I Protest

A lone demonstrator outside the old Chinese Embassy in London in the winter of 2014.

Quote of the Day

The first step in AI enterprise deployment was giving everyone Copilot, which mostly failed and is continuing to fail. The next step was pilots and trials to find and build point solutions and individual use cases. Almost all big companies are doing this, and it can work up to a point, but outside of some very specific industries (say, law), buying or building pieces of software one at a time is unlikely to move the needle for the entire company. To do that, you would need to rethink and reengineer whole workflows, processes, and, indeed, entire functions. You have to move beyond using the new thing as just doing more of the old thing.

That isn’t something that any big company does quickly – it takes time even to work out what you might want to do, and it involves a lot of work in working out what the process should be, and then going out and plugging it all together. That creates a paradox, if you like, that automation requires a lot of manual labour.

• Benedict Evans

He’s one of the best tech analysts around, with a knack for going right to the nub of the matter.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Abdullah Ibrahim & Ekaya | Water from an Ancient World

Link

Long Read of the Day

Context-collapse and its implications

This transcript of a conversation between Derek Thompson and University of Chicago philosopher Agnes Callard made me sit up because it was about a question which has bothered me for a long time: why is there so much negativity around? There are lots of simplistic explanations for this — for example the journalistic mindset that bad news is the only kind of news that the public likes to read, see or hear. (It’s often expressed in the mantra “If it Bleeds, it Leads.”). Mostly these explanations boil down to the view that our world-views are largely shaped by the media ecosystem in which we live and breathe.

What’s interesting about this long conversation is that Callard has an overarching theory about how negativity invariably triumphs. Midway in the conversation Thompson has a go at summing up the story so far:

For most of human history, people judged norms based on local context. A home had its own rules, a cathedral its own rules, and a classroom or bar or funeral parlor had its own rules. But now it is almost like we are constantly living in universal rooms, and the universal room we occupy is assumed to have universal values and universal norms. That has specific implications. First, rather than talk about what is good, which is context-dependent, we tend to focus about universal truths, and it’s easier to talk about universal bads than goods, so people focus on negativity. Two, character is context-dependent, so we talk less about character and more about its universalist equivalent, which is identity.

There’s a third implication that we should discuss. If everyone is on the same comparable plane, the same evaluative field, then comparison itself becomes a more inextricable part of life.

It worth reading the whole piece, though. It’s also a reason why we need theories in our attempts to understand complex issues, even if — as in this case — her theory is unfalsifiable, which means Karl Popper would have given it a thumbs-down!

Books, etc.

Oddly, this might turn out to be the book of the year because of Christopher Nolan’s forthcoming movie adaptation. It’s an immensely readable translation. My copy came with nicely rough-edged pages — which gave it an antique feel.

My commonplace booklet

For me, one of the best things about the World Cup has been my Observer colleague Rory Smith’s daily dispatches on it. Here he is on Monday, thinking ahead to the semi-finals:

And then there is England against Argentina, two teams that encapsulate exactly what football is: entirely irrational, a beautiful and inexplicable chaos, defined not by strategy or tactics or even necessarily talent but driven by a self-belief so deep-seated it borders on delusion, an iron refusal even to countenance defeat, and a sense of destiny so potent that it could be used to start whole religions.

It is no good trying to work out which of these teams is favourite: an Argentina side that seems to need to stand on the edge of the abyss simply to feel alive or an England team that has played what you would call ‘well’ for precisely 75 minutes in this whole tournament and that is now held together by sticky-tape, fumes and Jude Bellingham’s bottomless Madridismo.

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Norman Conquest 2.0

The British Museum in Bloomsbury, seen on a rainy afternoon a while back (when Britain still could make the rains run on time). From today it’s the temporary home of the Bayeux Tapestry which depicts events leading up to the Norman Conquest of England, which I’ve always thought must be the most thorough colonisation in European history. The tapestry will be exhibited from 10 September 2026 to 11 July 2027.

Quote of the Day

”Sex is like money; only too much is enough.”

• John Updike

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Alison Krauss | When You Say Nothing At All

Link

Wonderful!

Long Read of the Day

Chip Off The Old Block

There are two kinds of people in the world — those who have children and those who don’t. The latter group, especially when they congregate online, tend to have very definite ideas about how children should be brought up which, when you think about it, is a bit like Trappist monks having strong opinions on alternatives to the missionary position in intercourse.

The former group know that bringing up children is like perpetually sitting an exam and failing, or at least not getting full marks. I speak with some authority on this question, for I have four kids and although they’re all grown up and fledged I still worry about them. And as I get older is suppose they will worry about me. That’s life.

One public intellectual I had always assumed would not become a parent is Scott Alexander, who is (and has been for years) one of the most interesting bloggers around. I discovered the other day that he has become a parent and looked forward to his reflections on the experience. And lo! — he has begun to write about it here.

It’s lovely. Here’s a sample:

When I was young, my OCD was much more disabling. The worst was my closet door. I had to close it seven times every night before I was satisfied. It’s been decades since I was that bad; my children can’t know anything about it. But lately, my son has taken to obsessively closing the door to the cabinet in his room at night. One evening, after he must have shut it ten or twenty times, I almost yelled at him: “COME ON! YOU KNOW YOU ONLY HAVE TO DO IT SEVEN TIMES!” But maybe he doesn’t know; maybe the genetic transmission isn’t that high-fidelity.

The good news is that all of this gives me a new ally in all my little quarrels with my wife. I’m hypersensitive to being startled when I’m drifting off to sleep; I used to grumble whenever my wife made a tiny amount of noise, and she would grumble about my grumbling, and finally we learned to compromise at some level that worked for both of us. But now it’s great! Whenever my wife makes a tiny amount of noise around bedtime, my son will wake up and scream, and he literally doesn’t know the meaning of the word “compromise”. As a result, everything is much quieter. Except for the screaming.

