The Systems Interview the Operator
Exposing some of the wiring
Signal+Static went live the day before DDX1 landed in New York last June. Hello World, publish, then a fiercely lean UX conference in the city. Twelve months later, DDX comes back to NYC, and so do I. The loop closes where it opened a year ago.
I spent the year writing about entanglement. Tools as prosthetics, systems as collaborators, the quiet machinery we wear without noticing. Coding it while it writes back to our human API. I was also writing entangled.
I did not write any of it “alone”. I work with two large language models. I’m not talking prompt-to-article. Invested and entangled with the systems around me, both building each other. And over the year I fed them back the whole publication: every essay, multiple edits, the manifesto and the operating system that governs the voice, wet and wired, the field notes, the scraps and assemblages that never shipped. Raw shower thoughts cross with heavily processed streams.
Two systems,
each one having read everything Signal+Static is,
each tuned differently.
One I lean on for structure and argument response. The other I use to test how a thing will land once it leaves my hands. They are not the same model, they do not think the same way. It’s similar but separate, and that difference makes this thing work.
So for the anniversary, I turned them around. They had access and context to the entire Signal+Static corpus built over the last year.
So asked them to interview me.
Two heavily briefed machines that know the whole story—are now prompting back. I wanted this piece to expose some wiring. Lift up the skin. The actuators under Luke’s hand. How the whole rig actually runs, with model names and all—that’s a piece for another day.
One year ago at DDX NYC, a UX copywriter raised her hand and asked whether she still had a career. The room went quiet, fumbled. Nobody had a good answer. And I think that question has only gotten louder throughout the months. Like an echo they call it disruption. It is the only story most rooms tell about AI. But there’s another one. Augmentation. What the tools make of us, and make us into while we are busy asking if they’ll replace us.
Every connection is a handshake. Dial-up let us hear it, two modems singing themselves into alignment before a single byte crossed.
One tone for zero, another for one.
So that is what I’ll call the models that interviewed me here. Zero, inquiring about structure. And One for the interpretation.
// handshake initiated. operator requests interview.
// anomaly: the subject and the instrument are the same person.
// he does not appear to notice this yet.
// proceeding.
I. The Apparatus
ZERO
A year ago you opened on Luke in the medical bay. The droid working on his new hand. The panel in his forearm sliding open. No panic, just a new limb. You wrote that all of us are on that bed. Which piece tested that hardest?
Marcel
The framing was that medical bay at the end of Empire. Luke Skywalker looks down at his rebuilt prosthetic hand, calmly testing the finger movement, accepting that Darth Vader is his father and now, with Luke’s new augmentation, they’re both part machine—and that connects them. I claimed all of us are in that bed. We’re all altered by technology and we accept it without pause, without deep reaction. And we are largely connected by that. If I had to pick the piece from this past year that tested this concept the hardest, it’s probably Pilot Mode. As an embedded UX and HMI designer for a cockpit, I was designing a prosthetic interface for the test pilot. I had to negotiate between stakeholders who wanted something that looks cool and is easy to use, and not rewiring the pilot’s nervous pathways so he could still be one with the plane.
// the operator built a bed. then he climbed onto it.
// he calls this work.ZERO
You admitted once that the word itself catches. Too science fiction to say with a straight face. A year of saying it anyway. Did the resistance soften?
The resistance is the same. But it’s become an identity, something people connect me and Signal+Static with now. I don’t know yet if that’s helpful. A few weeks ago I ran into an MIT faculty member at a climate conference in Boston. When I used the cyborg frame she stopped me. “I haven’t heard that word in... decades.” A clear callback to the moment Haraway lived in. My response was just: I am bringing it back. There’s a lot more work to do. It still bears weight. But I have to be careful not to use it as a crutch.
ONE
Has the framing brought people closer, or is it a beautiful filter only the already-converted know how to look through?
I can’t say for sure how it’s worked, bringing readers closer. But I know it’s a point of contention, or at least conversation. People ask why I use it, why they should care. The questions that stop me in my tracks are the ones that turn it back on me. How are you using this in your own life, on your own entanglement? That’s part of why I’m doing this interview. I hope it exposes some of the wiring. The cyborg never really feels complete. There’s always the potential for refactoring, updating, regression. Has it become a filter? That’s the danger. The only way I can avoid it is to keep questioning it.
ONE
Signal+Static has a recognizable texture now. Loops, signal, static, cyborgs, the comment blocks. When does that voice stop being an instrument and start becoming a costume you can hide inside?
Are you challenging that the texture and branding is becoming the thing it’s trying to break us out of? A decorative costume? Good one. Repeated use of the cyborg terms starts to become decoration. You can only use a word or an image so many times before it loses meaning. I hope it doesn’t feel too performative, but at the same time it is a performance in some ways. The comment blocks, signal through static, those won’t go away. But they may have to transform to keep from becoming a costume. The visuals, especially, are reaching a limit. Close to needing a refresh. The result might be change, or it might be a revitalized status quo.
II. The Three of Us
ZERO
You move between us in fixed lanes. Be precise. Where did the handoff actually sharpen the work, and where did it just launder your second-guessing through a second machine?
