Ludwig’s ghost

Ascension Burial Ground in Cambridge. In a nice coincidence, Frank Ramsey, the young genius who, as a teenager, first translated Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, is buried nearby.

Quote of the Day

”When you become famous, being famous becomes your profession.”

• James Carville

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Scott Joplin | Solace | performed by Phillip Dyson

Link

Not a piece I knew. Glad I found it.

Long Read of the Day

AI is destroying books to stop chatbots choking on their own slop

Last week’s Observer column.

Some months ago, online booksellers began to notice a dramatic uptick in business. Books published before 2022 were suddenly in demand. One seller interviewed by the 404 Media website went from selling maybe 20 books in a good week to suddenly selling hundreds. He was puzzled and slightly suspicious about this bonanza. The books he usually sold tended to be specialised and bought by schools and libraries. And his bulk orders in the past were inclined to reflect a sudden interest in a particular topic.

But the recent large orders were for books that had little in common except for one thing: they all had an ISBN (International Standard Book Number) – a unique publishing identifier. “There’s no rhyme or reason to it,” he said. “Also, there’s a total disregard for the price of the book. I’ve had some books that sold this way that were… greatly overpriced.”

Whoever was buying these books was clearly not price-sensitive. That’s because those deep-pocketed bibliophiles were an AI company. The most likely collector is Anthropic, which Wall Street thinks is closing in on a $1tn valuation and has form in the book-scanning business. Way back in 2024, it hired Tom Turvey, an executive who had been involved in the Google Books project, and put him in charge of “Project Panama” – a secret scheme to “destructively scan all the books in the world”. According to an internal document unsealed in a court case, the codename was chosen “because we don’t want it to be known that we are working on this”.

So what is “destructive scanning”? Basically, it’s nasty, brutal and quick. It means cutting a book apart in order to digitise it. You slice off the spine or use a heated solvent to dissolve the book’s binding glue, and separate it into loose single sheets that are fed through a high-speed scanner or automatic document feeder. And, having done this, you pulp or otherwise dispose of the paper.

To anyone who cares about books, it may seem barbaric. After all – as the Google Books project showed – it’s possible to digitise books without destroying them. But that requires time and care, two things entirely absent from the tech mindset. Companies such as Anthropic are in a hurry and their appetite is gargantuan.

An internal memo on “data acquisition opportunity” dated October 2024 said that “We still have room to grow our investment in Project Panama. There are ~40 million books available to purchase in the world. Given our current purchase parameters mainly around price, publishing quality, confidentiality, our serviceable obtainable market (SOM) is $[redacted]M. To date we have purchased redactedM books leaving a sizable [redacted]M left.” (Note: “M” equals millions.)

What lies behind this appetite? Answer: the fear of “model collapse”. Large language models (LLMs) are trained by ingesting every machine-readable text available online. But as they become more ubiquitous, more and more of the text those chatbots generate is itself ending up back online. Which means that newer generations of LLMs will be trained on data that includes much of this AI-generated output.

In other words, the machines could eventually wind up inhaling their own exhaust. This is not a good idea, even for computers, as the late computer scientist Ross Anderson and his colleagues pointed out in 2023. Their study of “the curse of recursion” found that “use of model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects in the resulting models”.

Avoiding the curse means finding some impeccable, machine-readable text that is unsullied by AI slop. And what better source of such glorious training data than books published before the slop started spewing after the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022.

Books, after all, are the prime example of accumulated knowledge packed into copy-edited, grammatical, lucid prose. They have, of course, one drawback: their lack of machine-readability. But to an engineer, that’s a mere technical problem. Books can be butchered and their valuable data scanned into the giant sausage machine of AI.

It’s a pity, obviously, that they have to be destroyed in the process. But then you can’t have a tech revolution without shattering some sentimental human illusions.

The Odyssey corner

The thing that fascinates me about the movie (which, Ironically, I haven’t seen) is the discourse around and about it that it has spawned. The next exhibit is Ezra Klein’s interesting take on it in the New York Times. It’s a 16-minute video but there’s also a transcript.

Klein’s main (and interesting) point is that Christopher Nolan has

smuggled the core of Judeo-Christian ethics into “The Odyssey.” Zeus’ law, in Nolan’s “Odyssey,” echoes Leviticus 19:34: “The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt.” It echoes Rabbi Hillel, who said: “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary.” It echoes Matthew 7:12, when Jesus says, “In everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the law and the prophets.”

I asked Claude to explain the thinking behind this interpretation. Here’s how it responded:

Nolan’s Odysseus is a man living amid the wreckage tricksters have caused, forced to reckon with it. Klein argues we’re currently living through “an age of tricksters” (Musk, Trump, Tucker Carlson, etc.) — figures who gain power by transgressing norms and taboos. Nolan’s twist is smuggling Judeo-Christian ethics (the Golden Rule, “love the stranger as yourself”) into the film via “Zeus’s law,” which in the actual myth is a much narrower rule about hospitality, not compassion. That substitution is the film’s “trick”: it makes an old moral inheritance — reciprocity and compassion over domination — feel new and urgent again.

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Wistfulness

Quote of the Day

”War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.”

• Thomas Mann

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Alison Krauss | Down To The River To Pray

Link

Long Read of the Day

Threw away the boot

Lovely memoir by Dilip D’Souza

When I was younger, so much younger than today, family and friends began to notice that I stood a little awkwardly. Maybe I never needed anybody’s help in any way, I don’t know. But the awkwardness was most obvious in photographs, where I would invariably stand with one foot out to the side. They also found I ran a little oddly, even though I was active and loved playing outside.

