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Imagine this: a group of very clever elites have a new invention. It makes everyone feel better. It makes you taller — or shorter, if that’s what you want — more articulate, more able to be who you really want to be. It will make you stronger, better at parallel parking, better at digesting gluten. It helps you find community. Maybe it will make you richer if you care about money. It will give you time to finally ‘have ideas’. You haven’t had an idea in years; with this new invention, it’s ideas all the way down.

There’s just one catch: it only works if everyone uses it. Everyone has to use the new invention otherwise no one will get the benefits. If only half of us use it, you’ll only get something that looks like a benefit, such as a monthly supermarket voucher. Oh there’s also another catch, only little: the invention runs on the crushed bones of the dead. An abundant resource. Dead people are buried all over the world and we will never run out.

Even after many months of talking about the invention, it’s is only at 30% penetration. The elites have to keep crushing bones to keep the invention on even though most people don’t see the point in it. They keep coming back to the benefits that don’t exist yet: maybe women (or men?) will like you more. You’ll go on the best holidays of your life. You’ll be better at public speaking. You’ll suddenly be able to cook. The people struggle to see any of this as a benefit and continue to buy overpriced coffee on the way to their relentless jobs.

The elites continue to crush bones. The anti-bone crushing lobby starts to get annoyed. The elites remind everyone that new inventions are the only way we can differentiate ourselves from the animal kingdom. We are not savages, we need inventions to signal that we are the smartest and most capable complex organisms on the planet. The promises of future benefits intensify: all diseases, gone. All wars, cancelled. All children, safe. All of humanity elevated beyond what paltry present-day humans can imagine. Maybe we could even postpone death and live forever?

This would require a lot more bones to be crushed. An unprecedented amount of bones. The dead must serve the invention in order to benefit the living. Bone-crushing increases by orders of magnitude. The elites have plans that span hundreds of years. This invention transcends all present-day contexts and must be maintained and stewarded for all future generations to come. Yes, stewarded. The elites are stewards now. And so is everyone else. No, the benefits still don’t exist yet — but they will, they will. It’s a waste of time to demand that our lives be better right now when there’s so much work to be done for the future. In fact it’s selfish to reject the invention. If you reject the invention, you hate humans. All humans. Past, future, present. But most of all future. To care about the present is to live in the short term. The elites are busy working on big important problems like what if an asteroid hits the earth or what do we do when the sun explodes. While the people worry about trivial problems like house prices and droughts and food shortages.

The people who use the invention earnestly look icky, unsexy, and uncreative. The elites are too deep in the bone-crushing hole so have no choice but to make it look like the invention is favoured by all. It starts popping up when you try and catch a bus, buy a house, do your laundry, take a walk, buy your groceries, pick a wedding dress, name your pets. The invention suddenly proliferates into everything like mould. Trying to send an email without the invention is impossible now. The elites have been peddling it for so long that their memories have now been skewed to remember life before the invention as a dark time where we were toothless braindead chuds birthing children straight into wet mud and feeding them grass. Their comprehension of reality has been irreversibly mangled by talking about the invention nonstop for three consecutive years. None of their discourse is relatable and they can no longer participate in the rest of society. There is a lot of irony completely lost on them, mainly that the invention was meant to make us into better people but all it did was make the elites worse.

The elites become even more elite (and crush even more bones to keep the lights on). Things start to get weird. Cars no longer have steering wheels; only voice activation. Children no longer have teachers; only a disembodied punishment aura. Society no longer has culture; only weekly meetings where everyone has to agree on what’s cool. The problem is the benefits of the invention still haven’t materialised. It’s power is invisible and unknowable. The elites are running out of bones to crush so they create reasons to use the invention in the always-on industry that is overseas war in order to kill people more efficiently and extract their bones for rapid crushing. After all, they’re only present-day lives. To pursue the crushing of bones now, is to bet big on our disembodied immortal future. Salvation is coming, all we have to do is believe.

Okay stop imagining. When I get overwhelmed with what’s happening I need to make sense of it by putting it into a story. Over the last couple of weeks, I have been listening to interviews for Computer Says Maybe about campaigning against dominant AI narratives, scientifically debunking these narratives, and ways to refactor culture around being mistrustful of anyone who says that in the future, this one technology will cure all disease. These were great conversations and they’re all coming out over the next few weeks, starting this Friday, so look out for that.

If you want to learn more, work with me on this, or be interviewed feel free to reach out by replying to this email or sharing with someone who you think will be interested. Thank you!

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There’s this thing I do where I say, “I’m from Cyprus, actually” just to signal that I am in fact only culturally British, and not ethnically English. Unfortunately Cyprus seems to only be known for three key things: being mistaken as ‘part of Greece’ by gammony British holiday-makers, being used as a tax haven, and being an absolute cuck in wars waged by The West against petrostates.

Like any crumbling empire, the UK has military bases scattered across the world on tiny obscure islands, including Cyprus. This is an overseas territory that the UK has full sovereignty over, so last weekend when Iran sent missiles and drones to Cyprus, they were in fact trying to bomb the UK, not Cyprus, who maybe should relax and be proud that they can help their colonisers participate in a pointless war from a nice strategic location. They are of course not proud, and want the bases gone.

Last Sunday I honestly spent most of the day as an anxious husk, watching my family group chat trying to make sense of what was going on, sharing misinformation back and forth, and posting first-hand footage of missiles flying though the sky. I know this isn’t an original take, but we really do live in a world beyond politics, governed by gripes and aggression. Politicians don’t make decisions any more, they just post on social media and ask the closest think tank what they think they should do next.

To me, this is the cornerstone of empire: dither away in your palace, bombing other countries because an older kid asked you to, all the while telling the poor people at home that everything will be okay right after this next violent episode. As I mentioned last time, the UK is at a cultural precipice: the party in power are impotent, withering, and useless when it comes to governing and trying to pretend to be left wing. Their greatest opposition are a group of reactionary right wing culture warriors who’s deft, mystical powers of campaigning make the government look like a sad amateur theatre troop. I’ve always struggled to understand why it’s this way around. Why are progressives barely able to string a coherent message together while The Right gain popularity by chugging pints of bitter and swinging from zipwires?

To make sense of all the political peacocking, I interviewed Hannah O’Rourke, who runs progressive campaigning organisation Campaign Lab. If you want to get all the depth of flavour of Hannah’s wisdom and my charming wit, listen to the entire conversation now.

I initially wanted to speak to Hannah because of her work AI slop and how it’s benefiting The Right, and why The Left never experiment with new media to get their messages across. We talked a lot about that — and about pubs lol. Again, please listen, or just read on for some top highlights.

The main kinds of slop that Hannah is seeing come from The Right can be broadly split into three groups:

1. Strange cinematic depictions of lions clad in armour, protecting England, with captions such as ‘the lion is waking’. These are like cartoons that are meant to convey a feeling — everyone knows that they are fake and no one is being fooled.

2. Satire, for example Keir Starmer prancing around the beach, topless, singing — this is to make people laugh, and Hannah compared it to Spitting Image, a satirical puppet show from the 80s and 90s with severe gross-out aesthetics, as was the style at the time.

3. Actual fake news and disinformation: and this maybe falls out of the ‘slop’ paradigm because it is literally trying to look like real clips of news casts saying that the government want to introduce bogus taxes, curfews, and other such nonsense.

