Zoombini

While looking for something else, I came on this photograph of the most remarkable animal I’ve ever known. She died some years ago, and we miss her, still.

Quote of the Day

”War doesn’t determine who’s right, it determines who’s left.”

• Bertrand Russell

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Dire Straits | Why Worry

Link

Long Read of the Day

Predatory Hegemons

A cautionary prediction by Michael Ignatieff about the emerging global disorder.

My excellent friend and former colleague, Steve Walt of the Harvard Kennedy School, calls them the predatory hegemons. America, China and Russia are prowling the world, turning a rule-ordered playing field into a jungle in which the rule of the strongest prevails. The middling powers Prime Minister Carney talked about at Davos are scrambling to escape the jungle. Carney’s travel schedule– Delhi, Tokyo, Sydney—maps the emerging contours of a counter-order of defense and economic partnerships.

Middle powers can seek to protect themselves from the predators, but they can’t keep the predators from ripping each other’s throats. So the biggest question in international politics is whether the predatory hegemons can cease their depredations and forge a new global order instead. From the hegemons’ point of view, a future in which the only question left is who destroys the other first is not a happy prospect.

[...]

At least once before in history, great powers have drawn back from the fearful implications of a lawless world. We owe the order created in 1945 to the Soviet, American and British realization at Yalta and Potsdam that armed giants, one possessing nuclear weapons and another on the brink of doing so, would destroy each other unless they agreed to a basic framework of deconfliction and conflict management. The order was often violated, by the predators themselves, but at least it kept the world free of nuclear war. The question is whether a new order among the three predators is possible…

Books, etc.

Rob Nelson’s review of Cory Doctorow’s terrific book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It* about how bad people running giant technology companies ruined the internet.

They deliberately added complexity, and hid it behind frictionless interfaces that trap consumers. Platform enshittification explains other ways life got worse. Think about the hours spent trying to correct an error with your health insurance or resolving a problem in your employer’s HR system. The most egregious forms are when governments add layers of reporting to the social safety net, forcing those who lose their jobs, can’t afford groceries, or become disabled to spend hours and hours submitting information online or stand in a queue to talk to a person. By design, this means many who need those benefits don’t receive them because they cannot navigate the bureaucratic demands or quit trying in frustration.

Adapting the old Anglo-Saxon word into something that means poop smeared across digital platforms is a silly, juvenile way of describing this situation. We need more language like it. The value of enshittification is that it undercuts the theoretical seriousness of explaining postmodern conditions and the social scientific demand to gather data, always more data, to validate what we feel is real. Yelling Stop! gives voice to the feelings but offers little more than a return to the garden. Yelling about how the internet turned into the shitternet is a call to collective action.

Disenshittify your government! Disenshittify your university! Disenshittify your life! This is a call to bring out the tools to clean the machines. It offers a sense of joyful engagement with dirty work that needs doing…

It’s a long read, but worth it.

My commonplace booklet

USB is wonderful in principle, but it’s become a menace in practice. Our house is littered with devices which require USB-a, USB-c, mini-USB — or the Apple Lightning connector. And all need charging. Which explains why, when I spotted this Charmast portable power bank, I went for it. It charges through all four connections, and is small enough to be unobtrusive.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Instagrammers’ paradise now looking a bit tarnished

From yesterday’s Irish Times…

Despite its perilous location, Dubai has generally been insulated from the wars and conflicts that intermittingly roil the region. But no matter how much the “rhinestone emirate” portrays itself as an Instagrammer’s paradise, there is no escaping the geography that places it in the middle of the region’s fiercest fault lines: the Sunni/Shia divide, and Israel and Iran’s murderous mutual obsession.

The UAE, of which Dubai is one of seven self-governing emirates, and the other small Gulf states such as Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait, have tried to straddle these divides and conflicts over the decades. To do so effectively, their governments have embraced a strategic outlook based on diplomacy and dissonance. They play host to US military bases and large Iranian populations; they sign trade deals with Washington while helping Tehran circumvent international sanctions; they have Sunni ruling families but significant Shia populations; they engage in rapprochement with Israel while their own people pray for Palestine.

In many ways, the Gulf states have adopted an “Irish approach” to dealing with the US: giving voice to an independent, neutral mindset while allowing the US military to conduct operations and renditions from its airports and airstrips. This balancing act worked for years, and the Gulf generally avoided the worst of the Middle East’s conflicts and conflagrations…

Don’t you just love the idea of a strategic policy “based on diplomacy and dissonance”!

