounts to nothing less than making light produce permanent pictures…[British periodical]

…Objects that paint themselves with inimitable fidelity; light, compelled by the art of chemistry to leave lasting traces… [personal correspondence to German aristocracy]

…The growing interest attached to this subject (of which we have evidence in almost every foreign journal taking cognizance of the Fine Arts that reaches us)…” [British journal]

…a view of whatever kind, projected on this plate by an ordinary camera obscura leaves its imprint there in light and shade, thus presenting the most perfect of drawings…[personal correspondence from France to England]

…The drawings obtained in this way are remarkable for the perfection of details…[Fine Arts report]

Comments seem ecstatic about this new development, but universally speak of it in terms that seem semi-cryptic, figurative, or misused.

The effect within the academy

There was a pervasive air that the resolution of the fixation problem was imminent, yet the captive audience within the hall was reported to be “stunned” by the news of its achievement. My impression was that this was equal parts a news-conference style report—uncharacteristic of the normal philosophic society proceedings of formal presentation of papers— and a deliberate pronouncement by an authority, one of their own, to those near and far, engaged in the same pursuit, that “the dream” they were all chasing had been achieved.6

Arago’s resumé and offices made him an unquestioned authority. He reports a resolution to the long-standing impediment to achieving “the dream” while identifying the inventor with the weight of an authoritative proclamation.^⁠

Historian Pierre Harmant, writing in 1960, described the event as “a crack of the whip,” meant as “a stimulant” for those who were engaged in the same pursuit to “show their hand.” Historian Helmut Gernsheim, writing in 1955, suggested that “the race was over before it was known to have started.” Having read numerous works that discuss how this event came to be and its subsequent history and consequences, neither assessment makes sense to me.

Why would there be a rush to make this carefully crafted declaration, said to have stunned the audience of academy members, unless it was deliberately intended to thwart, undercut, or nullify the work of those, known and unknown, to be working on the fixation problem? Work was ongoing simultaneously in various places on the continent, mostly in quiet seclusion or secrecy, because the implications of success—beyond the “purity of scientific advancement”— were known and anticipated but not spoken of openly and publicly by gentlemen of science.7

This pronouncement struck me as having a palpable ex-cathedra overtone. The specific phrasing of “{the means/the way} to fix the images” infers this method is ‘the one; the only one’ given the qualities of the images produced compared to earlier processes. There is a connotation of finality, a declaration of closure.

This was a quickly contrived, arresting first strike in a long-term plan between Arago and The Inventor. It is a story with its own extensive and fascinating history that is, unfortunately, mostly outside the scope and direction of this project, but portions relevant to that purpose will appear in future discussions.

The effect on this project

With a reference point now clearly established and a full understanding of what was accomplished, we can move on to concerns closer to the present.

What’s that you say? You don’t fully understand? Really!
It’s all right there, magnificently concise and plain as day to all who heard it then, and to us reading about it almost two hundred years later!

You disagree. You are perplexed. You have questions.

So did they.

The announcement was carefully crafted, allegedly to supplant the hazy hearsay, rumors, erroneous assumptions, and salon gossip rampant at the time, but did little more than raise many more questions.

As it was intended to do.

So…for my process purposes, was this announcement the jackpot!…or not?

Let’s review the status of my 6-point process checklist:
1) identify the invention: Not clear. We have issues with discriminating between discovery and invention that must be resolved.
2) when it was achieved: We are not given a date, but there is a strong inference it was very recent.
3) by whom it was achieved: A name was given, but I have held it back for now.

Notably, and very oddly, regarding my last three points:
4) the name it was given,
No naming term is given, leaving
5) the thought process of how and why it was so named and
6) the fundamental concepts encapsulated in the name,
—the very fundamentals at the core of our definitional purpose—not addressed and so unresolved at this juncture.

The announcement said some specific things in peculiar ways that seem alien to us. In our time, we think we know—that “everybody knows”— what he is talking about. We expect to see certain words used, but they never appear. Instead, we are perplexed to see ‘discover/discovery’ and ‘invention/’invented’ being used interchangeably in both the announcement and coverage throughout Europe. The equating with drawing, painting, and even engraving creates a perplexing disconnect from what “everybody knows” is being described.

The perplexity and intrigue get deeper after the announcement. In the next post, my process quest continues as I zero in on events leading to formally establishing the core fundamentals and their nomenclature.

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My mood for this post:

Some comments on historical research and sources and why the core suite is taking a long time to produce

The history of photography, as has been noted by its many historians, is quite well documented. Much has been published, right from the beginning. There are issues, however.

One is that some of the most known important primary documents were considered destroyed or lost —and no doubt, many were. Histories were written, and declarations were made based on what was available to the historian or what the historian chose to use or exclude. Some of these documents were found decades later. Other sources, never known to have existed, were found over 140 years later.