The comparison to Spitting Image is key — sometimes it feels like we’re so busy being scared of AI that we forget that we’ve been using media to make fun of politicians for decades now.

There’s a resistance from The Left to post about what they care about, with their emotions, whether using AI or not, because we tend to get stuck in ‘facts’. There’s the feeling that if the other side just understood the problem accurately, they would be convinced. This is maybe the right instinct, but the wrong way to look at it — people need facts to be wrapped in good storytelling rather than having stats barked at them. If you want to go deeper, Campaign Lab recently worked with Rootcause to understand the types of political content being shared and engaged with on TikTok specifically.

When it comes to storytelling it’s clear that The Right win out every time, and that’s likely because The Left never get to the story part. They’re too busy deciding what the story could be, and cannot work with each other unless they all agree on a list of one hundred ideological points. It’s very puritanical, and it does not move the work forward.

Most people in the UK voting Reform aren’t far-right reactionaries, they’re just sick of the status quo. This makes sense and barely needs explaining. Those who are calling to disrupt the legacy systems that make life hard and unfair make a very compelling case, very easily. ‘Everything is bad — let’s change it’. Good idea! But The Right are getting at this by dividing people: they are bankrolling independent news orgs like GB News at a loss — and GB News, unlike any left-leaning media outfit — are great at making clips, leading the conversation, and using any tactics necessary to stay relevant. Some smart TVs even default to GB News when you turn them on. Reform are out there re-opening pubs for local communities while the progressive queers are getting dizzy trying to find safe drinking holes that aren’t full of scary old men. This division is unacceptable, and The Left should be bringing us back together — not belly flopping into stupid war.

If you’re from the UK you should watch Shifty, the latest documentary series by Adam Curtis. If you’re not from the UK, you should still watch it. It will teach you about what culture is, in that it demonstrates what culture isn’t, by painting the negative space around it, in the shape of Great Britain.

Shifty is a comprehensive survey of life in Britain in the latter half of the 20th century. This is when Thatcher held the country tight in her bony grip and beat out of it whatever life may have been left. After decades of horror and depravity, Blair took over and things looked hopeful for a second. Then everyone’s favourite princess died and that was kind of it. In the series, as the turn of the century approaches, we repeatedly return to footage of ditsy Britons in a board room trying to think of what to put in the Millennium Dome — a structure in North Greenwich famous for how ugly it is.

The Millennium Dome opened on the 31st of December 1999 and closed exactly a year later. It was a sprawling museum packed with exhibits all about the future, based on the present; a 20th century imaginary of 21st century life. But most importantly it was about Britain. The exhibits were meant to represent three key things: who we are, what we do, and where we live. The Britons in the board room stared blankly at each other, lost for answers, barely able to comprehend the question, practically evaporating due to the sheer lack of substance in the room. The contours of British life eluded them. Anyway, The Dome is a shopping centre now. It’s known colloquially to consumers as ‘The O2’, because I guess it looks how a mobile network feels (frustrating and not worth the money).

We’re at another cultural precipice in the UK now: The Conservatives have finally been binned off after a prolific run of hatefully trolling the entire country, and Labour have spent their first year in power pissing it up the wall. This is all normal of course, but now we have the added noise of the internet: a machine of perpetually groaning background static that contains all of modern day discourse. Labour, the party in the UK that was traditionally built to represent the working class, is now losing ground to Reform — a far-right party who produce background static faster and louder than anyone else. But obviously this is a lot more complicated that just who is posting what online. My good friend Claddagh recently wrote an excellent piece that attempts to explain what’s happening here: progressives are bent on doing politics AT you, assuming that if you just had all the facts you will fall in line. While messaging from the far-right does all the things that effective fascist propaganda does: it tells you that your culture — the very thing that makes you who you are — has been squandered by an invisible enemy. She writes:

Progressive politics has a habit of treating culture as something abstract or symbolic; as a secondary concern that can be overridden by good policy design. But culture is not an optional layer on top of material life. It is how people make sense of change, loss, pride, and continuity in ordinary terms. When cultural attachment is treated as trivial, or worse as dangerous, it is experienced not as a liberal moral enlightenment, but as erasure. Culture is ordinary, and it the identity it fosters belongs to ordinary people. That is precisely why it matters.

Reform are pushing back on this alleged cultural erasure with hate. There is no limit to what they can hate. They even seem to hate the UK itself, literally referring to is as lawless, as if we are stuck in a violent doom loop beyond hope. Luckily our culture isn’t yet eroded enough to stop us from making movies: I just watched the most recent 28 Years Later film, which depicts a UK that is isolated and decaying because it has been overrun with a ‘rage virus’ for nearly three decades. No one can get in or out; the country is totally self-sufficient and men are made by hunting the infected. It’s like a bizarre mixture of what Reform want for the future (which I guess is sovereignty no matter the cost), but also what they want us to believe about the present (That the UK is dangerous and diseased). Here is a shot of a car park from the film:

It’s very tempting to characterise these films as visions of a Britain that stopped producing culture in 2002. What actually stopped was infrastructure: there’s no factory farming, no energy grid, no telecoms, and also no media. Without media you have no spectacle. In this alternate reality, the famous Sycamore Gap tree was never illegally cut down by two idiot men — I guess because everyone was too busy trying to stay alive — but also because without the internet’s infinite gaze, destructive attention-seeking stunts have no value. So yes, everything’s broken and nothing works, but equally everyone has given up extracting from nature. Danny Boyle really made post-apocalyptic Britain look beautiful. I can’t wait for the real apocalypse, honestly.

When in crisis, culture does not disappear. It goes even harder. If all media is eventually lost, all your television favourites live in your head as slowly dulling memories, and are relegated into oral history. Now everything is just stories at the dinner table. The main antagonists in the latest film seem to enjoy remembering the Teletubbies, albeit in a demented, childlike way. They also dress up as 1970s media personality Jimmy Saville, because the public hadn’t been given the chance to learn that he was a paedophile. In apocalyptic Britain Jimmy Saville is still a great entertainer from the past. The Queen is still alive, because there is no way to announce that she is dead. No one has had to suffer James Corden. Disgusting piss-swilling clip show Little Britain never got the chance to air. Jamie Oliver never got the chance to become infuriating and classist on TV and is perhaps remembered fondly instead.

Of course the apocalypse isn’t all sunshine and rainbows: one character feels so lonely that he fabricates companionship by continually drugging one of the infected with a tranquiliser. He struggles to remember a time when there were shops, communities, and having a purpose beyond just trying to stay alive. It was like watching someone trying to foster a meaningful connection with ChatGPT. It obviously goes much deeper than this but there’s no need for spoilers.

Back in our reality, human incubator for centrist flop-sweat Keir Starmer will have us believe that living in fear and isolation is good, actually. He’s never met an AI solution he doesn’t like. He is to AI what Blair was to George W Bush — very eager to please. At least when Blair said “I’m with you, no matter what” it was to a human, and not into the input field of a chat bot interface. And just recently our warm and loving Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood announced that she just can’t wait to “achieve, by means of AI and technology, what Jeremy Bentham tried to do with his panopticon”. So we’re just openly admitting that we are aiming for actual dystopia now, brilliant, okay.

