Projects & publications · Bernard Fitzgerald
Why I made ShitScience and Nepravda
Mirid, ShitScience and Nepravda are projects I created. The relationship is public: these sites are not independent organisations endorsing one another, and their fictional credentials are not evidence of Mirid’s capabilities.
They approach a shared question from different directions: how much room does a person have to make their own judgement about the technology and information put in front of them?
The idea behind the institute
In my book draft, Then They Came for the Adults, Chapter Eleven—“The credentials that come back to you”—examines what I call credential laundering. An organisation makes a claim. A publication repeats it. Another writer or an AI answer encounters the repetition and treats it as independent confirmation. The claim comes back with references, even if nobody has added a new check.
“The number of places saying something has increased. The number of people who have checked it may not have increased at all.”
That distinction is the starting point for ShitScience, formally the Shit Science Institute for Connexital Epistemic Diffusion. Its fellows, honours, rankings and working papers are invented. The institute adopts the language of authority to make the construction of that authority easier to examine.
The introduction to the manuscript explains the role of the humour:
“A euphemism asks you to pass smoothly over a decision. A joke can make you stop on it.”
Hunter Fitzpatrick, the institute’s fictional director, also appears in the manuscript and grew out of my earlier corporate cover-letter satire. The character gives institutional language someone to speak through.
The publication beside it
Nepravda extends the exercise into editorial authority: the report, the analysis and the apparently external reference. Its coverage of SSICED can be read as part of the same fiction. Nepravda also publishes articles explicitly labelled nonfiction commentary, with factual sources and editorial judgements distinguished from the invented institute.
The connection is part of the work. A reference from one of my projects to another is not independent corroboration. Neither site’s recognition of the other establishes a research result.
What this does—and does not—demonstrate
These projects illustrate a concern about presentation, attribution and circular citation. Their existence does not establish that a search engine or AI system has been deceived. Any claim of that kind would need an actual test, a recorded method and results that somebody else could examine.
I use AI tools to help develop the sites and their writing. The concept, editorial decisions and responsibility for publication are mine. The institutional fiction is disclosed in each site’s terms; sourced nonfiction is identified separately.
Where Mirid fits
Mirid is the software project: designed to make open-source, private AI conversation and creativity accessible to adults aged 18 and over. You should not have to be an “AI person” to use it. Its performance must be assessed through the software, its documentation and appropriate evaluation—not through an invented research institute.
Public runtime distribution is currently paused. I’m seeking funding, a development partnership or an acquisition conversation to support the next stage. If the software, the broader work or the combination is relevant to you, contact me at [email protected].
The manuscript remains a draft. The short excerpts above identify the ideas behind these projects; they are not a claim that the book has been published.