Roblog, the blog of Rob Miller

10 December 2024

Filed under: culture

Navigating the vibe shift

Should we be optimistic in the face of a shift in culture that feels like it will be for the worse? Can we be? How?

27 November 2024

Dan Davies on farming and inheritance tax

The streets of London were crawling with tractors recently, protesting the changes to inheritance tax on farms. (Previously farms were exempt from inheritance tax; now farms worth over £1m will be subject to it.)

My initial response was to buy the line that this would only affect a tiny minority of farms, and that it was shutting a pretty egregious tax loophole exploited by the likes of James Dyson and Jeremy Clarkson.

It has felt impossible to find a nuanced view because of the strength of feeling on both sides. But in this article Dan Davies thoughtfully explains the economics of it, and why my gut feeling was actually wrong:

“In the thirty or so years since Agricultural Land Relief was brought into the tax code, the price per acre of farmland has gone up roughly fourfold, and according to credible numbers I’ve seen, there are plenty of farms which, considered as businesses, are earning a return on assets of less than 1% (£35,000 of annual profit on a farm valued at £3m is apparently pretty good going).

“In that sort of situation, you have to value the tax shield separately – what the yeopersons of Olde Englande actually own might be a farm worth about £700,000, with a mortgage on it, and a £2.3m tax asset. So if the tax position changes, the value of the farm should be expected to plummet, and they go from being asset-rich—cash-poor to just poor.

“And this matters a lot… The asset value of a family farm, although it’s for the most part not realised or consumable wealth, is potentially a big part of the contingency reserve of that family against uncertainty. If things get really bad, either in a business context or some other family emergency, you can borrow against the value of the land or, in extremis, sell off a few acres.

“There’s a lot of uncertainty in farming! If the backstop of being able to sell bits of tax-advantaged assets isn’t there, then rather than being gradually eroded over four or five generations (which seemed like the natural outlook for the small farm sector), you’re likely to see lots of them wiped out suddenly in the next drought or foot & mouth disease outbreak.”

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13 November 2024

Filed under: art

Cabel Sasser on Wes Cook

I suspect this will do the rounds, as it thoroughly deserves to. Try to watch it without spoilers. It’s Cabel Sasser’s talk from XOXO this year, it’s about art and memory and what lives on of us after we pass, and it’s lovely. #

7 November 2024

Filed under: language

Why “paradigm” and “paradigmatic” are pronounced differently

I’ve always wondered why “paradigm” is pronounced pa-ra-dime, but “paradigmatic” is pronounced pa-ra-dig-ma-tic. Why does that silent ‹g› suddenly become noisy?

This answer, from the user tchrist on the English Stack Exchange, explains it incredibly clearly.

In short: the ‹g› is there because it’s there in the Greek original. We can’t pronounce it because English phonotactics forbid the pronunciation of a /g/ followed by a nasal at the end of a word (hence “align”, “consign”, “foreign”, “phlegm”, etc.). But keeping the ‹g›, rather than spelling it “paradim” or “paradime”, is helpful:

“We tend to keep the written ‹g› in English words like this, even though we ‘can’t’ say it there at the end of the word right before that final nasal. This helps us understand the shared relationship with longer words like paradigmatic that have a vowel after the nasal, which allows the /g/ to ‘reappear’. But we probably no more ever said it in paradigm(e) than we ever said it in phlegm. Our phonotactic rules forbid it.”

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25 October 2024

Filed under: london

King’s Cross, a miracle in London

The Economist with a gushing tour of the newly redeveloped King’s Cross:

“Some complain that this sleek King’s Cross is a betrayal of its grotty past. Far better to see the district as a sign of a city building its future. If a resurgent Britain finds itself at a technological frontier, it will be thanks to the likes of DeepMind plying their trade in the place where prostitutes once did theirs. If Britain is only to maintain its current trajectory of relative decline, then the success of King’s Cross is still necessary: selling off Victorian gasworks and charging foreign students £28,570 per year in tuition fees is a good living.”

