”What do you mean, “No”?

Quote of the Day

”Trump’s most outrageous innovation was dispensing with the pretense that he needed to provide reasons for his positions. The source for all of his claims was his own authority—he endlessly assured audiences that he knew more about anything than anybody (“Believe me”). Those who endorsed him—at first, mostly a motley collection of has-beens or outsiders—were winners. Anybody who challenged him was a loser whom Trump would dismiss, playground-style, as crazy, weak, sick, dumb, pathetic, a liar, a bimbo, a piggy. His greatest apostasy was not his rejection of any particular set of ideas, but his categorical rejection of the whole notion of ideas.”

• Jonathan Chait, writing in The Atlantic

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Lee Valley String Band | When First Into This Country

Link

Long Read of the Day

The first surprise at the Other Voices festival in Dingle came on Friday night when Michael D. Higgins, who had just stepped down after 14 years as the President of Ireland, turned up unexpectedly to read three poems from a recently published collection of his.

Ponder that for a moment: a president of a liberal democracy who had found the time and energy at the age of 84 to publish a book of his poems. (He’d already published four other books of poetry and three collections of essays.) But then Michael D. (as he is universally known in Ireland) is sui generis. He’s also well known for ignoring the constipated reticence traditionally expected of Irish heads of state by his penchant for expressing distaste for neoliberal capitalism and other excrescences. Indeed, one suspects that members of the Irish political establishment thought of him as Mrs Breen in Ulysses described her husband: “a caution to rattlesnakes”.

When US Vice-President Mike Pence came to Ireland there’s a photograph of him with Michael D. in the latter’s study in the presidential residence. It shows the two statesmen in a bookish study almost as untidy as mine!

After watching him deliver his poems on Friday we went looking for supper and found a quiet corner of the Skellig hotel (where we were staying). And just as we were contemplating the choice of dessert, who should walk in but the former president, his wife and a couple of companions who sat at a corner table just across from us. No fuss, no security detail. No fawning maitre’d. Just a former president coming in for a spot of dinner.

Now, I know that Ireland is a small country in which life moves at a different pace and on a different scale. Still, there was something comforting in the quiet normality of it all…

It also brought back memories of a day in 1995 when I spent an enjoyable morning with Michael D. He was then a government minister with responsibility for arts and culture and his department had published a Green Paper on the future of broadcasting which was radically different from the normal run of Irish governmental publications. It seemed to me that the minister’s fingerprints were all over it and the Observer (whose TV critic I then was) dispatched me to interview him. So I flew to Ireland on a wet Sunday evening having arranged to meet him in the Great Southern Hotel in Galway (his constituency) the following morning at 10:30am.

The interview was scheduled for an hour because he had a Cabinet meeting in Dublin in the afternoon. I had booked a small conference room and coffee. He arrived slightly late and remarked on the box of cigars which had slipped out of my case when I was taking out my notebook. I asked him if he would like a cigar. “Yes, “he replied, “but don’t tell my wife”. So we sat there in a classic smoke-filled room smoke and talked. And talked. And talked. It was not so much an interview as a conversation between a couple of eggheads. We talked about media ecology, Neil Postman, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, censorship, the impact of TV on Irish society, the Late Late Show, and sundry other topics.

11:30 came and went. More coffee was ordered. Periodically, his Private Secretary would put his head round the door and be waved away. Eventually, though, the poor chap became more insistent. “Minister,”, he said, ” I’m sorry to interrupt, but if we don’t leave now you will miss the Cabinet meeting”. At which point, Michael D. conceded, shook hands and left.

For me, what was most striking about the experience was that I had been talking to a politician who was deeply, deeply interested in ideas! In a way, I suppose it might have been like talking in the 1970s to Roy Jenkins, Denis Healey or Tony Benn — to name just three titans of that vanished age.

So you can perhaps understand why, on a Friday night in the westernmost parish in Europe, I wound up unsuccessfully racking my brains trying to think of a contemporary British (or indeed Irish) politician who would be as engaging an interlocutor as Michael D. had been all those years ago.

My commonplace booklet

Gay Byrne’s Christmas Cake Recipe

Since it the first day of December you will doubtless be thinking of assembling the ingredients for the festive cake. In which case you will find this recipe by a great Irish broadcaster (who is, sadly, no longer with us) useful. Take a few minutes to learn how you can amaze your friends and family.

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Westward Ho!

This weekend we’re heading to Dingle for the Other Voices festival. This is a view of the Blasket Islands, a few miles west of the town. So we’re heading to the most western point in Europe.

Quote of the Day

”I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody’s head.”

