Six months ago I pulled a local language model onto my laptop. Took about 12 minutes with Ollama. No account, no API key, no data leaving the machine. It felt like a small act of sovereignty — exactly the kind of local-first approach I’d been arguing for.

Then I started using it. And I noticed something.

The model’s cultural centre of gravity was somewhere around San Francisco, circa 2022. Ask it about food systems and it defaulted to commodity agriculture and supermarket supply chains. Ask it about community governance and it reached for American municipal frameworks. Ask it about traditional land management and it gave me a careful, earnest summary that read like it had been assembled from university anthropology papers — not from anyone who had actually grown anything, or sat with the country long enough to know it.

I just recently stumbled across this link to the ‘Heartland Institute‘ via a reference in an American Newspaper site citing their sources for an article about the US Economic Stimulus package. I initially was hoping this might be a satiric site such as CNNN, but after taking a closer look and checking out some references it appears these people are actually serious (and worse still seem to have a lot of funds at their disposal to spread their dubious view). Reading this rubbish got me thinking about how many kids would actually think this could be an authoritative source for information.