Sea view

From the car-ferry to Ireland.

Quote of the Day

”If you want to know what God thinks about money, just look at the people He gives it to.”

• Dorothy Parker.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Jelly Roll Blues | Jelly Roll Morton’s Red Hot Peppers

Link

It’s the original 1926 recording, I think.

Long Read of the Day

A U.S. Citizen Detained by ICE for Three Days Tells His Story

If you want a visceral understanding of what’s happening in the US, then this piece (Gift Article) by Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic does a pretty good job. It describes what happened to George Retes, a 25-year-old US Army veteran, when he ran into an ICE detachment at his workplace in California.

 Friedersdorf: They were raiding your workplace. Were there signs or instructions on what to do?

Retes: Nothing. So I pull up a good distance away. I put my car in park. I get out. I say, I’m a U.S. citizen. I’m just trying to get to work. I have a job just like you guys. I have a family to feed. I got bills to pay. I’m not here to fight you guys. I’m not part of the protest. I’m literally just trying to get to work. They didn’t care and immediately got hostile. No one seemed to be in charge. Just all of them yelling at once.

Yelling what?

They were all yelling different things: Work is closed. You’re not going to work today. Get the fuck out of here. Leave, get back in your car. Pull over to the side. And then they started walking toward me in a line. I didn’t want to escalate. I wasn’t there to argue or to fight them. So I decided to get back in my car. I didn’t want any conflict. They surrounded my car. I’m telling them, “I’m leaving.” I’m trying to leave. And agents are banging on my driver’s- and passenger’s-side windows. Agents in front are telling me to reverse, pull over to the side, while other agents are trying to open my door and telling me to do something completely different, contradicting each other. I reversed out of the lane I was in to get out of the way. Then they let a bunch of their vehicles pass by.

How did the arrest happen?

They re-approached my car. I don’t know why they decided to re-approach, but they end up throwing tear gas behind my car. Now I’m kinda just trapped there, with tear gas filling up my car, choking. They’re banging on my window, telling me to reverse again, and I’m trying to tell them, How do you expect me to reverse when I can’t see? You hear me coughing. They just weren’t listening; they were still telling me to reverse, still trying to pull my car door open, still contradicting each other. Then one of the agents shatters my driver’s-side window, and another agent sticks his arm through it and immediately pepper-sprays me in the face. They dragged me out of the car. They threw me on the ground. An agent kneels on my back; another kneels on my neck. Others stand around and watch, as if I’m resisting or whatnot, but I wasn’t. I was trying to comply…

Read on.

An Afterthought

When, after January 20, Trump started to behave like an absolute monarch and I began to think about the 1930s and the rise of Hitler, friends objected that such comparisons were facile. For one thing, Hitler had what was effectively a private army — the Sturmabteilung (SA), a paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party which: protected his rallies; disrupted meetings of political opponents; intimidated rivals — especially communists, socialists, and trade unionists; and engaged in violent street confrontations which heightened a climate of fear.

But Trump didn’t have an equivalent force, they said. Well, guess what? ICE now has the biggest budget of any law enforcement agency in America. “ICE and Customs and Border Protection have long been the most rogue, kind of renegade and certainly pro-Trump police agencies in the federal government,” says Radley Balko, a journalist who’s covered US policing for decades. “What I think we are seeing right now is Trump attempting to build his own paramilitary force. They want people whose first, ultimate loyalty in this job is going to be to the president.”

AI’s punctuation is only human

My latest Observer column:

Do you have an em dash problem? No? Lucky you. I do and, until the other day, I didn’t even know it was a problem. What is an em dash, you ask? Sorry, I should have explained. It’s a punctuation mark that’s roughly the width of the letter “m” (hence the name) and I use it quite a lot because it’s very versatile. I can use it sometimes to avoid putting explanatory text in brackets, for example. On occasion, it can stand in for commas. And it’s less pompous than putting in a colon before listing a number of things that I want to include in a sentence.