• John Updike

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ooh La La | The Faces

Link

Long Read of the Day

The long game

This blast from Cory Doctorow (Whom God Preserve) is welcome because it sets out the historical context for what I wrote about in last Sunday’s Observer column about the failure of the antitrust suit launched against Meta for its anti-competitive behaviour in buying Instagram and WhatsApp as preemptive strikes against potential competitors. “This is particularly galling,” writes Cory,

because Mark Zuckerberg repeatedly, explicitly declared that these mergers were undertaken to reduce competition, which is the only circumstance in which pro-monopoly economists and lawyers say that mergers should be blocked.

Let me take a step back here. During the Reagan years, a new economic orthodoxy took hold, a weird combination of economic theory and conspiracy theory that held that:

a) It was bad economic policy to try and prevent monopolization, since monopolies are “efficient” and arise because companies are so totally amazing that we all voluntarily buy their products and pay for their services and;

b) The anti-monopoly laws on the books are actually pro-monopoly laws, and if you look at them just right, you’ll find that what Congress really intended was for monopolies to be nurtured and protected:

The one exception these monsters of history were willing to make to their pro-monopoly posture was this: if a corporation undertakes a merger because they are seeking a monopoly, then the government should step in and stop them. This is a great standard to come up with if what you really want to do is nothing, because how can you know why a company truly wants to buy another company? Who can ever claim to know what is in another person’s heart?

This is a great wheeze if you want to allow as many monopolies as possible, unless the guy who’s trying to get that monopoly is Mark Zuckerberg, because Zuck is a man who has never had a criminal intention he did not immediately put to writing and email to someone else.

This is the guy who put in writing the immortal words, “It is better to buy than to compete,” and “what we’re really buying is time,” and who described his plans to clone a competitor’s features as intended to get there “before anyone can get close to their scale again”:

https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/29/21345723/facebook-instagram-documents-emails-mark-zuckerberg-kevin-systrom-hearing

Basically, Zuck is the guy who works until 2:30 every night, and then, before turning in, sends some key executive a fully discoverable, immortally backed-up digital message that reads, “Hey Bob, you know that guy we were thinking about killing? Well, I’ve decided we should do it. And for avoidance of doubt, it’s 100% a murder, and right now, at this moment, I am premeditating it.”

And despite this wealth of evidence as to Zuckerberg’s intention at the time, US regulators at the FTC and EU regulators at the Commission both waved through those mergers, as well as many other before and since. Because it turns out that in the pro-monopoly world, there are no bright lines, no mergers so nakedly corrupt that they should be prevented. All that stuff about using state power to prevent deliberate monopolization was always and forever just bullshit. In the pro-monopoly camp, all monopolies are warmly welcome.

It wasn’t always this way…

Read on. It’s worth it.

Books, etc.

(I’ve been thinking for ages about a way of celebrating books that have had a timeless appeal. So think of this as the first in an occasional series.)

Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, was on Desert Island Discs recently. This is a venerable BBC radio programme in which a guest (usually a prominent individual) is invited to choose eight pieces of music that have meaning for them, and to choose one book to take with them on their virtual term in exile.

I was intrigued by Tim’s choice of book — A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander which has been timeless because it offered something generic and powerful: a practical, human-centred grammar for designing spaces, buildings, cities, and — later — even software systems. Ward Cunningham, the man who designed the first Wiki (and co-authored the Manifesto for Agile Software Development), said that the wiki design was inspired by Alexander’s work. The book gives non-experts a vocabulary for making sense of why some spaces feel alive and others dead. It democratised design thinking and challenged the assumption that architects always know best, arguing instead that ordinary people can design their own homes, neighbourhoods, and communities if given the right tools. For me, the great revelation of his thinking was that the huge software systems we were building in the second half of the 20th century ought to be designed with evolution and change in mind, rather like buildings for communal use. Otherwise these programmed monsters become like tombs or ancient monuments.

My commonplace booklet

From Jonathan Haidt:

Earlier this year, someone started a viral trend of asking ChatGPT this question: If you were the devil, how would you destroy the next generation, without them even knowing it?

Chat’s responses were profound and unsettling: “I wouldn’t come with violence. I’d come with convenience.” “I’d keep them busy. Always distracted.”

“I’d watch their minds rot slowly, sweetly, silently. And the best part is, they’d never know it was me. They’d call it freedom.”

As a social psychologist who has been trying since 2015 to figure out what on earth was happening to Gen Z, I was stunned. Why? Because what the AI proposed doing is pretty much what technology seems to be doing to children today. It seemed to be saying: If the devil wanted to destroy a generation, he could just give them all smartphones.

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The conversation

Walking in a stately garden the other day I suddenly saw these two carefully-trimmed bushes as a pair of animals in conversation with one another, adult to child.

Quote of the Day

”Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking.”

• John Maynard Keynes

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Traveling Wilburys | End Of The Line

Link

One of Tim Berners-Lee’s choices on Desert Island Discs.

Long Read of the Day

The Vatican is the oldest computer in the world

Lovely essay by Andrew Brown.

