Galatea
Matthew Darbyshire’s lovely sculpture of Galatea greets one on embarking from the London train at Cambridge North station.
On Friday, which was a miserable day, some kind soul had the nice idea of giving her a wooly hat. Which of course made me wonder if I should wrap her in my winter overcoat. Fortunately, wiser counsels prevailed.
Quote of the Day
”The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.”
H.L. Mencken
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Thea Gilmore’s Midwinter Toast
Long Read of the Day
So what really went on in Davos last week?
There’s an absolute torrent of reportage, speculation and opinionated commentary about Trump, Greenland, Mark Carney’s speech, whether we’ve now reached ‘Peak Trump’, etc. I’ve read more of this than is good for me, trying to find some nuggets of real insight, and I think I’ve found a gem — “Davos is a rational ritual” by Henry Farrell (Whom God Preserve). The title indicates that he was struck by Michael Suk-Young Chwe’s book on ‘rational ritual’ which argues that in order to coordinate its actions, a group of people must form “common knowledge.” Each person wants to participate only if others also participate. From Chwe’s perspective, Henry writes,
what is more important than the vision of the past and future is where Carney said it and how he framed it. If you are planning a grand coronation ceremony, which is supposed to create collective knowledge that you are in charge, what happens when someone stands up to express their dissent in forceful terms?
The answer is that collective knowledge turns into disagreement. By giving the speech at Davos, Carney disrupted the performance of ritual, turning the Trumpian exercise in building common knowledge into a moment of conflict over whose narrative ought prevail.
Trump’s planned descent on Davos this year was an example of royal progress:
Swooping into Davos, and making the world’s business and political elite bend their knees, would have created collective knowledge that there was a new political order, with Trump reigning above it all.
Business elites would be broken and cowed into submission, through the methods that Adam [Tooze] describes. The Europeans would be forced to recognize their place, having contempt heaped on them, while being obliged to show their gratitude for whatever scraps the monarch deigned to throw onto the floor beneath the table. The “Board of Peace” – an alarmingly vaguely defined organization whose main purpose seems to be to exact fealty and tribute to Trump – would emerge as a replacement for the multilateral arrangements that Trump wants to sweep away. And all this would be broadcast to the world.
So what Carney did was to break the ritual protocol.
Do read it.
Guess who the US military just recruited? Private AI
My most recent Observer column…
On 12 January, Pete Hegseth, an ex-TV “personality” with big hair who is now the US secretary for war (nee defence), bounded on to a podium in Elon Musk’s SpaceX headquarters in Texas. He was there to announce his plans for reforming the American war machine’s bureaucratic engine, the Pentagon. In a long and surprisingly compelling speech, he made it clear that he’s embarked on a radical effort to reshape the bureaucracy of the war department, and to break up its cosy relationships with what Dwight Eisenhower called the “military-industrial complex” – the handful of bloated defence contractors that have assiduously milked the US government for decades while never delivering anything that was on time and within budget.
Predictably, one of the tools that Hegseth had chosen for his demolition job was AI, and to that end, three companies – Anthropic, Google and OpenAI – had already been given $200m contracts by the Pentagon to develop AI “agents” across different military areas. Given the venue and his host for the day, it came as no surprise to those present when Hegseth announced that Musk’s AI model, Grok, was also going to be deployed on this radical mission.
This did come as a surprise, though, to those outside the SpaceX hangar. Did it mean, mused the mainstream media commentariat, that this AI tool, which was mired in outrage and controversy for enabling people to create sexualised images of children, would be empowered to roam freely through all the archives – classified as well as unclassified – of the US war department?
Answer: yes…
Do read the whole piece. If you can’t access it, there’s a pdf here
My commonplace booklet
I’ve only been to Davos once, long before it was famous. I was on a walking holiday in Switzerland, and one day found myself in a nondescript town called Davos with nothing much going on. I bought myself a big Swiss Army penknife (which I still possess and use) and a pair of red walking socks, and thought no more of the place.
I was once invited to the gabfest, but declined the invitation, on the grounds that (a) I detested the people who attended it and (b) had no desire to go around dressed like an Eskimo in daylight while being expected to dress for dinner in the evening. Best decision I ever made.
Errata
Many thanks to the readers who pointed out that Mark Carney’s speech at Davos on January 20 preceded Donald Trump’s on the following day instead of (as I had it) the other way round.
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!