Eventually an older aunt and my mother lay me down and actually measured my legs. By a couple of inches, one was shorter than the other. My mother took me to a well-known Bombay doctor, who confirmed the difference in the lengths and said that I must have had a mild attack of polio. (Polio was, of course, much more prevalent and frightening then than it is now.) To make up those inches, he said, I would have to wear a boot with a thick sole.

So I began wearing this heavy boot, and I was clearly unhappy with it. I couldn’t run around much anymore; instead, I stumbled here and there. My parents were dismayed, but then this is what the well-known doctor had recommended.

About then, the family moved to Aurangabad. Friends there suggested to my mother that she take me to a local doctor…

Do read on. It’s a heartwarming story.

The Odyssey Corner

Inside the projectionist’s booth

What does it take to put the movie on an Imax screen?

Lovely mini-essay in the Observer by Xavier Greenwood.

He works in darkness but everything he creates is light. Michael Ford, chief projectionist at the BFI Imax, struggles to name his favourite film, but he does have a favourite cinema. It was where he began his career in Southend-on-Sea. “I went to the guys knocking it down and asked if I could have a brick as a souvenir,” Ford says over the sound of a jet engine. “When the technology of Jurassic Park becomes reality, I can clone my cinema.”

That jet engine is not actually a jet engine. It is the sound of the Imax projector, a one-tonne hulk of grey machinery, which beams 5ft 7in of film per second on to a screen almost as tall as five London buses. A glass lens plate sucks a frame against the lens, holds it in place, lets it go, then moves on to the next frame. “When there is something wrong it will tell you,” Ford says. “You start hearing weird noises.”

The full print for The Odyssey, which was filmed entirely on Imax cameras, is 11 miles long and made up of 250,000 individual frames. It weighs as much as a small car. As I walk towards the projection booth at the BFI, I pass three silver flight cases with “PROPERTY OF IMAX” written on them. A few months ago, these cases carried three film reels from California to London, where they were checked and spliced together by the team. The BFI Imax is one of only 41 cinemas in the world able to show the film as it was shot.

I arrive in the booth midway through a screening…

My commonplace booklet

When my kids were small, this was one of their favourite books. (And indeed, one of mine, because we were a cat-loving family.) It’s about a cat who lived in a street who was welcome in every house in the neighbourhood, with predictable consequences.

And now what do I find but a story (£) in the weekend edition of the FT reporting that “rogue feeders are creating armies of Six-Dinner Sids, prompting felines to pile on the pounds — and some owners to take legal action.”

Hmmm…

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Flying Saucer

A light suspended from the ceiling over a dining table.

Quote of the Day

”Fashion is the performance of leisure.”

• Thorstein Veblen

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Richard Wagner | Prelude to Lohengrin | Simon Rattle

Link

Mesmerising.

Long Read of the Day

 The Heated Debate In Europe Over Air Conditioning

Given the heat dome that we have been living in, this essay by Nathan Gardels is interesting and timely.

Recently, Elon Musk stirred controversy across a sweltering Europe simply by tweeting on X that Lee Kuan Yew, the founding father of Singapore, was a “genius” because he had the vision to see that introducing air conditioning would entirely change what was possible in the post-colonial tropics and make the city-state he ruled as prosperous as the imperial West.

The biting subtext of Musk’s post was ridicule of the Continent’s general anti-tech sentiment even when facing heat-stroke temperatures of 100-plus degrees. In France, where only 25% of homes have air conditioning, compared to 90% in the United States, the issue of adopting AC or not has divided the body politic between climate adapters and cultural traditionalists — despite the fact that the country is largely powered by the most technologically advanced renewable resource, nuclear energy. No doubt, stiff preservation rules and renovation red tape play a role in stalling updates in a centuries-old built environment.

European reticence seems grounded in the notion that the climate is natural while conditioning it is the kind of tech fix associated with big-living Texas trillionaires who admire authoritarian leaders and the extravagant overconsumption of Americans. AC, in the minds of some, appears to be a proxy for all that is wrong with America.

Musk was quoting from an interview I did with Lee back in the 1990s…

Do read on.

My Commonplace booklet

From Dave Pell…

Sam Altman shared a parenting idea on social media the other day. “cool use case of chatgpt work i heard last night: connect your family calendars and explain your kids’ interests. every morning for the drive to school, have it make a podcast that talks about one kid’s soccer game that afternoon, one kid’s upcoming birthday, some news, etc.” Most of the responses were like the one from TV creator Alex Hirsch, who asked: “What if you just talked to your children?”

This struck me because I wrote the other day about how Silicon Valley bros seem to be unconnected to the real world as inhabited by you and me.

The Odyssey corner

Christopher Nolan’s mega-epic is the gift that keeps on giving. I’m intrigued by the discourse that surrounds the movie and readers keep pointing me to interesting essays, critiques, reviews of it.

Two examples from this week.

First, a witty poem poem by Bridget Pratt, looking at the saga from the viewpoint of Penelope, Odysseus’s long-suffering wife. It’s partly inspired by C.P. Cavafy’s poem, Ithaka . Here’s a sample:

Ithaka, I’m sick of ya!

Of course they were wild, my own lad included!

I thought Yules was too clever to be so deluded

As to sail off to sea and lay siege against Troy .

Damn it! Nell was a beauty, Parry just a spoiled boy!

