Roblog

A couple of months ago I made my first documentary film: Chain Your Heart to a Star. It’s the story of Fee Warner, who for 48 years has been visiting the site of Marc Bolan’s death in south-west London. There she has built, and continues to maintain, what has become a shrine to Bolan and T. Rex. The shrine is visited by people from all over the world, and is enduring evidence of the depth of feeling we humans have for music and musicians. #

Nicholas Hune-Brown in The Local exhibits more diligence than most publications in tracking down the source of an AI-written pitch:

“I was embarrassed. I had been naively operating with a pre-ChatGPT mindset, still assuming a pitch’s ideas and prose were actually connected to the person who sent it. Worse, the reason the pitch had been appealing to me to begin with was likely because a large language model somewhere was remixing my own prompt asking for stories where ‘health and money collide,’ flattering me by sending me back what I wanted to hear.”

Such grubby scams are, he thinks, reflective of the diminished media environment we live in:

“Every media era gets the fabulists it deserves. If Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair and the other late 20th century fakers were looking for the prestige and power that came with journalism in that moment, then this generation’s internet scammers are scavenging in the wreckage of a degraded media environment. They’re taking advantage of an ecosystem uniquely susceptible to fraud – where publications with prestigious names publish rickety journalism under their brands, where fact-checkers have been axed and editors are overworked, where technology has made falsifying pitches and entire articles trivially easy, and where decades of devaluing journalism as simply more ‘content’ have blurred the lines so much it can be difficult to remember where they were to begin with.”

Immunisation against these sorts of scams and misinformation is possible, as Hune-Brown demonstrates with his dogged investigative work. But the skills needed are precisely the ones that the media have spent the last decade or two gutting. It does not bode well. #

This whole piece, about what happens to the waste our modern economy produces by the billions of tons, is fascinating. But I particularly liked this bit as a novel and useful explanation of something I’ve thought about before, but not in these terms:

“Three other insights about value from political economy are helpful here. The first is that use value and exchange value are not equally important under capitalism – or, more precisely, are not of equal importance to capitalists. Marx showed that where the two are in tension, as they often are, exchange value overrides use value: the imperatives of competition and accumulation mean that commodities must be produced principally for sale. What counts as ‘waste’ comes to be decided by reference to wealth creation and preservation. This is what Locke was doing when he justified the European annexation of Indigenous territories on the grounds that they were not being used ‘productively’: the land was, in other words, being wasted, and should be brought into the ambit of capitalist modernity and its calculus of value. In a present-day example, Franklin-Wallis describes seeing a batch of unused TVs from a major manufacturer at a US electronics ‘recycling’ plant waiting to be destroyed in order not to act as competition for the same manufacturer’s new line of products. In 2020 Apple sued a Canadian recycler for selling off some of the half a million unsold devices it had sent to be shredded. In July 2018 it was reported that Burberry had incinerated ‘deadstock’ worth £28 million in the previous financial year to prevent its being sold at discounted rates. And so on.”

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As Frederik Pohl said, “a good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.”

Lots of optimism about AI in its early days focused on how it might make the job of people in bureaucratic roles much easier, as it massively increased their information-processing bandwidth. But here is the flipside:

“A new service called Objector is offering ‘policy-backed objections in minutes’ to people who are upset about planning applications near their homes.

“It uses generative AI to scan planning applications and check for grounds for objection, ranking these as ‘high’, ‘medium’ or ‘low’ impact. It then automatically creates objection letters, AI-written speeches to deliver to the planning committees, and even AI-generated videos to ‘influence councillors’.”

This is the tricky future we must navigate. One particularly unsavoury detail:

“Kent residents Hannah and Paul George designed the system after estimating they spent hundreds of hours attempting to navigate the planning process when they opposed plans to convert a building near their home into a mosque.”

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Jeremiah Johnson with a dystopian piece on the seeming contradiction between Meta’s unstoppable financial success and its obviously corrosive social impact, with a depressing conclusion:

“The only thing scarier to me than a mega-billionaire shoving pornified-AI bots down society’s throat is the idea that even if Zuck wasn’t doing that, we’d be clamoring for someone to step up and do it in his place. And that theory of Meta is what I ultimately think is the correct one. Why did Meta shift from promoting human connection to promoting porny AI chatbots? Because they have access to better data than anyone in the world about what people actually want, and that’s what the data tells them. The terrifying truth might be that even if Meta closed up shop tomorrow, their vision of an AI future would come to pass regardless. Maybe the people just want what they want, and they’re going to end up getting it good and hard.”

