Miss Haughtiness Herself

Quote of the Day

”Santa Claus has the right idea – visit people only once a year.”

• Viktor Borge

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bob Dylan | Song to Woody

Link

Long Read of the Day

Europe is under siege

Following on from Henry Farrell’s essay on Monday about the fact that the US is now an enemy of Europe, this long Substack post by Noah Smith spells out what could lie ahead for us. Europe, he argues, is currently under siege from three directions: Russia’s aggressive warfare; China’s expanding influence, support of Russia, and its matchless production capacity; and — potentially most critically — the US’s decreasing commitment to European interests.

Most Europeans (except for those in the Baltic States and Poland) probably think this kind of thinking is alarmist, or even hysterical. If so, Smith has an interesting way of waking them up:

How can Russia, a country of just 144 million people and $7 trillion in GDP (PPP), hope to overcome Europe, which has 520 million people and $33 trillion in GDP (including the UK), especially after Russia has expended so many of its young men and materiel in its war with Ukraine already? There are three answers here. The first is gray-zone warfare, including sabotage and political influence campaigns. But that’s only the beginning.

Russia’s second method for fighting Europe is what I call a “Ponzi empire” strategy. Russia has enslaved vast numbers of Ukrainians from the occupied regions of Ukraine to fight against the rest of their country. If Russia conquers the rest of Ukraine, it will similarly enslave the rest of the country’s population, and send them to fight against Poland, the Baltics, and Moldova. If they then defeat Poland, they will enslave the Poles and send them to fight against the next European target, and so on.

This is a very traditional Russian strategy. Enslaved Ukrainians were used to attack Poland in 1939. Enslaved Poles were forced to fight Russia’s wars in the days of the old Tsarist empire, and would have been forced to do so again as part of the Warsaw Pact. Just like zombies turn humans against their own, each slice of Europe that Russia can chop off ends up being turned against the rest.2

Russia’s final strategy for fighting Europe is to rely on Chinese assistance. Russia’s own industrial base is very weak, and relied heavily on imported European parts and machinery that has now been partially cut off. But Chinese tech has largely plugged that hole, as the Carnegie Endowment reports…

Anyone familiar with the history of Europe since 1900 will recognise the significance of Chinese support for Russia. The First and Second World Wars were won mainly because America was the world’s biggest manufacturer at the time. Its ability to build ships, tanks, aircraft and other military hardware on an astonishing scale was what made German defeat inevitable. But even if the US wanted to come to Europe’s aid in a future crisis, that manufacturing base has been hollowed out. China has replaced the US as the workshop of the world.

My commonplace booklet

 Revised Definitions of the Verb “To Google”

by Jessica Camargo on McSwiney’s Internet Tendency

1. To look something up quickly and then spend twenty minutes fact-checking the AI summary, only to find out that it was absolutely wrong.

2. To search for directions and two hours later end up with five items in your Amazon cart.

3. To receive results as ten-second videos that present a sponsored product as the only possible answer to your question.

4. To attempt to look up basic information about someone you recently met, you have to go through a sequence of “background check” sites, each showing a dramatic loading bar while it pretends to search. After fifteen minutes, it subtly suggests that criminal records may have been found, and you can view them now in exchange for a modest $24.95 monthly subscription…

It goes on. Click and growl about enshittification.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• The Land of Giants

Making only minor alterations to well established steel-framed tower design, we have created a series of towers that are powerful, solemn and variable. These iconic pylon-figures will become monuments in the landscape. Seeing the pylon-figures will become an unforgettable experience, elevating the towers to something more than merely a functional design of necessity.

Link

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On the road…

… in Burgundy, September 2012.

Quote of the Day

“Courage is the only virtue you can’t fake”.

• Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Pentangle | Goodbye Pork Pie Hat

Link

Long Read of the Day

 America has identified its greatest enemy: Western Europe

I can’t understand why European states continually fail to understand the implications of J.D. Vance’s speech to the Munich Security Conference. Which is why Henry Farrell’s latest essay on what the US National Security Strategy has become under Trump was so welcome. In it he distills what he learned from a recent closed-door, high-level conference he attended in Switzerland. And it’s salutary stuff.

Sample:

It has been clear for some while that the Trump administration has a … novel … understanding of America’s relationship with Europe. But it has not always been as clear as it ought be to European officials. These officials have often vacillated in response to previously unthinkable demands, sometimes making concessions, sometimes looking to preserve a little autonomy. Brief shocks (such as J.D. Vance’s speech at Munich) have not been sufficient to galvanize long term coherence.