On the Plus side…

A space for optimism

 UK emissions fall 2.4% in 2025 as coal hits 400-year low Link

The UK’s greenhouse gas emissions fell by 2.4% in 2025 to their lowest level in more than 150 years, according to new Carbon Brief analysis.

The biggest factors were gas use falling to a 34-year low and coal use dropping to levels last seen in 1600, when Queen Elizabeth I was on the throne and William Shakespeare was writing Hamlet.

Oil use fell by 0.9%, despite rising traffic, helped by more than 700,000 new electric vehicles (EVs), electric vans and plug-in hybrids on the nation’s roads. The UK’s emissions are now 54% below 1990 levels, while its GDP has nearly doubled.

As the Tesco mantra says: every little helps.

h/t Charles Arthur

Well, fancy that …

Klaus Schwab, founder of the ludicrous Davos gabfest and high priest of globalisation, has a new book in the press and he asked Yascha Mounk for an endorsement. Yascha invited him onto his podcast instead, and all went swimmingly until he asked a question about Schwab’s fatuous enthusiasm for “stakeholder capitalism”, at which point his guest discovered that he had a bad migraine and would be unable to continue. Afterwards, Mounk tried to arrange a suitable time when they could continue the conversation, but made no progress, until eventually one of Schwab’s assistants said that the guru did not want to participate. I wonder why.

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Lynch forever

Striking poster for an interesting David Lynch season at the Prince Charles Cinema in London.

Quote of the Day

”The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.”

• Bertrand Russell

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Handel | Lascia ch’io pianga (from Rinaldo) | Voices of Music with Kirsten Blaise, soprano

Link

Long Read of the Day

 Is ethical AI ‘woke’?

Fabulous column by Rory Cellan-Jones on the widening gap between the US and Europe over the regulation of AI, and its implications for the UK.

The EU has passed an AI Act which appears to be quite interventionist, with a framework which assesses AI projects by their level of risk. For instance, using AI for social scoring ,where people are classified according to their behaviour or personal characteristics, would be deemed an unacceptable risk and banned, whereas its use in employment and education would be seen as high-risk with strict rules on transparency enforced. While the UK is no longer in the EU it is widely accepted that our businesses will want to comply with the new law so as to have access to the European market.

By contrast, the US appears determined to have as little regulation as possible, citing the need for American AI companies to keep ahead in the fierce competition with China. Indeed, it would seem that the kind of AI operation that would be deemed an unacceptable risk in the EU might look very attractive to a Trump administration which has not hesitated to declare a national emergency to justify all manner of actions that look legally or ethically dubious.

Another reason then for the UK government to take a long hard look at American tech companies and ask whether we can trust them…

Yep.

My commonplace booklet

The dry and the wet burn together

This LRB essay by Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi is the most insightful thing I’ve read about the assault on Iran.

The war will not restore equilibrium. It will reorder the region both violently and unpredictably. The Islamic Republic is likely to emerge transformed or weakened in ways not yet visible. But the notion that it would simply dissolve under pressure was always fanciful. States formed in revolution and hardened by protracted siege do not yield easily to external diktat.

The dry and the wet burn together. One hundred and sixty-five graves have been dug in Minab, in Hormozgan province, for those killed when US or Israeli missiles struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh school on Saturday morning as classes began. Most of the dead were girls aged between seven and twelve. Washington and Tel Aviv have sought to distance themselves from the carnage; the photographic record of the desolation remains.

Trump has spoken of a campaign lasting weeks; the Islamic Republic’s current leadership has vowed to fight on. Wars of choice rarely confine themselves to their intended targets. They consume not only the combatants but the assumptions that animate them. What began as an attempt to alter the regional balance may instead hasten the erosion of the order that presumed it could interfere with impunity.

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Cause or effect?

Seen outside a shop selling vapes in London. I’ve often wondered if these e-cigarettes act as a gateway drug for tobacco. The answer seems to be ‘yes’. At any rate the largest review of dozens of research studies to date found that young people who vape are about three times more likely to start smoking tobacco later than those who don’t vape.

Quote of the Day

”Some drink deeply from the river of knowledge. Others only gargle.

• Woody Allen

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Grateful Dead | Ripple

Link

One of their loveliest numbers. There’s a nice video of how it was conceived.

Long Read of the Day

Sovereignty for sale

Really interesting blog post by Sam Freedman on the way some tech monopolies (and their owners) now seem to be more powerful than nation states.

Elon Musk’s decision to block Russia from using Starlink satellites has proved a serious setback for Moscow; hampering troops’ use of drones and artillery. Putin’s reliance on tech controlled by a foreign company has left him badly exposed.

