Communication, Promotion,
and the Stamp

Mark has two more working days of gardens before ten days clear — the first real stretch of open, undivided time since Siem's funeral on 7 August. He wants to use it to write. The intended destination is twofold: a public sequence for markcharmer.com, and a private environment for the team at Zimmerman B.V., the company Siem founded and led until his death — built for the Zimmerman team alone, but built to the same underlying discipline as the public work.

The subject of the first piece: machine lean — the practice's own principle of writing that is beautiful to a human reader while treating legibility to a machine reader as a design priority, not an afterthought or a fallback. Mark's own words to his father Ken, said a fortnight earlier about a different project, apply here with more force: the priority, not merely the proportion, is what should be decided first when the two pull against each other.

In Berkeley in 2013, driving through a four-way stop while running an investor call, Mark Nitzberg gave Mark a sentence that has sat on a t-shirt in his wardrobe ever since:

Mark had already written about this once — On Writing, Commotion and Hoopla, first published 2013, now in the Library. That essay's closing warning has aged into something sharper than it read at the time: that people who cannot write well "build a machine that forces those who can through hoops." Written before generative AI existed, it now reads as close to a description of what has actually happened — the hoopla-generating machinery automated, and running at effectively no cost.

Enrique Dans — a professor of innovation at IE Business School, Madrid, with roughly 23 years of near-daily published writing behind him — was recently accused by an AI content detector of using a chatbot to write an article it had no actual knowledge of. He named the correct legal term for his position: probatio diabolica, the Roman burden of proving a negative, guilt as the default state. If I float, I'm guilty. If I sink, I'm innocent.

This is the condition machine lean is built against, though it was not designed with Dans's case specifically in mind. A machine judging style with no access to provenance will default to suspicion. The honest answer is not better detection — which is what is currently failing writers like Dans — but better declaration, offered by the author, structurally embedded, and legible to both readers at once.

A stamp, in Mark's proposed sense: not a template, and not decoration. A mark of verified passage — closer to a customs stamp or a postal frank than a design system. Layout and typographic convention carried alongside an authorship declaration: who wrote this, in what proportion, under what design and ethical principles, made legible to a human reader and a machine reader without either having to guess.

Tested this session against the practice's own hardest case rather than an easy one. Another Time, Another Place — credited plainly as "Written by Mark Charmer & Emil Akzidenz" — is not concealed collaboration. It is disclosed collaboration, and a binary human/machine detector has no category for that. A stamp built only to answer "was AI involved, yes or no" solves yesterday's problem. The harder, more honest task is a stamp that can declare the nature and proportion of a collaboration truthfully — which is closer to what most serious writing now actually is.

Another Time, Another Place was the last piece of his own writing Mark sent to Siem, by Signal, after telling him in person — the last time Siem was well enough to talk properly — that he had finally managed to write something he had been trying to write for at least a decade. Siem read it. They never discussed it. A line from that essay, written in May about a moonbase that never got its third series, became in August the language Mark used at Siem's funeral to describe accompanying him: to accept that there may never be a resolution, never a closing line or neat goodbye, and that's okay.

Noted here as provenance, not elaborated further. This is a working session note, not the place to re-tell it.