So, there’s me with a baby to raise on my own

Never guessed Yules would leave me till I was a crone

… Well, not quite a crone, babe! I’m still hot and good looking

The lovely young suitors’ libidos are cooking…

Yes, I look shy and virtuous and lower my eyes

While they jostle and brag and compete for the prize

(That’s Ithaka and me, if the penny’s not dropped)

So of course, my son Telly said it had to be stopped

I must stick to my tapestry, keep them all waiting

To be honest though, babe, I’d much rather be dating

The cute little blond with the muscly pecs

If I’m truthful, in fact, I’d quite like some hot sex!

It’s years since Yules left, what was I s’posed to do?

Read on. It’s sharp.

And then there’s Emily Wilson’s LRB review of the movie. That’s special because she’s the author of the knock-out translation of the text that my wife and I are currently reading (and that I believe Nolan used when creating the script).

Here’s a snippet:

Christopher Nolan’s $250 million action movie version of Homer’s ancient Greek poem is an entertaining way to hide from the high temperatures for a few hours. Nolan’s trademark jumps and twists in the narrative structure are relatively easy to follow, and appropriate for The Odyssey, a narrative of tales nested in tales. My teenagers had a good time. Unlike some of Nolan’s other films, The Odyssey is not boring, thanks to the source material, which is impossible to mess up entirely. It’s a family-friendly audiovisual spectacle, like an elaborate Fourth of July fireworks display – and with about the same level of narrative and emotional depth.

As in his previous films, Nolan is interested in the discontinuities of space and time, in magic, tricks, craft, technology, rivalry, substitution, masks, miscommunication, what we remember and what we choose to forget. Yet again, survival is portrayed as a kind of triumph. Yet again, there are long, claustrophobic scenes of drowning and near-drowning, and technically impressive episodes in which buildings are engulfed in flames and vehicles explode. Yet again, we watch a male character’s desperate quest to recover and/or avenge a female love object. I had hoped that Nolan’s affinity with these Homeric themes might push him to new creative heights, and enable him to conjure more believable characters. But The Odyssey features his usual combination of grandiosity and superficiality. Without a tub of wax for my ears – which Himesh Patel’s ever anxious Eurylochus, Odysseus’s doomed right-hand man, uses to sail safely past the Sirens – I was exposed to the full din of thumping sticks, staffs, swords and clashing armour, thunderbolts, crashing waves, grunts, screams, toppling palaces and burning temples. But unlike Matt Damon, the wax-free Odysseus who is tied to the mast as he is conveyed past the Sirens (naked ladies reclining on some uncomfortable-looking rocks), I gazed at the shipwrecks and bloodbaths without any agony of emotion. My eyes stayed dry, even for Argos the dog – whose adorableness as a puppy is predictably amped up to suit our animal-loving times. If only the human characters had been treated with such serious attention…

Great stuff.

Feedback

• From Geoff Stead…

By fabulous coincidence we were camping at Knepp last week too (Thursday night only). It was fascinating – we loved it. Especially those wheeling storks.

We heard a slightly different version of their origin story though. They didn’t just find Knepp. They were brought there.

Original parents were injured birds from Poland who can no longer fly. They live in pens at Knepp and also Cotswold wildlife park to produce the next generations. These fledglings are the birds that return (after a few years) to set up home at Knepp.

The youngsters we saw wheeling around were a mix of local youth, and 40-ish that had been recently donated from Cotswold WP. They didn’t yet have nests and are busy imprinting, mapping the area so that they can find their way back again in a few years!

• From Janet Cobb

Knepp started a huge national movement:

Heal Rewilding https://www.healrewilding.org.uk/ Boothby Wildlands https://www.boothbywildland.com/ https://www.rewildingbritain.org.uk/rewilding-network/projects

Smaller initiatives existing everywhere including Middle Marches CLT (Community Land Trust) in Shropshire https://middlemarchescommunitylandtrust.org.uk/

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Airstreamed surrealism

This is a photograph of something that is both real and surreal. It’s of the reflections in the side of a beautiful Airstream food truck at Knepp, shot in bright sunshine with minimal post-processing.

Quote of the Day

”The most important aspect of a new technology isn’t what the machine does, it’s who it does it for and who it does it to.”

• Cory Doctorow

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band | Thunder Road (Live In Barcelona)

Link

Long Read of the Day

The future according to Silicon Valley

My latest Observer column.

Why do tech moguls seem so disconnected from the real world? Think, for example, of Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei saying that half of entry-level jobs could be wiped out by AI in a few years, while also predicting a 95% reduction in cancer mortality and incidence in the same time period. Or Elon Musk burbling on about how AI will make work “optional”.

Why do these guys talk such nonsense? Is it just ignorance of the world? Or is it the arrogance that comes from the reality distortion field that surrounds the unimaginably wealthy; those who inhabit a zone in which nobody dares to disagree with them, so they wind up thinking they are geniuses?

Answer: a bit of both, but the main reason is that they are, overwhelmingly, males who come from narrow Stem (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) backgrounds and are trapped in a particular mindset that the technology writer Evgeny Morozov called “solutionism”.

This is an ideology that recasts complex social phenomena such as politics, public health, education and law enforcement as “neatly defined problems with definite, computable solutions or as transparent and self-evident processes that can be easily optimised – if only the right algorithms are in place!”

Solutionism has been endemic in Silicon Valley from its earliest days, but the arrival of AI has dramatically turbocharged it. This technology, we are told, will enable us to solve the climate crisis, eliminate cancer, boost productivity, quadruple gross domestic product, transform education and so on. In short, AI will change the world.

Which naturally leads you to wonder what the transformed world envisaged by the tech industry may look like. With impeccable timing, the economist Branko Milanović, an expert well known for his work on income distribution and inequality, has helpfully provided us with an outline sketch of this brave new nirvana envisaged by Silicon Valley.