[…]

The National Security Strategy declares that Europe is not just in economic decline, but faced with the prospect of “civilizational erasure.” The “European Union and other transnational bodies” are undermining “political liberty and sovereignty.” Europe is riddled with “censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition.” It is led by “unstable minority governments, many of which trample on basic principles of democracy to suppress opposition.” Most fundamentally, Europe is being turned into a zone of “strife” by migration policies, so that it will be “unrecognizable” in two decades. Certain NATO members will become “majority non-European”and no longer reliable allies. It doesn’t take much sophistication to decipher what terms like “majority non-European” are intended to mean.

However, the NSS says, America “cannot afford to write Europe off.” Instead, it will work to foster what it calls “genuine democracy, freedom of expression and unapologetic celebrations of European nations’ individual nations’ character and history.” America “encourages its political allies in Europe to promote this revival of spirit, and the growing influence of patriotic European parties indeed gives cause for great optimism.” To help all this along, the NSS says that America will undertake actions which include “[c]ultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations” and “[b]uilding up the healthy nations of Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe through commercial ties, weapons sales, political collaboration, and cultural and educational exchanges.”

This is, quite straightforwardly, a program for regime change in Europe, aimed at turning it into an illiberal polity. Accomplishing this transformation would involve undermining existing liberal governments in cahoots with Europe’s own far right, and turning Eastern Europe into an ideological wedge against its Western neighbors…

When Russia invaded Ukraine I remember thinking that the post-war “holiday from history” that we Europeans have enjoyed is over. Not only is the US no longer a potential ally, it’s turning into an adversary. We’re into an entirely new game.

Books, etc.

Ever since I first read Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens I’ve had the thought that maybe we humans were’t such a good thing for the planet. Henry Gee, a palaeontologist, hammers this message home in his new book. I was first alerted to it by a splendid episode after listening to a Past, Present, Future episode in which he talks to David Runciman. The (only) cheery thought is that we may still have 10,000 years to go before we’re extinct.

My commonplace booklet

From Niall Ferguson, writing about the AI feeding frenzy. He’s reminded of the Dr Suess story in which Sam-I-Am is continually trying to sell ‘Green Eggs and Ham’ to people.

When you come to think of it, there is often someone called Sam trying to sell you something you don’t initially want. In the 1920s, as I learned from Andrew Ross Sorkin’s 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History and How It Shattered a Nation, it was Sam Crowther’s article, “Everybody Ought to Be Rich” — exhorting housewives to buy stocks with margin credit.

Which reminds me, I need to read the Sorkin book.

Feedback

My use of the Frans Hal’s portrait of a wealthy Dutchman prompted Sheila Hayman (Whom God Preserve) to point me to an interesting commentaryon Dutch still-life painting.

“The skull,” she writes

is actually the least interesting and crudest symbol of it; the link goes into all the details but, crudely, flowers and fruit are often depicted in full bloom/on the point of decay, which is the signifier of mortality and the transience of life; insects on or in them, ’the worm in the bud’ , signify that no physical thing is without its flaw, and only the immortal can attain perfection; and scientific instruments, mirrors, etc signify the vanity and conceit of human ambition.

Everything in one of these elaborate paintings has a meaning, in addition to the technical virtuosity it displays.

The great thing about being a blogger, as I’ve often observed, is that you continually learn stuff from your readers.

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Memento mori

I’m writing a piece about what great wealth does to those who possess it. The context is the current crew of tech zillionaires in Silicon Valley and their pathetic obsessions with life extension or even ‘synthetic immortality’. And then I remembered Frans Hals’s 1612 portrait of a wealthy man of his time, with the skull signifying that nothing lasts forever. Carpe diem and all that.

Quote of the Day

”AI’s use by high-school and college students to complete written assignments, to ease or avoid the work of reading and writing, is a special case. It puts the process of deskilling at education’s core. To automate learning is to subvert learning.”

• Nicholas Carr

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Hot House Flowers | Lakes Of Ponchartrain

Link

Long Read of the Day

Tom Stoppard’s Ordinary Magic

Lovely tribute to a great playwright by Henry Oliver.

Stoppard’s genius was to make a confluence of the highbrow and the lowbrow. Jumpers is a satire of academic philosophy, written in the sort of dialogue critics inevitably call dazzlingly clever; but it contains a set of gymnasts, who make human pyramids on stage, and, at one point, the philosopher opens the door with half his face covered in shaving cream with a tortoise under his arm and a bow and arrow in his hand.

Such moments are the essence of farce, which demands the question: “how did we get here?”

Stoppard’s art is full of such moments, sometimes involving half-shaved philosophers and tortoises, sometimes moments of great beauty such as the head-spinning twists of Arcadia or the Joycean magic of Travesties, and sometimes with periods of true philosophy, as in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.

