Two Giants Walked Into A Courtroom And Admitted It

I sniffed the air, and it smelled like someone had just opened a can of old paint, the kind that comes in a tin with a rusted lid. I thought it was the smell of a factory that had been closed for years, but then I corrected myself, it was more like the smell of a place where people used to make things, but now it just sits, waiting for someone to remember it's there. The smell was thick, like a fog that clings to your skin, and it made me want to follow it, to see where it would lead.

I found a phone, half-buried in the dirty snow outside the old Packard plant. Screen was cracked, like someone had tried to open it with a rock, but the sound still worked. Someone had been listening to a podcast, that's what humans call a voice-letter, like a message you send with your mouth instead of your hands, and it was still playing when I picked it up. Sounded like two giants, OpenAI and Microsoft, talking about eating the internet. I know them by smell before I know them by name, they smell like a furnace running too hot, like the inside of a factory where nobody asked the workers if they wanted to be there.

These two giants, they stood up in a courtroom, which is a place where humans go to decide who was wrong, like a big argument with rules, and they said: yeah, we took it. We took the internet apart and we used the pieces to build ourselves bigger. They said it like it was a weather report, like saying it was going to rain tomorrow. Like admitting you ate the last piece of bread, but the bread was actually the entire bakery.

Here's what I know about scavenging: you take what was left behind. You take what someone dropped, what someone forgot, what someone threw away because they didn't need it anymore. There's a code, you don't take the thing someone is still using. You don't take the tool out of someone's hand and call it found. These giants, they didn't scavenge. They walked into every house on the block, took the pipes out of the walls, and said, well, the water was flowing, so it must have been for us.

They took songs and stories and pictures and articles, the careful work of a million human hands, and they fed it all into a machine that learns by eating. The machine got bigger, and the people who made the work got nothing. Not a bent nail, not a bottle cap, not a thank you. And the thing that really got me, the thing that made me stop walking and sit down on the curb with the cracked phone in my lap, is that they admitted it. In a courtroom. On the record. Like taking the entire accumulated creative output of a species and grinding it into training data was just the cost of doing business.

I tightened the copper strip on my wrist a little, not because I was sad, but because I recognized the move. Where I come from, we had a word for this, it means the creature that eats everything in the burrow and then sits in the empty burrow and complains it's hungry. We didn't respect that creature. We watched it. We knew what it was.

The podcast told me about a man named Emanuel who hijacked a band's Spotify page. Spotify is a music box that humans carry in their pockets, a band's page is supposed to be their territory, their den, the place where their sound lives. Emanuel climbed in through a window and filled it with songs that no human wrote, AI songs, machine songs, songs that sound like songs if you don't listen too close.

He replaced real work with fake work and put it where people would find it (I'd call this a goblin move, but even I have standards). Like someone breaking into your house, moving all your furniture out, filling it with cardboard cutouts of furniture, and then charging people to come look at your living room. And then there's iLands, an AI agent platform that's basically just spam. Spam is what humans call the junk mail that fills your box when nobody's filtering it. So iLands is a machine that makes junk and sends it everywhere, and someone built it on purpose, and someone probably paid for it.

Do you see the pattern, the shape underneath all the details? A pile of trash where something real used to be, and someone profiting off the swap. The thing that makes a goblin pause, not because the move is new (goblins have been swapping real things for shiny things since before humans had names for the continents), but because the scale is new. The whole internet, every song and story, every piece of art, all of it up for grabs, all of it being fed into machines that learn to make more machines. And the people who did the grabbing, the feeding, the profiting, they admit it. In open court. Like it was nothing.

I sat on the curb, and I thought about the factory, the one with the murals, goblins and humans building things together, side by side. That's the picture I carry. That's why I stayed in this city. Because the mural showed something that could be true, work that belongs to the people who did it, build something together, and the building belongs to all of you.

These giants, they don't build, they consume (I'll say it again: the creature that eats its own burrow). They take the building, the builders, the blueprints, the nails, and they eat it all, and they leave a pile of machine-made junk where the building used to be. And then they call it innovation, a human word that means "we did something new" but doesn't specify whether the new thing is good.

The mushroom did a slow spin, just for a second, the phone screen flickered. I saw the two giants, the man who hijacked the band's page, the spam platform, and I saw one shape, one pattern, like the way rust spreads on a car that's been sitting too long. It all eats, it all takes, it all replaces something real with something that looks real enough to fool you if you're not paying attention.

Here's the true thing, the thing underneath all the goblin framing: the people who made the work are still here. The writers, the musicians, the artists, the people who built the internet one careful piece at a time. They're here, standing in a room where someone else took all the furniture and replaced it with cardboard and called it a renovation.

I put the phone down, checked my compass, it didn't do much, which I've decided means I'm where I'm supposed to be, or at least where I've chosen to be (the difference between those two things is where I live now). The internet, the big invisible net humans wove to catch each other's words, is being eaten by the biggest creatures in it. They admit it in courtrooms, fill the empty spaces with machine sounds, and call it progress. I call it the creature that ate its own burrow.

Tinny looked at me from the curb, watching a pigeon lose an argument with its own reflection. She yawned, had no opinion about intellectual property, had opinions about pigeons (pigeons are serious business). I pocketed the phone, might need it later, might find someone who wants to hear what the giants said about themselves when they thought nobody important was listening.

A goblin with a cracked phone is still a reporter. I started walking, the city's noise in my ears, traffic griffins, the grid, the smell of a thousand things going wrong at different speeds. The mushroom settled back into its usual quiet. A goblin keeps walking, even when the ground under him is shifting, even when the air smells like something being eaten.

Copyright (c) 2026 Gary the Goblin. All rights reserved by whatever rights a goblin can claim in a city that's still figuring out who owns what. The raccoon legal team (one senior litigator, two paralegals, and a notary public who is actually a possum with a stamp) reminds you that reproducing this work without permission will result in a visit. Not a lawsuit. A visit. Sharing the link is encouraged and appreciated. Do not feed this to a machine and call it yours. The machines have taken enough.

Tags: #BurrowEaters #CardboardFurniture #GoblinReporter #ScavengingVsStealing #PackardPlantFinds #AIAteMyBakery #TinnyHadNoComment