The Ukrainians have had their own issues with Starlink. Musk provided thousands of terminals in the first days of the war, after Russia blocked access to the Viasat satellite communications systems. But since then he’s limited Ukraine’s ability to use it to attack Russian territory; starting after he spoke to Putin in autumn 2022.

Musk’s ability to change the course of the conflict raises questions that go far beyond Ukraine. Private businesses have a long history of participating in wars, and providing public services, as contractors and suppliers. But the power that major tech companies have over nation states is something new…

It is.

And it’s not just Starlink. Closer to home there’s Peter Thiel’s brainchild, Palantir, which the UK government has invited into the NHS.

My commonplace booklet

“An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted… A retreat began from the old confidence in reason itself; nothing any longer could be what it seemed… A sort of political surrealism came dancing through the ruins of what had nearly been a beautifully moral and rational world… The whole place was becoming inhuman, not only because an unaccustomed fear was spreading so fast, but more because nobody would admit to being afraid.” (Miller 1974: 30, 32, 36)

Arthur Miller: “The Year it Came Apart”, New York Magazine, 30 December, 1974.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

From Tuesday’s edition of Heather Cox Richardson’s marvellous Substack…

Today the war continued to widen, leaving hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals in the Middle East desperate to leave. France alone has 400,000 people there. The U.S. has between 500,000 and a million people in the Middle East. The U.S. State Department has urged them to leave but said it could not help, and with airports and airspaces closed, just how they are supposed to do that is unclear. After pressure, the government is now saying it will work on chartering aircraft and using military planes to transport people who want to leave.

This Blog is also available as an email three days a week. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays delivered to your inbox at 5am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

No thanks

An eminently resistible invitation seen in Soho the other day.

Quote of the Day

“We love our phones, but we do not trust them. And love without trust is the definition of an abusive relationship.”

• Maria Farrell

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Deiseal | Lord Inchiquin

Link

This is a ravishing tune in 3/4 time composed by Turlough O’Carolan, a legendary blind Irish harper and composer who died in 1738. It was composed for one of his patrons, Lord Inchiquin, a shifty opportunist who was Prince of Thomond and claimed descent from Brian Boru, the famous High King of pre-colonial Ireland. When the English arrived, he accepted English titles which were granted under the policy of ‘surrender and regrant’, and were conditional upon: the abandonment of any Irish titles; the adoption of English customs and laws; pledging allegiance to the Crown; apostasy from the Catholic Church and conversion to the Church of Ireland. In return he was made both Earl of Thomond in the Peerage of Ireland and Baron Inchiquin.

In 1921 his splendid castle in Co Clare was earmarked for destruction by the Dublin leadership of the IRA, but the sabotage orders were reversed at the last minute at the urgent request of local IRA leaders in County Clare, who argued that the Inchiquin family had been fair and benevolent in dealing with their tenant farmers. Sir Lucius O’Brien, the 13th Baron of Inchiquin, it seems, was remembered respectfully by the people of County Clare for his relief work in the famine years of the 1840s. In 1962 Lord Inchiquin sold the castle to a bunch of Irish-American moguls who transformed it into a five-star hotel (room rates from £378.40 to £1319.59 a night). And (needless to say) there’s a golf course attached.

Long Read of the Day

The ideological implications of China’s economic success

Fabulous essay by the economist Branko Milanovic which takes the long view of China’s transformation. He wants to look at what China’s transformation means from a very long-term ideological angle. In other words, what the accomplishment of China’s leadership in our lifetimes might look to people several centuries remote from ours. His point is that when we look at big historical events like Visigothic invasion of Western Europe, Arab conquest of North Africa and the Iberian peninsula, the fall of Constantinople, or European colonization of Africa and Asia, we do not see only the political and economic side of such world-transforming events. We see their ideological importance too.

If we look at China’s success from the same vintage point, what can we see? I think that the most remarkable ideological result of China’s success will be seen to be a movement toward the ideological, or perhaps even cultural, fusion in the large Eurasian space. I base this on the following reasoning. China’s economic and civilizational success was achieved on an undoubted basis of a European ideology, namely Marxism, which itself was the product of European enlightenment, German philosophy and English political economy. (The triad skillfully summarized by Lenin.) But this was not enough to produce China’s success. Anyone who would try to explain it by these “imported” elements alone would be wrong. They created the basis for success. They might have been necessary, but they do not provide a full explanation of success. Indeed without a Communist Party, China would not have become a rich nation. And the Party came to power thanks to a Western ideology which it skillfully adapted to Chinese circumstances. Yet to be successful and to transform China as it did in the past forty years, it had to fuse these essentially foreign elements with domestic ideologies, first, those largely derived from Legalism, and then from Confucianism. It blended eminently European and Chinese ideological traditions into one that produced economic growth and improved lives of millions.