In these moments, the confluence of high and low is revealed as the essential structure of Stoppard’s work. We can never quite say what is farcical and what is serious…

Very nice piece.

Books, etc.

All the books Cory Doctorow reviewed in 2025

Córy Doctorow (Whom God Preserve) is both an inspiration and a cause of desperation to lesser beings. If you want to see why, cast an eye on his blog, his lectures, essays and novels. Or examine his list of what he read (and wrote about) in 2025. I often wonder when he sleeps, if indeed he does. The books I personally most regret not noticing from his current list are Ellen Ullman’s Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its Discontents and Ron Deibert’s Chasing Shadows: Cyber Espionage, Subversion and the Global Fight for Democracy. So you can perhaps guess what’s on my Xmas list.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Simon Willison’s fascinating blog post comparing the energy consumption of a brief exchange with an LLM with that of watching a Netflix stream. He’s such a careful and open researcher.

Feedback

Thanks to Ian Clark, who pointed me to “the (disputed) antipodean origins of the flat white”.

Looks like yours had chocolate on top, which I believe is a no-no, but then almost anything goes these days I suppose.

Yep.

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Into the Vortex

What happens when you ask for a ‘Flat White’. (I’ve often wondered where that name comes from.)

Quote of the Day

When asked what Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead was about he replied that it was about to make him a lot of money. He used to reply, when asked where he got his ideas from: “Harrods.”

• Henry Oliver, writing about Tom Stoppard (RIP)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart| Don Giovanni, K. 527 / Act 1 | Là ci darem la mano

Link

Verily, the Devil always has the best tunes.

Long Read of the Day

 Watching politicians failing yet and yet again: lessons from a life as an environment writer

Paul Brown was the Guardian’s environment correspondent from 1989 until 2005 and has written many times for the paper since. He submitted his final column last week after being diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. In it, he reflects on 45 years writing for the paper.

I first got to know him in 2011 when I invited him to Cambridge for a Term as a Press Fellow on a programme I run in my College, Wolfson. He spent his time with us writing an excoriating paper on what he called the “voodoo economics” of Britain’s nuclear industry, and what’s interesting about this piece is its suggestion that not much has changed.

There has been another – in my view, very sinister – development, which has put back the cause of action on climate change into very dangerous territory: the latest “nuclear renaissance”. I started covering the nuclear industry in the early 1980s, and like all well trained journalists was neutral then. Nuclear power was a success story because it was part of the National Coal Board and its true costs were hidden, not just from consumers but from the government.

The first nuclear renaissance took place in the late 1980s when the Sizewell B nuclear power station was being built. Several more were on the drawing board, but Thatcher demanded to know the cost and the resultant price of electricity to consumers, and was so enraged that she and the government had been lied to about the real cost that she cancelled the rest of the programme. It was one of my more memorable stories.

At least two more “renaissance” moments have come and gone, mostly also on cost grounds, but now Keir Starmer’s government has gone completely gung-ho on nuclear – to the utter dismay of many environmental campaigners.

The government subsidies are simply huge: a nuclear tax is being levied on hard pressed consumers. What is the government thinking of? The fossil fuel industry, which has thrown its weight behind nuclear power, is of course delighted; all these decades of new construction without any electricity to show for it gives at least another decade or two of unabated burning gas. It is no accident that Centrica invested in Sizewell C – after all, it is primarily a gas company. With Sizewell C likely to take 10 to 15 years to build, that is a lot of extra gas being burned and profits for shareholders.

It’s a sobering story by a fine journalist and well worth reading. I have an eerie sense that governments’ historical infatuation with nuclear power (which, remember, was going to be “too cheap to meter”) is now being reenacted with ‘AI’.

Books, etc.

This is a truly beautiful book. It tells the remarkable story of a remote Irish island nearly untouched by time in the first half of the twentieth century, and of the adventurous men and women who visited and were inspired by it. I was reminded of the book when we were in Dingle last weekend. What’s remarkable about it is the way the author, an American writer and academic, developed such a sympathetic and intuitive understanding of the community that lived on the island until the hardships implicit in their way of life eventually led to their evacuation to the mainland in the 1950s.

Feedback

Many thanks to everyone who wrote in after I got Monday’s date wrong. All the suggested interpretations, including smoking too much dope and an excess of Irish whisky were wide of the mark (except perhaps for “ageing”). I’ve always admired Sam Johnson’s celebrated response to the indignant lady who asked him how he could possibly have defined ‘pastern’ as ‘the knee of a horse’: “Ignorance, Madam, pure ignorance”. In my case, for ‘ignorance’ read ‘incompetence’.

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”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.

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