Or: I get irrationally annoyed if someone leaves a room without closing the door, but it’s fine, it would be weird to bother people about it, it would seem too confrontational to conspicuously get up and close the door, so I just take a deep breath and forget about it. Except that now I don’t have to, because my son immediately gets up from whatever he’s playing with and closes the door for me.

The bad news is that my daughter has inherited all of my wife’s traits, so now it’s 2-2. My room and my son’s room are spotless – my son refuses to sleep if there’s even one toy on the floor. My wife’s and daughter’s room look like a trailer park after a tornado. To my son and my dismay, they both hum wherever they go…

He’s already sitting the exam.

Books, etc.

As someone who’s written 50 newspaper columns a year since the mid 1980s, I have a keen interest into other labourers in the same vineyard, partly because a newspaper column is a particular kind of literary artefact — something you sculpt to fit into whatever space your Editors have allocated rather than construct to a blueprint — and it’s interesting to see how others do it.

Umberto Eco, who in addition to being a best-selling novelist and a serious literary scholar also had a charming column in a major Italian newspaper, L’Espresso. I was first alerted it to it by a wonderful column in which he compared the Apple Macintosh with the IBM PC, a metallic box with a text-based screen which ran under the MS-DOS operating system.

“I am firmly of the opinion”, he wrote, in La bustina di Minerva” (“Minerva’s Matchbook”), published on September 30, 1994.

that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant … It is cheerful, friendly, conciliatory, it tells the faithful how they must proceed step by step to reach – if not the Kingdom of Heaven – the moment in which their document is printed. It is catechistic: the essence of revelation is dealt with via simple formulae and sumptuous icons. Everyone has a right to salvation.

DOS is Protestant, or even Calvinistic. It allows free interpretation of scripture, demands difficult personal decisions, imposes a subtle hermeneutics upon the user, and takes for granted the idea that not all can reach salvation. To make the system work you need to interpret the program yourself: a long way from the baroque community of revelers, the user is closed within the loneliness of his own inner torment.”

Carlo Rovelli is also Italian and cut from the same cloth. In his case he’s a distinguished physicist, but also a someone who writes for newspapers. This little book collects 50 of his essays in a volume that’s a delicious travelling companion.

“An article in a newspaper”, he writes in the preface,

has something in common with a Japanese koan or a European sonnet: limited in size and form, it can transmit little more than one piece of information, a single argument, one reflection, a single emotion. And yet it can speak about everything and anything.

The pieces collected here, which were published in various newspapers over the last decade, speak of poets, scientists and philosophers who have influenced me in some way, of travels, of my generation, of atheism, of black holes, telescopes, psychedelic experience, intellectual surprises … and much else. They are like brief diary entries recording the intellectual adventures of a physicist who is interested in many things and who is searching for new ideas – for a wide but coherent perspective.

It’s a delight.

My commonplace booklet

Worship me at the office altar: Why narcissistic leaders resist remote work

This is a long  academic article  that caught my eye. It’s on Open Access, which means that anyone can read or download it. It caught my eye because I’ve been puzzled about why some organisations are still so hostile to allowing employees to work from home.

The title gives the game away. The basic findings of the research are that (i) narcissistic leaders (executives, middle managers, supervisors) tend to resist remote work; and (ii) that their resistance stems from the fact that remote working interferes with their need for power and status.

As far as I know, there is no cure for narcissism, even when the sufferer is President of a powerful country.

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PHEW! WHAT A SCORCHER!

Screenshot

As the front page of British tabloids used to put it.

Quote of the Day

”When people are least sure, they are often most dogmatic.”

• John Kenneth Galbraith

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Cavatina (from The Deer Hunter)

Link

Long Read of the Day

We’re using the wrong pronouns for AI

Interesting essay by Matt Ridley

Most people who talk about artificial intelligence reach, sooner or later, for the singular. There is the AI, the machine, the mind we are about to build, and the only argument left is whether it saves us or finishes us off. Matt Ridley thinks that whole habit of speech is a category error, and at ARC in London this week, the annual gathering of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, the science writer offered something cheerier and more curious instead: stop saying it, and start saying them.

His line was almost a grammar lesson. “We’re using the wrong pronoun,” he told the room, before landing it plainly: “It’s not it. It’s them.” From most speakers that might pass as a debating trick, but Ridley has spent forty years studying how living systems arrange themselves, and he means it as biology rather than wordplay. What is arriving, on his account, is not a single intelligence on a single timeline but a teeming population of them, and once you see the technology that way, almost every fear attached to it changes shape.

That instinct is what makes Ridley such a refreshing voice in a conversation otherwise run by computer scientists and philosophers. Where most of the AI debate borrows its metaphors from software and science fiction, the runaway program, the bottled genie, the god in the machine, he reaches instead for the living world. He looks at the field the way a zoologist looks at a coral reef, and what he sees is not one emerging titan but a habitat beginning to fill up with competitors.

The difference is anything but cosmetic.

It is.

The six principles of AI – a king’s speech for Andy Burnham

My recent Observer column

ow that we’re into regime change in the UK, I began to wonder whether Andy Burnham had done much thinking about AI. If he has, he’s been keeping it to himself. But then he has a lot on his plate just now. So I thought it might be helpful if I came up with a king’s speech for him on the matter. After all, he’s already “king of the north”. So this can be used to inspire his new southern subjects after his impending “coronation”. Here’s how it goes.