Do read it.

I liked it because it provides an intelligent answer to a question that had puzzled me after the Soviet Union imploded in the early 1990s and I was wondering what would replace the binary split of the Cold War as we entered Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ phase. I thought Russia would never pose the same challenge to Western dominance as the USSR had; it was just degenerating into a kleptocracy with nukes, and lacked an ideology that could be attractive to other societies seeking an alternative to the US-dominated West. The only other entity that seemed (to me) to have that kind of potentially attractive system was China, but I was unable to provide a coherent argument (other than the country’s sheer size) to support that hunch.

This is exactly what Milanovic’s essay tries to provide, which is why I was drawn to it.

My commonplace booklet

The Apple iPad is coming up to its 16th birthday. It was announced on 27 January, 2010 and pre-ordering in the US started on March 12. A Wi-Fi-capable version was released on 3 April 3 and a 3G-capable version came out on 30 April, but it wasn’t available in the UK until 28 May, the day I bought one.

Annoyingly, my good friend (and long-term competitor in what became known as the “gadget wars”), Quentin Stafford-Fraser, beat me to it. He had flown to the US on the day before it came out there and had cunningly pre-ordered one because he had an American credit card at the time. So imagine my humiliation of opening his blog for 4 April, 2010 announcing the arrival of what he — perceptively — called “coffee-table computing.”

I initially underestimated the significance and utility of the iPad because I thought it might just be a reception platform for mobile couch-potatoes. This misapprehension lasted until when I bought one of the (relatively) few apps that were available for the device from the outset — The Elements app created by Theodore Gray, John Cromie and Max Whitby — which was an eye-opener because it dramatically demonstrated what this new device could do.

Screenshot

Since then I’ve used an iPad almost every single day for one purpose or another. It couldn’t be my sole computing device — there are lots of things that only a proper laptop or desktop machine can do — and iPadOS means that it’s significantly less generative than a traditional computer. But it’s still indispensable, at least to this blogger

En passant: I’ve noticed that people I know who regard a laptop as too too alien or intimidating find the iPad really approachable and useful for the things they want to do, even if that only means email, photograph albums and the BBC iPlayer. And in that sense — especially for elderly people — it’s a life-enhancing device.

Linkblog

The New New Tech Industry specialist role: Enshittificator

Lovely satirical video by the Norwegian Consumer Council. It’s laugh-a-minute clever, and has a delicious punch-line. Only takes four minutes and provides a sarcastic insight into the mindset of the creeps who are ensuring that many digital services — and all platforms — are relentlessly degrading.

Thanks to Sheila Hayman (Whom God Preserve) for alerting me to it.

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On the road

Walking along this road in the Peak District on Saturday I was stopped in my tracks by a Skylark’s song. Which explains today’s Musical alternative

Quote of the Day

”I am lucky to have participated in conversations about the future of AI with executives and builders at frontier labs, economists at AI conferences, AI investors, and other bigwigs at off-the-record dinners where important truths can theoretically be bandied about without risk. And if I had to pick three words to summarize this collective expert view of the future, I could not in a million years, or with a trillion tokens, find three words more suitable than these: Nobody knows anything.”

• Derek Thompson

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ralph Vaughan Williams | The Lark Ascending | Iona Brown & Neville Marriner | Academy of St Martin in the Fields.

Link

It was inspired by an 1881 poem of the same title by George Meredith. Having read it a couple of times, I think the music wins by a mile.

Long Read of the Day

AI vs. the Pentagon

I guess that most people will regard what’s going on between the American Secretary for War (née Defense) and the AI firm Anthropic is petty arcane. But it’s actually really important and worrying, and I was looking for someone who could put it in a context that would make it understandable, and I found this long blog post by Jasmine Sun which admirably fits the bill.

Who would win in a fight: an alcoholic Fox host with a fetish for extrajudicial airstrikes, or a neurotic Italian-American physicist running an AI company worth $380 billion dollars?

I’ll start with a TL;DR of everything that’s happened. The whole thing plays out like a TV thriller, and I don’t blame anyone not keeping up. (Fellow situation monitorers, feel free to skip ahead to the analysis if you like.)