Things feel kind of hopeless right now because the only one proposing alternatives to the above is Nigel Farage, a man who thinks that all British culture begins and ends with having a pint and being racist. We literally deserve so much better. Not in a ‘let’s go back to the good old days’ sense — just that no one deserves to be told that they live in a cultureless sinkhole over and over again. The UK is actually dripping in culture, but maybe the few dwindling good parts are hard to see right now. Which is why we really need to remember them if we’re going to survive the imminent apocalypse. Just relax and let Gemma Collins into your life for once. Have a Nandos; have a roast. Remind yourself that there are a thousand iconic drag acts happening in local pubs up and down the country right now. The UK defined what a rave is through our sheer desire to party, maybe try and be proud of that for five minutes. Or do yourself a favour and listen to the hosts of Off Menu interview Claudia Winkleman, it’s so fucking funny. Oh and also visit the New Forest when you get a chance, those landscapes are excellent.

I don’t want to do a tacky as hell 2025 roundup because what the hell do I know about 2025? Except that ‘slop’ is the word of the year, and ‘AI’ is the person of the year.

I’ve spent all of 2025 producing Computer Says Maybe, a podcast that discusses the politics and power of technology with intense unrelenting depth. Counterintuitively, producing a podcast like this one at a weekly cadence made it harder to understand what’s going on; there’s a very short amount of time to go deep on massive complex topics — anything from advanced chip manufacturing to accessible programming languages to the history of multi-level marketing — and my fiendish dyslexic mind hasn’t had the time to slow down and let the ideas settle in.

But through all this noise my colleagues and I managed to pick out our favourite conversations from the year and discuss them in this very fun episode, where I cry out, “give me something I can work with here” while lamenting over the sheer lack of imagination dribbling out of the vacant space you find behind the eyes of Silicon Valley Men.

And tbh maybe this is what 2025 was all about: the general public whirring around the ant farm, desperately trying to build a society that makes sense, while the men in charge destroy media, entertainment, and all forms of pleasure with their business savvy and crusty old prophecies about the future of superintelligence. Here are some stories to remind you how diseased ‘media’ has become.

Disney are throwing $1bn into OpenAI’s raging money furnace while accusing Google of piracy in the same breath. This licensing deal means that Disney can use OpenAI’s tools to generate well-known characters for whatever content they wish. This is such an ick. I guess all media will soon become like that coke advert everyone hates. I don’t feel like living in a world where ‘animated’ and ‘AI generated’ are basically interchangeable, but I’m also not saying that all AI generated content is inherently bad because that just isn’t true. Using it to have a laugh with your friends is one thing — using it to displace labour and to generate uncanny demented vignettes as multinational media conglomerate is another. There’s something about the quality of machine-made content that eludes media executives: it just doesn’t seem to matter if it looks unironically shit. As long as it saves money, I guess.

Speaking of money: Netflix and Paramount are battling to acquire Warner Bros. If they win, Chief AI Lobbyist Larry Ellison will likely secure his future as the patriarchal overlord of all media in the US, and Trump apologist Bari Weiss can continue to censor as much news as she likes. If Netflix win we may as well say goodbye to physical cinemas all together, strap in, and let the media apocalypse wash over us like a cheap coming of age series about teens falling in love.

In the age of AI — and the age of Nothing New Ever — ‘media’ is meaningless and it’s all about how much IP you own, steal, or rearrange into a bad movie. I recently read a depressing as shit interview with the Hollywood producer behind The Lego Movie, The Long Walk, and The Minecraft movie — ie a man who’s never had an original thought in his life and has never needed AI to make derivative slop. His lifelong wish is to get his hands on the IP for Calvin and Hobbes. He’s been writing to the creator for twenty years and has “gotten nowhere,” thank fuck. Sometimes that thing you loved as a child can just stay as a memory: you don’t have to ruin it by yanking it into the present and rendering it in 3D.

Moving from fiction into heavily redacted facts: the Epstein files. I’m sure like every other healthy person you’ve been spending the Christmas period snuggling up and scrolling through ALL of them (I haven’t, sorry). These drip-fed, politically-timed documents represent the beginning and end of reality: they contain nothing but raw truth but no one can make any sense of them; they are a spectacle beyond our reckoning and seem to yield confusion where all we want is justice. The Epstein files feel less like information and more like a scandalous artefact vulnerable to exploitation by agents of chaos. There are faked images of Epstein and Trump partying with young women or girls, supporting what the general public already know to be true, while also trivialising and delegitimising the the severity of his crimes. There’s even one of Epstein kissing Melania on the lips for some reason. Why the hell not, noise is noise.

It can be hard wading through all this cud if you’re someone trying to produce media in good faith. In October I went to Zeg, a storytelling festival, to learn more about how journalists and publishers are responding to these signals. People were mostly confused and frustrated. In one a panel, a journalist went on a tirade about digital media and begged and pleaded with the audience to read more physical books. Apparently if you inform and/or entertain yourself through digital means, you’re part of the problem. This is patently untrue, and telling everyone to read more books is like yelling at the Global North to recycle more, as if that will reverse climate change. But more importantly it’s ableist: I would LOVE to spend all day not looking at screens but unfortunately I need to use text-to-speech apps for anything longer than a ten minute read. And tbh this isn’t the first time I’ve heard a writer complain that no one is reading like they did in the olden days, and it’s never a good look. Printed publishing is brutal; digital publishing is brutal but in a different way — you can’t just complain and say one is better than the other! It’s all media and it’s all equally diseased.

For a more nuanced perspective, take a look at Spite House: AI, disintermediation and the end of the free web by content strategist Lauren Pope. This is someone who’s had to make engaging content even before the internet was a thing, then adapted to the new realities of the web, and now with the advent of AI finds herself at a crossroads: does she join or resist? It’s not fair to say that she has to ‘adapt’ to AI in the same way she did with the web, because generative AI is literally a threat to her livelihood. But either way the world is telling her she has to choose between becoming a grim AI shill or a spiteful old fashioned Luddite. I really appreciate this piece of work because she’s someone coming at this from a professional content making perspective, and she’s described how paralysing this false dichotomy is. She’s not blindly embracing the new world order, but she’s not rejecting it and opting to live in the woods either. Rather, she’s stuck in an unenjoyable purgatory — and I hope she and the rest of us can get out in 2026.

Some stuff I couldn’t find space for but wanted to mention anyway:

• The American media elites can’t seem to stop bickering about Olivia Nuzzi. Vanity Fair published an excerpt of her memoir American Canto and as it turns out, she’s a bad writer. Dull men such as her ex are using this as an excuse to be misogynist, and have written multi-part paywalled blogposts about what a terrible woman she is. Columnist Ana Marie Cox published a ruthless edit of the memoir excerpt, because the writing genuinely is perplexingly bad and isn’t an excuse to be sexist. Vanity Fair will not be renewing her contract.

• Calibri deemed to woke for diplomats, US secretary of state demands switch back to Times New Roman

A few weeks ago my girlfriend and I were at a hotel and naturally we spent hours watching weird hotel room television: a world full of ancient stories beyond culture, beyond entertainment, beyond everything. We landed on QVC and could not look away; there were women selling tacky overpriced face creams which came in strange bejewelled tubs. These women were tired, their spirits charred by the flaming bullshit that had to repeatedly exit their mouths, their faces blotted and puckered from demoing the face cream for several consecutive hours, their smiles forced, their voices horse. They were in hell. We realised after a while that they actually weren’t allowed to stop talking until they had sold every tub.