There are issues of selective cherry-picking of sources, often to plant national flags of honor. There were communication issues. There are translation problems. But most damaging are the attempts to identify and validate individuals and their accomplishments—anecdotally alleged or documented—to satisfy our strange need to establish firsts, as in, who discovered/invented “photography.”

There are many forms of historical fallacy, but the most damaging—especially in this present pursuit— is a trilogy of fallacies: the historical fallacy, the historian’s fallacy, and the scourge of presentism. Throw in deficiencies of descriptive lexicography and we have quite an uphill struggle before us. I will address these problems as they come up, but if you are interested in getting a headstart learning about these and a host of other fallacies of historiography, I highly recommend Historians' Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought, a classic work by David Hackett Fischer.

There was simultaneous discovery, simultaneous thought, and simultaneous invention. Some occurred in isolation away from centers of learning, commerce, or communication. There was deliberate adherence to scientific methods of procedure and processes. There were moments of serendipity and luck. There were incremental advancements and appearances of giant leaps forward. There were also dead ends, crushing defeats, and premature abandonment of further pursuit.

I have a very dim view of those who spend 5 minutes on web “research” to cull quick historical background (usually of dubious validity) as they produce nearly daily clickbait posts.

I have now spent over 1,000 hours delving into a large number of published histories, some dating back to the 1840s, as well as academic theses, and evaluated hundreds of internet posts. I have expended considerable amounts of time and cash getting at primary sources and contacting source curators and keepers.

Histories are more than a quick chronology or annals. They are interpretive narratives about past events. Let me be very clear about what I am doing in this suite of core posts. I am not writing a new history. I am not rewriting existing history. As stated in a previous post, my goal is not to establish who did what first because doing so creates a myriad of problems, cannot be definitively settled, and doesn’t matter. I am surveying a huge number of sources, not to establish absolute, irrefutable truths that can be precisely attributed to specific individuals, times, or places, but to develop a historically-based serial argument leading to a legal definition of photography.

Some additional comments and observations based on my reading of recently produced online content:

Many in this new AI culture continue to delude themselves into thinking they have a handle on this AI image-generative technology. They are oblivious to the challenges that were imagined and achieved in centuries past by people who spent years deliberating and experimenting to achieve the rudiments of what your iPhone now does in milliseconds or what some are equating with what AI generates in a few seconds based on billions of tokens that took millions of people billions of man-hours to produce that were then systematically stolen by scraping to “teach” LLMs how to emulate something it neither knows nor can duplicate.

One of the latest practices self-proclaimed “experts” in this “art” have concocted is to teach others equally clueless—often for a fee—their “secrets” of how to produce “photo-realistic” images by using “photography-based prompts.” This technique is said to be a sure-fire method to get spectacular results with the same aesthetics as photography—a subject they know nothing about —bypassing the years of knowledge and practice required to become skilled in the actual endeavor.

I continuously ask, “Why?”

I see posts full of images they and AI have created that they think are so realistic, astounding, and “insane” (makes me want to puke, but there is truth in the thought). Obviously, they haven’t taken a look at them! There are so many problems I can spot instantly: the wrong number and anatomy of fingers, insects with three antennae, perspectives that are just wrong, and the list goes on. Their use of so-called photography-based prompts is laughable because 1) they know next to nothing about photography, 2) AI “knows” nothing at all, and 3) the combination shows in the results. These poor deluded souls think all the crap they create is oh-so-wonderful that they think equally ignorant individuals are willing to pay for it! I suppose many of them will.1

They stand like gnats on the shoulders of giants who would, rightly, send them to writhe for eternity in an AI-generated virtual hell with a mere flick of their fingers.

I had to edit and re-edit the last four paragraphs for tone and my language many times until the anger and the venom I was writing had been softened to meet my own standards for publication. But I hope you get my meaning and actual visceral state of mind about all this garbage and those who produce it, looking to get clicks, “likes,” and fawning comments, hoping to keep the reader reading long enough until the pitiful payment algorithms kick in so they can earn literally a few pennies. AI chat apps are particularly good at writing that kind of stuff.

I have mentioned in a few different places the need to confront those we see calling AI-generated imagery “photography.” I have been so successful in doing so that I have lost count of how many miscreants have blocked me from their open sites, especially those on Medium. Fools. I just come in from a different IP address and/or device and still monitor what you are doing and saying.

And I am cataloging them. These are important activities. Issues created by casual and deliberate semantic blurring and misuse will result in a lexical nightmare and pose a greater problem than AI (about which I will be necessarily brutal when I address the problem of descriptive lexicography). This is why I stress the need to confront the conflation of photography and AI-generative processes and terminology.

Oh… this just in!… [back when I was originally writing this], I am reading that OpenAI has just canned Sam Altman. Imagine that. All his mea culpas to con the government couldn’t save him from the overlords to whom he prostituted himself. Image that…  I am imagining the real truth as to why and what it is the board wants…it’s not that hard to figure out, actually, but I can’t wait to read all the clickbait commentary being feverishly created at this moment to ‘splain it to us. It should start overflowing my inbox in 10…9….8…7… [which indeed happened before the day was done!]