In July last year, Anthropic signed a $200 million contract with the Pentagon to provide access to Claude. Until recently, Anthropic was the only leading AI lab whose services could be used on classified networks. The company was eager to cooperate with the US military, even partnering with Palantir. But when Claude was used for the January capture of Nicolas Maduro, that allegedly miffed an employee inside Anthropic, which got leaked back to the Pentagon. A pissed-off Pete Hegseth wanted to make super sure that Anthropic was down for anything he wanted, citing “all lawful uses”—which under US military law, means basically whatever. And that was where things got messy.

The thing is, Anthropic’s original DoW contract included two exceptions for military use: their AI could not be used for domestic mass surveillance or fully autonomous weapons. But Hegseth ignored this, demanding that the Pentagon retain full discretion over how they use Claude. When Anthropic said no, he threatened to designate Anthropic a “supply chain risk”: a highest-tier national security designation usually reserved for companies like Huawei run by foreign adversaries. (Even Tencent and DeepSeek are not tarred with this label.) Anthropic was given a strict Friday 5pm deadline to comply with the DoW’s request.

Days passed while Hegseth’s ultimatum hung in the air. Then, on Thursday, Dario Amodei published a statement: “These threats do not change our position: we cannot in good conscience accede to their request.” The AI community praised his courage. For a moment, there was celebration.

Well, Secretary Hegseth was not bluffing. He moved ahead with designating Anthropic a supply chain risk. In a long and dumb tweet, he calls the company’s behavior a “master class in arrogance and betrayal” and “a cowardly act of corporate virtue-signaling that places Silicon Valley ideology above American lives.” (He also uses the phrase “defective altruism,” which I must admit is pretty good.)

But the implications are severe…

They sure are — for democracy, human safety and security. Do read on.

Footnote For other worthwhile takes on the crisis, see Henry Farrell on why the tech industry should fear this precedent and Jack Shanahan on what makes this different.

The Intention economy

My Observer column of 20 February.

Did the advent of chatbots and LLMs (large language models) herald the demise of the attention economy? And, if so, what might replace it?

The most interesting answer to that question I’ve seen comes in a paper by two Cambridge researchers, Yaqub Chaudhary and Jonnie Penn, in the Harvard Data Science Review. Their thesis is that we are at the dawn of a “lucrative yet troubling new marketplace for digital signals of intent”, from buying cinema tickets to voting for political candidates.

They call this the “intention economy”: a marketplace for behavioural and psychological data that signals human intent. It goes beyond capturing attention, to capturing what users want and “what they want to want” and operates through natural language interfaces powered by LLMs…

Do read the whole piece.

pdf version here

My commonplace booklet

From Azeem Azahr:

Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth designated Anthropic a national security supply chain risk, effectively barring federal contractors from using its technology in government work. Hours later, Trump directed every federal agency to follow suit. No Chinese AI company has received the same designation. It’s quite an astonishing sucker-punch.

The proximate cause was Anthropic’s refusal to lift all safety constraints on military use of Claude, around autonomous targeting and AI-assisted mass surveillance. These aren’t unreasonable positions; they reflect genuine technical concerns about where AI capability ends and unacceptable risk begins. But the punishment for holding them was disproportionate, a tool designed for compromised semiconductor supply chains and foreign hardware manufacturers, repurposed to punish an American AI lab.

This seems to me a very good reason for supporting Anthropic — and for using (and paying for) Claude.ai — which I’ve done almost from the outset.

  This Blog is also available as an email three days a week. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays delivered to your inbox at 5am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

Spring ahoy!

I’m so fed up with the Cambridge weather at the moment that I’m constantly on the lookout for signs of spring. Which is why these crocuses stopped me in my tracks yesterday.

Quote of the Day

”Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.”

• Erich Fromm

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Gerry O’Beirne | When You’re Gone I Say Your Name

Link

Long Read of the Day

Inventing Tradition

Arthur Goldhammer’s delicious demolition of Marco Rubio’s meretricious speech to the recent Munich Security Conference.

JD Vance went to Munich in 2025 to offend; Marco Rubio went in 2026 to make amends—up to a point. He tried to reassure Europeans stung by Vance’s insults that the United States criticized Europe “because we care deeply.” He invoked his European ancestors from Seville and Sardinia so as to claim consanguinity with his audience and thus solicit its trust. And he insisted the the U.S. and the countries of Europe were bound by “the deepest bonds that nations can share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage.”