Here’s how it opens…

Francis Spufford once said that Bletchley Park was an attempt to build a computer out of human beings so the credit for this metaphor belongs to him. But it can be generalised to any bureaucracy. They are all attempts to impose an algorithmic order on the messiness of the world, and to extract from it only only those facts which are useful to decision makers.

With that said, it’s clear that the Vatican is the oldest continuously running computer in the world. Now read on …

One way of understanding the Roman Catholic Church is to think of the Vatican as the oldest computer in the world. It is a computer made of human parts rather than electronics, but so are all bureaucracies: just like computers, they take in information, process it according to a set of algorithms, and act on the result.

The Vatican has an operating system that has been running since the days of the Roman Empire. Its major departments are still called “dicasteries”, a term last used in the Roman civil service in about 450 AD.

Like any very long running computer system, the Vatican has problems with legacy code: all that embarrassing stuff about usury and cousin marriage from the Middle Ages, or the more recent “Syllabus of Errors” in which Pope Pius IX in 1864 denounced as heresy the belief that he, or any Pope, can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization,” can no longer be acted on, but can’t be thrown away, either. Instead it is commented out and entirely different code added: this process is known as development.

But changing the code that the system runs on, while it is running, is a notoriously tricky operation…

It is.

What I like about this essay is how it suggests a different perspective on other computer-like ‘machines’ that exist in our world. For years I’ve thought of corporations — especially large ones — as ‘superintelligent machines’ (which is why I think that much of the faux-nervous speculation about what it would be like to live in a world dominated by superintelligent machines is fatuous. We already know the answer to that question: it’s like living in contemporary liberal democracies!)

Charlie Stross, the great sci-fi writer, calls corporations “Slow AIs”. Henry Farrell (Whom God Preserve) writes that since Large Language Models (LLMs) are ‘cultural technologies’ — i.e. information processing machines’ — they belong in the same class as other information-processing machines — like markets (as Hayek thought), bureaucracies and even states. David Runciman, in his book Handover:How We Gave Control of Our Lives to Corporations, States and AIs* makes similar points.

Of course these are all metaphors with the usual upsides and downsides. But they are also tools for thinking about current — and emerging — realities.

Feedback

Ioan Claudiu Todoran was visiting Paris (lucky devil) and read my piece in the November 5 edition about The Monument exhibition at the Fondacion Cartier-Bresson. So he went to see it.

“As someone born in a communist country,” he writes,

Sibylle Bergemann’s The Monument exhibition piqued my interest and I decided to add it to our itinerary, alongside the already planned visits to the Museum of Decorative Arts (for the One Hundred Years of Art Deco exhibition) and Palais de Tokyo.

There were a couple of lenses offered to interpret the exhibition, with the obvious one being as a critique of a slowly collapsing regime. But my preferred one was seeing the photographs (almost) as staged, with often theatrical, comical effects: Marx and Engels missing the upper body, being covered by what looks like garbage bags (but are probably rain coverings), with the structure revealing a wooden framework (with the legs looking thin and weak) and my favorite ones: two workers working at Engels’ feet (tying his shoes, maybe?) and one with adults climbing the monument like joyous children.

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The punting business, 2025

Cambridge, on a dark, wet November evening

Quote of the Day

“The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.”

• Edward O. Wilson (in 2009)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Wagner | Lohengrin – Prelude

Link

Long Read of the Day

 Perseverance in Despair

Arthur Goldhammer, bravely trying to find light in the darkness.

There is a saying, well-known in French, counseling resolve in the face of hopelessness: “Il n’est pas besoin d’espérer pour entreprendre, ni de réussir pour persévérer.” (Freely translated: Hope is not necessary to endeavor, nor is success necessary to persevere.”) The thought, with minor modification, has been variously attributed to both Charles the Bold and William of Orange and quoted by writers as different as Marguerite Yourcenar and Jean-Paul Sartre. It’s a good motto for bleak times in general and for these times in particular.

For the first time in a long while, though, I’ve begun to feel the first stirrings of hope, and even if Charles and William are right that hope is something one can do without, I think they would agree that it’s easier to get going if you think the winds might be shifting in a more favorable direction.

Certainly, the election results of a few weeks ago offered a modicum of encouragement. To that Republican electoral debacle have now been added signs that the MAGA movement is neither as unified nor as indomitable as it once appeared…

Hmmm… And I suppose the election of Zohran Mandimi is also a positive sign. It’s hard to believe that it’s only a year since Trump was elected.

Footnote Goldhammer has translated more than 125 books from the French and writes widely on French culture and politics. He is also the author of the novel Shooting War and is at work on another novel about physics in the 1930s and 40s.

Books, etc.

This is one of my favourite books. It was published in 2011 and I’ve often revisited it. On Saturday evening a conversation with one of my grandsons brought it to mind and I dug it out and, later, started to re-read it.