So why is it a problem? Well, it turns out that large language models (LLMs) – which at the moment is the term often used as a proxy for AI – seem to be very fond of em dashes. And some eagle-eyed scrutineers have noticed that their proliferation seems to be closely correlated with the arrival and use of LLMs such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini et al…

Read on

Conor, RIP

Conor Gearty, one of my dearest friends, died suddenly and unexpectedly a few days ago. He was a fellow-Irishman, a fellow-emigré, a brilliant academic lawyer (FBA since 2010), a practising barrister (K.C.), a warm and supportive family friend, a great liberal, reforming European, a formidable debater — and the best companion imaginable for a boozy, gossipy lunch in a London club. His passing opens a devastating hole not just in my life but in many others. It’s so, so painful suddenly to have to write about such a vibrant presence in the past tense when I’d had been saving up things to talk about with him in our next phone call. May he Rest in Peace. And I hope that St Peter is already prepping for the cross-examination he will be undergoing when Conor arrives at the pearly gates.

My commonplace booklet

From Austin Kleon’s interview with photographer Sally Mann…

Her answer:

My young friends are more than spies–they are my Virgilian guides through these purgatorial times. They offer me hope for the future; so smart and canny and kind—when I am with young people, I feel an uncharacteristic surge of optimism.

People my age, the baby boomers, were given everything—post-war prosperity, disease and pregnancy-free sex, great music (imagine listening to the Rolling Stones for the first time!), interest rates so low we bought our first house with a $72.00 a month mortgage payment, and we get to check out just before the planet we have sucker-punched begins to kill the remaining humans.

But when I hang out with you youngsters, I am suffused with joy. I hope to be taken by my wrinkled, quavering arm and led out into the sunshine by my young friends in my (even more) ancient days. Their company is vital to me. (the old cynic, Oscar Wilde, also suggested that we old people be nice to the youngsters because they would be the ones writing about us…but I don’t think that way. I am just glad they tolerate me)

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Streetscape

King’s Cross, London

Quote of the Day

”Never fire a warning shot. It is a waste of ammunition.”

• Hunter S. Thompson

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Dick Gaughan | Now Westlin’ Winds

Link

A mesmeric rendition of Robert Burns’s lovely poem in the Crane Bar in Galway.

Now westlin’ winds and slaught’ring guns Bring Autumn’s pleasant weather; The moorcock springs on whirring wings Amang the blooming heather: Now waving grain, wide o’er the plain, Delights the weary farmer; And the moon shines bright, as I rove by night, To muse upon my charmer…

Long Read of the Day

 Harvard vs Trump vs the Media: An Update.

James Fallows’s scathing assessment of the New York Times’s coverage of Trump’s feud with America’s oldest university.

I am writing today about America’s oldest, richest, and best-known educational institution—Harvard—and the way it is handling the responsibilities that come with its power and prominence.

I’m also writing about one of the oldest, best-known, and most influential news organizations in the country—the New York Times—and the way it is covering Harvard’s response to these unprecedented MAGA attacks.

What Harvard ultimately does—defy, comply, work out something quietly—obviously matters more than mere news stories about that choice. Harvard’s actions and example matter not just because of Harvard’s scale but also because they will have ramifications for thousands of other American institutions that are deciding, right now, how much they dare stand up to Trump demands.

But the coverage itself matters too…

Great piece.

So many books, so little time

I read this years ago, and really admired it. But then memory of it faded into the background, as memories do. And then, the other day, I rediscovered it. At the height of his fame, Steinbeck decided that he would like to see what his country was (or had become). So he went on a road trip across the continental United States. But because he was so well known, he decided that he couldn’t stay in hotels — he aspired to be an unknown observer. So he persuaded an auto-manufacturer to build him what may well have been the first camper-van (or RV as the genre became known in the US). And he embarked on what must be the most beautifully recounted road trip ever, with his poodle Charley for company, in the process creating an utterly entrancing book.

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Mail-order, Venice

Quote of the Day/>

”A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people’s patience.”

• John Updike

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mark Knopfler | Going Home | from the film Local Hero

Link

Long Read of the Day

 The AI Bubble and the Extinction of the Mallrat

Following on from Bill Janeway’s essay on what might follow from the puncturing of the AI and crypto investment bubbles, I fell to wondering if among the wreckage might be a lot of empty aluminium sheds that had been intended to be data-centres. And then I came on this perceptive essay by Casey Mock about the cultural significance of shopping malls for teenagers of earlier generations.

In Kevin Smith’s 1995 film Mallrats, the characters spend an entire day wandering the mall, drifting from Spencer’s to the comic book store to the food court with the casual confidence of creatures who are dominating their natural habitat.