[That story changed quickly, as it was destined to, and the intended natural order was quickly restored, allowing the troubling issues involved to remain safely out of the public spotlight.]

Back to work… Post 2.3 and others being developed simultaneously are in the works. I think most will find it all very interesting. Others will bristle as I challenge some of their core beliefs and knowledge.

In the course of my daily general reading while I was researching and working on the draft of this post, I received this promotional email:

The Car
Go for a ride through the 9,000-year history of the car, from its roots in dogsleds to Henry Ford’s affordable and assembly line-built Model T, and meet the scientists working on the next generation of self-driving automobiles.

9,000 years old? Roots in dogsleds? This I had to see…1

Patrick Stewart began narrating a meandering, romanticized, hyper-extended mess of widely and wildly disparate notions, loaded with figurative language and semantic distortions mashed together purporting to explain via a tortured six-degrees-of-separation narrative, how we came to have the automobile. I stopped watching after nine minutes.

It was mind-boggling to me how this production equates the evolution of man—an already self-contained, auto-propelled biped—from being “two-legged to four-wheeled,” that began with non-wheeled sleds pulled by dogs as “humankind’s first engine” that somehow became the precursor to the self-propelled car.^⁠

It was fictitious hyperbole on crack and steroids that the producers meant this thesis to be taken seriously, at least to me. Your mileage and ability to stomach such a rough ride may vary.

But it gets worse…

I may have been hyper-sensitized to this overreaching fantasy because I watched it while taking a break from finding, reading, and reacting to academic histories (and a plethora of blog posts) that speculate (or outright declare) the genesis of photography could be cave paintings and drawings dating anywhere from 5,000 to 70,000 years ago. By doing so, I realized they had created a “dog sled” photography timeline directly linked and analogous to the history of drawing.2

Woof!

So now I need to take time to evaluate the history of drawing!

No less an authority than the Encyclopedia Britannica states that “as an artistic endeavour, drawing is almost as old as humankind.”

I began with the broadest search:  define drawing.
I’ll pick two search results from the 4,250,000,000 returned:

the art or technique of representing an object or outlining a figure, plan, or sketch by means of lines.3

Seems very reasonable…
and

a picture or diagram made with a pencil, pen, or crayon rather than paint.

I picked that one because a very large number of returns contained the same elements, including this opening paragraph in Wikipedia’s non-attributed definition, which states:

Drawing is a visual art that uses an instrument to mark paper or another two-dimensional surface. The instrument might be pencils, crayons, pens with inks, brushes with paints, or combinations of these, and in more modern times, computer styluses with graphics tablets.^⁠4

I pulled this next one due to its  more refined perspective:

In fine art, the term "drawing" may be defined as the linear realization of visual objects, concepts, emotions, and fantasies, including symbols and even abstract forms. Drawing is a graphic art which is characterized by an emphasis on form or shape, rather than mass and colour as in painting.^⁠5

Run this search yourself using the broadest possible search query and you will observe that the overwhelming number of returns do not include a prehistoric perspective. They tend to place the history of drawing from the Middle Ages or the pre-Rennaisance period. You will also notice they have a didactic quality meant to inform students of art history rather than as definitions meant for the general public.

And we again have “painting” added by extension to the mess!

Note the Wikipedia definition says drawing is a “visual art.” The fine arts definition states that drawing is a “graphic art” without mentioning examples, contrary to many of the other returns. Do your own search on “graphic art” and see that most definitions that list examples will include photography. That didn’t sit well with me. How about you other photographers out there?

Words such as picture, representation, depiction, realization, reality, resemblance, and replication are synonyms applied freely across modern definitions of drawing and painting.

Keep in mind that we are in the process of learning how photography came to be defined. If you wrote a definition of photography as I suggested in post 2.0, and checked your work versus definitions found on the internet per post 2.1, you also saw these same words used in modern definitions.

Let’s not forget (and how could we given innumerable sources telling us ad nauseam), that the word photography was created from two Greek roots that mean “writing with light’ or, better, “light-writing”… or drawing… or painting…

Then I came across an oft-visited site that places the beginning of photography perhaps just a bit earlier than 70,000 years ago with this opening line:

The dream of photography may be as old as the human eye, which, in processing colors and shapes for the brain, essentially does what a camera does. ^⁠6

This introduces “camera” —an as-yet-undefined concept in the timeline to this point— and another inevitable consequence of projecting present understanding onto the past, known as the historian’s fallacy, and it introduces another new element: “the dream of photography.”

Cave drawings (or any unaided manual drawing, sketching, or painting process) have as much to do with photography's genesis as dogsleds do with motor vehicles. If we choose to embrace these over-conflated senses of distant connective (ir)relevance, then let’s cut through all this romanticized academic hyper-blather and make one all-encompassing, irrefutable statement:
By backward chrono-logic extension, photography (and dog sleds, cars, et omnia, began with the mythsterious Big Bang!

