The decisive moment
Well, a provençal moment anyway.
Quote of the Day
”The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed.”
- Ernest Hemingway
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Edward Elgar | Enigma Variations, Op.36: IX. (Nimrod)
Something calming before you get to what lies below.
Long Read of the Day
Mike Brock on the significance of Trump’s renaming a lake — and the way giant corporations bend to his will.
Mr. Orwell, if he were here with us, would recognize what he was looking at. Moving past the fascinating advances in technology he missed during this absence, the general outlines of the epistemic tyrannies he warned about are all around.
What he would be looking at, this week, is a lake. One of North America’s Great Lakes. On Tuesday, Apple renamed one of them — Lake Ontario — on its Apple Maps application. Users in the United States now see “Lake America.” Users in Canada still see Lake Ontario. Everyone else gets both names — one body of water, two labels, assigned by region settings. No law made the company do it. The president’s order directs federal agencies and the federal names database, and it cannot compel a private label on a private map — and Apple did it anyway.
Orwell’s century had a ministry for this work — a Records Department, clerks, tubes for the old maps, a furnace. Ours is quieter. Nobody seizes the record. The record is a product, and products update. Keep the dates, because the dates are the story: the call was disclosed on Monday, August 31, Tim Cook’s last day as chief executive of Apple. The map changed on Tuesday, September 1, John Ternus’s first.
The order came on Thursday, August 27, directing the Interior Department and the Board on Geographic Names to scrub Lake Ontario from federal maps, contracts, and communications. The government database was updated within hours. I wrote about the order. MapQuest, a company the country had mostly forgotten, posted a screenshot of the lake that same day with four words under it: “We’re not changing it.” On Saturday, Google folded in three sentences on a product blog. On Monday, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum went on Fox Business‘ Mornings with Maria and described the president’s phone call to Tim Cook as scheduling: “I know that the president reached out to Apple directly, so I’m sure that we may be seeing that change coming up coming up soon to Lake America.” He called it “a little bit of inside baseball.” On Tuesday, the label flipped.
Apple has explained none of it. The company did not respond when the call was reported, and when the rename went live it declined to comment — no statement, no policy page, no byline anywhere on the decision…
The longer this goes on, the more relevant Orwell and Hannah Arendt become.
AI’s surveillance dystopia is handing power to the peepers
My latest Observer column.
Way back in 2013, Edward Snowden (whom God preserve) revealed to an astonished world the scope and scale of US mass surveillance. The National Security Agency (NSA), he showed, was collecting everything it could, right down to recordings of German chancellor Angela Merkel’s phone conversations. But although the agency was able to “collect it all”, as its then director, Keith Alexander, put it, it was drowning in the torrents of data it was hoovering up. It found it difficult to turn all that data into information, its reach exceeded its grasp.
There was a sense in which that capacity deficit was reassuring. “Sure, I might be being surveilled,” went the mantra, “but I’m only a drop in that ocean.” There are CCTV cameras everywhere, but nobody’s really watching those videos, unless the police are looking for evidence after a crime.
But that was in 2013, which is 91 internet years ago. Now the NSA, and every other comparable agency in the world, seem to have the necessary capability. They call it AI, even though it’s mostly large language models such as Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek or GPT-5.
These machines have several critical capabilities for this work. One is that they’re very fast workers. A good example is scanning retinal images looking for cases that require human inspection. The processing time of AIs for each image range from 240 milliseconds to 45 seconds, while human graders may spend up to 20 minutes reviewing a full screening case. Given that the NHS needs to scan 12 million images every year, you can see why using the technology makes sense. Second, AIs are good at ingesting, cross-referencing and analysing disparate data sources. And third, they’re tireless, as the Hugging Face team observed in the startup’s postmortem on the now notorious hack on its servers by rogue AI agents from OpenAI.
Dystopian fears about an all-knowing surveillance state have been around for aeons. But this time, writes James Ball, a distinguished British journalist who worked on the Snowden story, there’s a crucial difference: “All of the technology to deliver this already exists,” he observes, “and is already in widespread use. Existing large language models would be more than capable of delivering such a system, not just pulling together disparate sources of intelligence, but analysing them in real time, ‘advising’ police on who to grab, and where to find them. Those systems will only improve in time. An administration could at least argue – and try its luck through the courts – that existing laws would allow all of this to be done.”
