I have never thought of food without thinking of the calorie. By the time I could read, it was there, on the back of every box and jar at the grocery store, alerting me to how many of these things I was about to put in my body. I never really knew what a calorie was, though as I got older and in line with many women my age, I internalized the idea that I should eat as few as possible. But I never thought deeper about it, or about how it became the omnipresent measure of all foodstuff.

According to historian Dr. Nina Mackert, interviewed below, it didn’t have to be this way. In fact, it probably shouldn’t have. The calorie, one way to measure the energy value of food, was not a particularly good measure of nutritive value, satiety, pleasure, or many other things we need and want from our food. But the calorie “was politically versatile and therefore successful in serving divergent political agendas and arguments,” she writes in her new book, Inventing The Calorie: The Politics of Food in the Early 20th-Century US.

The calorie as it pertains to food (rather than just a thermodynamic unit of energy) was developed in the 1880s, at the onset of the Progressive Era, a time of mass social and political upheaval. People were looking for order amid the chaos, writes Mackert. And so, as a “scientific unit for measuring and comparing food needs, diets, and bodies,” the calorie represented a way to quantify something as previously mysterious as the body (though whether it actually does that is another question). In an era obsessed with classification, whether that was timekeeping or attempting to categorize race, the calorie was primed to be adopted. And abused.

It was breathtaking to read how the calorie, a scientific measurement, was used to justify just about every existing prejudiced argument, some of which directly contradicted each other. A scientist seemed to pull the idea that adult women need fewer calories than adult men out of thin air, and yet I have seen that assumption persist to this day. Capitalists used the calorie to argue “that hunger and malnutrition were not caused by poverty under capitalism but rather by poor spending choices,” and that workers should instead learn what foods are calorie-rich and cheap. It was used to uphold white supremacy, with backward arguments that people of color needed fewer calories because they just didn’t work very hard. And then, as the economy boomed and consumers navigated culinary abundance rather than lack, the calorie did a 180. It was used to encourage the white middle class to embrace calorie counting and “moderation,” to differentiate themselves from the working poor and people of color, who were assumed to not be able to control their appetites. 

It also created new prejudices. The idea of the calorie seeded rampant fatphobia in America, as larger bodies began to be considered not just a happenstance of genetics, but “a sign of immoral, inefficient, and irresponsible consumption.” Health began to be calculated around “ideal” averages of weights, and the knowledge that reducing calories could reduce weight (however unreliable that association is) made being anything but slim a matter of personal choice — the wrong one.

As I read Mackert’s descriptions of how the calorie was used to legitimize anxieties that white men were “falling behind” at the turn of the 20th century, and how it was used to portray fatness as a symptom of laziness, I thought of every protein-maxxing bro that’s ever appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast. It feels like we are again in a time of great social and political change, so is there any wonder that we are seeing white men embrace macro counting, protein gains, and other forms of vaguely scientific-sounding diet advice? Or that tech bros are constantly in pursuit of “optimization” of the human body? Or that, with the relentless marketing of GLP-1s for weight loss, we are regularly being told that thinness is as easy as taking a pill, and choosing not to do so is a personal failing? We are still looking for order amid the chaos, and over 100 years later, the calorie, and many things like it, promises that we’ll find it.

Here, Mackert, a professor of North American history and public history at the University of Hamburg, breaks down just how the calorie embedded itself into our everyday lives, and why despite constant criticism, it has endured.

Jaya Saxena: What first got you interested in looking into the calorie and its place in modern society? 

Dr. Nina Mackert: I became interested in the history of body fat. As a scholar of body history, I was coming from a position of huge unease about modern fat shaming. I looked into the history of the Fat Man's Club, which was a group of businessmen in Gilded Age America, and they centered their weight. They did these weigh-ins at the beginning of every meeting, and the goal was to be the heaviest person. Newspapers started to observe these groups with growing ridicule, so I looked at these groups as an example of increasing unease about fat at the turn of the 20th century. But I felt there was something missing on the measures that emerged at the time. Not just BMI, which became important very much later, but I felt someone needed to write a history of the calorie, because it really is a key to understanding modern society and modern fat shaming.

Calories are just so ingrained in many people's lives as the main way to relate to nutrition and food. How did people think about the relationship between food and the body and energy before we had the language of the calorie? 

First off, it was not about weight loss before. People did not strive to become thin. Thinness was not yet an aesthetic or moral goal. It was connected to poverty, to hunger, to starvation. But also, bodies were not considered something under individual control. They were given by divine providence, or by fate, and there was nothing that you could control more to your liking. There was a mixture of different bodily ideals, and the absence of this individual imperative to change the body according to society’s liking. It was nothing that could be measured on a supra individual level. And there were not bodily standards; not even the idea of ideal weight was born. 

That was such a fascinating shift from talking about what is healthy for one individual person to the idea of an average ideal weight that suddenly you’re not living up to. 