And another fantasy source

Some scholars allege to have identified prophetic photographic dreams in writings from antiquity.

Since ancient times, devices have been used to aid the eye and hand in reproducing the appearance of optical reality. Indeed, the legend of the Corinthian Maid who preserved the look of her departing lover by tracing his cast-shadow outline on a wall points to the antiquity of the desire for lifelike replicas.7

Given my diatribes above, and so as not to interfere with the narrative flow, I have split off my take on this as a digression.

But even after my diatribes, I find myself liking this idea of “dreams” as a narrative thread to follow through developmental history—provided they are of the “What if...How does...What can... ?” variety that seek technology-based goals pursued with scientific methods, with the potential to be achieved.

So we have drawings in various places found in the prehistoric world, and mythical stories from ancient cultures, interpreted by those in our time, to be precursors to concepts and technologies that the ancients couldn’t possibly imagine, even as a dream.^⁠

A more appropriately focused approach

Obviously, we need a more tightly relevant timeline and narrative that is specific to photography. And yes, I realize that the goal here is to define photography, not yet done, once again pointing out the problems created when discussions continuously slide back and forth from present to past to present and back again. Unfortunately, we will continue to come across dubious, vaporous connections and distorted perspectives that divert and dilute the quality of that part of the history that is relevant to our definitional purpose.

Now that this obstruction to the process has been exposed, in the next post, I will get us back on track to tracing the history that actually resulted in the invention of what someone, somewhere, at some time, eventually called photography.

And a piece of advice from Sir John, 1869:

Every student who enters upon a scientific pursuit, especially if at a somewhat advanced period of life, will find not only that he has much to learn, but much also to unlearn.

I encourage you to take that advice to heart. In posts that follow in this core series, I will challenge our present-day understanding of photography and how it is (or should be) defined.

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** Regarding the image of Raging Herschel, I make the following claim statement:

I, a functional human, in one of my dreams, independently and intellectually conceived and hereby claim the idea of Sir John Herschel raging while holding a DSLR camera, which I consciously converted into text prompts that were rendered into a visually tangible image by processing with the NightCafe AI-generative image engine on 29 September 2023. Given that at the time of its creation and publication, the US Copyright Office has declared AI-generative art is not eligible for copyright protection in that the process fails the test of being human-created, and given that this ruling is being challenged and remains open to future re-interpretation, I hereby preemptively claim my presumptive copyright, to be retroactively effective should said ruling be reversed, as ©2023, by Len Romanick/Infonomena LLC. All rights reserved. The conceptual framework of this legal claim and intellectual property statement, as publicly presented for the first time on the Substack platform in this post on 9 October 2023 is ©2023, Len Romanick/Infonomena LLC. All rights reserved.

If I now say you can check your definition against what you could find online, what search prompt would you use? Perhaps:

what is photography
or
what is the definition of photography

For the first, you would likely come up with a mixed bag of dictionary definitions and squibs from galleries, photography-themed magazine sites, and probably some sites of online “experts” whose real expertise is knowing how to game SEO algorithms to get on the first page of results. Not definitive; not very helpful.

For the second, you probably noticed that at least half of the results were the same returned for the first.

Did you make assumptions that whatever you read was “correct”?

“History” is not a thing that exists, needing only to be discovered. Histories are narratives created by human conceptions, therefore riddled with all of the frailties of human nature, not the least of which is the modern propensity of attention spans measured in seconds. People want, expect, and accept quickly read, easily digested answers to complex questions.

Let’s try again by being a bit more focused and producing another search prompt:

who invented photography

The question seems quite normal but is an example of simple questions about complex topics seeking quick answers that is guaranteed to return results that perpetuate a continuous mythical state of unresolved ambiguity. Plug that into your favorite search engine and you will see results from many different sources, many with the appearance of being authoritative, declaring different answers as fact, often with dates that do not coincide. What results are facts, and which are myths or a mix?

Let’s try another, more constrained prompt that hopefully provides more uniform and decisive returns:

who created|invented|coined the word photography

I entered that exact prompt, and .45 seconds later, the engine responded with this outsized response in massive text across the top of the page:

And every other hit on my long results page said the same thing. Have you ever seen another question/answer combo with a unanimous response? This result must be settled truth. There is no mythic ambiguity here!

Here are some facts:

• It is true that he used the word “photography” in the title of his presentation paper and that the paper was presented on that date.

• The word appears exactly one time: in the title. A few references I found stated the phrase “picture obtained by photography” appears in the paper.^⁠ It does not.

• The phrase “photographic processes” appears twice and “photographic transfer” once in his short presentation.

As we have seen, Herschel is widely credited with coining and first using the word “photography.” This has been stated and restated a staggering number of times. But others have championed alternative contenders. Their arguments are based on distances separating those working in the field and the pace of communication methods of the day. Add overtones of personal, professional, and national honor regarding pride of place and primacy and positioning for the later potential of personal or national financial enhancement—and you have the makings of a first-rate who-done-it (first) thriller. All this contentiousness made for an intriguing rabbit-hole investigation into who deserves the honor of claiming primacy.