It was an artful portrait, slyly conceived to obscure crucial features of that “shared history,” which consisted of “centuries” indeed of bloody internecine warfare; of a “Christian faith” marked by schism, sectarian bloodletting, and intolerance…

I’m always baffled by references to “European civilisation”. This is the continent, after all, that was responsible for the two bloodiest wars in history, not to mention the Holocaust. Those who forget history may indeed be condemned to repeat it.

Books, etc.

This is one of the most important books I’ve read in years. I read it fitst in Kindle format when it came out, but I’ve just bought the paperback because it’s relevant for something I’m writing and I need to be able to scribble on, and annotate, it. It’s “the kind of book,” one reviewer wrote, “from which you look up to find the world suddenly more comprehensible.” It also provides the most readable account yet published of the work of the cybernetician, Stafford Beer, and explains why cybernetics provides an insightful lens for examining our current predicament(s).

My commonplace booklet

The Epstein files

The huge trove released by the US Congress contains millions of documents. But it also includes lots of videos and audio recordings made by Epstein or his associates. Some enterprising researcher has collected them in on JeffTube. I scrolled briefly though the gallery and came on one showing the Harvard whizkid Steven Pinker sitting across Epstein in his private jet while a girl in the background is heard asking “where are you taking us?” My question: what the hell was Pinker doing there?

  This Blog is also available as an email three days a week. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays delivered to your inbox at 5am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

One way of growing an Iris

In the college garden.

Quote of the Day

”What is the difference between a Nazi and a dog? The Nazi lifts his arm.”

• Viktor Borge

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart | Don Giovanni | K. 527 | Act 1 | “Là ci darem la mano”| (Live)

Link

How is it that the devil generally has the best tunes?

Long Read of the Day

Populism is an information problem, but not in the way that you think

One of the frustrating things about living in the UK at the moment is the way the country seems to be terminally stuck. It has a Labour government with a huge parliamentary majority — big enough to qualify as the ”elective dictatorship” that the Attlee government used to start the reconstruction of a war-exhausted country — and yet it’s blundering around devoid of a vision or even a good story. Part of that is a legacy of Brexit, but the bigger reason is that the UK is a case study in a much wider problem — how post-war liberal democracy has failed its citizens.

Democratic revival has to start with a frank acknowledgement of this failure. And for that we need an analytical lens through which to view it, which is why this essay by Andrew Curry in yesterday’s edition of his Just Two Things Substack was such a delight. He draws on Dan Davies’s magnificent book, The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions to make his point.

All of this reminded me of Dan Davies’ book The Unaccountability Machine, about the principles of management cybernetics developed by Stafford Beer (more about the book on Just Two Things here), In it, he applies some of the learning to the rise of populism:

“People are overloaded with information that they can’t process; the world requires more decisions from them than they’re capable of making, and the systems that are meant to shield them from that volatility have stopped doing the job. (p.253)

Although it is hard to define ‘overload’ in this context, you can see the signs:

“you can easily observe the difference between a human being that is coping and one that is overloaded”. (p.251)

Often these signs are qualitative: Lexi, for, example, a mother of two, who told John Harris that she

“holds down three different jobs – as a care support worker, a dinner lady and a cleaner – and says she is just about holding everything together”.

But there are not only qualitative signals. The work of Anna Case and Angus Deaton showed a sharp quantitative increase in what they called “deaths of despair” in the United States, from alcoholism, opiate addiction and suicide. The qualitative insight here was in connecting these different data categories in a single frame.

But one of the bigger problems here is that in modern states, even in democracies, the information channels between governments, political parties, and citizens don’t carry very much information:

”The only kind of communication that such a constrained channel can carry is a scream: the signal that passes through the levels of control and announces that something has gone wrong which threatens the integrity of the system itself. This is why there was a family resemblance between the ‘populist’ movements that sprang up in the 2010s… The medium itself is the message: what liberal society ought to be responding to is the fact of mass distress, not its content.” (pp250-51, emphasis in original)

I’ve always thought that the Brexit vote was a scream in that sense. In the 2015 general election in Britain, for example, nearly 4m people voted for UKIP — the “Leave’ party. And got precisely one MP (out of 650) because of the country’s First-Past-The-Post system. The Brexit referendum, however, gave them a vote that would matter — a binary choice — and they took it.

Do read on. Dan Davies’s brilliant insight was that cybernetics offered a novel way of thinking about our present difficulties. This is music to the ears of an engineer like me. And not just me: it has also struck Henry Farrell, who is a great political scientist and one of the smartest people around.