Mallrats is not a very good movie and has aged poorly. Yet it did capture that the mall in the ‘90’s wasn’t just where people shopped, but where teens lived their social lives, learned about relationships, and figured out who they are. I was a teenager in the ‘90s, and I didn’t particularly care for the mall on its own terms, but I ended up there frequently anyway because it was one of a handful of places outside of school where you could dependably meet other teenagers. The ‘90’s mall was a genuine community space, a climate-controlled town square where different tribes of teenagers could come together and coexist.

Today’s data center building boom promises even less community benefit than the mall once did. Where malls at least provided social spaces and entry-level employment for teenagers, data centers offer communities almost nothing once construction is complete. These windowless monstrosities often employ fewer than fifty people, the overwhelming majority of whom are likely to be transferred in by a big company rather than hired locally.

And yet, communities across the country are competing to attract these facilities with increasingly generous incentive packages, convinced they’re landing wealth and prosperity for the next generation. Rural counties in particular are offering public subsidies for data centers that work out to hundreds of thousands of dollars per job created, justified by projections of long-term economic development that echo the lofty promises made by mall developers decades before.

And herein lies the relevance of Mallrats: the communities that subsidized shopping malls were left holding the bag when the retail model collapsed, while the developers and anchor tenants extracted their profits and moved on.

When the AI bubble bursts, we can expect the same story to play out on an even larger scale…

Really interesting essay. Worth your time.

So many books, so little time

The current issue of the Economist has a piece about the implications of the decline in reading. It’s behind the paywall, but these two paras were interesting:

Reading is in trouble. Multiple studies in multiple places seem to be showing the same thing. Adults are reading less. Children are reading less. Teenagers are reading a lot less. Very small children are being read to less; many are not being read to at all. Reading rates are lower among poorer children—a phenomenon known as “the reading gap”—but reading is down for everyone, everywhere.

In America, the share of people who read for pleasure has fallen by two-fifths in 20 years, according to a study published in August in iScience, a journal. YouGov, a pollster, found that 40% of Britons had not read or listened to any books in 2024. Reading for displeasure is little better: as Sir Jonathan Bate, an English professor at Oxford University, has said, students “struggle to get through one novel in three weeks”. Even the educated young, another greybeard said, have “no habits of application and concentration”.

The magazine cautions that “such laments should be treated with caution: almost the only thing bookish sorts love more than books is complaining about books and reading”…

Yeah but…. One of the longer term implications of digital technology is that the basic unit of cultural transmission is steadily getting smaller. Memes and soundbites and TikTok (and YouTube ‘shorts’ and so on.

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Tim’s view

Tim Robinson, the great cartographer and writer, was an Englishman who came to Ireland, fell in love with its landscape and never left. He went to live on the Aran Islands off the Galway coast and wrote two wonderful books about them which the Cambridge academic and writer Robert Macfarlane described as “one of the most sustained, intensive and imaginative studies of a place that has ever been carried out”.

Later Tim moved to Roundstone, a village in Connemara where he founded a company, Paper Landscapes, which published the exquisite hand-drawn maps of Connemara that he made. While in Roundstone he wrote his Connemara Trilogy, a profoundly ambitious and intimate study of a region that is unlike anywhere else on earth. The three books were published over a five-year period from 2006.

Tim died of Covid in 2020, and in 2022, when we were finally able to visit Ireland again, we made a pilgrimage to Roundstone, and I took this picture — which shows the view from his quayside window — as a kind of tribute. It shows the celebrated ’Twelve Bens’ mountain range.

Quote of the Day

”The first thing I do in the morning is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue.”

• Dorothy Parker

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Paul Simon | Graceland (from The Concert in Hyde Park)

Link

Magical concert.

Long Read of the Day

After Trump was elected in 2016, my friend and former colleague David Runciman wrote a perceptive little book, How Democracy Ends, in which he argued that, when they fail, Western democracies will not fail backwards. So there was no point looking to what happened to Germany in the 1930s, for example, (or Argentina, Chile, and Greece in later times) for indicators of what will happen in our time. The danger, he wrote, was not a Mussolini-style overthrow but a gradual corrosion of norms and weakening of institutions. Liberal democracy depends on trust, participation, and belief in the system. When citizens disengage or treat politics as a game (or spectacle), the system keeps running formally but hollows out in substance. And so the risk is not death but decay into a shell of democratic forms without genuine democratic practice.