Based on my investigation, which involved at least 30 hours of work, I will state that Herschel did not create this neologism.1 My statement is based on documentary and anecdotal evidence, some of which was not known until decades after the reported and ossified certainty that he coined the word. There is also a logical component that gives credence to my independent conclusions (of which I am not alone). None of this precludes additional evidence from being found in the future that would scramble the story again, but this is not likely.

Welcome to the horrible wonders, blunders, myths, and pathology of historiography!2

My confidence level is equally high that the word was coined somewhere in the date range from 1833, up to, but not including, when Herschel presented his paper. I have my own opinion on who was first, but for reasons I will give a few paragraphs from now, I will keep to myself.3

Intrigue indeed!

I have spent hundreds of hours digging into the voluminous material that constitutes “the history of photography,” and spending a significant amount of cash to access selected primary source material critical to forming and substantiating some of my conclusions. Yes, this is a disease!4

I collected, sifted, arranged, and evaluated a huge amount of alleged facts, factoids, and figures: articles, papers, theses, documents, annals, commentaries, and histories. I started this core series of posts almost 8 months ago, expecting to complete them in about two. I have stopped and started rewriting from scratch no less than 10 times due to finding new material or having debates with myself over the evidence gathered and conclusions drawn across the component parts of this series, which were being written simultaneously. There were days when I thought my head would explode, and others when I hoped it would.

Before I went completely insane, I “hit the wall” and mentally “shut down.”5

Once I stopped running down rabbit holes chasing down mythtories, I came to the following conclusion:

I realized that attempting to prove who did what, when, and how in excruciating exactitude with 99.999% surety of the facts, was not only not possible, but not necessary for the purpose of this and likely any other project. Getting the minutiae of these details perfectly accurate is not important for our purposes.6

But starting with the next post in the series, I intend to delve into what is.

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Ditto, at least figuratively.

Here, we are identifying historically entrenched dubious notions, fallacies, and demons of historiography that need to be dishonorably discharged and redefined in a manner that will benefit our mission to defend against imposters— ignorant and malicious alike. We must identify and battle with those attempting to bastardize it and provocateurs who would steal, imitate, and replace our photographic legacy. We will continue to be vigilant and recognize these incursions as we also conduct a historical investigation with a future definitional intent.

AI has been part of visual arts since the beginning of the digital era, whether or not those of us who have been using pixel manipulation hardware and applications for decades consciously realized it. It is one of many things that occur in our lives we are not consciously aware of but have a hazy perception of their existence. If we are oblivious to their presence or action, or if they appear to make our lives easier or more enjoyable, we don’t give them any thought.

The general public has no real sense of how widely AI technologies have been embedded in our lives over the last several decades. And from the perspectives of those who produce AI products and processes, the less we know, the better.

The phenomenal disruptions caused by the introduction of new AI-generative products in November of 2022 seem like the result of a recent, instantaneous AI “big bang” in the creative universe, perceived by the vast majority of us, the neophyte non-data-scientist general public, as the beginning of a new age.

The mind abhors a vacuum. Introduce something unknown, and it will attempt to establish some point of reference as an intellectual anchor point. I observed photographers and non-photographers alike talking about prompt-based AI-generated images as being “photographs,” perhaps reflexively equating the end product of this new technology to something “everyone knows.” Hold that thought.

This problem occurred because these latest techno-tool toys were introduced without any preparation to tell us what they are, what they do, how they do it, or even how to talk about them—they weren’t given a specific product name— thus creating a new set of lexical problems.

The tech companies’ lexical failure by omission has the potential to become a legal issue, alongside the existing lawsuits over how these companies quietly and secretively sidestepped a host of intellectual property issues to produce their products.

Photography has a history long enough to have significant social, legal, and economic consequences in ways that are deeply interwoven and difficult to split apart for separate examinations. Any technology with commercial potential will quickly raise concerns about intellectual property and social consequences, likely to lead to government oversight and regulation. Any of these aspects have legal ramifications, which will require an examination of the contextual lexicon intrinsic to each.

Let’s begin with a simple challenge.
No cheating; no dictionaries allowed, even after you’re done.
Please write your answers down and save them. We will come back to them at a later time.

1. How would you define ‘photography?’
2. How would you define ‘photographer?’
3. How would you define “photograph?”

Take your time…I’ll wait…

Did you come up with definitions or scoff at the idea you should have to, because “everyone knows” what they are?1

If you took the challenge seriously, perhaps you found them difficult to define without reverting to using the terms themselves in their own definition, a lexical taboo called circularity—a direct result of the fallacy that “everyone knows.” 2

As you contemplated your definition of “photography,” did you come up with all these different contextual meanings:

• As technical processes
• As a practice of “taking pictures”
• As a body of work

Whether you found this exercise easy or hard, were successful or not—and even if you blew it off—two questions need to be answered:

1. Did you (by that, I mean “we”) get them “right?”
2. Does it matter?

The fundamental premise of this project is that it does matter. Amateur or pro, if you are a photographer who doesn’t think knowing how to define and defend what you do is important, you likely will change your mind in the near future. Again, to be clear, as they have previously, new technologies are challenging perceptions of photography that will affect intellectual property law and have other related consequences.