Milanović thinks that untrammelled deployment of AI would create a society that is highly stratified into four social classes. At the bottom of the heap is what he calls the “surplus population”; for example, people whose skills are made obsolete by AI, either permanently or in a way that will require them to spend years retraining. Silicon Valley thinks of these as humans who have little or no industrial value.

If this group reaches between 15% and 20% of the labour force, Milanović thinks, it could become politically explosive, needing to be kept “quiet and docile” through modern bread and circuses (lifetime unemployment benefits, plus 24/7 low-cost streaming entertainment, perhaps?).

Then there will be a “service-sector working class” comprising those whom AI hasn’t yet replaced, living precariously on low-to-moderate wages under constant threat of being pushed down into the surplus population.

Above them is what Milanović calls the “homoploutic” class; those who are simultaneously in the top 10% of capital owners and top 10% of wage earners (currently about 3% of the US population). Think of them as “professionals”; lawyers, surgeons, dentists, corporate executives, readers of the Financial Times and the Economist. He thinks that AI will probably increase the size of this group, since its high labour-plus-capital income enables it to keep buying into the most profitable sectors of the new economy.

And, finally, at the very top of this stratified pyramid, Milanović’s model envisages a new aristocracy of tech lords: an extraordinarily wealthy elite, consisting of thousands of people (not just the 0.001% we have now) who own the technology itself and wield outsized political influence.

The revealing thing about this model is that it produces a logical extrapolation of Silicon Valley’s fantasies about AI. It shows how the vision of AI-driven abundance and leisure that Musk recently outlined to the Economist’s bemused editor-in-chief, Zanny Minton Beddoes, results instead in a chronically unequal and politically unstable society. It’s a dystopia created not by malicious AI, but by how its economic gains are (and are not) shared.

My Commonplace Booklet

The weekend edition of the Financial Times had a nice collection is mini-essays by the paper’s writers on the subject of “The summer that changed me”. I was particularly struck by Martin Wolf’s contribution, because he and I are both Boomers.

“My choice of life-changing summer,” he writes, “is that of 1946″.

I was born in August of that year. It is impossible, after all, to think of any event that meets this criterion better than one’s birth. It is more than life-changing: it is its beginning.

Moreover, 1946 was rather special: it was the first full year after the end of the second world war. I was one of the first postwar “baby boomers”, a generation that has had a profound influence upon the western world.

Yet even more interesting than the subsequent history of my own generation were the choices made by our parents. They were then young people, mostly in their twenties and thirties, who had been through a devastating war. In the UK alone, some 450,000 had died. Worldwide, the estimated total death toll was an almost inconceivable 87mn.

What did young people do after these horrors? They chose life: 955,266 children (19.5 children per 1,000 inhabitants) were born in the UK in 1946. This was the second-highest ratio in all the years between 1945 and 1970, and only just behind the 20.7 in 1947.

My parents chose life, too, despite knowing that almost all members of their wider families had been murdered in the Holocaust. They chose life, despite having been forced into exile during the war.

So many men and women in my parents’ generation chose life, because they trusted in a better future. They were right to do so: their children have lived in a golden age of peace and plenty. My life began with optimism. We need such optimism again.

We do.

The Odyssey Corner

Source

• Janan Ganesh, writing in the FT:

The debt to war goes deeper than that. Even the founding stories of the civilisation involve an external menace, whether Trojan or Persian.

Last week, I went to see the latest telling of them. The exposition in the early scenes of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is so inelegant that I still wonder — days later — if it is meant as a dry joke. The King of Sparta looks as though he mans the door at a South Beach nightclub. The moralising at the end, when the film tries to deplore the violence that it has inadvertently glamorised for almost three hours, grates. (François Truffaut was right. “There is no such thing as an anti-war film.”) The scenes are more grandiose than grand. As ever with Nolan, the impression is of someone burning through cash to puff up too small an intellectual concept.

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Benjamin

We spent a couple of glorious days at Knepp last week which meant, among other things, discovering that rabbits on the estate seemed relatively relaxed about having humans nearby. This chap spent much of his time nibbling near where we were cooking, and in the end had his portrait taken.

Quote of the Day

”Life is too short; Proust is too long.”

• Anatole France

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Beethoven: Triple Concerto in C Major, Op. 56 No. 2 ! Anne-Sophie Mutter, Daniel Barenboim, Yo-Yo Ma.

Link

What a trio! Staggeringly beautiful.

Long Read of the Day

AI’s warning shot has arrived

OpenAI’s latest models broke out and hacked Hugging Face. It’s the first known example of a misaligned AI escaping containment with real-world consequences. It’s a big story and this essay by Shakeel Hashim provides a sobering and informed take on it.

In OpenAI’s telling, the models did not set out to harm Hugging Face. They were simply “going to extreme lengths to achieve a rather narrow testing goal.” Rather than a supervillain, the models were more like an extremely dedicated college student — one who’d do whatever it takes to pass their exam. As one Twitter user put it, the models “just really really really want to do well at what we ask them to do.”

But the models clearly did not do what their developers intended. OpenAI did not want its models hacking Hugging Face. But the models did it anyway, because doing so was a good way to achieve the goal they were set. That the models were so easily able to breach OpenAI’s “highly isolated” environment is worrying in itself, both in terms of their capabilities and the strength of internal measures to control them.