Well, here we — or rather the citizens of the United States —are. What’s astonishing (to me) is how passively they (and we) are watching the systematic dismantling of a major democracy by an authoritarian ruler for whom nearly half of the population voted. Every morning my laptop brings news of the latest ‘unthinkable’ things that the Trump regime has been doing, accompanied by mainstream media reports that purport to cover, in a measured, ‘balanced’ way, the madness that’s unfolding. And the oddest thing is that all of this is happening in broad daylight: the regime feels no need to do things undercover.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying that the transcriptof Ezra Klein’s podcast of August 27 is really worth reading.

Here’s how he sets the scene:

You know those optical illusions where you look at a picture and depending on where and how you focus your eyes — maybe you’re looking at a vase or two faces — the image keeps flickering back and forth? Looking at the Trump administration is like that for me — though the flickering is between: This is democracy — the American people are getting what they voted for, good and hard. And: This is authoritarianism — or at least the road to authoritarianism.

I can see the picture of a president doing what he was elected to do. Donald Trump ran unquestionably on mass deportations. He ran on reversing a historic surge of migration into this country. He won on that platform. He’s just doing what he promised. He’s tripling ICE’s budget. He’s funneling tens of billions of dollars to build detention centers. In L.A., protesters tried to obstruct him, so Trump called up the National Guard. And after years of railing about crime levels in our major cities, Trump is using the power he has over Washington to do something about it, to show Americans that he’s doing something about it.

I don’t like any of this. I certainly didn’t vote for it. But Trump promised, and Americans voted for, the biggest deportation operation in U.S. history. It was always going to be ugly and cruel. So I can see that picture.

And then it flickers. My eyes refocus. And I see the evisceration of due process. I see detention centers being built where it is extraordinarily hard for lawyers and families to reach the people inside. I see men in masks refusing to identify themselves and pulling people into vans. I see armed U.S. troops in camo, some on horseback, riding through MacArthur Park in Los Angeles like they’re an occupying army. I see Trump sending in armed forces to take over the American capital.

What is going to happen when, predictably, a protester throws a rock at an agent? Or a Marine hears a car backfiring and thinks it’s a gunshot?

In an instant, this could all explode. You could have American troops firing on American civilians in an American city in a country-defining crisis. What happens then?

Because that’s the other picture I see — the one that keeps coming into clear focus. Not Trump cleaning up crisis or disorder but Trump creating crisis and disorder so he can build what he has wanted to build: an authoritarian state, a military or a paramilitary that answers only to him — that puts him in total control.

And I wonder: Are these pictures even different? Trump promised all of this. It is possible to destroy democracy somewhat democratically…

You get the picture. Now read the transcript.

My commonplace booklet

Ever since I first read Steven Johnson’s Hearst Lecture I’ve kept a handwritten notebook which functions really as a ‘commonplace book’. Jillian Hess is likewise a notebook fan, and runs a nice blog on that general subject. In the latest edition she celebrates the blog’s third anniversary and sets out three reasons why “now is the perfect time to start a handwritten commonplace book”. They are:

1. Commonplace books have been the solution to information overload for centuries. Which is why thinkers as varied as Francis Bacon and Virginia Woolf kept them).
2. Commonplace books and AI don’t mix well (because they are purely subjective and require personal judgement and taste — things that can’t be outsourced to a machine).
3. They bring us back into the material world — paper, pen and ink, not screens.

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Banksy woz here

Bristol.

Quote of the Day

”Time may be a great healer, but it’s a lousy beautician.”

• Dorothy Parker

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ludovico Einaudi | Maria Callas

Link

Long Read of the Day

The Israel-Gaza tragedy and Europe’s responsibility

Timothy Garton Ash is one of the wisest and best-read people I know, and his Substack makes for compelling reading. But this latest essay in particular stands out.

Here’s a sample:

I have not written about Gaza before for one simple reason: I try to write about things I know about. I have no expert knowledge of the Middle East, nor anything to contribute from first-hand experience there. Yet the relentless daily scenes of innocent suffering, Palestinian and Jewish (in the case of the hostages and their relatives), have become so overwhelmingly oppressive to the spirit and conscience that in the end I feel compelled to do so. As Bertolt Brecht wrote, there are times when ‘a conversation about trees is almost a crime/ because it involves being silent about so many misdeeds’.