It brought to mind Nik Cohn’s excellent Yes We Have No, a 1998 travelogue around what he called “the republic”; the rag-tag social underbelly of travellers, freaks, hippies, new-age druids, Elvis impersonators, and others that had opted out of the British mainstream. It centres on King’s Cross in its 1990s guise, before everything that the Economist gets so excited about, when it was home to squats and delapidation but also a thriving counterculture. Two competing visions of a world; one that won, and one that lost. #

21 October 2024

Filed under: ai

The 3 AI use cases: Gods, Interns, and Cogs

I wrote earlier this year about potential use-cases for AI, including things like “the rubber duck” and “the tireless intern”. In this post, Drew Breunig outlines three much clearer and more tangible categories of use-case: Gods (superintelligences that can replace humans and act autonomously), Interns (copilots that work under close human supervision), and Cogs (small, self-contained, automated functions that operate as part of a larger process). It’s a great classification. #

20 October 2024

Filed under: neuroscience

You don’t need words to think

This interview with Evelina Fedorenko of MIT is fascinating. She began her scientific career with an assumption, shared by many people, that language is somehow fundamental to cognition; that both language and cognition were both uniquely human abilities, and that each underpinned the other.

It’s a common – and fairly understandable – assumption. (She explains some of the reasons why it’s so intuitive in this article). In particular, most people have relatively strong inner speech – a sensation of a “voice inside our heads” that seems to enable us to think things through. That leads us to imagine that it’s this inner voice that is our thinking process.

But, as Federenko explains, it’s simply not true. There is likely to be some sort of underlying “language of thought” in our brains, but it’s not the same as natural language. Both humans with linguistic impairments and animals – who obviously lack language entirely – are capable of cognition. And Federenko also conducted experiments on people with no such impairments, checking with parts of the brain were active during cognition tasks:

“So you can come into the lab, and I can put you in the scanner, find your language regions by asking you to perform a short task that takes a few minutes – and then I can ask you to do some logic puzzles or sudoku or some complex working memory tasks or planning and decision-making. And then I can ask whether the regions that we know process language are working when you’re engaging in these other kinds of tasks. … We find time and again that the language regions are basically silent when people engage in these thinking activities.”

Language, then, is just one of several things that make us humans what we are:

“It’s most likely that what makes us human is not one ‘golden ticket’, as some call it. It’s not one thing that happened; it’s more likely that a whole bunch of systems got more sophisticated, taking up larger chunks of cortex and allowing for more complex thoughts and behaviors.”

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9 October 2024

Filed under: literature

Against lists of books

I meant to link to this earlier this year, but just stumbled upon it again in an open tab (yes, from August, so shoot me) and remembered how good it was. Sam Kriss takes on the now-ubiquitous “book lists”, taking aim first at the middlebrow blandness of Barack Obama’s, then the angsty teenage boydom of Reddit’s:

“What we’re looking at isn’t really a list of the greatest books ever written, it’s a bunch of examples of one very particular type of book: the long, morose psycho-philosophical novel. Like every list of books, it’s an exercise in summoning an aspirational type. This time, it’s the brilliant sensitive young man, quiet, maybe lonely, misunderstood, a creature with hidden depths. The long, morose psycho-philosophical novel is what this type of person is supposed to read.”

It’s hard to argue with his prescription:

“I’m sick of lists of books. Reading lists, top tens, flowcharts, curriculums, canons, counter-canons, the lot. Pathetic activity. Someone could write out the name of every single book I really love, ranked impeccably, with no omissions and no interpolations, and I’d spit cold venom in their face. I think the only way to read with dignity is to read organically, genealogically, backwards, by touch. Not running down a list, but excavating, following the seams where words bleed into each other.”

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22 September 2024

Filed under: economy

Foundations: why the UK economy is stagnating

It’s difficult to argue with this article’s damning assessment of Britain’s inability to build just about anything, and the economic stagnation that has resulted:

“Real wage growth has been flat for 16 years. Average weekly wages are only 0.8 percent higher today than their previous peak in 2008. Annual real wages are 6.9 percent lower for the median full-time worker today than they were in 2008. This essay argues that Britain’s economy has stagnated for a fundamentally simple reason: because it has banned the investment in housing, transport and energy that it most vitally needs. Britain has denied its economy the foundations it needs to grow on.”

I’m not sure I agree with the libertarian “just remove the red tape” prescription at the end of it; I think the authors’ policy recommendations are undermined by the example they themselves use, France, which is hardly some Thatcherite paradise of unfettered market forces. But perhaps it’s churlish to split ideological hairs on solutions: the problems seem so vast that scarcely anything could be worse. #

22 September 2024

Filed under: technology

The collapse of self-worth in the digital age

Publishing, like virtually every other industry, has attuned itself to the ocean of data that now exists, using it to measure the worth of art and artists in real-time. From Thea Lim:

“Only twenty years ago, there was no public, complete data on book sales. Until the introduction of BookScan in the late ’90s, you just had to take an agent’s word for it. ‘The track record of an author was a contestable variable that was known to some, surmised by others, and always subject to exaggeration in the interests of inflating value,’ says John B. Thompson in Merchants of Culture, his ethnography of contemporary publishing.

