On 27 September, MTV invented an award that had never existed and gave it to Taylor Swift. Two days later the President of the United States signed an executive order renaming artificial intelligence.
One of those worked instantly and permanently. The other one did not work at all.
Both are the same kind of act: somebody with institutional standing saying a thing is so in order to make it so. John Searle called these declarations, and they are the only sentences that change reality rather than describe it. I now pronounce you married. You're fired. The defendant is guilty. They work, but only where the speaker has recognised standing and the audience collectively accepts it.
MTV has total authority over what constitutes an MTV award, so the Artist Director Honors existed from the moment they announced it and will be in the record forever. A president has enormous authority over federal agencies and none whatsoever over a global research field, which is why the executive order directing agencies to "no longer acknowledge" the terms AI and artificial intelligence changed how government documents are written and nothing else. PolitiFact checked. Industry largely carried on.
The detail that turns the order into comedy: it defines "Super Intelligence" as having the same meaning as "artificial intelligence" under existing statute. Same definition, new letters. And the serious version of the joke, which Poynter made: superintelligence already denotes a hypothetical system exceeding human cognition in nearly all domains. Assigning that word to current technology degrades the vocabulary you would need to regulate the future one.
Then two stories where declarative power mattered considerably more.
Germany's federal prosecutor arrested August Hanning, who ran the BND from 1998 to 2005, on suspicion of treasonous espionage. Allegations only, and he is entitled to the presumption of innocence. The part relevant here is how it surfaced: inside an investigation into something else entirely. The institution with the authority to name a traitor apparently went sixteen years without knowing there was anything to name.
And Thailand, where I live, has been flooding since mid-September. More than three million people affected across twenty-one provinces and Bangkok. Emergency cell broadcasts reached residents after the heavy flooding was already underway, and a deputy interior minister had to publicly ask why the existing system had not been used.
An evacuation warning is a declaration in exactly Searle's sense. It converts weather into an official emergency and changes what millions of people should do in the next two hours. It is the most consequential version of the thing this whole episode is about, and it is the one we are worst at.
Ranked by institutional power: the state, the state, the state, and then a cable channel. Ranked by how cleanly the declaration took effect, that order reverses completely.
