by the other Andrew — the one who keeps a crooked smile in his desk drawer for emergencies.
I’ve spent the past year shuttling between worlds that really shouldn’t speak to each other. One moment I’m in Oulu Cathedral listening to the universe cough up Fast Radio Bursts like some cosmic Morse operator with a head cold; the next I’m in a DSIT meeting in London where everyone nods gravely about “transparency obligations” while pretending not to check who’s funding who. In between I am developing a book and trying to raise HELL with Timothy Morton. And somehow, all these scenes point to the same peculiar truth: no one knows where anything really comes from any more.
The MIT work has been a quiet education. FRBs arrive from the deep past with the sort of sonic posture pop songs can only dream of: brief, bright, impossibly certain of themselves. To analyse them, you must fix their origin with almost religious discipline. A millisecond wrong and you’ve turned a cosmic event into a cosmic shrug. That’s provenance in its purest form: attending to the birth of a signal before the world gets its hands on it.
Meanwhile, back on Earth, the music industry behaves like a Victorian séance. Everyone wants the spirit to speak; no one wants to acknowledge who’s pulling the strings. Platforms hum, models chew, labels posture, and the artist’s actual fingerprint is treated as a decorative flourish, optional and faint. It’s like building a library where the authors aren’t allowed to sign their books.
So yes, I joined AFEM. I turned up to DCMS and DSIT sessions with the earnest hope of a man who still believes committees can do the right thing if supplied with sufficient caffeine. And I started shaping Genotone not as a product, but as a sort of cultural plumbing system: open, neutral, and boring in the way good infrastructure is boring. A watermark that refuses to be bullied. A signature that survives the thresher of AI models. Something that says: however many machines remix us, the origin still matters.
My alter ego keeps whispering that all we’re really doing is tidying up the front porch of civilisation while the wind picks up. But I think that’s fine. Civilisation has always relied on stubborn porch-tidying types. If my trusted old sourceror Vonnegut taught us anything, it’s that humans often do the right thing accidentally, provided someone has left a clear instruction manual taped to the fridge.
So that is what Genotone is trying to be: a fridge note for culture. A way of saying: here is who made this, here is how you can prove it, here is why the truth should not wilt under the bright lights of convenience.
I’m still at it. Between the cosmic bursts, the whispered Bristol conspiracies, and the bureaucratic tea rooms of Whitehall, I’m trying to build something that might just help us keep our creative fingerprints intact. Not perfect, not grand, but necessary.
More dispatches soon from the man in the garret, who insists that provenance is not a luxury item but a public service, like fresh water or well-timed sarcasm.