“This is hard to imagine, now that we are inundated with cold, beautiful stats, some publicized by trade publications or broadcast by authors themselves on all socials. How many publishers bid? How big is the print run? How many stops on the tour? How many reviews on Goodreads? How many mentions on Bookstagram, BookTok? How many bloggers on the blog tour? How exponential is the growth in follower count? Preorders? How many printings? How many languages in translation? How many views on the unboxing? How many mentions on most-anticipated lists?”

Lim’s heartfelt piece explains powerfully what that culture of measurement does to an artist – and what it’s doing to all of us.

“We are not giving away our value, as a puritanical grandparent might scold; we are giving away our facility to value. We’ve been cored like apples, a dependency created, hooked on the public internet to tell us the worth.”

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16 August 2024

Filed under: science

Why does Ozempic cure all diseases?

Over at Astral Codex Ten, Scott Alexander digs into the science behind anti-obesity drug Ozempic, and the subsequent array of secondary effects that have emerged in the scientific literature.

“GLP-1 receptor agonist medications like Ozempic are already FDA-approved to treat diabetes and obesity. But an increasing body of research finds they’re also effective against stroke, heart disease, kidney disease, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, alcoholism, and drug addiction.

“There’s a pattern in fake scammy alternative medicine. People get excited about some new herb. They invent a laundry list of effects: it improves heart health, softens menopause, increases energy, deepens sleep, clears up your skin. This is how you know it’s a fraud. Real medicine works by mimicking natural biochemical signals. Why would you have a signal for ‘have low energy, bad sleep, nasty menopause, poor heart health, and ugly skin’? Why would all the herb’s side effects be other good things? Real medications usually shift a system along a tradeoff curve; if they hit more than one system, the extras usually just produce side effects. If you’re lucky, you can pick out a subset of patients for whom the intended effect is more beneficial than the side effects are bad. That’s how real medicine works.

“But GLP-1 drugs are starting to feel more like the magic herb. Why?”

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6 August 2024

Filed under: brands

Review: The Road to Hell

Nick Asbury’s new book argues that the business world’s embrace of brand purpose over the last 15 years has been a huge error, failing to do both marketing and social good. But what comes next?

4 June 2024

Filed under: politics

Columbia Law Review board nukes website over Palestine article

The conflict within US universities over support for and reporting on the war Israel is waging in Gaza has thrown up another depressing case.

Last November, lawyer Rabea Eghbariah was to be the first Palestinian published in the Harvard Law Review, but he had his essay spiked before it could be published. The editors of the Columbia Law Review stepped in and stepped up, offering Eghbariah a chance to publish a newly updated essay in their journal. The Review’s board of directors intervened, responding not just by censoring the article itself, but by disabling the Review’s entire website. (It currently says, seemingly dishonestly, that it’s “under maintenance”.)

The worst thing is that Eghbariah’s article, which can still be read here, is not some aggressive polemic. It’s a thoughtful, considered, thoroughly researched essay that argues that the experience of the Palestinian people since 1948 is a category of oppression worthy of its own label, “nakba”. Eghbariah argues that it differs from genocide, from apartheid and from colonialism in important ways, ways that the law should recognise – just as it did following the Nuremberg trials, which prompted the recognition of “genocide” as a special category of crime that could exist in addition to “crimes against humanity”, which predated World War II.

Whatever you think of Eghbariah’s argument – I happen to find it extremely persuasive, but others may not – it seems deeply troubling that the Law Review of an Ivy League college would stoop to such naked censorship. #

31 May 2024

Filed under: biology

How do they know dogs are colorblind?

A lovely short film from new YouTube channel HowTown, exploring and explaining dog vision in an extremely clear way. #

29 May 2024

Filed under: nostalgia

When America was great, according to data

A data project from the Washington Post which investigated which decades people considered to be the “best”. It confirms an intuitive human truth:

“The good old days when America was ‘great’ aren’t the 1950s. They’re whatever decade you were 11, your parents knew the correct answer to any question, and you’d never heard of war crimes tribunals, microplastics or improvised explosive devices. Or when you were 15 and athletes and musicians still played hard and hadn’t sold out.”

