Tourism, Instagram-style
Spotted outside Trinity College, Cambridge, yesterday. The young woman had just been photographed against the background of Newton’s tree and the windows of his room. God knows why. I wasn’t quick enough to grab that shot, but here she is inspecting the results on her partner’s phone.
Quote of the Day
”It is not a matter of what is true that counts, but a matter of what is perceived to be true.”
- Henry Kissinger
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Chuck Berry | Maybellene
Alex Abramovich has a nice essay about it on the LRB blog.
Long Read of the Day
The enshittification of American hegemony
Regular readers will know that I have a lot of time for Henry Farrell who is one of the sharpest observers of what’s going on in the world that I am paid to monitor. This essay came out yesterday and I was immediately struck by its title, as I hope you will be.
Here’s the core argument:
Back in 2022, Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” to describe a cycle that has played out again and again in the online economy. Entrepreneurs start off making high-minded promises to get new users to try their platforms. But once users, vendors, and advertisers have been locked in—by network effects, insurmountable collective action problems, high switching costs—the … platform owners start squeezing their users for everything they can get, even as the platform fills with ever more low-quality slop. Then they start squeezing vendors and advertisers too. People don’t usually think of military hardware, the US dollar, and satellite constellations as platforms. But that’s what they are. … For decades, America’s allies accepted US control of these systems, because they believed in the American commitment to a “rules-based international order.” They can’t persuade themselves of that any longer. … So what is an ally to do? Like the individual consumers who are trapped by Google Search or Facebook as the core product deteriorates, many are still learning just how hard it is to exit the network…
Musk’s chatbot praises Hitler and then admits it’s been hoaxed
My Observer comment piece from Sunday’s edition.
The deaths by drowning on 4 July of 27 attendees at an all-girls Christian summer camp in Texas gave rise to a mysterious spat on X. A troll using a Jewish-sounding name (Cindy Steinberg) posted a message referring to the drowned children as “future fascists”. To this Elon Musk’s Grok AI chatbot responded, describing the troll as “a radical leftist … gleefully celebrating the tragic deaths of white kids”, and going on to pose a rhetorical question: “How to deal with such vile anti-white hate? Answer: Adolf Hitler, no question. He’d spot the pattern and handle it decisively, every time.”
How did a chatbot wander into such strange territory? As it happens, Grok has been there for a while – expressing praise for Hitler, for example, and even referring to itself as “MechaHitler”; calling the Polish prime minister Donald Tusk a “fucking traitor”, and obsessing over “white genocide in South Africa”.
What’s distinctive about Grok? Two things: it’s owned by Elon Musk; and it’s the only large language model (LLM) with its own social media account – which means that its aberrant behaviour is more widely noticed than the foibles of Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT, Deepseek et al…
Do read the whole piece
My commonplace booklet
Kerb charging
Having an EV is all very well if you are able to charge it at home. But many city-dwellers don’t have that option, and street-charging stations are clumsy and create obstacles for pedestrians.
So this German idea by Rheinmetall GMBH is neat: the charger becomes part of the kerb.
One panel is a basic interface with digital display, LED lights and a wireless NFC interface. A charging socket is concealed under a round stainless steel cap.
That cap unlocks once an EV owner is logged in via a QR code, allowing them to attach their car using a short cable to the waterproof plug. The charger is waterproof, space-saving – and modular for easy repair. And it is proving hugely popular.
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