One of my early projects with this book was to make clear that measuring food in calories was not inherent; it was a decision based on a very specific industrial logic at the end of the 19th century, when industrializing societies heralded efficiency and productivity. Modern nation-states were confronted with the problem of feeding the industrial masses, and they had a certain configuration of problems. Because of the scientific discourse on thermodynamics at the time, nutrition scientists decided that energy was a productive thing to measure. And the book shows how it became an allegedly self-evident and natural thing for us to measure calories. 

Whenever a political culture foregrounds individual responsibility for your fate, then it was a time when body norms were particularly aggressive and toxic

You point out how this supposedly scientific measure was used to justify all of these existing political and social views and prejudices, even when the evidence produced refuted those claims, or even when there's contradictory evidence. People seem to really be able to mold the calories to justify what they already wanted to justify. Why was this measure so easy to manipulate?

First of all, I want to say that it is a scientific measurement. And I think this is important. Contrary to pseudoscientific racism, for instance, there were all these experiments, and there were solid chemists doing things. Many natural scientists would agree that natural science produces ideas that are inherently fragile, and inherently tied to social and political problems. So it's not that I would say this is unscientific and political, but that it's scientific and political. I think this is really evident in these different efforts to set scientific standards and nutritional standards according to race and gender, for instance. 

One of the most interesting things to me while doing this research was that the current critique of the calorie that most of us are familiar with was already prevalent during the late 19th and early 20th century. That is actually impossible to mold bodies or health according to food energy units, on the basis of counting calories, et cetera. I'm really interested in how this mélange of scientific ideas, of political circumstances, political problems, created this very lasting unit that obviously sits on a very fragile basis. 

You write about how the calorie was used at this pivotal point in the labor movement, by the capitalist managerial class to position workers more as consumers. And this idea of consumer citizenship, where your diet, your health, and your ability to live are more about your buying habits than how much money you make. I'm curious to hear a little more about how the calorie allowed us to view others and ourselves as primarily consumers?

The calorie is about consumption, essentially. Its thermodynamic base locates the source of productivity of anything in its consumption. The idea of calories is that they provide energy for you to do something through consumption. According to the logic of the calorie, more consumption means more productivity. Even nowadays in Germany, there are always these discussions about how much money do people need? And how could we cut welfare spending? And there are right-wing politicians explaining how people can eat more cheaply by telling them about calorie counts. It can also be used in some initiatives for people to say they need to meet certain calorie needs; it holds the potential to ask for more. But frankly, it's been used most of the time to teach people how to need less. 

We have some very similar stuff happening here. RFK Jr. recently was telling people they should just eat cheaper cuts of organ meat. 

This large focus on consumption inherent in calorie counting is actually one of the main reasons why it became so successful in a consumer society, because consumer society is so fraught, so pervaded by notions of good and bad consumption, by notions of good and bad people, et cetera. Modern consumer society requires both self-restraint and consumption. It also measures status by consumption, and you're asked to consume, with pleasure, whatever the food industry throws at you. Many of the diet manuals in the early 20th century already say you can eat anything; you can eat butter, you can eat pie, you can eat cake, et cetera. But you’re also constantly required to exercise self-control. 

Calculations of how many calories people need vary wildly throughout its history. And now we have this 2,000 a day standard recommendation. Where did that number come from? 

I don't actually know. Having researched the basis for these historical figures, which were already arbitrary, I can say that this number is an average for an average person, and this average person is obviously non-existent. You cannot homogenize all people by one average. But public health experts and nutrition experts and social reformers felt the need to explain dietary needs to the people in a profoundly simple manner. That's also where the 100-calorie portion came from; this idea that people needed to be taught how to eat properly. So experts came up with these very general simplifications that are so general that they might not be of use to anyone. 

My interest in this project came also from observing myself. I'm not exempt from all of this. I go into the supermarket and look at the back of products where the nutrition facts are. And it's like, how do these numbers gain their power to suggest to us the truth of any particular food? 

What you wrote about the Progressive Era, and the drive to view the body as this machine that can be optimized, sounded so familiar. It’s felt like recently there really has been this push for body optimization, whether it’s with protein, peptides, adaptogens, or whatever. Is there something in the air that is bringing this language of optimization back? 

I do see parallels between the early 20th century and the early 21st century. But let me start with the differences. If we look back on the Progressive Era, among many reformers there was this well-intended idea of alleviating poverty and the bad consequences of capitalism. They were being paternalistic and racist in the course, but it was, I think, a different project than neoliberal health politics. If you look at the course of the 20th century, you can see that whenever a political culture foregrounds individual responsibility for your fate, then it was a time when body norms were particularly aggressive and toxic. This changed a little bit after the Progressive Era, during the Great Depression, and with the New Deal, when the focus was more on collective solutions. But you can see it coming back in the 1970s, even before [Ronald] Reagan, with the idea that people were responsible for their health, that people's individual responsibility needed to be foregrounded in public health. 