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29 May 2024

Filed under: middle-east

Gaza’s Great Omari Mosque, now in ruins

A simple but extremely powerful telling of a tragic story. This New York Times interactive uses historical photos, overlayed neatly, to tell the story of Gaza’s Great Omari Mosque, which has been destroyed once more by an Israeli bombardment. #

16 May 2024

Filed under: ai

Generative AI is totally shameless. I want to be it

Paul Ford is wonderful on the shameless usefulness of AI:

“So I should reject this whole crop of image-generating, chatting, large-language-model-based code-writing infinite typing monkeys. But, dammit, I can’t. I love them too much. I am drawn back over and over, for hours, to learn and interact with them. I have them make me lists, draw me pictures, summarize things, read for me. Where I work, we’ve built them into our code. I’m in the bag. Not my first hypocrisy rodeo.”

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27 April 2024

Filed under: crime

Montenegro’s pivot

A couple of years ago, Bloomberg published an extraordinary article about the Montenegrin infiltration of the Mediterranean Shipping Co., effectively converting it into a cocaine logistics business. Following on from that is Alexander Clapp’s account of how Montenegro came to occupy a crucial role in the global drugs trade:

“…seafarers from places like Kotor – which straddled the Venetian and Ottoman empires – occupied a crucial position in 16th-century Europe. The clans in and around Kotor functioned like ‘linguistic and cultural amphibians’, serving as missionaries, spies, merchants and pirates. The Adriatic clans were often exploited by the empires that encroached on their mountains and occupied their ports – enlisted into naval crews, or forced to convert – but in many ways they benefited from their borderland identity. They played off great powers against one another, leveraged strategic information for court influence, infiltrated imperial ranks and forged valuable mercantile connections.”

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25 April 2024

Filed under: food

The Story of MSG: Redemption

The scare around MSG began in 1968. Nearly sixty years on, there are signs of a renaissance, a reconsideration of it as an ingredient.

23 April 2024

Filed under: food

A not at all brief history of tinned fish

Since I’m basically becoming a “history of food” blog (sorry about that), here’s a deep dive into the history of tinned fish, including the recent hipsterification and renaissance of the stuff:

“Today’s tinned fish purveyors have updated the romantic aesthetic in keeping with more contemporary tastes, whilst simultaneously keeping alive one of the longest-running storytelling traditions in food commerce and consumer design. The miniature canvases decorating our Insta-worthy tinned gourmet snacks still spin tales of European vacations, handcrafted delicacies and nostalgic coastal grandeur, can by charismatic can. Which is wonderful.”

(Thanks to Joel Stein for the tip.) #

12 April 2024

Filed under: ai

Zach Seward on the role of AI in journalism

I wrote a few weeks ago about use cases for AI. In a similar vein is this thoughtful piece from the New York Times’ Zach Seward on the role of AI in responsible, thoughtful journalism.

I love the sentiment that AIs are actually often more useful when they’re not being creative, but instead are interpreting creativity and translating it into something more rigid:

“People look at tools like ChatGPT and think their greatest trick is writing for you. But, in fact, the most powerful use case for LLMs is the opposite: creating structure out of unstructured prose. [This gives] us a sense of the technology’s greatest promise for journalism (and, I’d argue, lots of other fields). Faced with the chaotic, messy reality of everyday life, LLMs are useful tools for summarizing text, fetching information, understanding data, and creating structure.”

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11 April 2024

Filed under: food

The Story of MSG: Controversy

In the 1960s, MSG was poised to conquer the world. And yet, by the end of the decade, it had become public enemy number one. Why was that?

11 April 2024

Filed under: crime

A family’s disappearance rocked New Zealand. What came after stunned everyone.

A strange story from New Zealand, of a father who disappeared with his three children and what it says about Kiwi culture:

“It was a blustery September Sunday in 2021, and the Hilux pickup sat far down the gray sand in a remote cove on the wild west coast of New Zealand’s North Island. The Māori men who noticed the car live in mobile homes and cabins up by the road, on ancestral land near Kiritehere Beach. The truck was parked below the high-tide line, facing the sea, and was nearly swamped by the waves pummeling the shore. The men found the keys, tucked under the driver’s-side floormat, and backed the car up the beach. They couldn’t help but notice empty child seats strapped into the back. If any kids had gotten close to the sea on a day like this, they were long gone.”

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4 April 2024

Filed under: food

The Story of MSG: Adoption

MSG went from discovery to the dinner tables of half the world in a couple of decades. But how?

4 April 2024

Filed under: psychology

The great rewiring: is social media really behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness?

Last week I linked to an interview with Jonathan Haidt about his new book; it seems only fair, in the interests of balance, to link to this rather savage review of it in Nature.

“Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University, is a gifted storyteller, but his tale is currently one searching for evidence.”

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28 March 2024

Filed under: food

The Story of MSG: Discovery

The savoury flavour known as umami is fundamental to the enjoyment of food and has been for thousand of years – and yet we only discovered it a century ago. How did we discover it, and why did it take so long?

28 March 2024

Filed under: psychology

The anxious generation

An interview with Jonathan Haidt, whose new book explores the relationship between rising levels of mental health issues in young people and the prevalance of social media. In interviewer David Epstein’s words, “we basically ran this kind of grand social experiment starting in 2010. And now we have some of the results. And they don’t look very good, particularly for young people.”

Haidt’s broad points are that human beings require social interaction and play during childhood in order to fully develop as social animals, and that indoor play and virtual social interactions are no substitutes for the real thing. Social media, with its dopamine-dispensing feedback loops, rapidly accelerates the development of unhealthy behaviours:

“Social media platforms are the most efficient conformity engines ever invented. They can shape an adolescent’s mental models of acceptable behavior in a matter of hours, whereas parents can struggle unsuccessfully for years to get their children to sit up straight or stop whining.

“On a phone, you’re endlessly presented with things to touch. And if you touch the right thing in the right way, you get a little hit. You get something that will give you a little hit of dopamine. It’ll either be validation of your social standing, or it’ll be entertainment, or it’ll be funny, or it’ll be sexual. As a parent, if we could implant an electrode in our kids’ brains to give them a little bit of reward when they clean up their room, a little bit of punishment when they drop their underwear on the floor, we could train them very quickly to clean up their rooms – if we had that button to deliver a little bit of pleasure or pain. We don’t have that button, but the rest of the world does… Once you put your kid on social media, you’re saying to the rest of the world: ‘Hey, how about if you train my daughter? You give her rewards and punishments, and I’ll just sit back and see what happens.’ And the result is a generation of girls that are anxious, depressed, self-harming and suicidal.”

Via John Naughton. #

25 March 2024

Filed under: politics

What have fourteen years of Conservative rule done to Britain?

Sam Knight with a brutally clear look at the state of Britain 14 years into Tory rule. He grapples with the impact of austerity, the influences of Brexit, and the prospects for future improvement.

“On January 14th, a poll of fourteen thousand people, which Frost facilitated, suggested that the [Conservative] Party is on course for a huge defeat later this year. The question is what kind of haunted political realm it will leave behind… It is unnerving to be heading into an election year in Britain with the political conversation so small, next to questions that can feel immeasurable.”

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18 March 2024

Filed under: games

Juice it or lose it by Martin Jonasson and Petri Purho

An old but excellent talk from Martin Jonasson and Petri Purho about a quality within video games that they call “juiciness”. A “juicy” game is one that has little details, little moments of surprise and delight; it’s the difference between an experience that feels flat and dull and one that feels exciting and engaging.

It strikes me that it’s true of game design, but it’s true of almost all things we produce for human consumption that are at all interactive: good copywriting has juiciness, good design does, good websites do. #

7 March 2024

Filed under: social-media

Instagram fatigue and the rise of 'Resentment Reels'

Taylor Lorenz’s video essay on the emergence of “resentment reels”: Instagram videos that express frustration at the vagaries of the Instagram algorithm and the scant pay-offs for most people in the “creator economy”. Lorenz traces their origins back to the initial emergence of the influencer economy and the subsequent pressure on everyone – regardless of their occupation – to also be a content creator.

But what has turbocharged this frustration is the shift towards video content in response to TikTok:

“Online attention had suddenly become the most powerful form of modern currency, but amassing that attention in a video-dominated world was more competitive than ever. Suddenly artists, small business owners and regular users were hit with whiplash. Creating video content is not like creating aspirational photos or making some graphics for a short Instagram story or tweet. It’s exhausting, it’s time consuming, and it requires a level of skill, effort and knowledge about the media landscape that most people don’t have time for.”

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5 March 2024

Filed under: sport

Behind F1’s velvet curtain

Road and Track magazine (somewhat predictably) spiked this brilliant piece by Kate Wagner, who I know for more for her excellent website McMansion Hell than for her cycling coverage. In it, Wagner visits a Formula 1 race as a guest of INEOS and says it like she sees it:

“I think if you wanted to turn someone into a socialist you could do it in about an hour by taking them for a spin around the paddock of a Formula 1 race. … I saw $30,000 Birkin bags and $10,000 Off-White Nikes. I saw people with the kind of Rolexes that make strangers cry on Antiques Roadshow. I saw Ozempic-riddled influencers and fleshy, T-shirt-clad tech bros and people who still talked with Great Gatsby accents as they sweated profusely in Yves Saint Laurent under the unforgiving Texas sun. The kind of money I saw will haunt me forever. People clinked glasses of free champagne in outfits worth more than the market price of all the organs in my body. I stood there among them in a thrift-store blouse and shorts from Target.”