Tony Judt was a truly great historian. His masterly Postwar — a history of Europe from 1945 onwards — has been an indispensable guide for something I’m currently trying to write. But in 2008 he was stricken by a cruel neurodegenerative disease which, as he put it, “leaves your mind clear to reflect upon past, present and future, but steadily deprives you of any means of converting the reflections into words”. At night, sleeplesss and alone in his motionless state, he took to revisiting his past in an effort to keep himself sane, and in the process constructed a really unique memoir.

His problem was how to store these meditations in a way that they could be retrieved in daylight. The solution he hit upon was one inspired by the mnemonic devices that early-modern thinkers and travellers devised to store and recall details and description — the mental construction of ‘memory palaces’ in each virtual room of which a particular memory could be safely stored. Tony decided on a more modest building — the skiing chalet in the Bernese Overland where his family used to go when he was a child. This is the Memory Chalet of the title. It’s a moving, unforgettable book, and it was lovely to be reminded of it.

My commonplace booklet

How in 1982, a physics joke gone wrong sparked the invention of the emoticon :-)

A lovely piece of cultural history in Ars Technicawhich provides a glimpse into what computing was like when I was a student. Possibly only of interest to geeks d’un certain age.

Feedback

Rex from Vancouver suggests that instead of “After computation, photography is dead”, how about “After AI, Reality is dead”? Maybe he has a point.

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The view from… nowhere

I was brooding on something that the French painter Paul Delaroche is reputed to have said after seeing one of the first daguerreotypes in the late 1830s or early 1840s: “From today painting is dead”. Given the astonishing computational power that my iPhone now brings to bear on every image snapped by its camera, I was playing with the idea of an analogous slogan — “After computation, photography is dead!” And then, just for fun, I told Google’s LLM Gemini to create “a photo-realistic image of a young man, dressed in a business suit, climbing up the outside of the Eiffel Tower”, and a few seconds later this was the result.

Quote of the Day

”George Washington did not enjoy public speaking. Because of his dentures, made of a combination of elephant tusks, horse and cow teeth, and teeth pulled from the mouths of people he held as slaves, he found speaking for any length of time painful.”

• Historian Jill Lepore, writing in the New Yorker

Hmmm… not half as painful as what the slaves who made that involuntary sacrifice experienced.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Elgar | Enigma Variations | Simon Rattle & the Berliner Phil

Link

Still stops me in my tracks.

Long Read of the Day

Are We Doomed?

This is the cheery headline on a masterly LRB review-essay by David Runciman of a trio of books on the forthcoming global population collapse. I’ve read some of this stuff, and it makes one’s head spin sometimes, but this is the best summing-up of it I’ve come on.

Here’s a sample:

People are living​ longer than they used to. They are also having fewer children. The evidence of what this combination can do to a society is growing around the world, but some of the most striking stories come from Japan. For decades the Japanese health ministry has released an annual tally of citizens aged one hundred or over. This year the number of centenarians reached very nearly a hundred thousand. When the survey started in 1963, there were just 153. In 1981 there were a thousand; in 1998 ten thousand. Japan now produces more nappies for incontinent adults than for infants. There is a burgeoning industry for the cleaning and fumigating of apartments in which elderly Japanese citizens have died and been left undiscovered for weeks, months or years. Older people have far fewer younger people to take care of them or even to notice their non-existence. That neglect is a brute function of some simple maths. In 1950, Japan had a Total Fertility Rate (TFR) of 4, which represents the average number of children a woman might expect to have in her lifetime. Continued over five generations, that would mean a ratio of 256 great-great-grandchildren to every sixteen great-great-grandparents – in other words, each hundred-year-old might have sixteen direct descendants competing to look after them. Today Japan’s TFR is approaching 1: one child per woman (or one per couple, half a child each). That pattern continued over five generations means that each solitary infant has as many as sixteen great-great-grandparents vying for his or her attention. Within a century the pyramid of human obligation has been turned on its head.

There are two different ways to describe a family tree. You can start with an individual and trace their ancestry through parents and grandparents and beyond to produce a picture of the variety of human beings it takes to make up any one of us. That’s genealogy. The other version is to pick someone from an earlier generation – king or commoner – and count their direct descendants. That’s heredity. But the choice between the two approaches – one spreading out backwards and one spreading out forwards – is only possible because earlier generations tended to have multiple offspring. Once that ceases to be true, family trees start to look the same from both directions. That has never happened before and it is hard to know what it will mean. But it is going to feel oppressive…

Read on. It’s both gripping and sobering.

My commonplace booklet

I asked ChatGPT: “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” Here’s its reply:

Short answer: it depends — on what you mean by “angel.”