We are also at a very particular moment in history right now. These movements can connect so well to neoliberal politics because neoliberal politics has been teaching us for decades that there's a survival of the fittest, and that there is a survival of the most responsible, and of the most able, and of those who can optimize themselves best. In the end, that has an authoritarian effect, because they naturalize a social hierarchy of the able, and these autocratic movements can easily pick up on that. I think that's the reason why we see this very fatphobic backlash right now.

What do you think about calorie counts on menus? 

As a historian, I am interested in them, but I don't think we need to count calories to talk about health. I think they are a technology of governing that seeks to nudge people to make the right choices, but not because they have a choice, but because these choices are circumscribed in a very particular way, and calories kind of suppose or suggest us in a very particular direction. 

Is there anything the calorie is useful for for a consumer?

I'm not a nutrition scientist, and I don’t have an agenda to teach people how to eat right, because I am interested in how societies talk about eating right, and how these norms of eating right work. So, I'm not the person to give advice about how to eat. I think the calorie has been important in creating the basis of modern food aid, and in modern efforts of alleviating poverty and hunger. But this also came with a certain price, so I would not say that there's any way of counting calories that serves solely great goals in an ethical way. I’d rather get rid of the calorie. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Cam Smith helped create Siri. He worked in Silicon Valley for six years, much of the time at Apple, where he trained nascent language learning models to parrot human language and perfect the craft of next-word prediction. Like a lot of tech workers, he didn’t grasp the extent of the Pandora’s Box they were building at the time. He also couldn’t predict the way tech oligarchs would wield AI. When he finally quit tech two years ago to pursue making art full-time, he set out to use his toolset to expose the corruption at the heart of those corporations. “I view my art practice as critically engaging with technology—taking ideas and tools from the tech industry and exploring and exaggerating them to show their shortcomings and weaknesses,” he told me over email.

Tonight you can see Smith’s work at Passable Art in his solo show Surveillance State of Mind. The exhibit features many of the ideas he’s been pursuing in the past few years, including gutting and hacking Flock cameras to turn them into engines for new media art. 

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’re probably aware that Flock cameras are public enemy number one (or a top contender at least) in Seattle right now. Seeing a real one up close and pulled apart in Smith’s Belltown studio is a little unnerving. For one thing, they’re big—large and Darth Vader-esque with their sleek black plastic casing and many-eyed, glowing red eyes that drill down on every ant-like human scurrying across the city’s crosswalks. Inside, there’s a computer, modem, and a brick of a lithium-ion battery pack. With Smith’s modifications, they become cameras for art. Hacking these machines is easier than you think, he would like you to know. (His are all ethically sourced, he assures.)

Smith’s work spans a range of interactive devices. One of his signature pieces is a Mona Lisa-inspired digital painting that uses generative AI in real time to melt Mona and meld the viewer’s face with the painting. It’s a very surreal and (at times) uncomfortable embodied experience—a digital reflecting pool that mirrors and morphs in response to your proximity to an invisible camera hidden behind the frame. But the image of you is never quite right or accurate, nor within the control of the viewer to manipulate. Smith poses the question: “If a random artist with a cheap computer can hijack the world’s most famous portrait in real time, what are tech corporations capable of doing with your data?”

Other works are more literal takes on the state of surveillance, compiling hours’ or days’ worth of surveillance data (read: individuals) crossing the street, collaged into beautiful kaleidoscopic compositions that pulsate and blink across a redacted, blacked-out background. In some ways, Smith’s work feels incredibly romantic, old-world, and painterly-coded; it also couldn’t be colder and more contemporary.

Smith’s got an analog side too. Earlier this year, he collaborated with AI scientist Myke Walton to write and publish the zine AI MUST DIE. Inside its radioactive Brat-green cover (featuring a photo of a security robot nose-down in a fountain), AI MUST DIE lays out the sci-fi fantasies and tech ideologies driving Silicon Valley’s relentless pursuit to take over every corner of our wallets and lives. It also contains a huge list of resources reflecting the growing AI resistance movement.

The zine keeps going viral every few months—this past weekend, thanks to a random post on X (a site Smith doesn’t even use). Smith estimates he’s sold or given away at least 4,000 physical zines to date, not counting the free version viewed online. (He can’t track that info because he and Walton “hacked the website together out of raw HTML in 15 minutes.” There are no analytics.)

Ahead of his show at Passable, Smith answered a few questions about his background in tech and the way AI resistance is shaping up in 2026. 

How old were you when you first encountered AI and what was the context?
I got really interested in cognitive science when I read How the Mind Works for a sixth-grade book report project. From there I got into Marvin Minsky and machine learning, but during this time period we were experiencing an “AI winter” and not much attention was paid to the field. After I dropped out of a PhD program, I found that some of the basic machine learning skills I’d picked up in cognitive science classes in college were in high demand, so I followed the money to Silicon Valley. I’m an atheist and materialist and was always interested in the “computational theory of mind,” but right now (2026) I’m worried that philosophical and technical discussions about AI systems are distracting from their real-world harms.