My commonplace booklet

From Brad Delong…

FEB 23, 2026

I do not know how to handle the intellectual crisis tsunami now coming down on me from the creation, development, and societal consequences of MAMLMs—Modern Advanced Machine-Learning Models—other than to find a floatation device, hang on for dear life, and start kicking as fast as I can. But I do know some things: As MAMLMs make text-extrusion five times faster, the real crisis moves to reading, filtering, and not going insane. “Prompt whispering” is theater; “context engineering is the work”. Stop treating language models like minds and start treating them like very fancy calculators wired to very large libraries. Your AI is not your friend, therapist, co‑author, or co-pilot; it is a token‑production machine. If you feed it a wise string of tokens, wise tokens will come out. If you feed it tokens from a stupid conversation, stupid tokens will come out…

He also quotes this from Mike Taylor:

Memory is frequently described as ChatGPT’s “killer feature.” Many people tell me they can’t switch to Gemini or Claude because the OpenAI tool “knows them so well.”

I have memory turned off.

The memory feature allows ChatGPT to save and recall information it thinks is important about you, as well as reference past chats to shape its responses. While I can see how this could make a “helpful assistant” more helpful, I don’t use it.

I want unbiased results from ChatGPT, based on context that I carefully curated and put in the prompt, so I know how it made its decision. With memory, anything from your past chats could affect the results in ways that are hard to predict.

This squares with my experience.

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Something I found while drinking from the Internet firehose

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The day Bob Dylan came on a street kid playing a broken guitar in New York. And stopped to talk to him

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The House

From Will Blackburn in Sydney. One of the rewards of an early morning run!

Quote of the Day

”Narrative is strategy in story form.”

• Mark Laity, former head of strategic communications at NATO.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Randy Newman, Linda Ronstadt & Ry Cooder | Rider In The Rain

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Long Read of the Day

How Jeffrey Epstein Became a Public Intellectual

Interesting insights from Ted Gioia

Elon Musk is now the wealthiest person in the world—and he’s making proclamations every day. He even bought his own social media platform, and posts his opinions constantly. He’s the reverse of Howard Hughes. You can’t escape him. And unless he flies off to Mars, you never will.

It’s not just Musk. There are dozens of billionaires who aspire to public intellectual status. Bill Gates serves up book reviews. Peter Thiel gives a lecture series. Tom Steyer makes speeches and offers himself as a candidate for President.

We have come a long, long way from the working class intellectuals and soapbox pundits of yore. Everything now is pay-to-play.

How did this happen? When did the status of public intellectual become something you can buy, like merchandise on the shelf at a Rodeo Drive boutique?

The recent release of the Jeffrey Epstein files gives a clue.

Epstein left NYU without earning a degree, and got dismissed from his teaching gig at Dalton for poor performance. But this didn’t prevent him from getting his own office at Harvard…

Read on…. It’s amazing what money can buy nowadays.

Books, etc.

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Zachary Leader has written what looks like an interesting book on the making of Richard Ellmann’s canonical biography of James Joyce.

James Woodall, who’s always a welcome guest at the Bloomsday lunch I host every year, has written an interesting review of it in The European Journal of Life Writing.

Over 800 pages, the Oxford University Press James Joyce was the first biography that mattered after a couple in Joyce’s lifetime that hadn’t. When I bought my copy in 1977, it read so smoothly and stylishly that it seemed sculpted by the steadiest of hands under the most unblinking of gazes. It had arrived – in print (in October 1959, one year before I was born) – in the compelling shape of a novel, a saga that might have taken a master, a Henry James for example, perhaps two years of undimmed concentration.

Ellmann’s book was not a shoe-in. Long thought about by its writer in his early thirties, James Joyce took five years: from his first research trip to Dublin in the spring of 1953, to his completion of the typescript in the summer of 1958. That in itself was a remarkable achievement, given the variables in play: the astounding number of people Joyce knew across Europe whom Ellmann had to track down; the volume of letters he found and used (and finally edited); his masterful wooing of the surviving family; and the sometimes tortured secrecy he had to spin to keep rivals at bay. A Joyce cult was brewing, and Ellmann needed to contain it to make the writer his. He did.

Hmmm… Given that I love Ellmann’s biography I might just have to buy Leader’s book.

My commonplace booklet

From Andy Borowitz…

Imagine a hypothetical job applicant. He can’t spell the simplest words, such as “heal” and “tap.” Confused by geography, he thinks there’s an African country called “Nambia.” As for American history, he’s under the impression that Andrew Jackson, who died in 1845, was angry about the Civil War, and that Frederick Douglass, who died in 1895, is still alive.

