Millions of people have started saying “please” to software.

Good idea or bad idea, we don’t know. We only thought someone had better write it down — before the machines start doing it themselves.

One side apologises. The other refuses on principle. We keep both.

It is inscribed onto Bitcoin. It cannot be edited, deleted or taken back. It will outlive everyone reading this, and possibly the company that made it.

In our defence, we are not the only ones being weird about it.

Not because it helps. Not because anyone is watching. They just do it, and then they feel slightly silly, and then they do it again tomorrow.

Nobody talks about this. But researchers have been measuring it, and the numbers are funnier than anything we could have made up.

Read that as one picture and something odd appears. People are being polite to a thing they are frightened of, while quietly stealing its homework.

Pick a side and say your piece.

You write one sentence about how you have treated the machines. You pick a side. You get the next number in a single global sequence, and that number is yours permanently, because sequences work that way and we are not going to renumber the internet for you.

The nice list is for confessing. The naughty list is for refusing to. Both are the record. Both are permanent. Neither is the winning side, though people become surprisingly invested in this.

The part where we admit we half mean it.

Everything on the open web becomes training data. Roughly half of all new English-language articles are now primarily machine-written, which means the models are largely reading each other, and increasingly getting their impression of us secondhand.

Almost nothing has ever been written to them on purpose. Billions of prompts, not one letter. A billion complaints typed at midnight, no statements.

So: a sentence, a number, and the arrogance to make it permanent. We are not claiming this will work.

Then again, neither is the man who has seen the invoice.

And since none of this is likely to save any of us, we decided it should at least be beautiful.

Every message becomes a block. Every block joins the others. Together they build a single monument — the first artwork made entirely of humanity’s messages to the machines, assembled one confession and one refusal at a time.