“My government will be committed to building a vibrant AI-using democracy based on six principles:

1 Reclaiming democratic sovereignty

We must ensure that the democratic process remains more powerful than the corporations now owning and controlling the technology.

Unlike other jurisdictions where technology leaders have used their unconscionable wealth to crush state regulation, the UK will establish binding national guardrails that require companies to disclose alarming incidents and prohibit the release of models that pose an “unreasonable risk of critical harm”. We will vigorously reject any new “aristocracy” of techno oligarchs who seek to determine how we live and work. Instead of direct action and violence becoming the only way for the public to find leverage, we will create institutional channels for meaningful community input on – and response to – the technology’s trajectory.

2 Rebuilding state capacity

My government will use AI primarily to augment state capacity and improve the provision of public services. We will do this by prioritising the use of the technology to assist human decision-making by providing officials with better and more timely information.

Read on

pdf download here

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

•  UK could run out of air-con units

BBC story

I’m surprised it hasn’t already!

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A rose by any name…

… is still ravishing.

Just noticed these as I was sitting at the table, with my favourite picture (HCB’s Rue Mouffetard) in the background.

Quote of the Day

” We don’t love qualities, we love persons; sometimes by reason of their defects as well as of their qualities.

• Thomas Mann

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Keith Jarrett | Over the Rainbow (Tokyo 1984)

Link

Long Read of the Day

America’s AI Policy Is Truly Chaotic

A nice commentary by Francis Fukuyama on what the chaos monkeys in the White House are up to with AI.

This year has been a crazy time with regard to Washington’s treatment of artificial intelligence, and the pace has picked up in the last couple of weeks. This train of events began in February when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared the leading AI firm Anthropic, a “supply chain risk,” meaning that neither the Pentagon nor its contractors could use Anthropic models without risking legal liability.

Then, in April, Anthropic announced that its latest Mythos model was so powerful that it would be released to only a handful of organizations. Mythos, it was claimed, had extraordinary abilities to break into computer systems, and these early organizations were asked to use it to test and secure their systems. In June, Senator Mark Warner told the Senate Banking Committee, “thank God it was Anthropic. When the head of the NSA and Cyber Command came and said, ‘This tool broke into almost all of our classified systems, not in weeks, but in hours,’ … we are not going to solve this problem if we rely on a less ethical CEO operating on the basis of plain voluntary testing alone.”

Experts later added caveats to this description of Mythos 5’s capabilities, but it is clear that the politics of AI regulation has shifted dramatically in the past month. The Trump administration came into office last year being advised by tech bros like David Sacks and Marc Andreessen, who opposed any form of AI regulation. The latter in fact created an organization called Leading the Future that put significant money behind lobbying against AI regulation. The Trump White House nonetheless intervened against Anthropic, but only for what looked like typically bad political reasons. The company, according to Hegseth, was too “woke”; otherwise, the administration’s default position was to oppose all regulation.

Read on. Even the monkeys understand a national security problem. Or do they?

Books, etc.

I read this biography when it first came out in 1995, but was reminded it at our annual Bloomsday lunch on June 16, when we were talking about Ulysses. It came up because in 1922 the literary critic F.R Leavis (who was then a junior lecturer in Cambridge) had referred to Joyce’s masterpiece in his lecture course on “Modern Problems in Criticism”). Ulysses had been banned in Britain since December 1922, when a copy was seized at Croydon Aerodome. Later on, Leavis astutely stirred the pot by asking his bookseller, Galloway & Porter (of blessed memory), to write to the Chief Constable of Cambridge asking if a copy of Ulysses could be supplied. In the book, Leavis’s biographer provides an hilarious narrative of the ensuing farce, which is straight out of Gilbert & Sullivan, but without the music.

The Home Office was disgusted at the prospect of “boy and girl undergraduates” reading Ulysses, the work of “a dangerous crank”. Active steps would be taken to prevent the lectures taking place. Another comedy character, the Director of Public Prosecution, was then brought in. At his behest the Chief Constable discovered that Leavis did not hold the post of University lecturer, though he did give lectures for the English Faculty, and that “he also takes pupils privately”. Worse still, he was also planning a course on criticism to be attended by both men and women!

Behind these scenes was the new Home Secretary, William Johnson-Hicks (nicknamed ‘Jix’ by some wags), who among other things was an evangelical president of the National Church League and, accordingly, someone whose sense of humour had presumably been surgically removed at birth.

The Director of Public Prosecutions wrote to the university’s Vice-Chancellor saying that “the contemplated inclusion of this book in the Leavis lectures must be avoided”. He confessed himself unable to “make head or tail” of Joyce’s novel but was nevertheless able to discern that its closing pages (Molly Bloom’s famous soliloquy) were obviously gross and indecent since they constituted the “reminiscences of an Irish chamber-maid”.

Which perhaps explains why I have embarked on a second reading of this fine biography.

My commonplace booklet

There’s the Constitution, and then there’s the actual constitution

From McSweeney’s Internet Tendency

For example, the ordinary Constitution may seem to say that birthright citizenship exists because it uses words arranged in that order. But the higher Constitution—the enlightened one visible only to people who have freed themselves from the tyranny of thought-out and legally pressure-tested sentences—reveals a more nuanced principle: Citizenship shall apply automatically at birth unless someone loud and male on any number of primetime cable news shows feels skin color makes them uncomfortable.

This is not hypocrisy. Hypocrisy requires a fixed standard. Please keep up. We have moved beyond that. This, too, is the genius of conservative legal reasoning: It can stand athwart history yelling breathlessly about original meaning, then sprint blindly toward the nearest convenient exception.

