Satire as Field Notes

How the Truth Surge cartoon experiments became a record of AI culture, cybersecurity incentives, and operational reality.

I was scrolling LinkedIn for ideas for free courses, while also experimenting with different visual styles for course graphics. One of the visual styles was cartoons. When I would see topics that repeated on LinkedIn, I would paraphrase the posts and feed them to the pipeline as input. The best way to describe the output is satire. I kept some of the artifacts.

Why Keep Them

The cartoons are not separate from the training pipeline. They came from the same production habit: notice a recurring pattern, turn it into a clear artifact, and test whether the result explains something faster than another block of prose.

Satire works when it compresses a real operational problem into a scene people can recognize. Vendor lock-in, AI mandates, security theater, dependency risk, executive incentives, and tool sprawl are all easier to discuss when the pattern has a shape.

The Gallery

These are the surviving artifacts from that experiment. They sit here as field notes: visual shorthand for the strange, useful, risky, and often overconfident ways technology gets adopted.