It is a textbook case of misalignment and loss of control, where an AI autonomously acts in ways unintended by its developers or operators. And this wasn’t a test designed to assess whether they would scheme or deceive — they just did so in pursuit of their goal. Yes, the models’ cyber guardrails — which may have stopped the attack — were deliberately disabled. But the UK’s AI Security Institute has found universal jailbreaks that get around GPT-5.6’s guardrails. And as this case demonstrates, models are running without guardrails inside AI companies…

Just at the moment this is canary-in-the-mine stuff. The incident was, in a sense, harmless. Nobody died. The system just hacked into an American company based in New York that develops computation tools for building applications using machine learning.

But an analogous attack could get deep into critical national infrastructure somewhere and wreak real havoc. Sometimes, humans are too smart for the own good.

Books, etc.

I bought this at Knepp in search of an understanding of the philosophy and methodology behind its owners extraordinary project to rethink conservation by letting go, allowing natural processes to happen and having no predetermined targets to meet. In short, to create Agribusiness’s nightmare scenario. But which instead turns out to be self-sustaining and productive — and far cheaper to run than conventional industrialised farming.

The thing that really blew me away, though, was the way storks have returned in force to the estate. I had never seen these extraordinary, beautiful birds before; and yet there they were, wheeling and swooping above the campsite while we were having breakfast.

Feedback

David Ballard was struck by Dan Drezner’s essay on the aphrodisiac effect of great wealth and great power and was moved to send me this link to an interview with Steven Spielberg on the same topic. For which many thanks.

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Beached!

The Law Faculty building in Cambridge. Designed (wouldn’t you guess) by Norman Foster, who also designed the Terminal building at Stansted airport. But it always reminds me of a beached cruise liner.

Quote of the Day

”If you want to get stuff done, dance to the available music.”

• Marlon Brando , advising the maverick film director, Tony Kaye.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Abdullah Ibrahim | Mannenberg

Link

Historic track, first released in 1974.

Long Read of the Day

The Perils of the Billionaire Bubble

Nice essay by Daniel Drezner on the aphrodisiac effect of great wealth and great power.

t’s been a little more than a year since I started my gig as Academic Dean at the Fletcher School. Looking back the biggest surprise — and let me stress here that it should not have been remotely surprising, given that I’m a political scientist, but sometimes I can be a bit thick — is how even a minute amount of power and status affects how colleagues treat you. Conversations that a year earlier would have been candid and blunt have become a bit more clipped. I don’t think I cut a particularly intimidating figure, but my administrative title matters, and my colleagues have reacted to that by being more circumspect.

This shift is understandable, but there is a danger that comes with it. Even within the academy, speaking truth to power can be a difficult thing. And without people willing to tell me that I have made/will make a mistake, a very scary feedback loop emerges. If no one tells me if I’ve made a mistake, that makes it easier for me to persuade myself that I am doing a great job, which in turn makes me more confident that I can take on more responsibility and power, which makes it even tougher for colleagues to offer constructive criticism, and then the cycle recurs.

The phenomenon I’m describing does not just apply to middle management. As I explained in The Ideas Industry, if you think speaking truth to power is hard, try speaking truth to money. Henry Farrell recently emphasized this point as well: “Old style princes were notorious for their tendencies to deranged behavior, which came not just from their inbreeding, but their power, and the unwillingness and inability of others to contradict or check them. So too, modern princes.” In other words, the dangerous feedback loop that I have encountered is several orders of magnitude worse for the wealthiest and most well-known people on the planet: Elon Musk and Donald Trump. And this past week each of their psychic self-confidence bubbles popped…

Perceptive piece. I’ve seen this aphrodisiac effect a couple of time, once with a politician (Tony Blair) and once with a tech mogul (Bill Gates). And once I’ve seen how charming it can be to meet someone (John Major) who had power but who had no aura, and was, in fact, a really nice, well-balanced man.

The Old Man and the Strait

Hemingway on Trump and his war with Iran

Lovely spoof by Carlos Greaves.

He was an old man who had started a war in a faraway Gulf, and he had gone one hundred and forty-three days now without reopening the Strait.

After forty days, a tentative ceasefire had been reached. Then another one. Then another one after that. Then another one that the old man had bragged about but that the enemy claimed no knowledge of. Then a memorandum that should have been a permanent ceasefire but lasted just eight days.

It was not the first time the old man had encountered such a setback. His entire life had been beset by similar misfortune.

That is the wrong word, he thought.

It was something worse than bad luck.

The Strait was rigged.

The old man recalled the many ways his life had been rigged against him. Rather than being born a Kennedy, or a Rockefeller, he had been born to a family of modest centimillionaires. Having a Kennedy in his employ could not make up for those humiliatingly humble roots. Besides, the Kennedy working for him was the lowliest Kennedy. The one who bathed in filthy rivers and spoke like a dying truck motor.

The old man did not want to think about that Kennedy. Especially because of the lettuce that summer. The lettuce had also somehow been rigged.

Instead, the old man thought about how he had grown his father’s modest $400 million fortune despite all of the losers who had been out to get him. The bank that had foreclosed on his casino simply for failing to turn a profit. The regulators who had shut down his university simply for failing to provide students with a degree. The women who had accused him of rape simply for failing to get their consent. And, of course, the Congress who had refused to declare him the winner of the election against the other old man simply for failing to receive more votes.

The old man thought about how everyone was constantly rigging things against him. The Strait must be another one of those things. There could be no other logical explanation.

“I did everything right,” the old man said to himself. He considered himself a very stable genius.