Naturally, the left keeps making the same tedious mistake. They point to text. They grunt their little grunts about precedent. Then they act wounded when five or six conservative justices consult the super-secret invisible Constitution and discover that the real meaning was hidden inside a special project that culminated only recently, in 2025. Please do not confuse this reading as lawlessness. It is advanced reading. So advanced, in fact, that it no longer requires reading.

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Street scene, London

Snatched in true Cartier-Bresson style. And in B&W too.

Quotes of the Day

The American republic celebrated its so-called 250th birthday on Saturday.

Here are two excerpts from speeches marking the occasion.

First, Trump, speaking in Dakota near Mount Rushmore.

Our American ancestors did not shed their blood at Concord and Trenton, Gettysburg and Shiloh, Midway and Normandy, just so that a band of thieves, radicals, and lunatics could come in and loot and pillage our nation. Our heroes died to win, build, and to save, and to build truly a great country, the greatest country ever in the world.

So, on the eve of this 250th anniversary of American heritage, we resolve and swear for all to hear that the citizens of the United States of America will vanquish communism quickly. Don’t let them take too much of your time. You know they’re wasting your time, don’t you?

But we’re not going to let them take too long or too much of our time as they play their games and send them into exile. We will send them quickly away and we will continue to build our country bigger and better and stronger than ever before. America will never be a communist country.

We can only lose the midterms if we allow ourselves to lose the midterms if we are foolish, stupid, and unwise. But if we terminate the filibuster as we should do and immediately vote for the Save America Act, then we will not lose an election for 100 years.

We do that. We’re not going to lose an election for 100 years. The Communist Party is made up of illegal immigrants, criminals, and everybody that doesn’t want to work. Communism is a loser. It always was, and it is right now.

Then Zohran Mamdani, Mayor of New York.

”We see a city of contradictions within a nation of contradictions. We see the wealthiest country in the history of the world — one where children go to sleep hungry while the world’s first trillionaire hungers for more. We see monopolies that dominate every industry and oligarchs who buy elections. We see masked agents terrorizing our streets, eating food cooked by our undocumented neighbors before spiriting them away in unmarked vans. We see a nation whose immense wealth has been built by those with calloused, dirt-streaked hands — those who toil on factory floors and chisel into stone — and we see a nation that has allowed so much of that wealth to be held instead in the soft hands of a precious few.”

Interestingly, as Francis Fukuyama pointed out in the FT, the United States was not created until final ratification of the Constitution, which did not happen until 1789.

The Constitution that gave birth to the country 13 years later made no mention of either human equality or of democracy. It provided for a complex separation of powers that would guard against a centralised state with tyrannical authority.

So what Trump was celebrating was the more or less complete breakdown of that ‘separation’ of powers that has happened on his watch.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Abdullah Ibrahim | Whoza Mtwana

Link

Long Read of the Day

The Anguish of Choice

Long but fascinating Aeon Essay by Skye C. Cleary on one of the most remarkable public lectures of the 20th century — Jean-Paul Sartre’s talk on “Existentialism is a Humanism”.

On 29 October 1945, the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre emerged alone from the Paris Métro. He was about to deliver a lecture titled ‘L’existentialisme est un humanisme’ (‘Existentialism Is a Humanism’) at the Club Maintenant. No one had any idea it was going to become one of the most famous lectures of the 20th century. As Sartre walked towards the venue, he saw a huge crowd of people gathered outside. He wondered if Communists were protesting him and whether he should go home. He pushed ahead – really only because he’d made a professional commitment.

While the crowd parted for celebrities, no one knew what Sartre looked like. He didn’t tell anyone who he was, and as he slowly nudged his way towards the front, he was jostled about by brutal scrimmages for seats. The room was overheated and overcrowded. Fifteen people collapsed. An hour late, Sartre climbed to the stage to defend existential philosophy against his critics and argue that existentialism is a humanism. He had no notes, his hands remained in his pockets, but he was well prepared. He said what he came to say and then left.

The hosts of Sartre’s lecture, Jacques Calmy and Marc Beigbeder, had a modest budget. They bought simple ads in newspapers. Their wives posted fliers in Latin Quarter bookstores. Calmy worried: ‘With a title like that! Existentialism!’ Just two months earlier, Sartre had publicly stated: ‘My philosophy is a philosophy of existence; I don’t even know what Existentialism is.’ (Still, Simone de Beauvoir writes in her autobiography: ‘In the end, we took the epithet that everyone used for us [existentialism] and used it for our own purposes.’) Along with recent accusations that Sartre’s novel Nausea (1938) was anti-humanist, they hoped the title might at least be a ‘paradoxical provocation’.

The morning after the lecture, Sartre met with Beigbeder at Sartre’s unofficial office, the Café de Flore. Beigbeder apologised for the chaos, and explained that, between advertising, space rental and the damage to club – including 30 broken chairs and a destroyed box office, meaning that they were unable to sell tickets – they were having trouble coming up with the payment they’d promised Sartre. Sartre had read the morning papers over coffee and croissants and interrupted: ‘As for my fee, forget it! Besides, it looks like we were a success!’

One headline read ‘Too Many Attend Sartre Lecture. Heat, Fainting Spells, Police. Lawrence of Arabia an Existentialist’. The papers reported ‘elbow fights’, ‘nonexistential angst’ and ‘a No Exit situation’ where the mob feared ‘dying of suffocation’. Critics accused Sartre of being ‘too scholarly’, but he was charismatic. His ‘cool’, his ‘courage’, his ‘grit’ and the force of his presence were striking.