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4 March 2024

Filed under: music

Mike Read’s Heritage Chart Show

Pete Paphides on the surreal spectacle that is Mike Read’s Heritage Chart Show:

“A couple of weeks ago, the UK’s only chart-based music show celebrated its hundredth episode, and yet, there’s every chance you’ve never heard of it. That’s because, in order to watch it live, you’d have to be seated in front of your TV at 3am on Monday morning. Furthermore, you won’t find it on a music channel. It’s not on any of our terrestrial stations. Mike Read’s Heritage Chart Show is, in some ways, an aberration on the schedule of vintage movie channel Talking Pictures. In another sense though, it’s a perfect fit among Talking Pictures’ carefully curated menu of Ealing comedies, monochrome sagas of wartime derring-do, old episodes of 70s daytime staple Crown Court and, on one memorable occasion, a 1954 documentary about the Shippams Fish Paste factory.”

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29 February 2024

Filed under: food

Nicholas Saunders: hippy, capitalist, guru, grocer

Before this excellent profile by Vittles’ Jonathan Nunn, I had no idea that the same person founded Neal’s Yard Remedies, Neal’s Yard Dairy, and Monmouth Coffee – the first being enormously commercially successful and the latter two having utterly transformed British food culture. His impact is inarguable, but his curiosity as a character is fascinating too:

“Even now, it’s hard to pin down exactly who Saunders was, not least because he was so many things at once: a hippy, a capitalist, a pioneer, a property developer, a drugs advocate, a social inventor, a greengrocer, a visionary. Yet a consistent philosophy guided everything he did: he believed, above all, that information should be wrested from gatekeepers and made free for people to use. ‘He didn’t just make information available, but made you feel like anyone has the capacity to go and do it,’ [Neal’s Yard Dairy co-founder Randolph] Hodgson recalls. ‘He lit a fire inside people.’”

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29 February 2024

Filed under: media

Vice made the fatal mistake of trying to grow up

Vice, the irreverent and offbeat magazine and publishing empire, announced last week that it was shutting down. Harry Cheadle, who wrote for Vice for years, gets to the heart of where they went wrong:

“Vice’s founders, [Cory Doctorow] wrote, ‘built a massive, highly lucrative media empire on [young people’s] free labor. … Whatever problems Vice had, they weren’t problems with Vice’s workers—it was a problem with Vice’s bosses.’

“Doctorow meant to be scathing, but if anything he was too generous. Vice was only ‘highly lucrative’ in the sense that it had a lot of money sloshing around. It had a big fancy Brooklyn headquarters, a dozen or more international offices, and hundreds of people on the payroll, some of whom would fly around the world to report from conflict zones. As it grew, it founded a record label and an ad agency, acquired smaller media companies like Refinery29 and i-D, and had TV shows on MTV and HBO before getting its own cable channel. The company even bought a bar and started brewing its own beer, called Old Blue Last, which tasted like the tail end of a long night out. During one holiday party, co-founder Shane Smith handed out envelopes to employees containing $1,500 in cash.”

“In ditching its original identity,” Cheadle writes, “Vice gained respectability but couldn’t make respectability work for it.” That’s about the shape of it. The path from counterculture to mainstream culture is well-trodden, but most often ends up in a messy compromise that pleases no-one. #

20 February 2024

Filed under: technology

Taking stock of AI progress

We’ve lived with generative AI for a couple of years now. Has it fulfilled its promise or fallen short of our hopes?

21 January 2024

Filed under: politics

How Davos works

Andrew Curry takes apart The Browser’s lightly fictionalised version of the annual World Economic Forum shindig at Davos. “The descriptions of how Davos works seem to have been written by someone who knows more about it than is completely good for them.”

“The Circle was a handsomely-upholstered comfort zone for people who had already changed the world, not necessarily for the better, and now wanted to cover their tracks. The Doc’s special genius, and the gift which he looked for in his staff, was to create an atmosphere of free-thinking debate while ensuring that everybody understood the limits of that debate and that no White Badge member was ever publicly embarrassed or deeply offended.”

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36 posts from 2024

Review: The Road to Hell