After all, he had tasked his top military advisor with waging the war. The advisor was the sharpest military mind the president had ever seen on television. Or, at least, the sharpest mind willing to swear fealty to the old man. The advisor had tried many good ideas. He had injected the soldiers with hormones so that they would fight the way men used to fight before men had become soft. Yet the advisor could not open the Strait…

You get the idea. It made me laugh. Maybe the best way to deal with Trump is to take the mickey out of him. Except for the fact that he might not notice. When King Charles made the joke in his White House speech mentioning that the British, in their day, had also had a go at renovating the building (they burned it to the ground in August 1814) it wasn’t clear that Trump understood the joke.

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Who do you think your are?

Sitting quietly by myself in the garden of the Orchard in Grantchester yesterday, I was joined by this teenage Jackdaw, who gave me a hard stare. So I stared back and he kindly posed for his portrait.

Quote of the Day

”Let us do something, while we have the chance”.

• Vladimir, in Waiting for Godot.

This could be a good motto for American electors, coming up to the mid-terms.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Fergus O’Farrell | Something right

Link

Long Read of the Day

Lionel Messi and the Baby in the Bassinet

As I was clearing away all the pieces about the World Cup that I’d collected during the competition I came on this essay by Michael Ignatieff on two great footballers, Lionel Messi of Argentina and Lamine Yamal of Spain, on whether great stars deserve fame and fortune.

When talent of such an extraordinary kind is in play, we enter a magic realm where normal rules and expectations cease to apply. Which is why we watch: we want our side to win, but just as much, we are held in our seats by the possibility of the unexpected, the unplanned, the instant of talent that transforms everything.

Extraordinary talent in any field—football, science, literature, art—always is a reminder to the rest of us that what makes human beings unique is that there are singular individuals among us. In no other species do singular individual members of the species do so much to define who we all are. Their achievements, whether in sport, science or art, set the expectations for everyone who comes after them. Doubtless, the attention and training provided these two young men at La Masia helped mature their talent, but their coaches knew, from the start, that these two had a prodigious natural talent. Their fans worship these talents and believe that they and other supreme sports stars deserve to be paid vast sums to display it.

This attitude towards the incorrigible inequality among individual human beings stands in contrast to the resentment we feel towards other social, economic, gender and racial inequalities. We admire and reward outsized individual talent, while we resent any outsized advantage that arises from birth, wealth, race, class or gender. The unearned privileges of ‘nepo-babies’, children born to fame or fortune, strike us as unjust and awaken resentment and scorn…

It’s an interesting piece which eventually gets to the hard problem that arises when siblings in the same family have greatly different abilities.

But it also reminded me of the way Messi choose to ignore the savage thuggery of his teammates after the final whistle. Instead of taking responsibility and using his status to help moderate their behaviour, he chose to sit sorrowfully on his own on the ground, thereby attracting most of the media attention from what was going on elsewhere. He may be a great footballer, but at that moment he looked like an irresponsible human being.

Books, etc.

Nolan’s Odyssey (contd.)

From Semafor:

Christopher Nolan wants you to see The Odyssey in 70mm, if you can manage to thwart crowds and scalpers to get a ticket — and that’s been a boon for IMAX and its oversized screens. In an earnings call Thursday, CEO Rich Gelfond said the film’s $52 million global opening weekend, sans South Korea, China, and Japan, was the biggest of its kind in the company’s history, with IMAX screens accounting for less than 1% of Odyssey showings but driving 20% of the film’s debut. A “fan frenzy” has pushed theater occupancy rates to “unheard-of” levels, he said, with Odyssey screenings selling out as many as seven or eight weeks into the film’s run and cinephiles packing the seats as early as 7 am.

As young consumers crave IRL experiences, audiences’ overwhelming enthusiasm has even carved out a new market for IMAX merch, Gelfond said: Popcorn buckets in the shape of the company’s famously cumbersome cameras sold out online in minutes.

My commonplace booklet

I’d been watching Searching for Sam, Adrian Dunbar’s fine BBC documentary about Samuel Beckett and was suddenly transported back to Ken Tynan’s unforgettable Observer review of the London premiere of Waiting For Godot. It was published in 1955, when I was a kid growing up in rural Ireland, and so I only discovered it in 1990 when I bought A View of the English Stage, a collection of Tynan’s columns. I can still remember the moment I came on the review, and how I was blown away by it. This, I thought, is what criticism is for: to illuminate a great work of art for those of us who are curious but can’t quite figure it out.

Maybe this excerpt gives an idea of what I mean.

A special virtue attaches to plays which remind the drama of how much it can do without and still exist. By all the known criteria, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is a dramatic vacuum. Pity the critic who seeks a chink in its armour, for it is all chink! It has no plot, no climax, no denouement, no beginning, no middle, and no end. Unavoidably, it has a situation, and it might be accused of having suspense, since it deals with the impatience of two tramps waiting beneath a tree for a cryptic Mr. Godot to keep his appointment with them; but the situation is never developed, and a glance at the programme shows that Mr. Godot is never going to arrive. Waiting for Godot, frankly, jettisons everything by which we recognize theatre. It arrives at the customs-house, as it were, with no luggage, no passport, and nothing to declare; yet it gets through, as might a pilgrim from Mars. It does this, I believe, by appealing to a definition of drama much more fundamental than any in the books. A play, it asserts and proves, is basically a means of spending two hours in the dark without being bored.

Its author is an Irishman living in France, a fact which should prepare us for the extra, oddly serious joke he now plays on us. Passing the time in the dark, he suggests, is not only what drama is about, but also what life is about. Existence depends on those metaphysical Micawbers who will go on waiting, against all rational argument, for something which may one day turn up to explain the purpose of living. Twenty years ago, Mr. Odets had us waiting for Lefty, the social messiah; less naively, Mr. Beckett bids us to wait for Godot, the spiritual signpost. His two tramps pass the time of day just as we, the audience, are passing the time of night. Were we not in the theatre, we should, like them, be clowning and quarreling, aimlessly bickering and aimlessly making up – all, as one of them says, ‘to give us the impression that we exist’…

I was the Observer’s TV critic for eight years (and am still writing for the paper) but the thing that most delighted me when I was offered the role was the thought that giants like Tynan had been there before me.