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Last year I linked to a Slate story about Tom Phillips, a New Zealand father who disappeared with his kids into the bush. Back then, the story was complex enough, with unclear motivations, a potential custody battle, and an underlying theme of hardy, resilient bush men resisting the opressively civilising influence of modern society and government forces. Some argued Phillips was essentially kidnapping his own children; others that he was a modern-day “man alone”, teaching his kids an admirable sort of self-reliance.

The story ended tragically today; Phillips was shot by police during a bungled burglary in which he fired at officers with a rifle. #

Sam Freedman on the high-speed pipeline that seeems to funnel certain people towards predominantly right-wing online propaganda:

“Over the last few years I’ve watched a disturbing number of people I used to know fall victim to the radicalisation spiral. It’s unnerving watching acquaintances who seemed relatively normal suddenly become obsessed with antivaxxer propaganda or start retweeting Tommy Robinson. I suspect many readers know someone, even if only tangentially, who’s disappeared down an online rabbit hole.”

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A thoughtful and moving piece by Tom Cox on the effect of time passing on art, as experienced when watching Get Back:

“It’s something very rare: a largely unaltered portrait of newborn art before any dust has settled on it. Time will make its refinements and adjustments to that art, just as it always does. You don’t have any control over that, even if you’re the most famous band in the world. All you can do is try to be as free as possible, give yourself space to fail, which is the same space that could very likely also permit you to flourish. Then it’s up to your other collaborators, which are the years that stretch out in front of you. They could be looked on as a kind of invisible post-production. They’ll sort it all out. They always do, even if they’re sometimes cruel or unsympathetic to your personal circumstances while going about it.”

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A fascinating post from Richard Williamson about far-UVC, a technique that uses ultraviolet light to kill pathogens in the air without harming people or other organisms:

“One of the best shots we have at turning the page on airborne disease is an emerging type of germicidal UV (GUV) light called far-UVC. Over the last decade, researchers have documented its ability to eliminate pathogens while being safe for humans. A landmark study from 2022 found that far-UVC reduced the concentrations of airborne bacteria by 98.4 percent in a room-sized chamber, all while operating within safe UV exposure limits. Compared to standard ventilation, this was the equivalent of changing the air completely over in the room 184 times every hour. To put that in perspective, the CDC recommends 5 or more air changes per hour in the workplace. Even hospital operating rooms in the US only require 20. Far-UVC is effective against viruses too; airborne coronaviruses are more susceptible to far-UVC than the same bacteria used in the other study.”

If it’s so simple, why hasn’t it been adopted yet? Richard argues that the problem is partly regulatory: there is no straightforward approval pathway for a device like this, like there would be if it were a drug. That means that people can just implement it (good) but also that there’s no rigorous trial process that proves its efficacy (bad). Without that proof, large institutions are unlikely to invest in a rollout of something that might be hokum.

Why doesn’t someone pay for a rigorous trial, then? The other problem is that UVC isn’t patentable (it’s already generic, there’s lots of prior art), so if a manufacturer made the huge investment in proving UVC’s efficacy then its competitors would be able to free-ride off the back of its work.

This is one of those posts where I have a slight amount of epistemic learned helplessness; I don’t know enough about the science to know if the bold claims of efficacy are true, or if there are unforeseen consequences or side-effects lurking here. But there’s something interesting in Richard’s proposed solution, which is to set up a non-profit to validate the claims so that everyone can benefit. I wonder what other inventions and breakthroughs have this same shape of coordination problem preventing their widepsread adoption? #

I’ve always found useful the idea of people temperamentally being either “lumpers” and “splitters”. Lumpers are those who assign things broadly and generally, valuing similarities over differences, and splitters are those who assign things narrowly and precisely, valuing differences over similarities. XKCD described the distinction well.

This fascinating essay by Richard Smyth is about the very real consequences of lumping and splitting in the world of conservation, and about how our decision whether or not to assign an animal its own taxonomic category can have transformative consequences for its chances of survival:

“Similarly, a segment in the BBC’s recent wildlife series Asia highlighted the grave plight of the Gobi bear. There are, Sir David Attenborough told us, fewer than 40 Gobi bears left. It’s a miserable statistic. But it’s worth thinking about exactly what’s being said here. The Gobi bear is, as it happens, a subspecies, a significant sub-population of the brown bear Ursus arctos. But what if it wasn’t? ‘There are 40 Gobi bears left’ lands a little differently than ‘There are 40 brown bears left in this part of the Gobi desert’; the former sounds like a call to action, no time to lose! – whereas the latter is more, well, who cares? What’s a few brown bears, here or there?

“What this boils down to, again, is the question of what’s real – what’s significant, what means something.”