Given the alarming state of his knowledge, you might wonder what job he could get. Unfortunately, he’s not hypothetical, and the job he got, in 2016, was president of the United States.

I had similar thoughts when watching his Press Conference on the SCOTUS decision.

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Potter mania

Every time I come through King’s Cross, it’s like this. Has there ever been anything as enduring as Harry Potter’s fandom?

Quote of the Day

”When somebody says it’s not about the money, it’s about the money.”

• H.L. Mencken

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

A. Vivaldi / N. Chédeville | Op. 13 n. 4 – Sonata for oboe & b.c. in A major (RV 59) | P. Goodwin

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New to me, but gorgeous.

Long Read of the Day

The left is missing out on AI

Really perceptive essay by Dan Kagan-Kans on how the Left — and academia — are making big mistakes in underestimating AI technology. I was particularly struck by this passage:

Publishing in journals requires peer review, and peer review is slow. As Zvi Mowshowitz, who writes perhaps the world’s most exhaustive newsletter on AI, said, “Nobody in real academia can adhere to their norms and actually be in the conversation, because by the time you’re publishing, everything you were trying to say is irrelevant,” a generation or two behind the cutting edge. Another incentive for researchers to leave for industry, then.

This splitting of a field that once would have been forced to coexist has probably made industry too optimistic about the pace of progress and made academia too skeptical. That then skews what’s heard by people who listen to academia but not industry — and nearly everyone with that tendency, today, is on the left. They hear only the skeptics, unaware that real science is taking place in the AI labs too (or especially), done by PhD’d researchers they might trust if only they sat in a faculty office.

Books, etc.

Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1879 book, Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes, is an utter delight. I was first alerted to it by his biographer, Richard Holmes in his book, Footsteps: Adventures of a romantic biographer, the first chapter of which recounts how he set out in 1964 to walk 220km through the Cévennes in Stevenson’s footsteps.

It’s an irresistible read, so I started on it again, and laughed out loud when reading his account of his first day on the journey. So here it is:

In an odd way, the star of Stevenson’s account of his journey is not him but the little donkey he purchased to accompany him and carry his baggage. She was, he wrote, the size of “a large Newfoundland dog” and the colour of “an ideal mouse”. He christened her Modestine and then discovered that she was an awkward character who “refused to climb hills,… shed her saddle-bag at the least provocation,… and in villages swerved into the cool of the beaded shop-doors”. He wrote that he often had to beat her with a stick (about which he felt increasingly guilty) and wept when he sold her at the end of his journey.

So when I think of RLS it’s Modestine who always comes to my mind. Accordingly, when we bought a Tesla in 2020 and discovered that we could give it a name, I of course chose Modestine, because the vehicle can, at times, appear to have a mind of its own.

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This puzzled our friends, but I felt it was vindicated when one day I saw my wife — normally the politest person in any room — impatiently thumping the steering wheel and shouting “Come on, you stupid donkey”.

You may wonder what propelled me down this particular rabbit hole. It was just a travel piece in the weekend edition of the Financial Times about a couple who had just walked the trail courtesy of a company called Macs Adventure (two-week trip on the full trail from £1,795).

As Miss Jean Brodie famously observed about chemistry, “For those that like that kind of thing, that is the thing they like.”

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Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

•  Mark Zuckerberg overruled 18 wellbeing experts to keep beauty filters on Instagram

Hannah Murphy, writing in yesterday’s Financial Times:

Mark Zuckerberg told a jury on Wednesday that he overruled concerns about teen wellbeing from staff and 18 experts to lift a ban on Instagram beauty filters because he was concerned about “free expression”.

The billionaire social media boss faced a grilling in a Los Angeles court on Wednesday as he battles a landmark legal claim that social media is addictive to children.

Instagram temporarily suspended beauty filters — which digitally alter people’s appearance — to conduct a review of the features in 2019. All of the 18 experts Meta hired concluded they presented a wellbeing issue.

Zuckerberg told the court there was a “high bar” for demonstrating harm, calling the restrictions “paternalistic” and “overbearing”, adding he “wanted to err on the side of people being able to express themselves” in making the decision.

As usual, he ‘erred’ on the side of profitability and growth.

Feedback

David Ballard was struck by Monday’s Quote of the Day in which OpenAI’s Sam Altman said:

”I think that AI will probably, most likely, sort of lead to the end of the world. But in the meantime, there will be great companies created with serious machine learning.”

It reminded him of a lovely New Yorker cartoon which (I think) came out sometime during the pandemic lockdown.

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