Before we can influence how photography will be understood and differentiated from its imposters now and in the future, it is beneficial to have a solid understanding of certain historical benchmarks and contexts during its development before being blithely carried along with those lurching into a hyper-driven technical, social, legal and economic black hole.

We photographers who will be most affected, injured, and abused must understand where our active, evolving activity came from, where it is now, and anticipate where it might be going. But more importantly, we need to prescriptively differentiate what it is from what it is not—and do so now.

We should also realize that our present understanding needs to be debated, developed, and documented. This will become a historical reference for photographers of the future, who may revisit these same subjects when they face a new threat from something not yet foreseen.

I hope my little introductory exercise has stimulated a desire to intellectually enter the fray. Please give it your serious consideration while I continue working up the rest of the core posts (and continue to battle with my inner satisfying daemon of knowing when to stop digging). Definitional issues will become important in the not-so-distant future. As a community, we must get serious about getting this “right.”

Posts for this suite of introductory articles to follow will examine these interwoven subjects :

• survey the technical history of photography as a means to define it.
• survey of patents to see how that process has defined related subjects.
• survey how reference works and governments have defined photography.
• the definitional problems caused by descriptive lexicography and why we need to…
• write our own prescriptive model definitions of our three core terms.

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I used to maintain a large site that showcased my categorized photography and some photo studies but found the constant maintenance an unrewarding constant battle and a drain on my limited time, so now I use other platforms and let them handle the backend. Their ability to handle photo-centric content is somewhat rudimentary but acceptable for my kind of work. I publish infrequently, but when I do, I tend toward somewhat moderately long-read photo stories about the natural world around us that we usually don’t “see” or appreciate. (See my Len’s Afield substack or here).

I have a large portfolio, the vast majority of which no one else will ever see. I also have a small number of selected photos showcased for sale. I haven’t edited or updated those offerings in a long time. I intended to do so, but as you will read in what follows, something happened along the way.

I have always been easily interested in new things and can quickly become immersed in them. That means I can easily sidetrack and meander from an intended track to exploration far from where I started. It’s a terrible flaw, a curse I’ve had all my life. It has been beneficial in some respects but a detriment in others.

This was true twenty years ago when an out-of-the-blue announcement caused chaos, confusion, and questions within an organization and its stakeholder community. The complex situation was in progress and ongoing. It included existential organizational changes and economic ramifications for its future. I was up-to-speed on the legal issues, but no one knew how the unusual financial machinations would work.

I was asked to produce a long-read article to explain the major players, what had occurred, what was in the offing, and how it was intended to work—to pull it all together and present it so we could all understand. I agreed but had to undertake tremendous amounts of research in a short period of time.

My flaw became an asset.

That project inspired me to start an independent research business early in 2007, and I could see the possibility of quitting my job and going into business full-time. I was right on track with my plan…right up until the economy was tanked in 2008, and clients responded by eliminating research budgets. Business dried up, so I put mine on hold, resurrected only briefly on rare occasions but always keeping it administratively active as far as the state and the IRS were concerned.

In the fall of 2022, I intended to rework, revamp, and revitalize my existing photography ventures over the winter, hoping they would produce a revenue stream sufficient to retire in the spring. [After another three and half years, I finally set a firm date and stuck to it.]

The process was moving along in early December of 2022, until I read a couple of posts on a couple of different platforms that altered my plans and are the reason you are reading this and the other content here. That story should be your next stop, and it begins here.

This was the beginning of a new set of problems caused by a new disruptive technology made available to the public before the providers or consumers had a common language for discourse.

So new was this phenomenon that there were no words to define and describe “it.” Conscientious writers tried to fall back on massaging familiar words about existing tech in order to discuss this new tech, but found they must resort to tortured metaphors or a lot of qualifiers and hyphenated compounded phrases. And there were those who simply called it ‘photography.’

What aigitates me most isn’t those ignorant about the difference, but photographers who know or should know better, writing and equating generative imagery with photography, creating a sense of vetted definitional validation that is actually dangerous catachresis. They have no sense of what this lack of discrimination will have in the future.

Houston, we have a problem.

This is a new frontier. So many are writing as much as they can, as fast as they can, to gain readers, likes, and followers, creating an aura of being insta-pundits, infoflow-influencers™, and instant go-to-experts in this new addition to the online info-economy.

Failure to control the lexicon and narrative will have serious ramifications, first concerning public perception. The public needs to be trained about what is and is not photography. Winning their hearts and minds is important for the battles to come once the inevitable social, political, and economic problems over AI proliferate.