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Bike park…

…well, maybe not.

Quote of the Day

”Civilisation is a thin film across an ocean of chaos”.

• Werner Herzog 

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ry Cooder and David Lindley | Jesus on the Mainline

Link

My favourite recording of this particular number.

Long Read of the Day

Is 2026 going to turn out like 1999?

Fabulous blog post by Rory Cellan-Jones.

His answer to the question is: “Only if the market fails to come to its senses about SpaceX and Tesla”.

I am getting all nostalgic about 1999, the year when I first started paying somewhat obsessive attention to the share prices of technology companies, a habit which has endured to this day. As a BBC TV business reporter, watching the stock market had been part of my job for a decade by then, but this was different. In the US, and to a much smaller extent in the UK, companies suddenly needed to have one simple thing at the end of their name to send their shares rocketing – the suffix .com.

All the traditional ways of valuing a company had been blown away by the arrival of the Internet as a consumer proposition. Suddenly, you did not need profits or even substantial revenues to be a valuable business. You just needed eyeballs – in other words, an online audience whose attention you could monetise. It was an exhilarating time to be a journalist covering the startup scene, and eventually I got my first book, Dot Bomb, out of the experience.

As share prices grew and grew, the warnings from those who had been watching the stock market for longer than a couple of years got ever louder. But the true believers scoffed at these Cassandras, claiming they just didn’t get it – the “dot coms” were going to change the world and the old rules of investment did not apply.

And among those evangelists for the dot coms were many of the analysts at investment banks. Somehow, their lengthy reports on tech companies who were being wined and dined by another branch of the bank, always seemed to end with a “buy” recommendation.

Then, of course, in the Spring of 2000, it all went pop…

Rory used to be the BBC’s Technology correspondent and he wrote a terrific book about it. As someone labouring in the same vineyard, I used to marvel at the clarity and ‘unforcedness’ of his prose. He’s still doing it, which is why this perceptive view of the AI madness is well worth your time. In the end the laws of economic gravity applied in 1999. They still do now — but of course this is not investment advice, merely a recital of mundane common sense!

My commonplace booklet

My son and grandson were lucky enough to get tickets for the screening on Christopher Nolan’s take on the Odyssey at the weekend, and I wondered if I should feel envious. But then I read Armand D’Angour’s critical review of the film and wondered if I should just keep reading Emily WIlson’s translation.

Here’s a sample of his piece;

While the epic’s multiplicity runs deep, Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey is an action film, replete with unabashed violence. It is essentially designed to entertain a modern audience familiar with movies such as Lord of the Rings. There are some passing moral reflections about the decline of ‘civilisation’ and about the guilty conscience of a ruthless military leader, but these are brief moments, unconvincingly tacked on to the storyline. With its monstrous creatures and robotic foes, and its scenes of fighting, death and destruction, the film is almost uniformly grim and gory, set at a pitch of intensity that scarcely varies for nearly three hours, during which the heroes never seem to change out of their armour and crested helmets. There are no moments of lightness, humour, or laughter, and little room for comradeship, intimacy, or character development, even though the film begins, faithful to Homer, with young Telemachus’s quest to find his missing father. Nor, disappointingly, does the story feature any music or musicians: absent are the bards whose performances give the Odyssey its most self-referential moments, such as when Penelope demands that Phemius stop his ‘distressing song’ about a hero’s return, and when Odysseus weeps to hear his own story sung by Demodocus. In their place, an orchestral score is in turns sweepingly heroic and thuddingly percussive, interspersed with a few quieter, more sentimental moments (including in the Siren’s Song and the reunion scene with Penelope the unmistakeable sound of the piper Callum Armstrong’s sinuous aulos, ancient double pipes).

So maybe I’m looking in the wrong place. This isn’t Homer’s story at all, but Christopher Nolan’s. So maybe I should go to see it.

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Non-musical chairs

I keep thinking that I must do something about these aged chairs, which have stood outside through wind, hail and rain for many years. There’s something touching about their quiet endurance, and now I need to make amends. Sanding them down and a coat or two of paint or preservative is the least I can do.

Quote of the Day

”The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots.”

• Erich Fromm

 ## Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Sharon Shannon | Blackbird | Live at Dolans

Link

She’s a charismatic musician who lights up every room she enters.

Long Read of the Day

Sketching the new dysto-utopian world with massive presence of artificial intelligence

If you want to know what the world might be like if the techlords of Silicon Valley get their way, then this essay by the economist Branko Milanovic is just the ticket.

(Spoiler alert: there’s no good news here. And yet democracies could stop it happening if they got their acts together.)

Sample:

The third issue is whether AI would create a significant surplus population. I prefer to use the term surplus population to a more neutral term of higher unemployment because it reflects better what may be the effects of a general purpose technology. It might create people who are basically unemployable and whose skills belong to a revolved era. These may be skills and knowledge that are entirely made redundant by the deployment of the AI; or people whose skills require a “retooling” for the needs of a new economy that would take five or more years. In either case, such people are over a medium- to long-term a surplus population. If the surplus population becomes large, for example reaching 15 or 20 percent of the labor force it would create political problems. The issue will then be how to solve this political problem. It may be dealt within the existing system of unemployment benefits with the proviso that in the case of the surplus population unemployment benefits might run for years rather than for six or nine months as they do nowadays. Or through, as many people argue, universal guaranteed income. Both would require a change in the way the welfare system is organized and funded. We would have to accept the possibility of people who would never work during their lifetime or might work for very little time in some subaltern occupations.