Three ways to answer it:

1) Theological / philosophical: If angels are immaterial (no size) then — mathematically — an infinite number can “dance” on the head of a pin. That’s the usual jokey scholastic point: the question is meaningless unless you fix physical assumptions.

2) Historical: The famous question is a later caricature of medieval scholastic debate, not a literal physics problem asked by medieval theologians.

3) If you force a physical/mathematical interpretation: Use the area of the pinhead and the area occupied by each angel. For a typical pinhead 2.0 mm across, area = π·(1.0 mm)² ≈ 3.1416×10⁻⁶ m². Then • If each angel needs 1 mm² (1.0×10⁻⁶ m²) → ≈ 3.14 angels (so practically 3). • If each needs 0.1 mm² (1.0×10⁻⁷ m²) → ≈ 31 angels. • If each needs 0.01 mm² (1.0×10⁻⁸ m²) → ≈ 314 angels. • If each needs 0.001 mm² (1.0×10⁻⁹ m²) → ≈ 3,142 angels.

Formula used: N = (area of pinhead) / (area per angel).

So — short, playful reply: “As many as you allow them to be.” If you want, tell me what pin diameter and what angel size you imagine and I’ll give the exact number.

Feedback

My quasi-surrealist pic of spectacles in sunlight in Wednesday’s edition, prompted Kevin Cryan to remind me that “there is nothing new under the sun”. As proof he pointed to this lovely 1920 work by Max Baur.

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Man Ray’s spectacles?

I’ve always been fascinated by Man Ray, the surrealist painter and photographer. Yesterday, I was struck by the shadows cast by this pair of spectacles in strong sunlight, and thought of him. So I pressed the button, and here it is.

Quote of the Day

”The many uses of analogy are balanced by the mischief which arises from its misuse.”

• David Hackett Fischer (in Historians’ Fallacies, 1970)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Weight | Featuring Ringo Starr and Robbie Robertson | Playing For Change | Song Around The World

Link

This was one of the good things to come from the pandemic. Fabulous singing, coordination and editing. And moving.

Long Read of the Day

The long history of unaccountable elites in American life

The Epstein files now being gradually published by the US House of Representatives are providing a lever for prying open several cans of worms. One is the nature and prevalence of a group of wealthy and powerful males who believe that the laws and moral codes that bind lesser mortals don’t apply to them.

Heather Cox Richardson (Whom God Preserve) is an American historian who’s terrific at putting current events in their historical context. Her substack blog is a must-read, and the edition of November 16 shows why. In it she points out that belief in a hidden American faux-aristocracy goes back a long way.

In 1858, in a period in which a few fabulously wealthy elite enslavers in the American South were trying to take over the government and create their own oligarchy, South Carolina senator James Henry Hammond explained to his colleagues that “democracy” meant only that voters got to choose which set of leaders ruled them. Society worked best, he said, when it was run by natural leaders: the wealthy, educated, well-connected men who made up the South’s planter class.

Hammond explained that society was naturally made up of a great mass of workers, rather dull people, but happy and loyal, whom he called “mudsills” after the timbers driven into the ground to support elegant homes above. These mudsills supported “that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement,” one that modeled itself on the British aristocracy. The mudsills needed the guidance of their betters to produce goods that would create capital, Hammond said. That capital would be wasted if it stayed among the mudsills; it needed to move upward, where better men would use it to move society forward.

Hammond’s ideology gave us the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, in which the Supreme Court found that Black Americans “are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States.”

You get the idea. Do read it, and savour the Abraham Lincoln quote that comes further down.

Thanks to Kevin Cryan for pointing me to it.

After I’d read the essay I dug out my battered copy of C. Wright Mills ’s 1956 book, which provides a good picture of the dominant elites in American society in the early post-war period. Interesting to see how things have evolved.

Amid a mental health crisis, could building AI therapists be a good idea?** 

My latest Observer column…

A recent Wired headline read: “OpenAI says hundreds of thousands of ChatGPT users may show signs of manic or psychotic crisis every week.”

At first sight, the headline sounded like tabloid hyperbole. After all, according to OpenAI’s figures, only 0.07% of active ChatGPT users show “possible signs of mental health emergencies related to psychosis or mania”, while only 0.15% “have conversations that include explicit indicators of potential suicidal planning or intent”. And then the scale registers: with 800 million weekly users, even 0.07% represents hundreds of thousands of people in crisis.

What prompted this disclosure? OpenAI had obviously been monitoring interactions between users and its bot, collecting data on warning signs such as extended chat sessions and perhaps also learning from the uproar after its abrupt (and temporary) withdrawal of GPT-4o, a model valued by users for the level of intimacy they felt it enabled…

Read on

Books, etc.

This arrived yesterday. Karp is, to put it mildly, a strange guy — a philosopher (not a geek) running a tech company (Palantir) which has become very controversial. He’s the only philosopher I know of who has a 24-hour security detail and is followed everywhere by a black SUV containing chaps who are, er, muscular. If anyone out there is thinking of a remake of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove, Karp might be worth studying. In the meantime, this biography is now on my bedside table.