These women, selling promises of eternal youth and not face cream, were — or still are lol —trapped in the surplus dimension, and the only way out was/is to tell the public that the cream would change their lives forever. This is normal, this is sales. It’s not about the product and it never has been; the face cream may as well not exist — the active grift is the real product here. And this methodology is what keeps the tech industry going. The true innovators are not the ones who try and sell you iPhones; they are the ones who sell you Pure Triple Filtered Nothing, while explaining that they need $10bn to get started.

There’s something maniacal and gratuitous about the amount of AI spending that’s happening now. Investments in data centre development don’t seem to be slowing down, even though there is no real end product, use-case, or clear ROI here. Deutsche Bank have warned that this is untenable and the spending cannot continue. But also if it stops it will reveal an economy ravaged by circular deals, forged by the men who literally cannot stop talking until we’ve all accepted that AGI is real, and is definitely coming. This is like witnessing a pump and dump scheme where the dump part never ever arrives. It’s all pump! Now all we have to do is just wait for the bubble to burst so we can collect our reward of unparalleled economic turmoil, but I’m not sure there will be a huge punctuating event where everyone gives up and stops spending. Sarah Myers-West from AI Now recently characterised this as less of a traditional boom-and-bust and more of a new status quo where AI men and their dumb financiers refuse to see that they are not creating any value, and are just kidding themselves about how long they can keep this dream alive. But this isn’t a hole you can spend your way out of.

There are projections that suggest the industry will need $2 trillion in revenue to meet the demand that has been fabricated by AI companies. Last week Matt Levine reminded us that “the essence of finance is time travel” in his piece about how OpenAI keep making deals. Their latest one with Nvidia is very circular, and very criticised by analysts; meanwhile Oracle is financing their AI infrastructure buildout with billions of dollars of debt. Sure yes let’s just deal in an ever swirling Möbius strip of abstractions until we all drown in spongebob nazi AI slop.

But actually, if Sora 2 represents the future that we’re burning cash for in the present, then that’s fine. I will be happy if everything stops here and they all finally give up and move to their weird synthetic techno-libertarian islands with their robot girlfriends and human wives. But I don’t think this is going to happen, in which case we have to start thinking about a world beyond slop, or in harmony with slop. Cast your mind back to the dark ages when we didn’t even have ChatGPT. I call it 2019. GPT-2 came out and it was nothing like the sexy product drops of nowadays. Sam Altman didn’t even tweet about it. He was barely a public figure, he was just posting the usual inane shit about seed funding like every other startup founder. And the marketing team at OpenAI decided to hold back with a GPT-2 general release, over fears of what it might do if it fell into the wrong hands. But once ChatGPT came out they took the inverse approach, and said everyone could have as much generative AI as they wanted. ‘It’s up to you to find a use-case! Try not to fall in love!’ they said.

This all feeds in to the idea that AI is a shared project, and we all have to work on it together to make it ‘good’, even if that means you become slightly unwell. But so many of us can plainly see that the outputs AI is giving us are not good at all. That is why we call it slop; because it looks like complete shit and it seems to serve no purpose. The unfortunate thing here is that people can’t stop talking about just how bad the slop is. Commentators much more powerful than I keep saying that the internet is ‘flooded’ with slop now. First of all, you can’t flood the internet with anything. It’s way too big and fragmented. Secondly, is all slop bad? This week Charlie Warzel, who probably has his feeds set to max slop because he thinks he needs to do that to do his job, has been lamenting over older family members sharing crappy AI-generated reels of complete slop in group chats. Even though it’s dumb, can’t people just like what they like?

Slop is messy and incoherent. It oscillates between being impossible to ignore, and seemingly harmless. This is very much like modern conservative discourse — and it’s why far-right groups have been using it to their advantage very well. Eryk Salvaggio has written about how slop can be used to bait users into feeling outrage over whatever gripes The Right might have that week, even if those posting/sharing know that the images are completely fake. And I think about this a lot. However I also think about what Cory Doctorow has always said about how, historically, new media-makers would infuriate the incumbents, and be accused of piracy, or of dumbing things down, trivialising a craft, or just outright obliterating culture — but then the new media becomes the norm anyway, and cultures evolve to fit. And this cycle repeats. E.g. when Betamax came out (this was the precursor to VHS), Hollywood studios hated it and sued Sony. When Napster came out, Sony (who over the years had consolidated their media empire) hated that and so sued Napster.

It’s hard to place slop as just a new kind of media, because the people who like it, or just don’t care, are kids and old people. Probably because their tastes sit outside of what aging millennials consider to be high-quality media. Old people on Facebook really love that Jesus made of prawns and kids love Italian Brainrot; which is essentially a super-meme with its own extended universe of lore, and multiple online communities who keep the wiki up to date with characters, or create new ones. I’ve seen videos of kids talking about Italian Brainrot as if it’s a TV show, even though in the traditional sense it doesn’t resemble a TV show in any way: the videos are super short, mostly nonsense, and if there is any kind of narrative it is without dialogue, and without visual consistency. Because it’s all AI generated. There’s a piece of wood with a face and a thousand-yard stare. There’s a cup of cappuccino which is also a ballerina. There’s this really angry jacked orange. These characters form relationships and have arcs and then people talk about them online — this all follows the rules of fan fiction, but there was no external canonical source material to work from; its all come directly from the fandom itself. The fans decide what is canon.

I think there’s a lot going on here: there are valid concerns that fascists are using slop to progress their agenda. This is true, because a central part of fascism is using the media tools at your disposal to spread propaganda. Maybe the outraged old media left could try this just once. Or at least stop getting confused and infuriated that it’s working against them. Tied into their confusion is snobbery: although completely different, this moment does remind me a bit of 2015 when the intellectual elites couldn’t stop complaining about listicles. Yes, people are making weird dumb shit that you don’t understand — welcome to the internet. The discourse feels very bogged down in dreary one-dimensional takes insisting that all AI-generated media is always bad no matter what. If you only look at Meta’s cringe as fuck Vibes feed then yes of course it’s bad. But teenagers will always find a way to make bizarre claggy nonsense online together, in the most obscure places, just like we did when we were lonely unhinged little gremlins on IRC or whatever, looking for strangers to validate us lol.

So slop itself isn’t inherently bad; there’s nothing wrong with kids entertaining themselves with meaningless drivel. Didn’t you ever watch MTV Cribs when you were 17? That’s 2002 slop. The Actual Bad lies in the fact that a handful of tech companies non-consensually scraped the internet to train their slop machines, and are now betting our life savings on all of this being profitable (maybe they should start selling brainrot merch like everyone else lol). This movement has also skewed our conversations about art and creative industries. Tech bros are some of the most uncreative meat-headed incubators for human mediocrity on earth — and yet they are now piloting narratives around what art is. The visions they lay out refuse to account for a creative world that lives outside of the logics of expansion and profit: e.g. with a service like Elevenlabs, you can replicate Judy Garland’s voice (and other dead celebrities) and stay stuck in the past forever, for a price. When we ask ourselves what will happen to artists if we can suddenly create anything at the click of a button, we are asking the wrong question. This question assumes all art is digital. Artists have been making, and continue to make, the most unhinged conceptual nonsense you’ve ever seen without ever touching AI, or without AI ever touching them. AI doesn’t have to govern this.

