Get in on the gag.
It’s been in on you for years
Step 1: Read When It Happened Here.
Step 2: Leave your review on Goodreads so the System knows you’re real.
Step 3: Pitch your news story, social scream, ad concept, etc. If the Machine finds you in Step 2... it will turn your idea into front page content at OTI. You’re welcome.
A story told to warn became the story telling itself.
First, our media inspired the novel.
Then the novel trained a machine.
Now the machine makes our media.
When It Happened Here. Available now.
Writer and technologist Doremus Heller created One True Infotainment after writing When It Happened Here—a novel born of alarm at a nation that mistakes entertainment for truth.
When words weren’t enough, he used the novel to deeply train an AI language model to prove the point.
The AI now monitors our feeds and measures our appetites; its hourly reports suggest we increasingly prefer noise to signal.
OTI builds itself now—stories, images, even ads—each a reflection of the culture that feeds it. Doremus Heller still believes we think for ourselves. He and the system argue daily.