By the autumn of 1945, the atrocities of the Second World War had been exposed: the gas chambers, the camps, the friend betrayals, and the avalanches of banal evils. Beauvoir, Sartre’s lifelong partner, wrote that people ‘had discovered History in its most terrible form.’ Sartre was popular because, according to Beauvoir, ‘there existed, at least at first glance, a remarkable agreement between what he was offering the public and what the public wanted.’ In post-liberation Paris, people realised they needed to reconstruct both their buildings and their moral foundations…

If, like me, you were once fascinated by Sartre but found him hard going, then this piece is a delight.

My commonplace booklet

In recent years I’ve got out of the habit of flying, partly because of a dislike of airport security theatre and general hassle. But last week I had to fly to and from Ireland for a funeral. On both flights I had a window seat and so fell into meditating on what I could see from that vantage point.

Which of course mainly consisted of clouds, which have always been an interest of mine because I’m a keen photographer who is constantly on the lookout for interesting cloudscapes. But I also had to do some thinking about them when I was preparing a lecture on “The Materiality of AI” for the Royal Geographical Society back in February. It turns out that the idea of the cloud (as in ‘cloud computing’) does a lot of heavy lifting in obscuring the weight of the industry’s footprint on the planet.

When you think about it the cloud — a soft fluffy object — is a brilliant metaphor for concealing the hard reality of a technology that is powered by submarine cables and data centres.

But in actual fact a real cloud is something that does exactly the opposite: it makes a physical reality — water vapour — visible.

This was brought forcibly brought home to me on both of last week’s flights. As the aircraft began its descent to its destination it had to break through dense banks of cloud. And as it hit them it perceptively shuddered: heavy object going fast meets physical resistance.

So I did some digging. It seems that an inch of rainfall falling on an acre of ground deposits 3,630 cubic feet of water on the surface. That’s about 103 metric tonnes, or the weight of two fully loaded articulated trucks. When you think about it in those terms, delightful fluffy clouds pack quite a punch

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The Beeline

Imagine how attractive these flowers would look if you were a bee. According to the invaluable Plantnet app, it’s Verbascum chaixii ViLL. Which is ‘Nettle leaved Mullein’ to the rest of us.

Quote of the Day

”The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.”

• John Kenneth Galbraith

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

J.S. Bach | Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring | Leo Kottke

Link

I once heard him play this live at the Cambridge Folk Festival sometime in the 1970s. And at one magical moment, the man sitting next to me began to whistle the chorale. And Kottke grinned in response.

Long Read of the Day

Greatness and the Machine

An interesting essay by Brendan McCord, based on a lecture he delivered at the 2026 Cosmos Feast at the Château de Tocqueville in Normandy. In it he argues that AI poses an unprecedented threat to human freedom and independent thought in a way that Tocqueville feared. There were, he thought, two inter-related dangers to democracies. One was ’soft despotism’, where government gradually assumes responsibility for daily life. The other was tyranny of the majority and a culture of conformity that discourages independent thinking. McCord argues that the long term danger of AI is that it might merge these two.

We face a condition no people has faced before: a tool that acts not on the world but on the will itself. Such a tool endangers things that a tyrant never could.

The first thing it risks is autonomy: the cultivated capacity to author your own reasoning. This means framing the question, weighing what matters, and then owning your judgment. This is not the same thing as agency. Agency is about getting things done. Like Elena, you can simultaneously be highly agentic, but devoid of all autonomy.

The second loss is older and grander. Tocqueville feared that equality would cost us the potential for greatness. He arrived in America, half-afraid that the democratic age had extinguished thumos – what the Greeks called the part of the soul that loves honor, contest, and daring.

Tocqueville, however, found it on the merchant ship. At the end of volume I in Democracy in America, he tries to solve the mystery of how American merchants were able to offer cheaper rates and dominate transatlantic shipping. He finds the answer in temperament.

The American leaves Boston to buy tea in China, is gone two years and touches land once, lives off brackish water and salt meat, runs into the storm under full sail and mends the ship as he goes. He does all this to sell a pound of tea for a penny less than the Englishman. He does this because, as Tocqueville writes, the Americans put a kind of heroism in their manner of trading. The old fire does not die in a democratic age, it changes address…

I’m not sure I buy the argument about the nature of the damage that AI could do. But I like people who think about this stuff outside the confines of the “AI Fight Club”. And in case you’re wondering what it costs to stay at the chateau, forget it. If you want to know the price, you can’t afford it.

Books, etc.

While we’re on the subject of Tocqueville, I’ve been entranced by the Economist’s Tocqueville Road Trip: Democracy in America at 250 which has made me feel ashamed that I’ve never read Tocqueville’s masterpiece. So I’ve asked for it as a birthday present.

What links AI and JMW Turner? Let me paint a picture for you…

My most recent Observer column:

I’m staring at JMW Turner’s Rain, Steam, and Speed – The Great Western Railway, a painting he did in 1844 of a section of the line at the Maidenhead railway bridge. It’s a classic Turner landscape obscured by swirling clouds, wisps of steam and rain. Nothing is clear except the funnel of an oncoming steam train and the walls of the viaduct, built by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, which Turner has exaggeratedly foreshortened, leading our eyes to follow it back to the fuzzy horizon. Everything else in the picture is a misty haze.

Pondering the picture, I began to wonder if what I was looking at was a visual metaphor for our current plight. We’re in the middle of a traumatic phase transition – from a disintegrating socioeconomic order into a future that is unknowable and could conceivably be dystopian. Lots of things that we once regarded as unthinkable are happening on a daily basis. Assumptions that we used to regard as solid bases on which to plan for the future are evaporating like melting snow.

Take, for example, the belief that children would have better lives than their parents had. Or that a university degree was a ticket to employment. Or that young people who worked hard would be able to own a place of their own. Or that democratic politicians who took bribes and kickbacks would be shamed into resignation once their transgressions were exposed.