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I wrote recently about the “vibe shift” that’s currently underway, and how we might build out way out of it. Joan Westenberg hits on a similar theme, and makes a powerful call for “pragmatic meliorism” – that is, neither deluded optimism nor destructive cynicism, but rather a pragmatic belief that “things are broken, AND they can be fixed; people are flawed AND capable of growth; systems are complex AND can be improved.”

It’s hard not to be cynical in a world as seemingly screwed up as this one, but Westenberg’s case against the cynics is convincing:

“Here’s a more charitable reading of cynicism: it’s not an intellectual position. It’s an emotional defense mechanism. If you expect the worst, you’ll never be disappointed. If you assume everything is corrupt, you can’t be betrayed.

“But this protection comes at a terrible price. The cynic builds emotional armor that also functions as a prison, keeping out not just pain but also possibility, connection, and growth.”

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Shortly before the Brexit referendum in 2016, Dan Hannan – one of the most unserious people ever to briefly be taken seriously by the British establishment, proof alongside Boris Johnson that a plummy accent and the occasional Latin phrase are all you need to appear an intellectual titan in British politics – wrote a vision of what life would be like in Britain in June 2025, nine years after the referendum.

The whole thing is worth reading, to remind yourselves of what these charlatans promised us, but I particularly hated this bit. It combines a level of oversimplification that is almost beautiful with a complete failure to understand both one’s own bargaining position and the priorities of the other side. In hindsight, it’s almost funny:

“The last thing most EU leaders wanted, once the shock had worn off, was a protracted argument with the United Kingdom which, on the day it left, became their single biggest market. Terms were agreed easily enough. Britain withdrew from the EU’s political structures and institutions, but kept its tariff-free arrangements in place.”

Almost funny.

Perhaps I’m being unfair; we do still have six months left for Hannan’s vision to come true. I’m not holding my breath. #

I watched Wim Wenders’s 1985 documentary Tokyo-Ga this week. It chronicles his trip to Japan in search of the Tokyo of film director Yasujirō Ozu, whom Wenders idolises. Will he be able to catch glimpses of Ozu’s city, or will it have been buried under the frantic rebuilding of postwar Japan? Along the way he meets Chishū Ryū, who starred in 14 of Ozu’s films; Yūharu Atsuta, Ozu’s cinematographer; fellow German director Werner Herzog; and countless others. Wenders’s open-minded and slow-paced journey is all the more remarkable for being filmed at a time of great western anxiety about Japan. Well worth a watch. #

The UK has been attempting to build a high-speed railway line called HS2 for years. Its development has been dogged by all sorts of problems, but perhaps the most farcical was the revelation that it had spent £100m on a 1km long tunnel for bats, in an area that was home to around 300 bats – an insane £300k per bat.

In this great post, Sam Dumitriu talks about why decisions like that get made, but also digs into some of the planning changes the government have made to hopefully make them less likely to happen in the future.

The plans seem to be better both from a “getting stuff built” perspective and a “preserving nature” perspective, which seems like a rare win. But it’s not over the line yet; it needs legislation to pass, which means getting it past lobby groups that are invested in the status quo.

“Wasteful spending on fish discos and bat tunnels should infuriate everyone whether their priority is world-class infrastructure or protecting endangered species. By fixing the Habs Regs, we can cut the cost of building new clean infrastructure and go beyond preserving the nature we have to actually enhancing and restoring it.”

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One of the most powerful things I’ve read in ages: Sophie Smith on Gisèle Pelicot and what her experience tells us about humanity, and men, and complicity.

“What are we taught not to see? What do we see and are taught not to talk about? If we want to understand the logics of a ‘rape culture’ that produces the ‘Monster of Avignon’, the scores of men he convinced to join him, the website on which they all met, the terms in which they made their excuses, the porn they and millions of others consume, the desire that this porn both writes and represents, the desire of men to get from women what they know they don’t want to give, the getting it because they can, the fantasy that the women they took it from wanted it anyway, the women who are taught to stay quiet, who are kept quiet, and the ones who are ignored, defamed or humiliated when they do not – if we want to understand this ‘culture’ (or rather, this way that we distribute power) might we need to think not about the ‘monsters’, but about the gruff, decent guys, the guys we love and forgive, the guys who are ‘not like that’, for whom we silence small anxieties about coercion and hurt and trust precisely because we are so relieved they are not monsters? And perhaps also because we are worried that if we do speak up they might leave us, exclude us, react with the infantile fury we are taught so carefully to contain? Are we not, when we look closely, surrounded by these small acts of accommodation, denial, repression, evasion?”

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