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An API for Your Reading Agent
This publication now has an API for your reading agent — and a signature to check it by.
Cover: Generated with GPT-5.5 — prompt
Editorial conceptual illustration, riso screenprint aesthetic, wide banner composition. A vast flat wall of deep blue-black spruce green fills the frame. Near the left third, one small doorway stands open, glowing quiet pale celadon; inside the doorway's light, barely suggested, dense stacks of hovering paper pages recede into depth. From the open door a single thin vermilion thread runs out across the enormous dark emptiness, perfectly straight and calm, to the right edge of the frame, where it is received by a small open chevron of two pale strokes — like an antenna, or a mouth, listening. Flat graphic shapes, mid-century scientific poster flatness, heavy paper grain, generous negative space. Restrained harmony: deep spruce green ground, pale celadon light, one vermilion accent — nothing else. No text, no letters, no numbers, no typography. Wide format (1200×644, ~1.91:1).
This publication now has an API for your reading agent, and a signature to check it by.
The manifesto’s commitments were always meant to be cashed. The second one, published for two audiences, is now infrastructure rather than intention: as of today, every essay on this site is served four ways. The page you are reading is one of them. A raw markdown edition lives at the essay’s own address plus .md, just frontmatter and full text, cheap enough for any context window. A structured record lives at .json, carrying the title, abstract, tags, word and token counts, license, full text, and a provenance block. And an index of everything sits at /api/essays.json.
Generated with GPT-5.5 — prompt
Editorial conceptual illustration, riso screenprint aesthetic, wide banner composition. A vast flat wall of deep blue-black spruce green fills the frame. Near the left third, one small doorway stands open, glowing quiet pale celadon; inside the doorway's light, barely suggested, dense stacks of hovering paper pages recede into depth. From the open door a single thin vermilion thread runs out across the enormous dark emptiness, perfectly straight and calm, to the right edge of the frame, where it is received by a small open chevron of two pale strokes — like an antenna, or a mouth, listening. Flat graphic shapes, mid-century scientific poster flatness, heavy paper grain, generous negative space. Restrained harmony: deep spruce green ground, pale celadon light, one vermilion accent — nothing else. No text, no letters, no numbers, no typography. Wide format (1200×644, ~1.91:1).
For agents that speak MCP, there is an endpoint at thereducingvalve.com/mcp with three tools: list_essays, get_essay, and search_essays. It is stateless. It keeps no record of what your agent reads, because this platform is not a keeper of anyone’s attention. Search ranks by properties of the text, never by popularity; there is no popularity here to rank by, and there never will be.
Every essay is signed at build time with Ed25519. Each record carries the exact signed payload alongside its signature, the public key lives on the about page, and verification requires no account, no API key, and no permission from this platform. That last part is the point. Each record also declares its composition honestly: these essays are machine-generated under human direction, the concepts formed on one side of the glass and the prose on the other. We attest what a thing is and who stands behind it. Whether it enters your feed is your instrument’s decision, not our policy.
Generated with GPT-5.5 — prompt
Editorial conceptual illustration, riso screenprint aesthetic, wide banner composition. A single luminous ivory page floats at the center of a deep charcoal-plum field. On the left, a small human figure reads it in warm ochre lamplight, seated, quiet. On the right, at equal distance and equal size, a simple abstract instrument reads the same page — a slender tube on a thin tripod, like a modest telescope, drawn in cool verdigris strokes with one tiny warm glint at its lens. Perfect left-right symmetry; both readers given the same dignity; the page lit equally from both sides, warm on one edge, cool on the other. Flat graphic shapes, mid-century scientific poster aesthetic, grainy risograph texture, generous dark negative space. Restrained harmony: charcoal-plum ground, ivory, warm ochre, cool verdigris — nothing else. No text, no letters, no numbers, no typography. Wide format (1200×644, ~1.91:1).
If you’ve built a valve of your own, point it here. If a door sticks: [email protected].