Ball has had conversations with current and former law enforcement staff, ex-intelligence agents from multiple countries, sources inside large AI companies, as well as academics and figures in civil society. Out of those conversations, he says, one clear message has emerged: “Thanks to AI, the surveillance dystopia science fiction has spent decades warning us about is already here. We just haven’t noticed yet.”
Here in the UK, though, it looks as if some institutions have been paying attention. For example, the Metropolitan police recently fed data from 35 sources into an AI system provided by (surprise, surprise!) Palantir to monitor officers and staff for disciplinary violations or criminality (keeping inappropriate images on work devices, say, or crossing ethical boundaries with victims of crime). The result was “investigations into hundreds of officers for issues including work-from-home violations, as well as a smaller number flagged for misconduct and criminality including sex offences”.
This kind of intimate surveillance used to be a wet dream for authoritarians. Now they can buy it off the shelf. What, then, will liberal democracies do about – or with – it? Expect the usual technocratic rationalisations for it: efficiency, reducing crime, value for money in the public sector and so on. And, of course, heading off threats to public order, such as, for instance, demonstrations against the mammoth datacentres that are now defined as “critical national infrastructure”.
If that, indeed, is the path we’re on, expect a rueful smile from Francis Fukuyama, the sage who thought that, after the Soviet Union imploded, liberal democracies would focus on “Getting to Denmark” – shorthand for a stable, prosperous and high-trust society. He may appreciate the irony that democracies opting for AI-powered surveillance would instead be focusing on “Getting to China”, where all this technology is already up and running.
Interestingly, this chimes with another development in the US.
This from Wired:
In the wake of attacks on CEOs, a nationwide protest movement targeting data centers, and increasing concerns about AI job replacement, federal intelligence agencies and domestic law enforcement are circulating reports with a new domestic target in mind: anti-technology extremists.
More than 1,000 pages of unpublished reports from the Department of Homeland Security, FBI, and fusion centers obtained by WIRED show a national shift taking place to surveil this new and worryingly broad category of people and activities deemed an emerging threat.
This new effort follows President Donald Trump’s National Security Presidential Memo 7, which instructs the Department of Justice to target anyone holding “anti-American,” “anti-Christian,” and “anti-capitalism” beliefs…
Books, etc.
My wife and I have just finished reading Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey and foolishly ticked it off the list of Books To Be Read. But guess what? She has decided to rewrite the damn thing.
“It’s a complete retranslation. It’s not a revision of the old version,” Wilson told The Associated Press during a recent Zoom interview from her home in Philadelphia, where she is a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania. “I’m about halfway through.”
Regarded as the first major English-language translation of Homer’s epic by a woman, her book was already a bestseller and a culture-wars flashpoint before the release of Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation. But she says her translation methods have become more sophisticated and that enough time has passed for her to see some flaws in her work — as an example, she overused the word “slave” when ancient Greek had different terms for different categories of enslaved people. The new edition will be longer, she says, and will better reflect the differing social worlds of Homer’s poem.
The original version has already sold a million copies worldwide. Wouldn’t you think she’d give us poor readers a break.
My commonplace booklet
From Semafor:
Ukraine is intensifying its aerial assault against Russia with drones that fly for longer and carry a larger payload, boosting Kyiv’s profile as allied nations race to distill its battle-tested insights. Ukraine is “churning out cutting-edge military technology” at a speed with “few parallels in modern history,” The Wall Street Journal wrote. That expertise is in high demand: Italy is bringing on Ukraine’s ousted defense minister and drone impresario to advise on strategy, as Poland, facing heightened incursions from Russia, prepares for joint drone exercises with the US that are explicitly modeled on Ukrainian soldiers’ experiences. Taiwan also recently credited Ukraine with inspiring its drone push.
And, guess what?
US Army Secretary Dan Driscoll’s resignation on Monday could undermine efforts to modernize Washington’s armed forces, analysts said. US President Donald Trump’s “drone guy,” Driscoll reportedly clashed with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over the army’s “transformation and readiness” efforts, which Driscoll believed were hamstrung by Hegseth’s firing of generals, CNN reported. Last month, the army said it would fold a cutting-edge drone unit that had been formed to imbibe lessons from Ukraine’s battlefield successes, a decision reflecting the new chief’s “back-to-basics” approach.
Errata
Heartfelt thanks to Terry Kavanagh and the many other readers who pointed out that the Simpson figure in Wednesday’s pic was not Bart but his nemesis, Sideshow Bob! My latest helping of humble pie has been duly ordered. I could not find my hat, but that was because I had already eaten it.
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