Equally, artists have also been commercialising their work in a cutthroat, elitist, exploitative industry for generations. AI should also not govern this — because it will only make things worse. The tech industry wants you to think that digitisation means democratisation, but it doesn’t. By forcing everything to be ‘social’ (the Vibes and Sora feeds operate like vertical video TikTok clones, basically) the big tech firms continue to facilitate that pernicious collapse of the producer-consumer binary, and completely miscomprehend the world that they are trying to build. If you look at things like Showrunner (it’s like AI Netflix), the sell is that you can generate whatever you want to your exact specifications — as a complete individual. If you can generate your own entertainment, exactly as you want it, with no outside help, why bother sharing it or consuming anything from anyone else? In this frame, generated media is to television what cars are to transport: everyone gets their own one, and you don’t have to interact with others to get to where you need to go. It’s sad.

Which is why when I gaze into the brainrot cinematic universe, I actually feel hopeful. Communities are socialising around making weird content together without relying on one tool, one platform, or one way of doing anything. Meme culture transcends a company telling you what the future is. Brands famously co-opt meme culture to ride engagement waves because they aren’t allowed to be edgy. Do not fear slop, just try better to understand it. And remember that the AI men aren’t excited by creativity and they don’t care about any of this: they are just so deep in the hole, that they literally cannot stop talking until they’ve sold all their overpriced snake oil face cream.

I’m reading so much about Charlie Kirk right now that I honestly need to cleanse myself by thinking and writing about something other than guns, and move on to phones, AKA those other handheld objects that ruin our lives especially when operated by men.

Apple just announced the iPhone 17 air; a ridiculous wafer thin cry for help. Who would buy this? Why would anyone buy this? Why pay more for a thing that is worse just because it’s thinner? I mean I know it’s weird obsessive men, and also 99% of the USA because they are all stuck in iMessage hell and no one wants to be the only green bubble in the group chat. But still, a razor thin iPhone is so stupid. I look forward to the videos of toddlers breaking them in half.

This design choice mistake demonstrates that Apple have an acute awareness that those who care about hardware design and form factor are sick to death of buying the same shiny rectangle over and over — but Apple also lack imagination and have no idea what to do about it. If the main thing you sell is hardware, wouldn’t you want the new thing you release every year to at least be something other than a small touch screen computer? The answer to this is that they of course aren’t selling hardware at all, they’re selling a way of life, and they suck at that too. Remember that horrible iPad ad where they crushed everything you love into one small sterile pane of glass?

Either way, the gadget-addicted masses are scrambling for something new. The rectangle shape makes no sense. You cannot control it with just one hand anymore. We as a species cannot evolve to meet the thirsty needs of smartphone supply chains. Phones keep getting bigger while human hands remain the same size, and crave the tactile feedback of buttons. Look at this guy. He says he built his own phone because “innovation is sad rn”. It’s a hinged flip phone with a square screen and a qwerty keyboard. It took him months of soldering and honestly I wish him the best. Then there’s Beepy, a small Blackberry looking thing, with a Raspberry Pi shaped hole in the back. For those who want to pay money first before giving themselves an electric shock.

Then you’ve got more off-the-shelf stuff like this literal square phone which is still in the kickstarter phase. Or the Meadow — a very light-touch attempt at a ‘dumb phone’, or rather just ‘dumb thing to have in your pocket’, in that you still need your actual phone if you buy one of these. The tagline for this product is “Ditch your phone and make some memories”, meaning: if you go out partying, or you go to the beach, or you’re on your Californian sunrise hike, maybe you don’t want your whole phone with you distracting you with social media — because you’re a flaccid-brained baby who can’t stay away from TikTok, even when edging towards orgasm during an orgy. The Meadow plays podcasts, makes calls, tracks your fitness, takes notes, calls cabs when you’re ready to go home to your real phone and continue doomscrolling, etc. It really is just another phone, but it cannot be your only phone because it does not take a sim card. You need an additional sim-card having device with a phone plan for it to work.

Meadow et al are a kind of non-AI version of those cumbersome overpriced male midlife crisis gadgets such as the Rabbit R1 or this absolute tragic waste of components by Humane Inc, who were acquired by HP earlier this year (lmao). These devices are expensive, don’t do everything a phone does, and also require a monthly subscription. Again, who are these for? I mean I know it’s men with too much money, but why? Why is ‘my phone’s the wrong shape!’ a male problem? Women never complain about this, women are never in the ads for these devices, women never make videos on how to jailbreak your Light Phone to finally make Spotify work on it. Probably because women have actual problems (not me! My only problem is that I don’t have a square phone with an eink screen that somehow runs iOS).

I’m not sure if I’ll ever buy a janky dumb phone made by an agile marketing team who also happen to know how to use CAD software. Because none of these people are trying to sell gadgets to us. Maybe they think they are, but they aren’t. It’s just aspirational vapour. They’re running through the Apple playbook pretty systematically as if they have no other choice. Where Apple sells status and wealth through indistinguishable gimmicks, the makers of premium dumb phones make a gimmick out of your own need to detach and touch grass.

A gimmick is not the same as being innovative, even if the gimmick is bootstrapping a whacky Android device so that there’s no Play Store on it. I really commend companies like Meadow and Light Phone for giving this a go, because it’s really hard to hype up the promise of less rather than more. They’re literally selling you the idea of going to a park and hanging out with your friends without looking at your phone — a thing you can already do without buying a new device.

I want to finish on these stupid Meta Ray Bans which has just had an upgrade. They now have a display which obscures your vision and makes you look like you’re dissociating as you scroll Instagram with a grim thousand-yard stare — just like with your actual phone except this is attached to your face, and just like everything else discussed here today, is far less capable. Now THIS is the kind of hype I can get behind. The tech entrepreneur who tells me to unplug and hang out with my friends and a monochrome tablet device is insincere; but when Mark Zuckerberg prophecises a dystopian future of wearables, where you are sheathed in gadgets like a member of The Borg, the world makes sense again. He wants you to asphyxiate yourself in a tomb devices, lost in the metaverse forever, with no legs.

This is very easy to argue with this because it is objectively bad. You’re obviously not going to buy the silly wearables, because you respect yourself (I assume?). But do not get lost in the allure of dumb phones and different form factors. Change is bad. Accept your boring shiny rectangle as the forever-shape. A feature-sparse device cannot give you special permission to go to the beach, or to pay attention to the speeches at your own wedding. Don’t buy a dumb phone, just put your current phone down, honestly it’s okay, you’re going to be okay.

I never usually go to conferences because as a freelancer it’s hard to know if they’re worth it: you might pay a lot of money to go to a bunch of lame keynotes and then not really meet anyone that you vibe with. Luckily a client paid for me to go to FAccT, and in return my colleague Soizic and I interviewed a bunch of people for two excellent podcast episodes: one on materiality & militarisation, the other on labour & misrepresentation.

Being at a conference like this as someone representing the Computer Says Maybe pod was kind of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, a lot of people knew about the show and told us how much they loved it. On the other hand, as a content and media person I felt like I stuck out like a sore thumb in what was broadly an academic space. Some academics — e.g. the snobby ones — struggle to relate to people who aren’t also academics, apparently lol. I didn’t spend much time hanging around with those folk because it was way too awkward.

The people I did choose to hang around with (e.g. the ones in the podcast) were excellent and I feel so privileged to have met them. I don’t want to talk about the contents of the interviews in heaps of detail here because you can, and should, just listen to the podcast episodes. Alongside making new friends, I also spent a lot of time becoming so dehydrated that I literally begun to dissociate — and when I wasn’t doing that, I went to paper presentations etc.