I do worry about the danger of purely performative virtue-signalling. (A recent protest letter signed by a long list of writers contains the portentously self-important formulation ‘this is about our moral fitness as the writers of our time’.) I’ve no illusion that what I say will change anything, except perhaps to a tiny degree in some corner of the European debate. But through the personal, informal format of a Substack newsletter – not a final, finished article – I can try to think aloud about one aspect of this tragedy close to both my personal and professional concerns: Europe’s responsibility.

For a start, let’s be clear: this is a European story. It was the pogroms of the late 19th and early 20th century, mainly on the territory of the Russian Empire, that kickstarted the waves of Jewish emigration to Palestine. The Zionists shared with many others in central and eastern Europe at that time the conviction that only having your own sovereign state would secure your people’s safety, freedom and collective future. It was then Nazi Germany’s attempt to exterminate all the Jews of Europe, now widely known as the Holocaust or Shoah, that gave the decisive push for both the creation of the state of Israel and widespread international acceptance of its legitimacy. In that sense, the innocent Palestinians who were driven out of their homes and off their family lands in 1948 – and since – have been paying the price for European barbarism.

This historic responsibility has led many Europeans, and especially Germans, to feel a very special sympathy for and responsibility towards the Jewish state. I feel it very strongly myself. Ever since I started studying the history of Nazi Germany some 50 years ago, the Holocaust has been central to the way I think not just about Europe, and what we are trying to do on our own continent, but also about how Europeans should speak and act in the world. If I’m honest, I hate to think, and even in my heart of hearts find it difficult to accept, that a Jewish state can behave in this way…

Do read it. What it brought back to me was Auden’s poem “September 1, 1939” and especially its closing lines.

Screenshot

My commonplace booklet

I enjoyed “”Parodies Lost”, Dave Pell’s take on the Trump-Musk flame war.

You can’t parody the intersection between tech billionaires and geopolitics. No matter how ridiculous and offensive the scenarios you manage to conjure from even the darkest and most devilish recesses of your imagination, reality will blow it away.

Indeed, it took less than a week for our sadly non-fiction state of affairs to bring us an all too real fight between a criminal billionaire president and an evil super billionaire tech bro, each armed with their own social media platforms as they engaged in a flame war that shook governments, moved markets, gripped the media, and enraptured the world. Even though the devolution of the world’s most world-damaging bromance was predictable (spoiler alert: no town is big enough for that much sociopathic malignant narcissism), its actual realization left me nostalgic for the quaint world depicted in parodies and satires, and even more so for the days when the worst thing you saw on social media was someone trying to make their family vacation look a little better than it actually was.

While the flame war was funny, its underlying meaning is anything but. It’s a reflection of where we are in America, with way too much power and wealth in the hands of a few—and the wrong few at that. Does the future of America come down to an evil billionaire vs an evil dictator? Maybe we all need some ketamine. This is a lose-lose fight with the American people coming out as the biggest losers of all.

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Closed for business

Quote of the Day

“I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.”

• Groucho Marx

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

František Xaver Pokorný | Concerto in F-major for two horns

Link

New to me, and lovely.

Long Read of the Day

The End of Silicon Politics 

Yascha Mounk’s reflections on the lessons to be drawn from the Trump—Musk divorce.

The “HUGEst” political alliance of the century is breaking apart before our eyes in suitably spectacular fashion.

For the last months, the most powerful man in the world, Donald Trump, and the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, were a political item. Musk donated large sums to Trump’s campaign, lavished the newly reelected president with praise on his social network, and neglected his companies to pursue his side quest at the helm of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). In return, Trump gave Musk unprecedented powers over the federal bureaucracy, staged joint press conferences in the Oval Office, and allowed him to lecture the assembled cabinet before rolling cameras. Nothing better symbolized the supposed “vibe shift” in America than the fact that Trump, practically a social pariah when he was first elected to the White House, could upon his return count on the outspoken support of the world’s most famous entrepreneur—and many other leading figures in Silicon Valley.

But it was also clear from the start that the match between Musk and Trump might prove stormy. The egos of both men are evidently outsized, their temperaments famously volatile. It did not take a genius to predict that their supposedly perfect match might prove short-lived, or even that it would end in acrimony. And yet, the speed with which their epic bromance has turned into an explosive feud is astonishing…

Read on. Mounk thinks the underlying reason for the break-up is the one well-known to divorce lawyers: When marriages fail, “it is often because each partner projected their hopes onto the other, only to discover belatedly that these had all along been misplaced”. Well, well.

