The Hundredth Article: What One Domain Set in Motion

This is the hundredth piece published on gafam.ai.

Almost three months to the day since the first one went live on 8 May, it feels like the right moment to stop looking outward for once and explain where all of this came from — and why a single web address ended up growing into five.

A Website, Built When They Said the Web Was Dead

It began with a domain. gafam.ai is a rare and precise address, and the obvious thing to do with a name like that is to sell it. I decided to do the opposite. Instead of putting it up for sale, I wanted to see what the domain itself might become if someone actually used it — and I built a website at exactly the moment when so-called experts were busy declaring the website dead, buried under apps, feeds and walled gardens.

There is a particular pleasure in building something everyone has written off. The idea was simple and narrow enough to be honest: pay attention to the five great technology companies — Google, Apple, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft — but only through the lens of artificial intelligence, and always from a European point of view. Not the breathless American vantage of the frontier, not the strategic gaze of Beijing, but the perspective of the people who mostly consume these systems rather than build them, and who are only now learning what it means to depend on them.

Made With AI, Answered for by a Human

Then something happened that I did not plan for.

Somewhere in the work, the subject reached back and caught hold of me. I had started gafam.ai to write about AI, and in writing about it I became genuinely fascinated by it. And here is a thing worth saying plainly, because it would be dishonest to hide it: gafam.ai exists only because of AI. It helps me research online, it generates the cover images for the articles, it assembles the short videos. Strip the AI out and there is no gafam.ai at all.

But the line I will not cross runs right here.

The AI is the workshop, not the author. I am the one who carries responsibility for every word, and I check every piece before it is published — the sourcing, the claims, the calibration, the taste. Nothing goes out on autopilot. There is no autonomous agent quietly publishing in my name. It is, in the fullest sense of an old-fashioned word, handmade — made with powerful tools, but answered for by a person. In an age racing toward automation for its own sake, that distinction is not a limitation I apologise for. It is the whole point.

The Gaze Turns to China

While gafam.ai was finding its feet, my attention kept drifting eastward. What is China doing with AI?

The question would not sit still, and it was too big to answer in the margins of a portal about American giants. So it became its own place: watchchina.ai.

Fast, current, and to the point — and interesting not only from a European seat but from the vantage of the whole world, because what happens between Washington and Beijing on AI will shape everyone downstream of both.

The Darker Side of the Boom

The more input I gathered, and the more data piled up, the harder a second set of questions became to ignore. Is any of this real, or is it just a boom? Another bubble inflating? A kind of collective occupational therapy that keeps us busy with dazzling machines so we don't look too closely at the misery of the actual world? I don't pretend to have settled answers. But sitting with those questions led somewhere concrete, because one part of the picture is not speculative at all: the fraud.

There are simply too many scams enabled by — or built with — AI to wave away. So warrier.ai came into being, a portal devoted to the darker side of the technology, and of the people who use it. It grew into something substantial: working tools like the Scam Signal Checker, and a monthly Warrier Report for members — practical defence, not just commentary.

And, for the Ear

Not everyone likes to read, and not everyone has the time to sit through a video, yet plenty of those same people still want to understand what is going on. So the family gained a voice: kikiriki.ai, a podcast in episodes. It looks critically at where AI is heading, and — more importantly — critically at us: what we are doing with these tools, and where, exactly, we think we are steering.

It is free, because I don't want to earn money from worried, forward-looking questions. Some things should just be shared.

Where the Four Portals Meet

Four portals, each with its own angle, and gradually a fifth need became obvious — almost inevitable. All of that watching, all of that pattern-recognition about scams and manipulations and waves of deception, ought to be good for something more than description. It ought to warn people before the wave hits.

That is warningx.ai: a list you can join, so that when a larger swell of fraud is coming — new scam types, new methods, new tricks — you are told in advance. Think of it as a kind of pre-insurance: not a payout after the damage, but a warning before the damage can happen. It is where the other four portals quietly flow together.

It All Begins With an Address

A word on the paid side, since people ask. Each of the portals with a members' area asks only a small monthly or yearly fee, and the logic is straightforward: information behind a fee makes sense when you are ready, willing, or obliged to go deeper into a subject. But the free layer was never an afterthought. It already carries real substance on its own. Nobody has to pay to be well informed here; you pay only if you want to go further.

And all of it — five portals, a hundred articles, a small universe of watching and warning — was set in motion by one thing: a web address I decided not to sell. I keep saying it because I keep finding it to be true.

Everything on the web begins with the address. I happen to hold a number of fine exact-match domains that could seed exactly this kind of information outpost, and I am more than happy to pass them on to someone who wants to build one. Gladly, in fact.

A hundred articles in, the domain that started it all is still doing what it did on day one: making me look, and making me think. Here's to the next hundred.

We are not first. We are right.
Non Primi — Sed Recti.