New law will have to be created. Existing law, including intellectual property law, will change. It is vital we directly influence the debate and process. Legislative and judicial action, just starting now, will escalate as this technology continues to develop. There is a lot at stake here, so we need to get control of the narrative and become a major influence and stakeholder in the social, legal, and market sectors.

To that end, our first point of action is something anyone can do:

Never allow generative imagery to be equated with, or qualified alongside, the concept of photography. We must firmly correct any and all instances of this semantic and linguistic misapplication and abuse whenever and wherever we come upon it.

Here’s one actual example among many I come across in my daily reading:

Here is how we should respond:

Generative AI is not a photographic process; it does not produce photographs. It is not photography.

If you want, add a link to this site: aigitated.com generally or this post specifically (right-click on either to copy the link).

The reason for my AI backstory, for the About page, and this post is to have someplace to give as a reference when we correct misuse and to educate. This site is intended, in part, to become a resource for corrective action.

We must specifically define and preserve our craft and art, prescriptively and proscriptively. I am aigitated, not panicked, by generative AI. Photography is not going away. As more unrealities are introduced into society, the more valuable reality and those who can present it and work within it will become. Fear not…on that point, but only that point.

In the next few posts:

• I will develop a brief history of the earliest development of the science and processes and the words used in those contexts to define and describe what evolved into photography as we know it. This is important because we need to establish a historical basis of definitional characteristics and traditions of the photographic process and its products.

• Present a survey of definitions for ‘photography’ and ‘photograph’ from dictionaries, subject-specific journals, other narrative sources, the United States Code, and other government/regulatory sources. This is important because some have weight as “authoritative” precedents and could, as is, be injected directly into the body of draft legislation. They are generally awful. Others are more nuanced and developed, useful for being included in the legislative record as a resource and reference for committee debates and inclusion in references about legislative intent, which could help shape court decisions. And important for us when we develop our model definitions.

• Provide an essay on lexicography, the problem of general-purpose dictionaries, and why correcting catachresis is necessary so we don’t lose control of the definitions and then the narrative, both less likely once we …

• produce our scholarly, categorical, authoritative, go-to techno-aesthetic definitions that will meet any challenge.

Like the About page and My AI Backstory, this post is open for comments. If there are enough comments and questions raised, I will open up a chat forum. Let’s talk about it. We have work to do.

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In early December 2022, I read a couple of posts about new applications using artificial intelligence (AI) that could create fantastic images from nothing but simple, descriptive text inputs. Apparently, these new tools had become publicly available sometime in mid- or late-November. Maybe I saw an article title or two back then, but since they weren’t directly related to photography, they likely didn’t make me curious enough to read and explore further.

Then one day, sometime in mid-December, I saw several posts about how these new products were either a new way to “do photography” or a new way to enhance photography. They got my attention—on more than one level.

Soon thereafter, there were posts about how this new tech threatens photography—some portending its imminent death as we know it. There is no doubt that posts relating words of apocalyptic consequences to something in which I am heavily invested with my time and money (reading this stuff after having just made some major new gear purchases), and articles that play fast-and-loose with terms and semantics, certainly got my attention.

The combination of all the above, along with other topics not yet mentioned, soon elevated my natural skepticism, cynicism, and general wariness. This tends to happen whenever newly alleged next-best things are foisted upon me, and I am told I would be a fool if I do not submit to and embrace whatever “it” is with all my being—or risk being left behind. Yes, there were posts that actually said such things using such words.

I began to call all this collective tech “IT.” Great! Another topic to add to my already bloated daily reading list.

Then I read an article on how these generative image models are trained. It was written in a manner short on details and clear as mud. That gave me a sense of unease.

Then I found more detailed articles supplying more specifics of said training. In a nutshell, this involved massive input from collections of image-text pairings. Some were supplied from publicly available and licensed collections developed for the purpose. Billions more were simply and systematically scraped from “public websites.”

My unease became outright agitation after I began to find my images in one of the larger training datasets. Lots of them.

Yes, I always knew that anything posted online could likely be lifted. But I also know that without the internet, having my work seen and possibly bought by anyone, anywhere, would be impossible. So I shrugged my shoulders and accepted the conundrum.

But that acquiescence was based on the assumption that theft of my images would be done by individuals. Those infringing on my copyrights could be (and have been) found, and the situation addressed.

Calculated, deliberate, en-masse scraping of my work by corporate entities to train new, for-profit apps intended for use by the general public (and we can only guess for what other purposes), never entered my mind.

And—spoiler alert—this is quite likely completely legal.

These unsolicited, secretive, intentional, bald-faced incursions into any websites they so desired, for the purpose of taking my images, undeterred simply because they could—without my permission and without compensation—in order to produce new for-profit AI-generative apps some perceive as abusive and threatening to photography, a favorite personal endeavor, made me mightily agitated.