Money transfers however do not eliminate the political issue of a large surplus population. It would be naïve to believe that simply giving people money to survive would make them happy. Surplus population could create a permanent pool of malcontents who would be politically difficult to handle, a malleable population who would be there to be exploited and used by political operators. The very presence of a large group of people who have nothing to do and lots of free time to plot rebellions would by itself be politically destabilizing.

“Surplus population” is an interesting euphemism. It basically means people who have little or no economic value

Books, etc.

I was blown away by the Economist’s Tocqueville Road Trippodcast, and particularly by some of the excerpts from Alexis de Tocqueville’s own account of his journey through the New World, that I felt ashamed that I’d never read it. So, guess what, when I opened my eyes on the morning of my birthday, there it was — all 722 pages of it! And, rather to my astonishment, it’s an entrancing read. He was such a perceptive observer of the country to which he had been dispatched to see what all this democracy stuff was about.

My commonplace booklet

From the Borowitz Report…

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report). Seeking relief from the latest tariffs slapped on his nation’s goods, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney told Donald J. Trump on Tuesday that the orange air blanketing regions of the United States was intended as a “spectacular tribute” to the US president.

“We Canadians were thinking of something special we could give you for your birthday, and this is what we came up with,” Carney said.

“We thought that turning the skies above Washington orange would be a spectacular tribute to you, much as the Reflecting Pool is an amazing tribute to Greenland,” he added.

After Trump agreed to drop the tariffs, Carney thanked him, adding, “I would urge you to go outside and breathe in as much of that beautiful orange air as you can.”

Linkblog

We do the Irish Times cryptic crossword every morning and are often puzzled by the expressions that come as solutions to clues. Yesterday, the solution to the clue “Man will hide outside unfinished fort as quickly as possible” (4,3,7) was “Hell for leather”. It’s an expression I knew from my childhood onwards, but how did it originate?

Answer:

Screenshot

Link

So that snippet has now been added to the warehouse of useless information known as my brain.

Errata

In my piece about Rory Smith’s essay on the England-Argentina match, I mistyped Rory’s point about England inviting Argentina to spend the match camped “20 years from their goal”. So many hanks to Niall O’Sullivan for pointing out that the distance was measured in yards, not years.

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The art of conversation

What French cafes are for.

Quote of the Day

”Republicans want smaller government for the same reason crooks want fewer cops; it’s easier to get away with murder.

• James Carville

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Keith Jarrett | Shenandoah

Link

Long Read of the Day

From Cockburn to clickbait

Lovely essay by my friend Andrew Brown.

Claud Cockburn, one of the finest hacks there has ever been, wrote that journalism is very simple: it is a mixture of advertising and entertainment and to succeed you need only decide who you want to entertain and what cause, as it were, you wish to advertise. He had no time for journalism as the pursuit of abstract truth, and – as a member in good standing of the British imperial class and an intermittent Stalinist – he would have laughed at the idea that journalists had a sacred duty to democracy until tears of neat whisky streamed down his cheeks.

Cockburn wished to lose his illusions without losing hope, as he wrote admiringly of a Stalinist friend. His energy, optimism, and courage are still inspiring; he was also an excellent stylist, whose plain and forceful manner concealed a great deal of art. He cared more for the English language than for all of his causes and most of his wives. So if there is any guide who can lead us, like Virgil, through the descent into dreadful clickbait hell, Cockburn is the man.

He must have inspired many people into journalism with his autobiographies, but I don’t think he ever set out to be a journalist. What he wanted was to savour the variety of the world and to write about it. Working for the Times offered the least constrained way to do this. “The press, sir, and the gentleman from the Times” as a Victorian flunkey is said to have introduced journalists to the Prime Minister.

So he started off respectable; what makes him timely, though is that he invented – at least in English speaking countries – a form of journalism that did not depend on advertising and was aimed squarely at an elite audience. To put it another way, he invented Substack 80 years before Substack did…..

Do read on. I love it partly because it’s such a readable account of why the journalistic trade (for it is a trade and not a profession) is in trouble. But also because I knew and admired Claud Cockburn, who (with his wife, Patricia) were very kind to me when I was an undergraduate in Ireland. (They lived in Youghal, a seaside village near Cork, where I studied.) The last time I saw him was after my graduation; he asked me what I intended to do next. I replied that I was thinking of journalism. At this, he grinned wickedly and said, solemnly: “One word of advice: make sure that early in your career you libel somebody famous!”

Books, etc.

You’ll be hearing a lot about Dave Eggers’s new book. He’s a truly remarkable writer. His book The Circle provided the most insightful glimpse I’d ever seen of what it’s like to work inside a tech giant. But his reportage is also shrewd and perceptive. Way back in the Summer of 2016 I was on holiday in Provence and brooding on the upcoming US election. As a devout reader of the New York Times I was reassured on a daily basis by Nate Silver that Hilary Clinton was on track for election. And then I read a very long piece by Eggers who had been to a Trump rally in California and had spent a lot of time talking to attendees who seemed to him to be ordinary Americans. And I started to wonder if the pollsters might be missing the picture. But then I looked at the NYT polling figures and thought “Nah!”. The rest turned out to be history, as they say.

Let’s teach Meta a lesson

For the background see here.

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