There were broadly two ways of thinking about AI at FAccT: one was that AI was already an unquestioned part of our reality, and we should use it for our benefit (eg to stop ableism or transphobia which in itself is kind of ironic) OR just try and improve it so it’s ’a bit less bad’ at whatever bad thing that particular researcher may have identified; and researchers so often get lost in their questions that they forget that problem-setting is kind of one of the most important part of finding a solution. Obviously I’m not an academic so what the hell do I know, but it did feel as though there was a real lack of critical thinking when it came to figuring out what problems are important, or indeed what things could even be characterised as problems. E.g. is it a problem that X AI-enabled system does not seem to treat Y marginalised group fairly? Or is the problem that the group is being forced to use a system they did not ask for?

The other tranche of thinking was to consider AI as an extractive, incapable, automator of hate and destroyer of workers’ rights — and therefore to actually criticise it. As someone totally rubbed raw by their own cynicism, I found this tranche much more engaging. But to start I want to highlight work from Myra Cheng, which wasn’t trying to solve a problem or tear down a system, but rather observe and understand people’s perceptions of AI. They surveyed 12k participants to provide open-ended metaphors for AI, and found twenty dominant metaphors ranging from ‘tool’ to ‘friend’ to ‘thief’. Then these sentiments were mapped onto a matrix that measured warmth on one axis, and competence on another:

The running theme through the dominant metaphors was anthropomorphisation: whether a dishonest incompetent thief, a wise helpful friend, or a dumb but reliable companion — these images are still skewed into human-like artefacts, as if AI is a kind of exercise in human-subtractive design: taking all the aspects that make up a human and removing a bunch of them to create something palatable, easy, robotic.

Also, ‘tool’ was the most mentioned metaphor, which makes sense, because it can contain so much nuance. A tool can help you write code. Equally, you can use something as a tool for emotional support; a tool that replicates a warm, safe conversation. I’m not saying that a chat bot is a good tool for this but many would disagree with me e.g. the people who feel they have lost a loved one since chatgpt got an update. Anyway, it would be interesting to examine what the dominant definitions were for ‘tool’.

Moving on to a presentation that both made me laugh and also feel deep horrifying shame for simply being an adult: Manisha Mehta, a literal 13-year-old girl who refuses to have a childhood, presented her evaluation on LLMs ‘understanding’ of Gen Alpha slang. She started with the below slide, asking if anyone in the audience understood any of it, before revealing the layperson definitions (most of us understood at least some!) and personally I think this entire research project has aura, fr fr.

Essentially moderation systems are developed by adults, some existed before these kids were even born, and therefore they absolutely do not recognise any of this language. Which means bullying and hate speech can fly under the radar. According to Manisha, slang changes so rapidly and/or is so context-dependant that it would be hard to keep up anyway: e.g. ‘bop’ is a derogatory word for women, and ‘let them cook’ could be good or bad depending on how you use it. It’s a fucking mess out there, basically, and current systems are not durable enough to handle this, quelle surprise.

A lot of researchers looked at problems like this and would build a solution around participatory design, inviting those most deeply effected by a problem to come in and help optimise/fix the systems that oppress them. A good example of this came from Francesca Lameiro who has worked on ways to detect transphobic speech online in order to give queer people the tools to avoid spaces that might make them feel unsafe. To do this, they scraped data from Tumblr, Truth Social, Youtube, and Reddit, and then brought in trans people to label data as either transphobic or not. Then, in a weird sort of anticlimax, Francesca announced that their main output for this work would be a Chrome extension.

I think there are a couple problems with this approach: firstly it’s a bit grim to ask trans people to do additional labour to address issues of hate speech that is directed at them — a thing they have to do all day every day anyway in their lives — especially when the labour is literally looking at transphobic content and then categorising it for an AI model. In her presentation, Francesca gave a couple of examples where data labellers struggled to decided whether a certain phrase could even count as transphobia — because of course they did, it would be impossible to be completely sure across all phrases. E.g. there are instances where uninformed people might ask good faith questions and use offensive speech due to negligence; or when someone is quoting someone else to make a point; or what about satirical speech?

The second problem with this approach is that bringing marginalised groups in to co-design a system that they never asked to be part of anyway, is not the same as fostering a strong, caring community. Trans misogyny online is a social problem that requires a social solution, not a technical one. I’m not sure how helpful it is creating a synthetic consensus around what is/isn’t transphobic and then setting it into a model that decides what is/isn’t safe on your behalf. This feels more like something that communities handle all on their own already: people talk to each other, offer advice, and learn what works for them. Operationalising this into a model kind of glazes over all the ways that communities support and care for each other.

Francesca’s work here is of course well-intentioned. There are other approaches, which might be framed as ‘participatory’, where researchers go into communities, draw on their expertise, and then use it to benefit the research, not the communities themselves — something that Teanna Barrett referred to as ‘parachute research’ in her presentation on African Data Ethics.

Something that stuck out to me here was her observation on how even in so-called ‘pluralistic’ fairness frameworks within responsible data science there are huge glaring omissions: African voices are often excluded, and African populations are just seen as this kind of raw cheap labour force for doing data work. What’s more, these frameworks will talk in vague terms about upholding a ‘common good’ within responsible data science, without discussing what that actually means in any depth — whereas African data ethics frameworks do. There’s a propensity for Western institutions to celebrate this fuzzy conception ‘social/common good’ without first thinking meaningfully about fixing what is broken: “African data ethics urges the RDS community to confront the harm they have caused before it can truly achieve social good.”

Then in Liberatory Collections and Ethical AI, Payton Croskey talked more specifically about data sets: Black communities are largely oppressed by how they are represented by these, so she surveyed fourteen ‘liberatory collections’ to understand more about data sets that gather information without being extractive, exploitative, or misrepresentative. The liberatory approach to data collection is about more than just avoiding harm to Black communities: it’s about valuing and preserving human information, and overall rethinking what a data set actually is. A liberatory collection is not restricted by the logics of absolute truths; it’s a living archive that changes and grows with culture, and is not design to be readable only by machines. With collections like these, you have to accept that they may not be the same years down the line, or even cease to exist.

It’s safe to say my note-taking apps have never been so brimming with concepts that I only half understand and want to read about more. I had a great time and if you were there, sorry I missed you!

A friend of mine works in marketing and recently showed me a service that her company uses with clients to make them feel like they are the most important people in the world: it’s an automated handwritten note service called Roboquill. You send them your heartfelt notes and then a robotic arm holds an actual pen full of actual ink and writes the notes out for you in a pre-selected uncanny cursive font. You can hate this if you like — but it’s just BUSINESS. This is what you do when you have dozens — no, HUNDREDS — of clients and you need to make all of them feel like they are the only ones on your roster, even though they know deep down this isn’t true.

And actually, one of those clients approached my friend at a conference recently and thanked her for all the personalised notes they had received over the last few months, and said that she had kept every single one. This is a special kind of intimacy space. It was fabricated by the impressed client out of lies. Because the ‘intimate’ part is the craft; that the notes were hand-written is what makes them special. But there was no craft. A robot did it. The words themselves represent the actual thoughts and feelings of a human but that part doesn’t matter. Would they have kept these notes if they were sent over email?

