My daughter in family chat said the same thing this last week. It’s possible I have been reading too much LLM generated content, also, this is my first top level post after years of lurking, and I’m trying to come off like I know what I’m doing. If the argument doesn’t land, happy to talk about that. The style I can adjust.
That’s a fair question, and you’re right that it isn’t foolproof.
The reason it works at all is that the fruit isn’t known in advance. He posts the video first, then updates his site with the correct fruit for that video. Viewers can check after the fact. If someone deep-fakes him, they either have to guess the fruit correctly or regenerate the fake once the real fruit is known.
That doesn’t make impersonation impossible, but it does make it more expensive and slower.
And that’s really the point. This isn’t perfect authentication, it’s friction. It raises the cost just enough that casual fakes, reposts, and automated scams stop being worthwhile, even if a determined attacker could still get through.
Which is also why this is such a telling example. Instead of platforms providing provenance, creators are inventing human-readable ways to increase the cost of lying. Not secure, but legible and effective enough for most people.
That’s the ambient trust problem in a nutshell. We’re not aiming for mathematically perfect truth, we’re trying to make deception harder than honesty.
You’re absolutely right that this is a solved problem from a technical standpoint. Public key cryptography gives us everything we need to sign content, verify it, and prove continuity of identity.
But that’s how we solve it in technology. It’s not how my 82-year-old father solves it.
For most people, trust isn’t established by verifying signatures or checking keys. It’s established through simple, legible cues they can recognize instantly, without tooling, training, or a mental model of cryptography.
That’s why the fruit works.
It’s a human-scale authentication signal. No UI, no standards, no explanation required. “If you see the fruit, it’s him.” That’s something almost anyone can understand and apply.
The real problem isn’t that cryptographic solutions don’t exist. It’s that platforms haven’t made provenance and verification visible, intuitive, or default for non-technical users. Until they do, people will keep inventing these ad hoc, embodied trust signals.
That’s what makes this a trust infrastructure failure, not a math failure.
Days, up and down they come Like rain on a congadrum Forget most, remember some But don’t turn none away. Everything is not enough And nothin’ is to much to bear. Where you been is good and gone All you keep is the getting there.
To live is to fly Low and high, So shake the dust off of your wings And the sleep out of your eyes.
…
We all got holes to fill Them holes are all that’s real. Some fall on you like a storm, Sometimes you dig your own.
The choice is yours to make, Time is yours to take Some sail upondive into the sea, Some toil upon the stone.
To live is to fly Low and high, So shake the dust off of your wings And the sleep out of your eyes
Townes Van Zandt
Reading this article gave me the same feeling I get when someone tries to fix a server with what a former trans coworker of mine proudly called percussive maintenance. You can tell right away that somebody in Washington thinks they are offering farmers a real solution, even though they seem unclear about what the actual problem is.
A little background, since my political history has taken more turns than a loose extension cord. I grew up in an extreme conservative evangelical home as a preacher’s kid. That meant I carried around beliefs I had not really inspected up close. So yes, for years I showed up and did the Republican work. I made thousands of campaign calls for Romney. I worked for someone running for the state house who did not get elected while I was on her staff, though she later squeaked out a win by six votes, which felt like watching a progress bar creep from 99 percent to complete. I checked all the boxes. Special elector. County central committee. If there was an election from 2011 on, I was probably standing in a school gym with an R next to my name.
Then the party hitched itself to President Mango Unhinged. I wrote the county Chairwoman a long, weary letter explaining that I could not pretend this was normal. I switched to Independent and then, in a moment of questionable judgment, voted for Gary Johnson. Let us call that a corrupted file in my political directory.
Later, when the Senate Election Committee decided Roy Moore was still an acceptable investment, that was it. I went to the courthouse, filled out the form, and became a Democrat. There comes a point when you realize your operating system has too many vulnerabilities to patch.
During the last presidential election, I worked as the precinct chair in a rural county. My grandparents all farmed, and I spent plenty of childhood summers walking beans, putting up hay, and roguing corn with a hoe sharp enough to qualify as a safety violation. But I have been an IT guy for decades now, and even I could see what was coming when the final tally came in and sixty six percent of the precinct voted for Mango Unhinged. That was the moment I knew the whole system was about to crash.
So reading this article about a twelve billion dollar aid package funded by tariffs that Americans are actually paying feels like watching someone reboot the wrong machine. Farmers do not need giant checks mailed out after a political fire. They need stable markets, predictable trade, and equipment that does not cost the same as a mid range server rack.
And when I see a promise to cut environmental rules to make machinery cheaper, all I hear is the unmistakable sound of someone deleting files they should not delete.
At this point I half hope Pam Bondi has my name in a folder labeled Formerly Cooperative, Now Suspiciously Reasonable. It would be the most attention the federal government has ever given a middle aged Army veteran living quietly in an RV.
This twelve billion dollar relief package is not a solution. It is the equivalent of taping over a warning light on the dashboard. Farmers deserve real fixes, not another round of political tech support from people who keep unplugging the wrong cables.
This is harder to type than it probably should be. Back in 2015, because of the way I was raised in an extreme conservative evangelical household as a preacher’s kid, I was a Republican. I had already broken with that world in every meaningful way, but I had not actually sat down and examined what I believed. So there I was, still actively involved in politics. I helped campaign for Romney. I made more than three thousand phone calls, which I am pretty sure qualifies as a minor war crime. I was on the election staff of a representative who, for the record, had not been elected yet when I worked for her. I was a special elector. I was on the county central committee. I worked every election since 2011 with an R behind my name.
And then they picked the orange man. I wrote the Chairwoman a very long letter explaining, in polite terms, that this was not going to work for me. I switched my affiliation to Independent. Unfortunately, I still had not figured out where the world was heading, so I voted for Gary Johnson. The less said about that period of my life, the better.
When the Senate Election Committee decided to finance Roy Moore, I walked directly to the courthouse, changed my registration to Democrat, and started working elections for that party instead. There is a point where a person realizes the boat is not just sinking, it was built upside down to begin with.
Anyway, based on the tone of that old letter, I find myself hoping I ended up on a list somewhere for Pam Bondi. It would be nice to feel important for a moment. Besides, what a spectacular waste of resources it would be to track down one Army veteran who lives in an RV in the middle of nowhere.
That’s fair. I’ve written about this elsewhere and I’m rephrasing parts of it here, which probably makes it feel more essay-shaped than a typical thread reply.
I wasn’t trying to pad anything. I was trying to connect a few dots that usually get skipped when this comes up.