Were you ever excited about the potential of AI?
Yes. Like many in Silicon Valley, I believed in the liberatory power of technology—techno-optimism. Techno-optimism has now evolved into its logical conclusion—effective accelerationism (or e/acc), which advocates rapid AI development regardless of the costs, with the belief that the benefits of AGI (artificial general intelligence) will outweigh any downsides. Some of these beliefs were easy for me to believe in the mid-2010s when I was working in tech—it’s easy to think the products and tools you’re developing are more important than the political and social work being done by others.

Is there anything you find good or useful about it?
AI is a bundle of random tools. What they have in common is a metaphorical connection to “thought”—if you can describe your tool as “mind-like,” it’s AI. AlphaFold is an AI tool that mostly solved the protein folding problem, and its creator, Demis Hassabis, won a Nobel Prize for its creation. At the same time, the IDF uses an AI tool called “Gospel” for selecting targets as part of the ongoing ethnic cleansing in the Gaza Strip.

What spurred you to make the zine?
1) The rapid realignment of the tech industry and federal government under Trump. 2) My co-author, Myke, worked as a researcher at Census—policy work to help democratically govern AI. When Trump came back, Myke got the DOGE email from Elon and decided to quit. We had a few conversations. The word “zine” came up, and I convinced him to drive up from Olympia for a two-day intensive writing session at my art collective’s print shop (Common Area Maintenance).

The zine talks about hype cycles and AI winters. We’re currently in a hype cycle (the third one, according to you). Do you have a prediction for when the next impending AI winter will hit?
As the saying goes, predictions are hard to make, especially about the future. What I’ll say is that an enormous amount of money and power is tied up with these AI tools, and it’s really important to talk about them in a way that’s critical and doesn’t hype up the product or downplay its real-world negative consequences.

When the hype bubble bursts this time around, will we be educated enough to get exactly what’s happening? Will we emerge from the next AI winter better equipped to resist the next hype cycle?
I hope that more zines, podcasts, news articles, books, TV shows, etc., will be coming out that criticize and push back against AI, so that we can make educated decisions about how it’s used. The people boosting AI products are salespeople, not genius innovators, and we have to be careful not to get swindled—even the few genuine scientists in the space (Dario [Amodei], [Ilya] Sutskever, Hassabis) are too lost in the sauce. I spent years exploring and critiquing “alternative medicine” and “pseudoscience,” and when people are educated about these frauds, they start making better decisions that save them time, money, and prevent negative health outcomes—it’s the same story with AI products.

Do you think most people see through the hype at this point?
Some do, some don’t. Most Americans have at least some intuitive sense that AI comes along with “bad vibes”—and some of us go further and explore why it feels so icky. But in my experience, a very sanitized and optimistic version of AI is exported overseas. I’ve had extensive conversations (workshops, talks, etc.) with organizations in Taiwan, and despite people there being highly educated, worldly, and technologically literate, few know anything about the ideological underpinnings of the Silicon Valley billionaires pushing AI. Even in Seattle, the AI ideologies exported here from Silicon Valley are highly sanitized—you have to visit a startup or a hacker house in the Bay Area to get the raw, unfiltered insanity.

Speaking of exposing the unfiltered, your zine traces the connection between Silicon Valley and eugenics—something that’s been substantially documented by folks like Valerie Veatch. Where do you see the eugenics thread showing up in our current moment, culturally? And what should people understand about it?
You don’t have to look far to find evidence: Some of Seattle’s tech elite/art patronage has its own eugenics problem. If you can optimize and control some technology system, the thinking goes, why can’t you do it with the human race? Technologists are often smart and very good at solving technical problems, and have all the confidence that comes along with success in their field. But despite the STEM acronym, technology and science are very different—science, in the classic Karl Popper formulation, involves making theories that can be falsified by experiment in an attempt to better understand reality. In contrast, technology is about solving problems to get work done. Science involves lots of skepticism, critical thinking, and getting really deep into the foundations of truth and knowledge. Tech less so. So when techies wade into the intellectual waters of anthropology or biology, you get half-truths, misunderstandings, and nasty pseudoscientific frauds like eugenics.

Something else the zine calls out is liberal passivity: “Governments and corporations have demonstrated their total unwillingness, incompetence, and incapacity to meaningfully commit to accomplishing this goal.” Does that mean there isn’t much at this point we can do in terms of organizing political action?
I think there’s a lot we can do. Continue holding governments and corporations accountable. Vote, and vote with your dollars too. The midterm “blue wave” was partly a repudiation of data centers—a very positive sign that when Americans are pushed to the brink, we can respond positively. But there’s also plenty of space for direct action—hacking and destroying surveillance systems, poisoning databases, leaking state or corporate secrets, if you’re involved in one of those organizations.

What about at the household level—is there a meaningful way to divest from AI?
Harm reduction approach: Think of all the ways you use AI today and write down the alternatives. Start with the easy ones, like buying a cookbook instead of using ChatGPT to come up with meal ideas for you. Then move down the list until it gets harder. If you’re still using AI and have some technical background, think about running your own models instead of using Claude/Grok/whatever. Continually ask yourself: Am I using the tool in a way that gives me power and agency, or am I turning over power and agency to the tool? Do I need to use this? What are the risks and what are the benefits? Is this something that only belongs in the workplace, or should I use this at home too? Where is the data going? Who owns this tool? What do the owners and creators of this tool believe about the world, and are those beliefs aligned with my own?