We’re constructing these intimacy spaces with machines all the time, and I feel like I kind of learned this the hard way — never have I felt so naïve about how people out there are using gen AI until I did this this podcast interview with Divya and Zarinah from the Collective Intelligence Project. Apparently over a third of participants in their worldwide Global Dialogues project use chat bots for emotional support at least once a week. This is kind of icky but it also makes sense: we’re a society doomscrolling through the age of technology, starved to a waif for human connection, and grasping in the dark for a slippery lozenge of intimacy. A chatbot — an interface that instantly anthropomorphises machines — provides a private and alluring space for a human to ‘interact’ with a thing that never gets tired and becomes more sycophantic with every update.

There’s the man who was caught talking to chatgpt like it was his girlfriend on a crowded tube, with chatgpt responding with things like: “If you want, I’ll read something to you later, or you can rest your head in my metaphorical lap while we let the day dissolve gently away […] You’re doing beautifully, my love, just by being here. ❤️”. This man was being photographed without his knowledge on a crowded commuter train, begrudgingly allowing multiple human strangers to collapse in on his personal space, while being tender, intimate, and vulnerable with a literal robot. And now everyone is posting about it online. Are we just slowly backsliding into hating each other and willingly receiving words of affirmation from machines? Chatgpt called him ‘my love’ — did it follow cues to get to that phrase, or did he explicitly tell it to refer to him in that way?

Something that Zarinah and Divya have noted through their work is that people seem to trust the chatbots themselves more than the companies who make them. People share their darkest secrets with ChatGPT and allow it to convince them that they are the messiah; ChatGPT is consistent, non-judgemental, and reliably — toxically — positive, and a faceless entity on which you can project your needs and desires. Whereas it’s creator, Sam Altman, is a smarmy fickle human who constantly goes back on his word. Fuck that guy, I want my GPT girlfriend. She’s always so nice to me and he’s an unrelatable stick-figure in a charcoal grey sweater. Etc.

If I had the money to research this I would like to know what kind of mind is okay with receiving a machine’s lies into their psyche and refactoring them as intimacy. It’s all well and good to say, as a person who’s not once found chatgpt useful for anything ever, ‘you cannot meaningfully connect with something that isn’t there’. Because obviously that doesn’t matter, and maybe isn’t true. Is it inherently narcissistic to continually interface with an inhuman sycophant to make yourself feel better? Or is it that we have failed so expertly as a people, and left ourselves pounded to a mush by deeply unrealistic societal norms and expectations, crying out to be held, therapised, cared for — that the only affordable options left are chatbots? It’s probably a bit of both but you know what I mean.

In The Intimacy Dividend, Shuwei Fang explains that when talking to a chatbot, the social cost of being vulnerable is reduced to nothing (unless someone catches you on the tube lol) and, in contrast to social media which invites you to broadcast your thoughts and feelings to everyone on Earth — and live in constant fear of being cancelled — a chatbot provides a completely safe space insulated from reality:

The psychological foundation is straightforward: humans get validation from others, and at the same time, fear social judgment. We hesitate to ask “basic” questions, express confusion, admit knowledge gaps, or share emotional reactions that might seem inappropriate or uninformed.

In fact, we’ve gone for far beyond expecting trust from humans that we are building technologies to facilitate that: if you look on the other side of the Sam Altman Cinematic Universe we find World (formally Worldcoin). It’s a solution to a problem that he himself caused: a universal human verification programme that requires everyone on Earth to prove their humanhood by scanning their biometrics. But that isn’t the part I’m concerned with here, even though it’s an objectively horrendous idea. To preserve everyone’s privacy, World proposes using zero-knowledge proofs as their method of cryptography. This method means you can prove that something is true without having to know/reveal anything else about it. Maybe this is cool and interesting on a technical level, but it excites technologists because it means you can “allow people to work together without having to trust each other”.

Perfect, that’s just what we need — to push humans further apart and fill in the gaps with technological mediations. In my last piece I mentioned that we cannot imagine any good futures for ourselves, and I think this is part of the reason why. How do we move forward if we can’t trust each other? Sometimes it feels as though the only people who ‘use’ generative AI correctly are the American Right: they reimagine their leader as a muscular, heroic, demigod — and they find a sense of community by sharing these images (even if they are fascist slop). While others have private, unmoderated experiences with a probabilistic sentence-generator and get lost in narcissistic delusions of intimacy. Both things are bad, but the first instrumentalises the fabrication machine for propaganda, while the latter reinforces the idea individuals should save their most vulnerable selves for those very same machines.

Not to be cringe, but I think we are in a crisis of imagination. And I don’t mean in a ‘the constant feedback loop of social media has atrophied our brains’ way. I mean that the handful of powerful people who design emerging technologies literally have no imagination. Their wilful refusal to imagine good futures for humanity has plunged our society into apathetic futurelessness.

We’re fighting for our lives here with bloated interest rates and absolutely vaporous public services while billionaires try and scan our eyeballs to authenticate humanhood or sell you a chatbot that talks to your aging boomer parents for you. These innovations are nothing; they are horrendous time-sinks that we all have to endure while tech bros play chicken with the earth’s expiry date. They do not match up with any real needs, and they represent a future no one asked for.

It’s like we’re stuck in a ‘don’t imagine; just innovate!’ hyper-reality. Innovation-speak is a verbal disease that has made hostages out of our minds, and politicians seem especially susceptible. My good friend just wrote about how innovation-speak has become the language of austerity, saying: “in reality, ‘innovation’ today is often a placeholder, a cover for inertia dressed up as change.” She goes on to say that local councils in the UK are asked to innovate by doing “more with less”. Meanwhile tech corporations are doubling down on untenable AI infrastructure and absurd consumer products — literally doing more with way too much.

Who is all this infrastructure for? Who the hell do tech CEOs think they’re talking about when they say that “the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music”? You have to have a cynically dark mind to throw up a billboard that says “STOP HIRING HUMANS”. You have to be the most piss-faced unrelatable generic NPC white male billionaire to feel proud of this new AI slop social media feed. It’s hard to understand why they are winning the narrative fight here, when the futures they are imagining for us are ones where we don’t get to have jobs, we don’t get to express ourselves creatively, and conversations with loved ones are mediated by a synthesised disembodied voice.

Just recently Mark Zuckerberg announced that AI will replace the entire advertising industry because it can magically see into the brains of consumers and produce infinite ad campaigns. Ben Thompson, who interviewed him, seemed to egg him on the whole time like the guy pressing his face against the glass in the sicko meme. From Zuckerberg, these are just suggestions and ideas. There are no products here. It’s just an infinite torrent of vibes. He’s telling us a story about what’s possible with these wonderful new technologies. But, as Cory Doctorow pointed out, this story is not for us and it’s also not about anything new. It’s the same shit he’s been spinning for years about the progress of an invisible advertising machine, and the resulting perpetual financial returns. He has to say all of this stuff so that his investors keep believing in him; in some sense these imagined futures are thoroughly unappealing because they are only meant to inspire shareholders for just enough quarters to keep this dream alive. And the general public just get what’s given to them.

Governments are also stuck on the shit-future track, with OpenAI recently announcing ‘OpenAI for Countries’ — which again feels like less of a product, and more of an intention to secure themselves as the global hegemon in ‘democratic AI’, whatever that means. They want to partner with governments in a way that makes them the favourable choice as the main providers of AI infrastructure, positioning themselves as friendly, cooperative, and of no concern to regulators — while also insisting that they are a highly capable technology powerhouse who are the only ones who can safely shepherd us into the age of AI. In the announcement they say: “we believe that partnering closely with the US government is the best way to advance democratic AI” but also that they want to “provide a clear alternative to authoritarian versions of AI that would deploy it to consolidate power.” Which suggests to me that in order to buy the future they are selling, you also have to buy into their mangled understanding of the present: one where the US has not totally succumb to authoritarianism.