So much so that Me, Myself, and I had a meeting (more of an internal argument), after which we decided to put aside the original over-winter plan to revisit, rework, and revamp my existing photographic ventures. There was simply no point continuing as my brain was now infested and infected by the actions and implications of IT. Having glommed and latched on to IT, it won’t let IT go.

The implications and future impacts of artificial intelligence are going to be huge. So is the hype of previously unimaginable benefits that deep machine learning (a more accurate term) will have for our human potential. The oxymoronic juxtaposition of those concepts and the lack of restraint in saying so do not sit well with me.

Huge for whom, in what manner, and at what cost? Or would a better, more accurate question be, at whose expense…besides mine and all the others who don’t know they’ve been robbed?

Then I realized what the ultimate questions are:
Why do these companies need to produce tools for the production of generative “art” in the first place?
How does this fit into their business model or agenda?
(I provide a speculative answer here at the sister publication ThisOldGoat).

Passive anger achieves nothing. Action is necessary: calm, studious, deliberative, focused, community-oriented, directed, and properly targeted action.

I am ainxious, aigitated, vexed, stressed, and sleep-depraived because I have become attuned to the web of related topics, cross-correlations, and the threats included in this burgeoning and bewildering morass of social, economic, and political implications, all brought about by reading a few innocuous articles, a few months ago, about a few new digital toys, with more than a few implications for photography, and way beyond. What began by perusing those first few articles has quickly turned into a mountain of reading, notes, databases, and draft posts. It’s already all-consuming and overwhelming.

I do not intend to research the entire realm of AI technologies and attempts to create problematic parallel virtual universes. The specific aspects to which I have been trying to limit myself are still a massive undertaking. The amount of historical data that existed before these subjects were of broad interest is enormous, but now that AI-generative technologies have exploded into public consciousness, the amount of new daily noise about IT is expanding exponentially (much of it written or augmented in seconds by AI tools).

I hope I have clarified that asking the right questions and finding the right information is the key to action. There is no substitute, no shortcuts. Let me also be clear that all necessary information is not free to be found on the web. What is online is but a subset of all that is available, and not all that is available there is visible—or free. Please keep that in mind as you continue…

So, sensing no relief, no way out, I’m “in.” I have a new purpose. Retirement will not be a tranquil ride into my sunset. Can I transition from being “in” to “all in?” Are there enough people who are concerned enough to invest in my purpose—our purpose? It’s a gamble for me and anyone who wants to tag along.

There are vaccines to prevent various physical afflictions and medications to wean addicts from many dependencies, but none is known to prevent or quash the revival of my addiction to the disquisitive. It has been disquieting, to say the least.

Since I was vexed by this quest, I haven’t shot a single frame. Will I be able to make time to get out and about with my actual, physical photography gear to record and present the real, natural actual world in non-AI-generated words and photographs—while I still have time?

On Privacy

For Substack policies, see their footer information available on most pages.

I will keep this brief and simple: I have no intention of collecting any personal information from the general readership. I have been burned too many times by others who sell data. I won’t do that. Period.

Personal email correspondence is just that and shall remain so.

Participants who post comments or participate in chats are subject to Substack’s rules. I may need to have your email address in the event of a moderation issue, as discussed in the next section.

Terms of Use

For Substack’s policies, see their footer information available on most pages.

All content I write is subject to revision at any time. Announcements will be posted when there are significant changes, such as factual corrections or information that provides additional details or context. This is reasonably likely because 1) I am always tinkering with what I write, 2) details about topics can change based on new information at any time, and 3) the law is a critical component of this project that is constantly in flux.

Your active participation (by making comments in posts or in The Forum implies your agreement to abide by these guidelines:

I expect and will enforce common sense rules of civil behavior.

All comments will initially be moderated and approved before posting. I hope to abandon this policy if participants can successfully self-police. The following should be your guide to standards and acceptable behavior and decorum.

There will be no profanity. You will not use grawlix or special characters to mask letters to get around that edict. Personal attacks will get you barred from the site.

The nature of this project will necessarily include discussions of historical, contemporary, statutory, and regulatory law from international, US Federal, and individual state perspectives. I easily see potentially heated debates about correlations between political ideologies and the nitty-gritty real-world intersection of vested interest blocks, including corporate, governmental, and social interest groups. I can also foresee disagreements over discussions about goals, key concepts, and action procedures. I will not allow discussions to devolve into chaos and dysfunction.

The Rules

This site exists in the public domain, intended for use by the general public, but it is not a public site (in the sense of .gov sites). My site, my rules, take it or leave.

I didn’t decide to take on the work involved here on a whim. If you choose to stick around, and especially if you intend to actively participate, take this seriously so that if we gain traction, others watching will see we should be taken very seriously [6/19/23: already seeing signs of being monitored]. We can become a force to be reckoned with as agents of change.

Behave like adults who share and strive for a common purpose. If the collective can’t do that, know I am willing to pull the plug on this entire proposition at any time. Life is short and getting shorter. There are actual, relaxing things I could do with my time and money than this in my impending retirement.

If we are copasetic, welcome aboard.