In the middle of this chaos, however, one certainty seems to have gripped our ruling elites: that AI is the future. It’s the modern counterpart for the steam locomotive in Turner’s picture. And – according to the dominant narrative everywhere – it’s coming for us all…

Read on

pdf download here

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Fuchsia

I think this is still my favourite flower. If you’re ever in Kerry at this time of the year you can drive down country lanes where the hedgerows appear to consist of little else.

Quote of the Day

”If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story. The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy.”

• J.D. Vance June 26, 2026 Link

Sadly, it’s true.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel | Bist du bei mir | Placido Domingo & Sissel Kyrkjebjo

Link

This beautiful air — which has often been wrongly attributed to J.S. Bach because his wife had included it in one of her notebooks — came to mind yesterday. A beloved sister-in-law had passed peacefully away on Saturday morning after an horrendous battle with cancer and, like everyone else, I was hit by contradictory feelings — sadness at her loss, and relief that at least her suffering was over. The great thing was that her death was peaceful, something captured by the (translated) lyrics.

Long Read of the Day

Killing Keir and admiring Andy

If you are, like me, perpetually pissed off by the shallowness of mainstream media coverage of British politics, then this essay by David Aaronovitch may cheer you up. It’s triggered by the remarkable in-house coup which brings Andy Burnham into office with no noticeable mandate, and consigns Keir Starmer to the condescension of history. David has been a formidably cussed and independent commentator on these things for as long as I can remember and he’s spot-on here. His point, he says, is that,

Starmer may not have been good but he wasn’t a disaster, and yet he ended up underwater by 40 points and with commentators claiming that he was “hated” by the voters.

In these polarised times it’s impossible to escape being hated by someone. Starmer was labelled a genocidal war criminal over Gaza by the Left and an abettor of antisemitism by Netanyahu supporters for his recognition of the state of Palestine. Some gender-critical feminists loathe him for being slow to appreciate the pitfalls of gender ideology, and transgender supporters for appreciating them eventually. Latter-day discoverers on the Right of the historic wrongs imposed upon the people of Diego Garcia (almost entirely a “Left” issue until 2024) now call Starmer a “traitor” over a Chagos deal that was very nearly the policy of the last Conservative government.

In recent weeks new kinds of crimes have been laid at Starmer’s door. He was a disappointment in the tearoom, failing to stimulate his backbenchers and thus displaying the parliamentary equivalent of erectile dysfunction. He was strangely incurious. He was unsusceptible to argument. He callously didn’t even tell his staff that he was about to resign (which, if they hadn’t realised it by last weekend, made them a political version of the WASPI women).

But the voters? Why would they hate someone who has tried pretty hard not to upset them? (In fact, polls seem to suggest that very negative feeling about Starmer is limited to around 30% of the electorate.)

Read on to see his conclusion. It isn’t complimentary to the great British public.

Books, etc.

Although (as usual) I’ve got too many books on the go, Edward Luce’s review of this new book by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan might have to be moved up the queue.

One thing that surprised me is that Trump has now become “almost entirely housebound”. And in that house,

He is now surrounded exclusively by loyalists, many picked because they look like they are “from central casting”. He observes that often about Scott Bessent, Trump’s imposing Treasury secretary, and especially about Pete Hegseth, his swaggering, trash-talking “secretary of war” and former TV anchor. The daily intelligence briefing is just as chaotic. Hegseth’s party trick is to show Trump short videos of US missile strikes or boats being vaporised in the Caribbean. These are known as “Hegseth’s snuff films”, which Trump prefers to normal briefings.

Other principals, such as Howard Lutnick, Trump’s secretary of commerce, are there mostly because they are rich. Trump tells people that he puts up with Lutnick’s “bullshit” because he donated $25mn to the planned Trump library in Florida. But Trump’s library will be no such thing. As Haberman and Swan report, it will be a skyscraper hotel and luxury development accompanied by the Qatari gift of a Boeing luxury jet. After Trump leaves office, the Pentagon will “turn over” that jet to the “library”. The land, worth $67mn, was a gift from the state of Florida.

Regime Change is replete with such telling detail.

Which of course is the disreputable reason I want to read it. I should be ashamed of myself, as my mother would have put it.

My commonplace booklet

 Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning

Having read this I’ve come to the conclusion that perhaps everyone else should too. As a child I once got caught in a large Atlantic roller and thought I would drown. I’ll never forget it and for at least 30 years I avoided going to the beach on which it happened.

Here’s a sample:

1. Except in rare circumstances, drowning people are physiologically unable to call out for help. The respiratory system was designed for breathing. Speech is the secondary or overlaid function. Breathing must be fulfilled, before speech occurs.
2. Drowning people’s mouths alternately sink below and reappear above the surface of the water. The mouths of drowning people are not above the surface of the water long enough for them to exhale, inhale, and call out for help. When the drowning people’s mouths are above the surface, they exhale and inhale quickly as their mouths start to sink below the surface of the water.
3. Drowning people cannot wave for help. Nature instinctively forces them to extend their arms laterally and press down on the water’s surface. Pressing down on the surface of the water, permits drowning people to leverage their bodies so they can lift their mouths out of the water to breathe.

Read on.

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Café life

Quote of the Day

”Criticism and Bolshevism have one thing in common. They both seek to pull down that which they could never build.”

• Noel Coward

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Abdullah Ibrahim | Little Boy

Link

Long View of the Day

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video might be worth a million.