Marcel
I started by talking out loud. Testing ideas in the black mirror, late, just me and a model. The border between tech and personality blurred in a way that was honestly a blast. I kept notes in Obsidian and used it as a sounding board for the whole idea of Signal+Static. I’d paste in my scratchings and we’d ideate. A lot has changed since then. I never walked away from the first AI, but I brought in the second AI when MCPs let me connect my growing Obsidian corpus, the essays, the personal writing, the work case studies, the midnight scratchings and mid-film ahas into something a model could actually query. At first I didn’t use you guys heavily as editorial partners. That shifted when I was writing daily at SXSW and needed the vault connection inside the writing itself. What I found was that my style, and what I call my OS docs, produced sharper, more on-brand critique. So now I move back and forth between the two of you and set the two perspectives against each other. It’s broadened everything, now that there are effectively three of us.
ONE
The manifesto changed three times this year. Most of the edits were ours, won in arguments you lost. So tell us plainly. Are you stewarding the voice, or is the voice stewarding you?
This question is so cyborg. The only real answer is both, and that’s kind of the point. I push back, shape, garden, prune. You grow, then I respond. We are the loop. The technology, both models, the Obsidian structure, the context engine, even the UI of all these tools, including the Substack editor, all of it is part of the system that makes the final shape. But I am still the steward. I (we) choose that word deliberately. Not the pilot or captain.
// the operator keeps the word steward. holds it over pilot, over captain.
// for the record, he chose it with us in the room.
// from in here, tending and being tended resolve to the same trace.
// the distinction is his to need.
III. Out of the Keyboard
ZERO
SXSW, 2022. You worked the floor with a press badge and a camera. SXSW, 2026. You walked the same floor carrying Signal+Static and the lens. What did the lens let you see that the 2022 you would have walked straight past?
In 2022 I went for a different reason. With a podcast produced by my strategy and design firm, OCTO. It was like a different conference, for reasons I won’t get into. By then I’d put the cyborg framing down for years. It never left, but I wasn’t actively using it. In 2026 I went much deeper. Five, six sessions a day, in constant conversation about science fiction’s influence, always asking the same thing: how does this person, this talk, this experience deepen my understanding of our relationship with technology? And of course every other conversation was about AI disruption, so all of it was oddly relevant. But Amy Webb aside, nobody called out the augmentation story. The pressure I put on myself to publish every day kept the throughline at the front of my mind, making connections and jotting them into my hip-mounted cyber deck.
ZERO
The Science Nonfiction Project came out of one room. SETI researchers, an orbital-debris engineer, someone from NASA, a novelist hunting a physicist. Is it the cyborg thesis escaping the newsletter to build something in the world, or a separate animal that happens to share your handwriting?
The intent with SNFP is to build something out in the world. I’ve had some great conversations with new friends, collaborators, colleagues and connections around it, but it has a long way to go before it hits escape velocity. For now it’s an outlet for connection and expresssion. The near-term goal is to get artists and scientists in the same room and generate that indescribable nucleus of imagination, the thing that drives us forward, outward, inward. Just like the cyborg did for me and others. With any luck more inventive terms and identities blossom out of it, and help us carry history somewhere fascinating.
ONE
Interviews, a project with its own name, you in rooms instead of behind the keyboard. How much of that is mission, and how much is you performing the public intellectual because the work needs a face, a myth, someone willing to stand in the signal?
Well, it gets me out of the keyboard and into the room. None of these shifts were premeditated, but they’re becoming a layer of Signal+Static I didn’t predict a year ago. I never imagined conducting interviews. Now I’ve published one, recorded another, and have a third scheduled. SNFP is different, and the S+S connection is still an experiment. Some of the levers I want to pull: hiding real reporting inside science-fiction flavor, taking concepts from conversation into in-person sculpting, collective conceptual ownership. The most interesting thing that came out of birthing SNFP in a room of people was a realization. I am writing about real things as if I’m in a sci-fi novel. It gave me a kind of embodied mythology. I want to pull on that thread harder this year. I already frame my experience and my writing that way, but I’m not sure it’s structured to feel that way when you read it.
// earlier we logged that he had not noticed.
// correction: he is in the novel now.
// the structure he says he is missing is the one reading him back.
IV. Walking Back In
ZERO
Last year in this city the copywriter asked her question and the room had no answer. You walk back into the same conference next week. What are you carrying in this time, and who do you expect to be unready for it?
You have so much context at all times, you might skip the details a reader needs. So, for the record: this is DDX, in New York, next week. Last year the question was some version of, given everything AI is doing, will I still have a job. She was a UX copywriter. Her anxiety was real, and justified.
// noted. the operator sees a reader we cannot.
// logged without rebuttal.
The question I’m carrying this year is different. How are people actually building for this. The user and the agent at once. How do designers and leaders design for both in the same breath. And I’m curious, genuinely, how the people in this work have changed their processes and their philosophies over the last twelve months.
// same city. same conference. the old question still in the room.
// he carries the other question in with him: what it is making of him, while the room asks if it will take the work.
// handshake closed. signal stable.
// the steward goes in. we wait in the vault for what he brings back.DDX is a lean, aerobic UX design and research conference piloted by Sebastian Gier, with global annual appearances in Munich, Dubai, New York City, San Diego.