Something pretty much everyone agrees on at this point (across the political spectrum) is that they don’t want data centers in their backyard. What does an effective revolt against data centers look like?
This is something I’m optimistic about: Something like 40 out of the 41 anti-data center bills that were on the midterm ballot got approved by voters. It seems like there’s already momentum here, and I hope it grows into a bigger and more nuanced revolt against the tech oligarchy. On the other hand, we might end up in a Singapore/China situation: Jensen Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA, was recently caught having an affair with the leader of an offshore Singaporean data center company—this company buys GPUs from the US, sets up data centers, and sells compute to China, circumventing US sanctions on exporting chips to China. We might end up in a similar situation, with data centers setting up across the border in Mexico.

What are the top resources you recommend if someone wants to read up on AI resistance?
The Nerd Reich by Gil Duran describes the rise of the tech oligarchy and its belief system. Empire of AI by Karen Hao focuses on OpenAI and Sam Altman; it also paints a picture of Silicon Valley belief systems. Valley of Death by Sharon Weinberger focuses on the convergence of private tech capital and the US military—an extremely important topic for the future of the anti-war movement.

The post AI Winter Is Coming appeared first on The Stranger.

If you're american (even if you're not) you likely know how the elections went last week. Democrats across the country made historic gains in almost every part of the u.s. They won more than most people had ever dreamed possible. As a former texan, I've been hoping the state would turn blue since the 1990s. That's the era when Governor Ann Richards lost reelection to a young tycoon named George W. Bush. Hmm, whatever happened to him? Never mind! Some people did predict that Democrats across the south would win big. People like Stacey Abrams organized for years to build durable and effective movements. Movements like the ongoing anti-ICE actions in Minnesota showed that everyday people could win. These networks took Dems and leftists to victory in places that many in politics had long written off.

But not everyone believed these organizers could ever pull it off. Even days before the election, many political pundits were outright wrong about who would win. It's one thing to hope (or sigh, bet money) in our free time about which way the electoral winds would shift. But this is their job. People get paid to predict these kinds of gains. Some did, calling a blue wave what we'd soon know as a blue tsunami. Others predicted that Republicans would once again beat the months of negative polling. They'd ride their gerrymandered red state seats back into the maw of fascism. Instead, a bunch of old racists whose names I've had to know for decades finally lost their seats (good riddance, Virginia Foxx!). So why were most people's guesses so wrong?

Bias. People seem to be living in smaller and smaller bubbles these days. I do it too—the block button on social media is like a canteen in the desert. Our worldview and the ways we perceive reality has a huge influence on our expectations. We expect something to happen because all our friends and family agree that it will happen.

Playing it safe. Many political pundits hedged their bets predicting election outcomes. The "safe" prediction was that Republicans would lose the House but remain in power in the Senate. This was a very likely outcome because it has happened before. Still, there were many signs, for months, that this would not be a typical election. Others don't see governance as anything more than elected officials making slight tweaks to their odds of reelection. Choosing the most likely outcome does not make a person good at predicting the future.

Benefits and incentives. Lots of people love the way things are. Some even profit from these conditions. Scott Colom is the Democratic Senator-Elect from Mississippi; he's the first Black senator for the state since Hiram Revels in 1870. He's also the first Mississippi Democratic senator since the Dems were the party of segregation. He called out Cook Political and other political groups for rating his senate race a "solid R." Colom claims this kept donors from funding his and other "longshot" campaigns in the south. Many of these campaigns exceeded expectations in spite of a lack of dollars, national support, and media coverage. Angie Nixon, a Black socialist senate candidate, came very close to winning in Florida. Jamie Davis in Louisiana also lost by a slim margin. Political pundits profit by predicting a future they themselves influence into existence. If they're right, it's proof they know what they're talking about. If they're wrong, they'll be back in another election cycle (please go away, James Carville!).

on educated guesses

Elections are a contest where one side always wins. We usually learn how things will turn out in a matter of hours, days, or weeks. But elections aren't the only times in our lives that we try to predict what might happen. Think about the decisions taking place in your community. Think about the ones that dominate your workplace. How should we solve them? How audacious can we make our dreams? What might happen if we manage to reach those dizzying heights?

An educated guess often forms based on a person's reasoning, experience, and personal gain. No matter how educated it may seem, it’s still a guess. The truth is that any moment could become extraordinary. We can prepare for these outcomes. We can even help them along. But when we resist the reality that's staring at us, it's our educated guesses that are holding us back.