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Anyone for cricket?

A beach in Norfolk.

Quote of the Day

“I wonder if a single thought that has helped forward the human spirit has ever been conceived or written down in an enormous room.”

• Kenneth Clark (in his Civilisation TV series)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart | Soave sia il vento (Let the wind be gentle) | Così fan tutte

Link

Corinne Winters as Fiordiligi, Angela Brower as Dorabella and Johannes Martin Kränzle as Don Alfonso. To console my friend Ivan who is, I think, now on his long voyage back to Ireland from sunny Spain.

Long Read of the Day

 In Search of the AI Bubble’s Economic Fundamentals

As regular readers know, I’m anticipating a crash in 2026. But then I’m not an economist. Nor do I invest in shares. So I look to more knowledgeable people for a perspective on this. One of them is Bill Janeway, who is both an economist and has been a successful venture capitalist. It was from his book, Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy that I first learned of the central role speculative bubbles have played in technological development. Here is his most recent take on the current moment.

The history of modern capitalism has been defined by a succession of such “productive bubbles.” From railroads to electrification to the internet, waves of financial speculation have repeatedly mobilized vast quantities of capital to fund potentially transformational technologies whose returns could not be known in advance.

In each of these cases, the companies that built the foundational infrastructure went bust. Speculative funding had enabled them to build years before trial-and-error experimentation yielded economically productive applications.

Yet no one tore up the railroad tracks, dismantled the electricity grids, or dug up the underground fiber-optic cables. The infrastructure remained, ready to support the creation of the imagined “new economy,” albeit only after a painful delay and largely with new players at the helm. The experimentation needed to discover the “killer applications” enabled by these “General Purpose Technologies” takes time. Those seeking instant gratification from LLMs are likely to be disappointed.

The big questions, then are: Where does the AI bubble fit on this spectrum? And how long will it take for AI to have a real impact on productivity? It’s oddly reassuring to know that even Bill doesn’t know the answers.

My commonplace booklet

Ponder this email exchange. It comes from a paywalled article in the New York Times concerning the trove of documents about about Epstein’s activities that the US House of Representatives Oversight Committee has recently released.

As Matt Stoller observes in “The Blast Radius of Jeff Epstein”:

The single most important neoliberal thinker of the last forty years – economist Larry Summers – had an extensive and deep political and personal relationship with Epstein. He was reportedly on Jeff Epstein’s plane, nicknamed the “Lolita Express,” when young girls were present, and he often discussed his personal and political problems with Epstein.

It’s worth pondering. Summers was President of Harvard, and is still a professor there. He was also Treasury Secretary. In other words, he looked like a Serious Figure — as indeed he was portrayed in the film The Social Network. And here he is discussing with Epstein how to manage a floozy with whom he was preoccupied.

But then, the Epstein trove reveals that he wasn’t the only ostensible grown-up within the Epstein circle. Stoller again:

Bill Gates was a confidante of Epstein, so was Google co-founder Sergei Brin, Microsoft board member and “Abundance” backer Reid Hoffman, and private equity titan Leon Black. So were Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, and Ehud Barak. In other words, Summers and a bunch of powerful political elites are enmeshed in a scandal involving a network of, well, there’s no nice way to put it, globalist pedophile billionaires.

But it isn’t merely a tabloid story. It is also an important illustration of how our economic order functions.

It is. It’s no surprise that Trump was involved with Epstein. But here was a whole bunch of high-status, swaggering males with a sense of entitlement and impunity. And a complete absence of moral responsibility.

It shows that great wealth and political power are the most powerful aphrodisiacs of all.

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A reminder of Summer…

… on a dark, rainy, November morning.

 ## Quote of the Day

“As one watches the inexorable consequences of the new organisational design, as to which many guarantees have of course been given, it quickly becomes obvious that some luckless individual – despite his position of privilege and despite the guarantees – was born with a silver knife in his back”.

• Stafford Beer (in The Heart of Enterprise)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart | Horn Concerto No.2, I. Allegro maestoso | Mito Chamber Orchestra | Radek Baborák & Seiji Ozawa

Link

Long Read of the Day

 AI Could Be the Railroad of the 21st Century. Brace Yourself.

Nice long read by Derek Thompson, casting a useful historical eye on current proceedings.

Ours is a remarkable moment in world history. A transformative technology is ascending, and its supporters claim it will forever change the world. To build it requires companies to invest a sum of money unlike anything in living memory. News reports are filled with widespread fears that America’s biggest corporations are propping up a bubble that will soon pop. Behind the scenes, a political backlash is fomenting, as the forces of anti-oligarchy and anti-monopoly are rising.