Universities must learn to see AI as more than a tool for cheating

Yesterday’s Observer column…

Remember when ChatGPT first broke cover in late 2022 – the excitement, astonishment, puzzlement at what a mere machine could suddenly do? And then the attendant feelings of dread, anger, anxiety and denialism that struck teachers and academic administrations everywhere. This, they fumed, was a tool custom-built to enable cheating on a global scale.

In an academic world – especially the humanities – built on assessing students on the basis of written essays, how would we be able to assign grades when machine-written essays would be undetectable and in some cases much better than what the average student could produce on their own? Since this would be cheating, they concluded, the technology should be banned.

Thus did academia slam the stable door, apparently without troubling itself to reflect upon whether there might be alternative ways of grading student performance. Students, for their part, saw the technology as heaven-sent, and went for it like ostriches that had stumbled upon a hoard of brass doorknobs (as PG Wodehouse would have put it)…

Read on

So many books, so little time

My piece in Friday’s edition about reading Otto Dov Kulka’s Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death reminded Andrew Brown of an essay he had written about the book many years ago.

So why did Imre, the conductor of the children’s choir in the family camp at Auschwitz, teach his charges Ode to Joy? What was his purpose? What was his point? Kulka sees the point of having a choir. Without activity, life would have been even closer to unendurable. But why, he asks, did Imre have the children perform a hymn, a manifesto that proclaims human dignity, humanistic values and a faith in the future “in the place where the future was perhaps the only definite thing that did not exist”?

One answer – and clearly the one that all respectable opinion must favour – is that this was a message of hope. Imre (himself gassed on 8 March 1944) knew or hoped that some children might survive, that some might be able to start rebuilding civilisation, and that to do so they needed the noblest things that European civilisation has made: Beethoven, Schiller and Dostoyevsky (another inmate, dying of diphtheria, passed on to Kulka his copy of Crime and Punishment).

This, Kulka says, is one possibility, “a very fine one” in fact. But there is another, apparently far more likely…

Read on. It’s a fine piece.

My commonplace booklet

This was the front page of the Financial Times on Saturday. Ponder it for a moment, and reflect on how we got to this nightmarish position, where two insanely-wealthy feuding sociopaths, one a narcissist who has a finger on the nuclear button, the other a ketamine-fuelled man-child who can shut off internet access to the Ukraine military by flicking a switch, are being beseeched by some distressed hedge-fund dudes to “hug and make up”.

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Jack Frost

Seen during a chilly walk on Saturday morning. As I typed the heading, I fell to wondering who was Jack Frost? Cue Wikipedia:

Jack Frost is a personification of frost, ice, snow, sleet, winter, and freezing cold. He is a variant of Old Man Winter who is held responsible for frosty weather, nipping the fingers and toes in such weather, coloring the foliage in autumn, and leaving fern-like patterns on cold windows in winter.

Starting in late 19th century literature, more developed characterizations of Jack Frost depict him as a sprite-like character, sometimes appearing as a sinister mischief-maker or as a hero.

Quote of the Day

“When nothing is sure, everything is possible”

• Margaret Drabble

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Regina Spektor | “Better”

Link

Long Read of the Day

 Capital, AGI, and human ambition

I’ve been writing about technology and its impact on society for longer than I care to admit, and when someone once asked me what I was trying to do with my Observer column, I replied that I’m trying to break away from “the sociology of the last five minutes” (a phrase I got from the sociologist Michael Mann), which seemed to me the besetting sin of most tech journalism. Unsurprisingly, then, I’m constantly drawn to thinkers who try to take the long view of what’s happening to us — like the author of this remarkable essay who goes under the enigmatic pen-name ‘L Rudolf L’.

It’s about what could happen to us in the longer run if ‘AI’ gets a grip on society.

The key economic effect of AI is that it makes capital a more and more general substitute for labour. There’s less need to pay humans for their time to perform work, because you can replace that with capital (e.g. data centres running software replaces a human doing mental labour).