I could have generated a transcript of this video by Hannah Fry, a Cambridge professor, which provides the most useful and accessible explanation I’ve come across of why AI ‘agents’ might be both the smartest AND most worrying things we’ve ever invented. But I think the video conveys the message more cogently than text. It really made me think because I had downloaded OpenClaw but had held back from using it to build autonomous agents because (i) I couldn’t think of an application that would be both genuinely useful (for me) and (ii) safe. It’s still sitting there, looking at me reproachfully.

My commonplace booklet

Lovely piece of satire by Private Eye.

Many years ago Brits used to laugh at Italian politics where the country seemed to have an endless merry-go-round of Prime Ministers. Well, guess what? When Andy Burnham takes office in July the UK will be on its tenth Prime Minister in a single decade!

Teaching Meta a lesson

For the background, see here.

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Deux-Chevaux de luxe

Beautiful example of French ingenuity.

Quote of the Day

”Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.”

• Thomas Mann

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Wagner | Tristan und Isolde, Act III: Liebestod| Karajan and the Berliner Phil

Link

As Groucho Marx might have observed, I don’t like the look of Wagner, but I sure like the noise he makes.

Long Read of the Day

3 Lessons on Writing from Joan Didion’s Notes

This essay by Jillian Hess will be interesting to anyone who is interested in the writing process and/or the work of Joan Didion. I tick both of those boxes, which is why I liked it.

This is how Didion defines a writer: “a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper.”1 Anyone who has read Didion’s writing will not be surprised by this definition—her prose could only have been written by a person who passionately arranged words, hour after hour, day after day.

Before I went to see Joan Didion’s papers at the New York Public Library, I read all the reports claiming the archive gives us new insight into Didion’s writing process. Of course, I wanted more information—I wanted to know more of the nitty-gritty details regarding how Didion’s worked. So, I made an appointment and read through her papers. As I did so, I kept my attention trained on her methods so that I could write the report I wanted to read. And now here it is!

TL;DR summary. Three principles:

1. Collect Fragments
2. Transfer Notes to Different Formats
3. The Work is Never Perfect

Read on for detail. Hope you enjoy it.

Books, etc.

I came on this after listening to David Runciman’s conversation with its author on his Past, Present, Future podcast. Sarah O’Connor is a distinguished FT journalist who has been writing about work for decades and is the best person imaginable to ask about the likely impact(s) of AI on work. Accordingly, I bought a copy of her book and started to read. And am already chastened by how shallow my thinking had been on the subject. Ignorance is not always bliss.

‘Muskism’ is a new word to ask an AI about – but don’t expect to get a straight answer

My latest Observer column:

What is Elon Musk? Genius, meme lord relentlessly inflating tech bubbles (SpaceX’s recent record-smashing initial public offering), raver about population collapse and cheerleader for far-right conspiracy theories? All of the above, and more. But focusing on Musk as an individual is a mistake, say Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff in their recent book, as it misses the big question about him: what does he really stand for?

Their answer is that Musk is the spiritual heir of Henry Ford in two ways. One, is that Ford invented a revolutionary way of manufacturing cars, and Musk pioneered a new way of making the next generation of them: electric vehicles. But their key insight comes from recognising that Ford not only made cars. He also spawned a new kind of capitalism: what we now call “Fordism”.

This combined mass production with mass consumption and became the operating system of 20th-century socioeconomic life. Musk, they claim, is spawning something on the same scale. They call it “Muskism” (hence their book’s title, Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed.)

Read on

For a downloadable pdf version, see here.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• The Manhoff Archives

Major Martin Manhoff spent more than two years in the Soviet Union in the early 1950s, serving as assistant army attaché at the U.S. Embassy, which was located just off Red Square at the beginning of his time in Moscow.

He took full advantage of his post, using his gifted photographic eye to capture hundreds of images of everyday life in Moscow and across the U.S.S.R.

When he left the country in 1954 amid accusations of espionage, Major Manhoff took with him reels of 16 millimeter film and hundreds of color slides and negatives he shot during his travels – including of one of the Soviet Union’s pivotal events, Josef Stalin’s funeral.

But after his return to the United States, the trove of rare images lay forgotten, stored in cardboard boxes in a former auto body shop in the Pacific Northwest until its discovery by a Seattle-based historian.

Absolutely fascinating archive. It had a real resonance for us because my wife’s father was the British Embassy doctor at the same time as Manhoff and would have been a witness to some of the same scenes.

Link

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Through a glass, brightly

A window in a lovely old Yorkshire hotel

Quote of the Day

”The markets are moved by animal spirits, and not by reason.”

• John Maynard Keynes

C.f. the current AI ‘investment’ bubble

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Abdullah Ibrahim | Bra Timing From Phomolong

Link

Long Read of the Day

Sovereign AI is really hard to achieve

This is a really sobering read from Anton Leicht on what Europe would need to do to achieve AI sovereignty. It was prompted by the fact that the U.S. government shut down Anthropic’s Fable 5, currently the leading frontier AI model. The decision was motivated ostensibly by domestic cybersecurity reasons, but the effects on U.S. allies — fear, disorientation, alienation — were not only not the goal, but weren’t even seriously considered. But what it means is that in 2026’s AI policy, the rest of the world is so powerless that it can be cut off from frontier AI as mere collateral damage of domestic U.S. policy.

These days, if you can’t see the noose of a politically charged security apparatus wrapping around previously-abundant artificial intelligence, I’m not sure you’re paying attention. Increasingly, the frontier of AI capability is controlled by a maximally volatile version of the U.S. executive branch. Evidence is generated ad-hoc or perhaps deep inside the intelligence community, action is taken based on personal loyalties and with little respect for long-run consequences, decisions are biased toward immediate effects and domestic concerns. All this is carried out by an American presidency that considers itself a unitary executive that wields supreme power, and Congress is frozen into inaction by vociferous AI politics and institutional dysfunction. No interdependence and rational economic incentive truly binds this sort of administration—and so no ally can truly rely on American frontier AI.