Hi Everyone,

Here we are at the final of four newsletters on Signet City’s influences, and some of the media and ideas that have been stirred into the melting pot for my new project. If you missed any, you can see the posts indexed below:

Reading the City - Literature and poetry

Visualizing the City - Film, comics and photography

Listening to the City - Music

Today’s final newsletter is Playing the City, a set of videogames and tabletop games that have shaped the development of Signet City from when it was an idea, to where it is at today, past the halfway point of its development. As always this list is non-exhaustive, but a curated peek behind the curtain!

This time I wanted to zoom in a little closer: games can be such massive objects—aesthetic, sonic, narrative, systemic—to say a game as a whole influenced me is less true than saying that some particular part of it left its mark. I so often find inspiration in the details of games, in single systems or ideas that feel potent and open to expansion or development. Part of In Other Waters conception, for example, was drawing ideas from the scan visor of Metroid Prime and the gorgeous topogrpahic maps of Destiny and using them not as subsidary systems, but the central pieces of the project.

So here I am once again going to break my influences into three sections, with one main influence and two related influences, where I will pick out just one element of the game that I drew inspiration from. I would always advise those interested in making games to play widely, and with attention to the details, you never know what small system or moment might inspire a whole project in you.

WHISPERS IN THE STREETS

Dishonored | Arkane Studios

I don’t know if there is a series of games whose cities have fascinated me more than the Dishonored games. So richly layered, so elegantly stylized and so cleanly refracted from the capitals of empire of our own world, they feel deeper than any other simply in vibes alone. Dishonored and its sequels are deeply connected to Signet City, in the same way that Mass Effect 2 is connected to Citizen Sleeper 2 or In Other Waters to Metroid Prime: not in pure replication, but instead as a springboard towards my own creation.

If I were to choose a single element of Dishonored that feels like it sparked something in Signet City, it would be The Heart, an equaippable item that you only need squeeze to be fed a poetic whisper straight from the soul of Dunwall. You can point it at places or people, and it gives them all a sense of interiority or history. “The ale here is sweetened with honey to hide the taste of river brine,” the heart might hiss. I love the idea of pulling threads out from the city like this. Its a magic act repeated again in Death of the Outsider with its rat whispers, and in Signet City it is the starting point of the idea of a whole game where you search for these reasonant moments in a decaying, layered city.

Disco Elysium | ZAUM - though people often compare my work to Disco Elysium, I do think there are elements of my approach, style and intent that are different. However, I have always loved, just like Dishonored’s heart, the way the Shivers skill lets the city speak to us, in the most beautiful ways.

Blades in the Dark | Evil Hat - Blades influnece on my work is well documented, but for Signet City it is the city map, with its districts and factions that I feel the strongest influence from. Theres something so elegant in its minimalism, it seems to ask, what is the optimum amount of information you need to tell a story in this city that is both true to the setting and still your own.

LIVING ART

Mundaun | Hidden Fields

Mundaun is a very special game, a grotesque and yet gorgeous paper puppet show about a cursed mountain and the shadow its history casts over a remote village. There are many special things about it, from its haunting exploration, to its spiralling narrative, but it is its aesthetics that I can never tire of. Rather than trying to look like a drawing, Mundaun is a game made of drawings.

At the heart of this are its textures, each sketched in pencil by the game’s creator Michel Ziegler. I love the way that at a distance they are a part of the whole, this monochrome mountain scene, but when you get close they collapse into gestures and marks captured in graphite. Charred wood and even skin becomes heavy marks, while tiles are sketched in precise grids. It gives an uncanny quality to the game that has been on my mind as I have been shaping the aesthtics of Signet City.

Half Life 2 | Valve - Another Viktor Antonov concepted city, along with Dishonored’s Dunwall, City 17 is one that has lived in my mind since launch day. But it’s the city’s skyboxes—the citadel cutting through clouds, the socialist blocks at the canals edge—that serve as the canvas for my imagination. Something I hope to provide the player with in Signet City.

Despelote | Julián Cordero, Sebastián Valbuena - One of my favourite games of the past few years, Despelote is a beautfully heartfelt trip into its creators childhood, and role football played in it, but it is the character sprites that inspire me the most, hand drawn in a simple style that helps them pop among the photo-textures that capture the city of Quito.

DAY BY DAY

Alien Squatter | Andrew Hagen, Shea Kennedy

An RPG that should have sparked a revolution in the genre if there was any justice in the world, Alien Squatter is a hidden gem in the truest sense where you must productively spend your days in an alien migrant camp as you try to beg, borrow and steal a pass into the city. It is written with incredible heart and humour as well as a deep awarness of what it means to live in poverty, but it is the game’s loop that I find so brilliant.

Each day you have a limited humber of “steps” to walk around the camp, taking on tasks, getting into random battles with cockroaches, stealing, begging, chatting and scavenging. The more you eat during the day, the more steps you’ll have during the next one. It is tight to the point of restictive, but gives the game a compelling rythmn of overlapping short, medium and long term goals, while still allowing for surprises. As I have found with Signet City it can be so hard to get a day loop right in a game, but Alien Squatter is a brillaint example.

Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor | Sundae Month - Many of you will know the influence this game had on Citizen Sleeper, but one element I love that fits in Signet City where it didn’t in Citizen Sleeper, is its days of the week. Both an elegant way to give a world depth and a way to give the players variety and rythmn, I could never get enough of the way Theday parties and music were always naturally followed by the trash-strewn streets of Onday.

Before the Green Moon | Turnfollow - A farming sim that is less interested in bucolic fantasies and more interesrted in the downtrodden community at the foot of a space elevator, Before the Green Moon is another exceptional but overlooked game. There are many parts of its subtle narrative and world I love, but it is actually the rainy season, with its natural progression from drizzle to downpour, that I adore. Farming games often treat seasons as distinct, with hard boundaries that don’t reflect reality. Before the Green Moon instead stages an constant transition from wet to dry and round again that makes its world feel real.

So there you have it, nine games that all played their part in my process. Together, with the books, photography, film, comics and music, I hope you will find something to love while you wait for Signet City.

With this foundation set, this newsletter will now be turning to news and updates about the game itself. you have all been very patient, but I wanted to take my time with explaining the project to you all and give you an insight into my process. Most of the reveals around the game will be coming in 2027, but I may be back for one more newsletter before the year ends.

Until then, wrap-up warm and be well,

Gareth

Last week I went to a concert with two of my best friends. We were there to see singer-songwriter Nick Carpenter, who goes by Medium Build on stage. Carpenter has been in the music industry for more than a decade. He comes across as relatable and charming, a person who seems at ease singing deeply personal songs to rooms of 500 or so. Medium Build tells stories about people who have messed up, who loved and lost. He sings about the yearning and mistakes and sparks of growth that dot the lives of most young people. I heard the room sing along to one of his bangers about depression when I thought, "I want to talk to Vincent about this!" Vincent is an internet friend of mine from Toronto. He saw Medium Build a couple weeks ago when the artist toured through Canada. We had a virtual sit-down this week to chat about how we connected to Carpenter's music.

Vincent and I found out by accident that we were both hooked on Medium Build. His music doesn't sound like that of any artist we'd talked about before. Vincent says that his usual flavor of music is well within the "pop diva" realm. He says, "I try to seek out male musicians who use he/him pronouns when referring to a lover," something I do as well. Vincent also likes ballads and slow songs but will on occasion dip into twangier sounds. The twang genre—not quite country, not quite rock—is one of my favorites. I grew up in Austin (the live music capital of the world, thank you). Most of the music from the region, the land of Willie Nelson and Stevie Ray Vaughan, tends to have a little drawl to it. My tastes still include a lot of synthesizers and pop divas, but I have a soft spot for a sad song set to acoustic guitar. Across our conversation, I noticed a few themes in Medium Build's work that resonate with us both.

a different model of masculinity

Carpenter identifies as queer or bisexual. "Everybody's hot!" Carpenter says in one interview. He often leaves the subject of his songs as gender ambiguous, or refers to them as "baby," or the like. On other songs, he make his attraction to many genders more direct. 'Drug dealer' is about the crushes we develop on the service workers in our lives. His drug dealer is a man, his bartender is a woman, and everyone loves "that songwriter" on the same track. He opens 'Thank you, Cook' with the lyrics, “when the masculine in you finds the feminine in me.” Gender is a spectrum in a song about the connections we may have across our long lives. The song is a personal and emotional end to an album full of such moments. But it also touches on personal growth in ways that seem inaccessible to many male musicians. In the first verse he talks about needing Cook more than anything. By the end of the song, he reassures them that the love they once showed him is how he learned to love himself.

His writing also blurs the lines of biography and fiction. Carpenter describes the song 'Hey Sandra,' as a letter that his dad might have written his mom if he needed to win her back. Vincent says, “he's almost mythologizing his dad and and straight male relationships. He wants to win his woman back by writing her a letter. At one point he sings, 'That lil' prick from Texas tried to touch ya and I broke that fucker's hand? [...] You used to like that tough guy act.' It feels like it's part of a story.” It might be this exploration that makes Medium Build's music so compelling. Men can mess up, make mistakes, fail their partners, and apologize. Carpenter’s songs don’t put the blame on the person he’s singing to. It’s not that person’s job to fix him. He can feel torn up about losing them, even long for them, but the work is his to do. Carpenter also sings on several songs about his struggles with body image. Lyrics from older songs like 'FatBrokeLoser' read like painful and self-deprecating diary entries. Newer songs like 'Armor' reveal some growth when he sings, "I wanna starve myself until I'm beautiful. Hey, what the fuck is that? Thought I could fix myself without the dysphoria." This is a topic rarely covered by male musicians, but one that a growing number of men struggle with today. I Medium Build's music offers a model of masculinity that says it’s okay to be vulnerable; it's okay to grow.

storytelling in songwriting

Vincent and I learned that we approach Medium Build's storytelling in different ways. He's not the first artist to sing about messed-up youth and bad breakups. One of my favorite artists, The Mountain Goats aka John Darnielle, often sings in that register. Vincent and I compared Carpenter's lyrics to those of women singer-songwriters like Lana Del Rey and Mitski. Music critics often ask women artists if their songs are autobiographical. This stems from the outdated sexist belief that a woman can only write songs from her own experiences. Sarah MacDonald writes, "Authenticity is mistaken as a synonym for autobiographical, and women have been told by critics, fans and their male colleagues they can only make autobiographical art." Women create personas to blur the lines between reality and fiction in their songs. Darnielle never wrote songs about stories from his own life until The Sunset Tree, his 9th album. Men are free to create personas, too, something Carpenter seems to be urging us to remember.