Is this the artificial intelligence boom of the 2020s? Or the transcontinental railroad construction of the late 1800s?

Between the 1860s and the 1900, the transcontinentals transformed America. They populated the west, birthed the modern corporation, turned the U.S. into a coast-to-coast dual-ocean superpower, and revolutionized modern finance. As the historian Richard White wrote in his epic history of the transcontinentals, Railroaded, “they created modernity as much by their failure as their success,” leaving behind “a legacy of bankruptcies, two depressions, environmental harm, financial crises, and social upheaval.”

In the 2020s, AI is already transforming America in a similar fashion…

Read on. You hit a paywall eventually, but by that stage you’ll have got the picture.

My commonplace booklet

Kyp Kyprianou was struck by the Commonplace booklet entry on Wednesday, in which I quoted a nice rant from Dave Winer about the infuriating tendency of chatbots to pretend that they’re your friend. “Can we have a rule,” Dave wrote, “that AI bots must by default behave like a computer?” Kyp has been thinking along similar lines, and had the interesting idea of programming a browser extension so that whenever he embarks on a chat with an LLM it “benignly administers an injection of custom instructions at the head of any query I make”.

This had the effect of cutting out most of the “machine’s boilerplate chat”.

This is interesting (to me, anyway) because I’ve found that writing browser extensions can be very helpful in making LLMs perform tasks that speed up my workflow. Good to see that others have similar ideas.

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On the beach

Kilcummin beach, Dingle Peninsula.

Quote of the Day

“The issue is that generative AI systems don’t want messy perspective jumps. They want the median, the average, the most widely-approved of viewpoint on an issue, a kind of soft-focus perspective that is the exact opposite of how a good historian should be thinking.”

• Benjamin Breen

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Cristóbal de Morales | Parce Mihi Domine | Jan Garbarek and the Hilliard Ensemble

Link

Recorded at the monastery of Propstei St. Gerold in Austria in September 1993. Wonderful Saxophony.

Long Read of the Day

The Mad Farrago at the BBC

Tina Brown on a home-grown shambles…

So Trump has collected two more big media scalps, this time across the Atlantic—the widely respected duo of BBC director general Tim Davie and its head of news Deborah Turness. On Truth Social, he gloated, “These are very dishonest people who tried to step on the scales of a Presidential Election.”

The BBC triggered a mine of its own making. The sloppy-as-hell video editing of Trump’s January 6th speech in a 2024 documentary for Panorama—splicing together two different quotes that made it look as if Trump was directly urging protesters to walk to the Capitol and “fight like hell”—exploded last week with a leaked memo itemizing a litany of alleged bias (claims of transgender mania, antisemitism, liberal blindness on immigration, etc.) from a former independent adviser to the BBC’s standards committee. The editing blunder was a gift to Trump, who made a festive threat to sue the BBC for $1 billion (good luck with that) if it does not make a “full and fair retraction.”

It’s mystifying why it took a year to surface such a sensitive error and why the Panorama program director did not fall on his sword, after a fulsome institutional apology. But the Beeb is hopeless at acknowledging mistakes, mired as it is in committees and processes set up to protect its probity, but instead induce herbivore slow-motion…

Readers with long memories will recall that we have been here before. In 1984, to be precise, when a Panorama documentary, “Maggie’s Militant Tendency”, was broadcast in January of that year. The programme claimed that a number of Conservative MPs including Neil Hamilton, Harvey Proctor and Gerald Howarth had links to far-right organisations both in Britain and on the Continent. Two of the MPs sued for libel and the case headed for the High Court. But the Chairman of the BBC’s Governors then died unexpectedly and Margaret Thatcher replaced him with an establishment trusty, Marmaduke Hussey. The BBC’s Director General, Alastair Milne (who had approved the programme) resigned. The Governors decided to settle the libel case, and Hussey appointed a sharp technocrat, John Birt, to sort out the corporation’s new operation. The rest is history. But the BBC is still here. And will be ten years from now, I’ll bet.

Books, etc.

At my centre’s Monday ‘OpenLab’ seminar, the sociologist Robert Dorschel gave a fascinating talk on the research that went into this forthcoming book of his. It’s basically a sociological analysis of a slice of the tech workforce that hasn’t been properly examined before — the geeks who do the software. His talk — and the subsequent discussion was enough to persuade me to put the book on my reading list, and I look forward to picking up when it’s out (from MIT Press).

My commonplace booklet

From Dave Winer, (Whom God Preserve):

Now that Cory Doctorow has put enshitified into our vocabulary, I find myself looking for evidence of it in AI, and finding it everywhere. There is a common thread. Amazon Alexa has a really nasty habit of finishing a song by asking me if I want to listen to some other version of it. I’m sure that seems like a nice friendly thing to the product people at Amazon, but please — I’m grooving on the energy of the song, and the last thing I’m thinking about is some asshole robot interfering with my train of thought with a question so stupid only a machine could think of it. Okay I think that qualifies for enshitification right there. Can we have a rule that AI bots must by default behave like a computer. I, your human overlord, the one who is paying the bills, will ask the questions. And you will not speak until you are spoken to.

