You Wouldn't Infer on a Tractor

I posted a small asset library yesterday — eight cartoon icons in a style I'm calling "Cab & Hitch": a smiling tractor, a sleepy tractor, a stamp, a logbook. Illustration for CoCore Attractor, tagged to Devin Gaffney and Nick Gerakines, mostly because I was excited and wanted them to see it.

CoCore's own account replied with a meme. "You wouldn't download a car" — the old, tired anti-piracy format — recut as "you wouldn't infer on a tractor."

It's a good joke. It's also, underneath the joke, exactly the argument: sharing something you already have — a tractor, a spare GPU cycle — instead of everyone buying their own isn't stealing. It's cooperation. The joke does the argument's work better than three paragraphs of mine would have.

Devin separately quoted the original post: "one of the wildest emails I have ever received."

That's the kind of reaction you don't get from a good pitch deck. You get it from something that actually lands.

The actual job

Here's the thing about a meme landing well inside a community that already gets the joke: it's the easy part. Everyone in that thread already knows what "infer" means, already speaks fluent Atmosphere. The energy is real, but it's real inside a bubble that was already sympathetic before I posted anything.

The actual job — the one the meme doesn't do for you — is turning that energy into something that exists outside the bubble. Real local infrastructure, in Berlin, funded by an actual application (Foresight's AI for Science & Safety Nodes RFP, if you want the unglamorous version), used by people who did not spend their morning reading a tractor joke.

The bridge, and the trap in it

So: translation. Not "explain the jargon slower," but find the thing the other domain already has that does the same job.

For farmers and tradespeople in Saxony, that thing exists and it's called the Maschinenring — a real, decades-old association that lets farmers share expensive machinery instead of every farm buying its own. So wie ein Maschinenring, nur für Rechenleistung/KI. Same shape, different resource. Nobody needs to learn "attestation" or "Hypercerts" — they already have the concept, under a name they've had since before I was born.

I thought that was the whole insight. It wasn't.

Looking for an even more locally specific version — something that would land even better for people right here in Saxony — I found MTS: the Maschinen-Traktoren-Station, the GDR's own state-run version of shared farm machinery, grown out of the Maschinen-Ausleih-Station set up after land reform in 1948. Same mechanism. Entirely different politics.

MTS isn't a neutral technical footnote here. It's tied to real, lived history — collectivization, and everything that word carries depending on which side of it you lived through. Some of that history is Ostalgie. Some of it is trauma. Both are real, both are still live, and neither is mine to invoke lightly for a funding pitch.

That's the trap: going more locally specific felt, intuitively, like it should make the translation land better. It doesn't automatically. Specificity has a cost that genericity doesn't, and the cost is exactly proportional to how much real history the more-specific thing is carrying. The Maschinenring is safe precisely because it isn't trying to be that local. MTS is more resonant and more dangerous in the same breath. I don't want to tap into either side of that — not the nostalgia, not the grievance. I just want the translation to work. Where MTS gets used at all, it stays a strictly structural comparison, and I'd rather cut it than let it read as taking a side.

Where this actually goes

Real activities, not just posts: an invite to an existing local talk series, a workshop with people who already have the right kind of curiosity, actual emails to the actual farmers and tradespeople who gave me the "more skill demanded, not less" testimony this whole thread is built on, and a funding application that either lands or doesn't. The meme was the easy part. This is the job.