Carpenter's songwriting focuses on the emotional depths of the characters he sketches. I related to many of the people who show up in these songs. At some points in my life I have been those characters, these former lives of a person who's now grown up. I'm not the only listener who's ever been a little reckless in love. We all feel regret for the things and people we've lost. I am grateful for all the people who have left impressions on the many seasons of my life. 'John and Lydia' is one of a handful of Medium Build's songs that is explicitly about his parents. He intersperses snippets from the past with how he relates to them as an adult. He embraces the freedom of making his own choices and respecting the ones they once made. “Would we have been friends if we were born at the same time?” he sings. “Maybe in another life.”

I asked Vincent how he related to Medium Build's lyrics. I was curious if his life experiences overlapped his songs in the same ways that mine did. It surprised me to learn that, for the most part, he didn't. Instead, Vincent said, “the songs are like watching a movie about someone’s life, one that's not my own.” Songs like ‘Hey Sandra’ and ‘Misery’ are dramatizations of events that happened to someone around him. All artists borrow from and embellish the stories of people they know. But the way Carpenter blurs into his Medium Build persona gives us the thread of truth we need to connect with him.

parasocial connections to a stranger

At the concert, Medium Build sings a line from 'Never Learned to Dance.' It goes, "Buying weed on Wilshire, sexting with my therapist." The crowd sings along with him, but seem to get louder at that part. He grins at us and says something like, "I know you weirdos love that line." Carpenter worries about the fans who think the harmful relationships in his songs are normal. What does this say about us in 2026? A person who sings about depression is once again rising in the music industry? In another recent interview he says, “I get DMs all the time of people being like, "Our song is Triple Marathon." I'm like, "You should check the recipe on that cuz that song is unhealthy.” In many of his songs he wrestles with his growing fame. On ‘Perceived’ he laments having to turn his “private life into entertainment." On ‘Never Learned to Dance’, he sings, “Babe this dream I had feels like it might ruin me.” Despite lyrics that feel too revealing at times, Carpenter still comes across as a private person. Perhaps this is why he's quick to puncture the illusion of his stories in interviews.

I can see the appeal a songwriter might have in blurring the lines on the sources of their inspiration. Singer-songwriters aren't usually manufactured from within the music industry. Authenticity—emerging organically from the grassroots—is part of what they sell. People relate to an artist more if they tell a story that feels real. Songs about trauma feel more real when people who identify with them believe the artist has also experienced it. That vulnerability connects the fan to the artist in very personal ways. But we don't know an artist as a person when we hear their music. Despite the romantic notions we may hold, songwriting and performance is still a job. Artists are still part of a billion-dollar industry. The internet expanded how much access that regular people can have with celebrity. A post-covid decline in face-to-face interactions further fueled this desire for celebrity intimacy. Horton and Wohl first described these interactions as "para-social" in 1956. These are one-sided interactions where the audience falsely thinks they know a celebrity like a friend. It's well-documented that this belief is untrue (but huge business for many industries). It can also make celebrities, especially ones who are new to fame, uncomfortable. In 2024, Chappell Roan famously shared how uneasy parasocial fans made her feel.

do something productive

"I wonder what Nick would think if he read your article," Vincent said near the end of our call. "Would he be like, 'What are these guys talking about?? They don't know me!'" We laughed a little at the idea but I didn't have an answer ready. Writing this essay taught me how little we actually know about the famous people in our lives. I can relate to music without believing that the artist and I are the only survivors of those experiences. We will only know a sliver of most people's lives. Even among our friends, we know the most about what they choose to show us. Vincent is a friend I made from the internet. He visited Seattle once for a work conference but we chat online almost every day. Online interactions can certainly feel parasocial at times. Unlike most celebrity encounters, these potential friends can also deepen into real friendships.

What we do know with intimate familiarity is the interiority of our own lives. It can feel profound when another person holds a key of experience that matches one of the locks in our heart. When we connect with someone, we should see it as an invitation to share more in both directions. Even after we add one or two more colors to our palette, we still can't rely on a picture of the person we paint in our minds.

Medium Build, aka Nick Carpenter, is fascinating for many different reasons. But they're still two different people (or personas). I'm happy that I got to see Medium Build with two friends who are important to me. I'm delighted that Vincent was willing to chat with me on zoom for an hour after work. I'm grateful that Nick Carpenter's art found me when it did. I'm also grateful that he helped me create a deeper connection with some of the real friends in my life.

Thanks so much to my pal Vincent for talking with me this week!