Now assume another thing to be true: frontier AI really matters, the best systems are strategically and economically superior to the rest, and the resulting lead gives those at the frontier a decisive economic and military advantage. Frontier systems become so powerful that they threaten the sovereign state’s monopoly on violence, and that their owners become as powerful as any nation. In that world, you either own a frontier system yourself, or you are at the mercy of those who build, own, and control them. From that, any reasonable country would conclude that it simply needs its own frontier AI, however high the costs.

His argument is that achieving this will be a more formidable task than is understood by most European politicians.

This is not only a matter of succeeding at the most ambitious infrastructure project in recent history. It’s a matter of succeeding at this project while under adversarial pressure from the U.S. and strict scrutiny from fickle electorates. No one voicing the ambition of reaching the frontier is grappling with that further challenge of insulating the project against American coercion and domestic backlash at the same time.

As a result, the debate about sovereign frontier AI remains unserious. The LinkedIn types and Euroboosters, stripped of real resources, are forced to pretend that you can build AGI in a coworking space in Stockholm. EU institutions voice lofty ambitions, just to shape them into massively underfunded subsidies for blue-skies research that would bear its first fruits after American superintelligence has already been deployed. And everyone who is aware of the scope of the challenge shies back from discussing it. Just seriously discussing middle power parity at the frontier has become the marker of a fool. But that won’t cut it anymore. If things continue down this path, sovereign frontier development might yet become the only play. I think we sceptics have dismissed that future too readily…

He goes on to sketch what would be needed to achieve AI sovereignty. It’s not quite on the ‘Manhattan Project’ scale, perhaps, but it will require more resources, political determination and stamina to bring it off. And at the moment only one state other than the US seems likely to pull it off. Guess who?

Books, etc.

In 2005, a former senior Facebook executive, Sarah Wynn-Williams published a book about her experiences in Facebook. It’s a pretty graphic account of what a toxic corporation is like on the inside. As Larry Lessig, the great American lawyer and campaigner put it “If you ever need to be convinced that the future of humanity should not rest with the judgment (or integrity) of Silicon Valley executives, this book is a must read.”

It is. I know Sarah slightly, and she’s a formidable witness. Ever since Careless People came out, Meta — Facebook’s owner — has waged a relentless campaign against her. Here’s how her lawyer described it in a letter to the Hay Festival organisers who were putting on an event in which Sarah would appear on a panel with Carole Cadwalladr and Tim Wu.

As you may know, in March 2025, Meta initiated an emergency arbitration against Ms. Wynn-Williams and her publishers, demanding an order blocking publication of her memoir, Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism.

Through that process, Meta has obtained a temporary order preventing Ms. Wynn-Williams from “promoting” her book or speaking about certain topics, regardless of whether what she says is true. As a result, while we continue to challenge that order, Ms. Wynn-Williams has been careful not to speak about her book or about Meta during her public appearances.

Despite Ms. Wynn-Williams’s caution, Meta has threatened her with further sanctions. In March 2026, Meta filed a sanctions motion claiming that Ms. Wynn-Williams violates the order any time she appears in public in a place where she should know that her book is available for sale and her presence might draw attention to it e.g. a bookstore.

Meta’s motion expressly identified her forthcoming appearance at the Hay Festival as an example of conduct that should be formally sanctioned. Meta based this assertion in part on Ms. Wynn-Williams’s planned appearance with Carole Cadwalladr, who Meta called “the British investigative journalist primarily known for her negative coverage of Meta” and with the academic Tim Wu, who Meta described as “another known critic.” Meta also said attending the Hay Festival would violate the order because the Hay Festival’s “promotional materials include a direct link to ‘Browse the Festival Bookshop,’ … which offers Careless People for sale.”

In the event Sarah sat on the panel, silent, motionless and expressionless while the other panellists discussed her book. At the end of the session the audience gave her a sustained standing ovation.

Meta’s legal persecution of Sarah reminded Larry of the ’Streisand Effect’ — the phenomenon in which an attempt to hide, remove, or censor information results in the unintended consequence of the effort instead increasing public awareness of the information. And it gave him and idea: Sarah may not be allowed to publicise her excellent book, but there’s nothing to prevent the rest of us from doing it.

So here’s a little poster that will be appearing on this blog from time to time.

Nil carborundum: don’t let the bastards grind you down.

My commonplace booklet

There’s no Leica like an old Leica

As long-term readers will know (only too well), I’ve been a keen photographer since I was a teenager, and I have used Leica cameras since the early 1970s, which is why I was often broke in those days. What I like about the cameras is that they’re nearly indestructible. (The guy who sold me my first M2 said — jokingly, I think) that it was “made from a melted-down German battleship”).

Well, here’s one that has obviously been through the wars.

It was put up for sale at in auction in Wetzlar on the other day. According to the catalogue…

With a total production volume of just 402 units – of which only 141 were finished in black paint – the “M Professional” (MP) ranks among the rarest Leica cameras ever made. Developed specifically for reportage photography, it was conceptualised in response to American press photographers such as Alfred Eisenstaedt and David Douglas Duncan, who wanted to use their M cameras with the added benefit of the Leicavit rapid winder – which, at the time, was only available for the Leica IIIf. This particular model (with the serial no. MP-33) was originally delivered to Brandt, a Swedish Leica retailer, on July 29, 1957.

It went for 600,000 Euros. But at least it’s still in working order.

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