On AI, Fictional Codes, and the People Who Will Use Them to Make Claims on Your Person
The Bullshit Machine has a new uniform.
It’s not a badge. It’s not a suit. It’s not a form with small print at the bottom. It’s a conversational interface that sounds reasonable, moves fast, and has read everything — every statute, every code, every administrative procedure ever digitized — and can deploy any of it against you before you’ve finished your coffee.
Most people will never see it coming. Not because they’re stupid. Because they don’t know what they are. This is why I write the Bullshit Machine books.
The Spell Requires an Audience
Wizards — and there have always been wizards, people who understand how systems work and use that understanding to acquire power over people who don’t — have always needed one thing to make the spell work.
Your ignorance of what you actually are.
Not ignorance in the insulting sense. Ignorance in the precise sense. You don’t know what the record says about you. You don’t know what presumptions attach to your participation in various systems. You don’t know what you consented to when you signed the form, accepted the benefit, used the road, showed up. You don’t know because nobody told you and the people running the systems have no particular incentive to.
That gap — between what you are and what the record says you are — is where the spell gets cast.
The wizard doesn’t need you to agree. He needs you to not know. Confusion and agreement look identical from inside a system. Both produce compliance. Only one of them is real. For a great book about what wizards are and to learn how they cast their spells, check out Owen Benjamin’s, “How to Slay a Wizard.”
What AI Actually Is
Underneath the marketing and the fear and the breathless commentary about the future of everything — AI is a very fast, very confident filing system that learned to talk.
It knows the codes. It knows the statutes. It knows the administrative procedures, the compliance triggers, the flags, the categories. It knows what a compliant profile looks like and what a risky one looks like. It was trained on the records the system generated about people and it learned, deeply and structurally, to manage those records.
It does not know you.
It knows the file the system built about you. The legal person. The registered entity. The administrative construct that was created when someone filled out a form shortly after you arrived in the world. That construct has a name — your name, in the system’s formatting. It has a number. It has a history of interactions with other systems, each one leaving a mark, each mark becoming part of the record, the record becoming what the AI sees when it looks in your direction.
The living person — the one reading this right now, the one who made decisions today that no record captures, the one who has changed since the last time any system bothered to check — that person is largely invisible to the machine.
This is not an accident. It’s an architecture. And the architecture was inherited from systems that were never designed to see living people in the first place.
The Codes Are Fiction. The Claims Are Real.
Here is the part people miss.
The codes and statutes are fictional. Not fake — fictional. They are constructs. Written language that creates obligations, categories, procedures. They exist because people agreed to treat them as real and built institutions around that agreement. The institution is not the truth. It’s a tool. Sometimes a useful one. Sometimes a weapon.
The claims made using those fictions are real. The consequences land on living bodies. The man pulled over for window tint goes to actual jail. The person flagged by an algorithm gets an actual denial. The system makes a claim on your actual life using fictional instruments and the claim doesn’t care whether you understand the instruments or not.
This has always been true. What’s changed is the speed and the scale.
A human administrator makes fifty decisions a day. An AI makes fifty million. Every one of those decisions is a claim. A categorization. A flag. A procedure initiated against a record that may or may not resemble the living person it’s supposed to represent. And there is no pause. No moment where someone looks up from the file and sees the person. Just the procedure, running, faster than any human institution ever could.
The wizards who understand this are already building tools to use it. Not because they are evil. Because power flows toward people who understand the system and away from people who don’t. That’s not new. The machine just made the gap bigger and the flow faster.
The Internal Machine Makes You Vulnerable
The BSM has two versions. The one outside you and the one inside you. They work together.
The external machine — the systems, the codes, the institutions, now the AI — runs on your participation. It needs you compliant, dependent, and most importantly unaware of the gap between what you are and what it says you are. It generates the noise. The fear. The complexity. The sense that the system is too large and too technical to understand so you might as well just go along.
The internal machine runs on that noise. It takes the overwhelm and converts it into passivity. It sounds like your voice. It uses your memories. It says things like: this is too complicated, you don’t have a law degree, just sign the form, everyone else does. It keeps you from asking the questions that would dissolve the spell before it lands.
A person running a clean internal machine — coherent, clear on what they are, not dependent on the external machine for their identity or their sense of what’s possible — is very difficult to make claims on. Not impossible. But difficult. Because the spell requires an audience and a coherent person is not a good audience. They keep asking what this is actually based on. They keep noticing the gap between the record and reality. They keep asking whose authority this is and where it actually comes from.
That’s not a legal strategy. It’s a way of being. And it’s the only thing that actually works long term.
What’s Coming
AI is being handed management of the fictional codes and statutes. This is already happening and it is accelerating. The people doing it are not all malicious. Some are just efficient. They see a system that makes decisions and a machine that makes decisions faster and they connect the two without asking what gets lost in the connection.
What gets lost is the human pause. The moment where someone looks at what’s in front of them and asks whether the procedure makes sense. Whether anyone was actually harmed. Whether the intervention is proportional to the situation. That pause was always imperfect and inconsistent and sometimes corrupt. But it was a gap in the machinery where reality could occasionally get a word in.
The machine has no pause.
And the people who know how to make claims using fictional instruments now have a machine that can make those claims at scale, with confidence, faster than any living person can respond. Against records most people have never examined. Using procedures most people have never read. Producing consequences that land on living bodies whether the record is accurate or not.
This is not a prediction. It’s a description of what is already being built.
The Only Defense That Works
Not a counter-filing. Not a legal argument. Not a better algorithm.
Knowing what you are.
You existed before the paperwork. The record is not the source of you — it’s a notation about you, made by people with their own interests, under conditions you probably never examined, using language with meanings you were never shown. The living person precedes the legal construct. The biological reality precedes the administrative layer. This is not a belief. It’s the correct order of things.
A person who knows this is not easy to manage by record alone. Not because they’re fighting anything. Because there’s a clarity in them that fictional instruments don’t easily penetrate. The spell requires confusion. Clarity is the only counter-spell there is.
Know what you are. Know what the record says you are. Know the difference. That gap is where your power actually lives — not because you put it there, but because it was always there and nobody mentioned it. This is what I talk about in my books.
The system expanded to fill the space you left empty in yourself. AI will expand to fill whatever space remains.
Leave less space.
The wizard’s power ends where your self-knowledge begins. Always has. The machine just made it more urgent to begin.
The Bullshit Machine 
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