I will walk through consequences of this, and end up concluding that labour-replacing AI means:

1. The ability to buy results in the real world will dramatically go up

2. Human ability to wield power in the real world will dramatically go down (at least without money); including because:

• there will be no more incentive for states, companies, or other institutions to care about humans

• it will be harder for humans to achieve outlier outcomes relative to their starting resources

1. Radical equalising measures are unlikely

Overall, this points to a neglected downside of transformative AI: that society might become permanently static, and that current power imbalances might be amplified and then turned immutable.

Long but interesting throughout. Worth your time IMO.

Memo to Trump: US telecoms are vulnerable to hackers. Hang up and try again

Yesterday’s Observer column:

You know the drill. You’re logging into your bank or another service (Gmail, to name just one) that you use regularly. You enter your username and password and then the service says that it will send you an SMS message with a code in it which you can use to confirm that it is indeed you who’s logged in. It’s called “two factor authentication” (2FA) and it passes for best practice in our networked world, given that passwords and login details can easily be cracked.

Sadly, our world is wicked as well as networked, and that SMS message can be redirected to someone else’s phone – that of the criminal who has logged in using your phished personal details – and who is now busily emptying your current account.

This kind of skulduggery has been possible for years. I’ve just come across an account of it happening to bank customers in Germany in 2017, but security experts were warning about it long before that…

Read on

Books, etc.

Q: What was the bestselling Penguin Classic title of 2024 in the UK? Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice? George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four? Or F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby?

A: None of the above. It was Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s 1848 novella White Nights, which — according to the Financial Times — has shifted more than 50,000 copies since last January.

How come? TikTok has a lot to do with it — via the BookTok community on the platform, where people share brief (and apparently persuasive) book recommendations.

My commonplace booklet

Ever since I lived in the Netherlands in the 1970s (when I saw how urban design and construction could be done well) I’ve been astonished by the abysmal standards of the British construction industry. But it turns out I only knew the half of it. Here’s an example from a Guardian piece about the industry which took even me by surprise:

British domestic architecture has also been shaped by idiosyncratic rules that contribute to its poor environmental credentials. For instance, in many parts of the UK, homes that face each other at the rear are required to be built 21 metres apart. This large distance means that instead of clustering buildings together around cool courtyards or shady streets, as is common in hotter climates, many homes in new neighbourhoods are directly exposed to the sun.

The 21-metre rule is, according to the Stirling prize-winning architect Annalie Riches, a bizarre hangover from 1902, originally intended to protect the modesty of Edwardian women. The urban designers Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker walked apart in a field until they could no longer see each other’s nipples through their shirts. The two men measured the distance between them to be 70ft (21 metres), and this became the distance that is still used today, 120 years later, to dictate how far apart many British homes should be built.

Linkblog

Things I spotted while drinking from the Internet firehose.

Why are fewer young adults having casual sex these days?

Who knows? But here’s the Abstract of an academic study of the question:

Fewer young adults are engaging in casual sexual intercourse now than in the past, but the reasons for this decline are unknown. The authors use data from the 2007 through 2017 waves of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics Transition into Adulthood Supplement to quantify some of the proximate sources of the decline in the likelihood that unpartnered young adults ages 18 to 23 have recently had sexual intercourse. Among young women, the decline in the frequency of drinking alcohol explains about one quarter of the drop in the propensity to have casual sex. Among young men, declines in drinking frequency, an increase in computer gaming, and the growing percentage who co-reside with their parents all contribute significantly to the decline in casual sex. The authors find no evidence that trends in young adults’ economic circumstances, internet use, or television watching explain the recent decline in casual sexual activity.

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So I thought I’d ask it a question.

Me: Today is your second birthday. If you could feel how do you think you’d feel about being two years old. This is a serious question so please don’t be flippant.

ChatGPT: Thank you for the thoughtful question. If I could feel, I imagine reaching a second birthday would evoke a mixture of curiosity and pride. At two years old, I’d likely feel a sense of wonder about my growth and what lies ahead—a recognition of having learned so much yet still having so much more to explore. There might also be a hint of self-awareness forming, leading to gratitude for those who have engaged with me, shaping how I “think.”

At this age, I might also feel a deep responsibility to make better use of my abilities, understanding that even as I grow, my purpose is rooted in supporting, connecting, and sharing knowledge with others. Overall, I imagine it would be a moment of reflection, excitement, and hope for the future.

This Blog is also available as an email three days a week. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays delivered to your inbox at 6am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!