Amen.

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In case of fire…

… call photographer.

Arles, July 2022

Quote of the Day

“Fifteen years ago, the internet was an escape from the real world. Now the real world is an escape from the internet.”

• Noah Smith

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ralph Vaughan Williams | The Sky Above the Roof | Barbara Dickson

Link

Thanks to Kevin Nolan for alerting me to it.

Long Read of the Day

AI Friends too cheap to meter

Really thoughtful essay by Jasmine Sun, a remarkably insightful observer of the tech industry. In it she tackles one of the most surprising discovery of the current LLM-dominated era — the astonishing attachment of humans to these ‘stochastic parrots’.

We passed the Turing Test years ago and not enough of us are talking about it. There is something powerfully disorienting about software that speaks in human form—the fact that chatting with a frontier LLM is indistinguishable from an enthusiastic online stranger, the fact that a bot’s message bubbles look no different than ours, the fact that so many AI researchers have slipped in and out of believing in model sentience after long-winded chats. It seems there is something physiological about this response: we can read as many disclaimers as we want, but our human brains cannot distinguish between a flesh-and-bones duck and an artificial representation that looks/swims/quacks the same way.

Why do people become so attached to their AIs? No archetype is immune: lonely teenagers, army generals, AI investors. Most AI benchmarks show off a model’s IQ, proving “PhD-level intelligence” or economically useful capabilities. But consumers tend to choose chatbots with the sharpest EQ instead: those which mirror their tone and can anticipate their needs. As the politically practiced know, a great deal of AI’s influence will come not through its superior logic or correctness, but through its ability to build deep and hyperpersonalized relational authority—to make people like and trust them. Soft skills matter, and AI is getting quite good at them.

Do read it. We’re moving from an era of social media to relational computing.

Would you pay an AI to read your book?

My latest Observer column…

Kevin Kelly thinks that authors have got the wrong idea. “They believe,” he writes, “that AI companies should pay them for training AIs on their books. But I predict in a very short while, authors will be paying AI companies to ensure that their books are included in the education and training of AIs. The authors (and their publishers) will pay in order to have influence on the answers and services the AIs provide. If your work is not known and appreciated by the AIs, it will be essentially unknown.”

If that reminds you of the famous “Right to be forgotten” on the internet decision by the European court of justice in 2014, then join the club. That judgment empowered European citizens to petition for the removal from search engine results of embarrassing online information about them.

It wasn’t truly a right to be forgotten, merely a right not to be found by Google – and in that sense it was an implicit acknowledgment of the search engine’s power. If Google didn’t find you, then you didn’t exist.

Kelly’s thesis likewise rests on an implicit long-term vision of the kind of power and authority these machines might eventually come to wield…

Read on

Books, etc.

This is one of the most interesting books I’ve read this year. But it’s quite long and if you’re stretched for time, this recorded conversation between the author and Francis Fukuyama will give you a pretty good insight into it. The video is 36 minutes long, but worth it.

My commonplace booklet

I guess the reason Zohran Mamdani’s election has resonated so widely is that it’s the first bit of good news from the US since January. What was missed in much media coverage, though, is that there were lots of other elections across the country on the same day, and the results seems to have been a clean sweep for the Democrats. Was this a straw in the wind or a flash in the pan? Hard to say. The real test will be in the mid-term elections coming next November. That is, unless Trump tries to prevent them

Coming back to the speech, I was struck by an attentive reading by the inimitable Neila Orr on the LRB blog. Among the things she picked up was the significance of Mamdani’s quoting of Eugene Debs. It’s a long time since anyone prominent in American politics mentioned him.

The speech was both sweeping and precise, by turns tender and truculent. Mamdani positioned himself once again as both an equity-minded reformer and an anti-establishment crusader. There were invocations of ‘hope’, and it was hard not to hear the echo of one of the slogans for Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign. ‘Tonight we have spoken in a clear voice: hope is alive,’ Mamdani said. ‘While we cast our ballots alone, we chose hope together. Hope over tyranny. Hope over big money and small ideas. Hope over despair. We won because New Yorkers allowed themselves to hope that the impossible could be made possible.’

He stayed on message, and repeated once again his three campaign promises of fast and free buses, universal childcare, and a rent freeze on rent-stabilised apartments. He called this triptych of initiatives ‘the most ambitious agenda to tackle the cost-of-living crisis that this city has seen since the days of Fiorello La Guardia’ – the pathbreaking leftist politician who governed the city from 1934 to 1946, in Mamdani’s view the best mayor New York has ever had.

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