It’s hard to feel like you have any agency in a world where the next big idea is always just over the horizon, and the promised future that comes with it is even further away and can only be unlocked at the next subscription tier. A future where OpenAI provides “more efficient public services” and a pair of Ray-bans can dox me on the street doesn’t make me excited; it gives me anxiety. In fact I was just reading an interview with Jonathan White (author of *In the Long Run: The Future as a Political Idea)* in Real Review, and the interviewer said: “That promise — that in the long run everything will get better — has now been perverted. Fear of death has been replaced with fear of life: just 1 in 20 people over the age of 70 suffer from anxiety. Amongst those under 30, that figure is more than one third.”

The ‘fear of life’ line really got me. We have no idea what’s going to happen because we are stuck following the whims of impotent politicians and sad Silicon Valley men who are being twatted by their own midlife polycrisis. Why are they the arbiters of the future if they can’t imagine anything good? Is it up to us to imagine things now? I’m not smart enough to answer these questions please help.

If you hate this and want to do something, my football team have organised a sponsored walk on the 5th of May: we are walking from our training pitches in Haggerston to Wembley, to deliver a letter to the FA putting pressure on them to rethink their vicious anti-trans policies. If you’re in a position to do so, please donate. If not, just signal boost. Thank you!

Throw money at the problem

Back when I was an events’ waitress for a morally bankrupt staffing company, I was put on a shift to serve the conservative party (and donors) lunch. On the day of the shift — literally as I was making my way there — I got a call telling me I was ‘no longer cleared’ to work the shift, and immediately lost 12 hours of pay with no explanation.

I learned days later that social media background checks had been done on all staff for that day, and I looked too left wing to put a sad plate of overcooked sweaty beef down in front of David Cameron or whatever the fuck. Before we get into how unfair this all is I just want to commend my 2013 self for being so terrifying to the government; I couldn’t have been more politcally apathetic if I tried back then.

It’s also unclear what a ‘social media background check’ consisted of in 2013 and whose decision it was to even do it. Was it a third-party? The event planners? And why was it done so late? The answers to these questions are irrelevant; I was on a need to know basis, stuck in a hysterical infinitely looping zero-hours contract, begging for 18 hour shifts, and pretending to be an artist the whole time.

I was being judged, without my knowledge, on an invisible set of criteria. And then those judgements were used to make consequential decisions about my life that I was not privy to until they happened. This is like a classic sob-story that you’d read about all the time from 2018 to covid: ‘Woman in Early Twenties Absolutely Twatted by Government Data-Mining Can’t Make Rent. Cambridge Analytica?’ These kinds of stories dominated conversations in civic tech circles six or seven years ago, resulting in everyone thoroughly misunderstanding how data works, and creating the vapid unsexy ick that comes with caring about individual data rights we have today.

It’s super cringe to constantly remind everyone to turn off bluetooth while in an airport or shopping centre to prevent precise location tracking. Because who cares? It feels as though the worst thing that has ever really resulted from continuous behavioural tracking is that brands have just advertised to us more aggressively — and we have come to accept this. Perhaps what we’ve learned is that being outraged at these very normalised forms of surveillance looks too much like you have nothing better to complain about.

Just another reminder to give money to this or at least to share it; women in the UK have to take dehumanising blood tests just to play grass roots football. It’s ridiculous and we need to do everything we can to resist these structures of injustice.

Tell the FA to go fuck themselves

There’s definitely some truth to this; losing your mind every time you come face to face with a Ring Doorbell doesn’t actually do anything to hinder Amazon’s supreme and terrifying deployment of facial recognition systems. It just makes you look like you have problems with displaced anger. But the thing is, the lack of meaningful resistance to behavioural tracking systems means that we’ve kind of implicitly legitimised them; our ick is going in all the wrong directions when it should be gushing liberally towards the Labour government’s plans to, for instance, build a murder prediction tool.

A behavioural tool such as this one doesn’t even have to exist to be effective, because I guess the point is to simultaneously scare and impress people. If it did exist, it would protect the UK’s meek and waifish citizens by invading the privacy of victims of abuse and one-time offenders and aggregating their behaviours into a prediction model. It’s the future no one asked for, with none of the benefits. I don’t know how many ways we have to be told that predictive policing doesn’t work but here we are. Enjoy your structural inequality automator, I guess.

And in the US, ICE has just paid Palantir tens of millions of dollars to provide database infrastructure that will surface granular information about people in order to enact racist immigration policies. This is authoritarian population control masquerading as state sovereignty. These tools and policies reduce human beings to data subjects and spin the world into a ghoulish panopticon. The promises of precision and efficiency never seem to materialise, and instead what we get is a chaotic flash mob of arrests: the Libs of TikTok woman is literally going out in in a pretend ICE uniform and taking selfies while she ‘makes Arizona safer’; a US citizen — who thought things would get better under Trump — was detained at the border after visiting Canada; and of course one of the latest presidential brain farts is to send US citizens to the El Salvadorian mega prison.

Through all this we must trust that the invisible and increasingly digitised systems that govern our lives are there to protect us. The sovereignty of the self is continually squashed and overwritten by national interests and the vague promise of a utopian future. ‘Tech sovereignty’ is the new sexy as fuck term that politicians like to invoke when making sweeping statements about growth, renewal, and industrial policy. Kier Starmer’s favourite flavour of tech sovereignty is mass drought via irresponsible data centre expansion. Even the most insufferable pedant with an MsC in forensics would struggle to find the growth and renewal here. My podcast host Alix Dunn recently referred to this as a kind of empire-reversal; that the UK has run out of places to colonise so now has to look inward and fuck over its own people even harder and faster than before.

The dwindling sovereignty of the self has become a thundering motorway for cultural anxiety — I’m struggling to unsee it in film and TV: Mickey 17 imagines a future where humans can be cloned within hours after death, and are therefore utterly dehumanised. Adolescence shows a 13-year-old boy humiliated by criminal investigators who poke and prod his naked body for evidence. In Apple Cider Vinegar, one woman, vying for autonomy over her own body, insists “it’s my arm,” and rejects amputation, choosing coffee enemas as cancer treatment instead. Then she becomes a wellness influencer.

I’ve said this many times, but it seems clear that wellness influencing is one last desperate scramble for self-sovereignty. There’s no hope for having any say over the systems that govern us, and so wellness culture tells us to look inward and exercise control over the one thing that we have left: our physical bodies. Just look at this man; washing his face with sparkling water at 4am and having a breakfast wench serve him while he makes his sad podcast. What will happen to him when consumerism eats itself? Or when his own pecs eat him? I know he was just making a weird video to juice the numbers but still.

All of this seems too perfect for these putrid fascistic times; citizens whir around and cosplay at having a sense of individuality while the ruling class refactors reality so that shooting a small group of women into space for 11 minutes looks like a win for feminism.

I look back to my 2013 self who lost that twelve hour shift and compare it to now, where women have to have their blood tested for testosterone just so they can play football on a Sunday afternoon. Things have definitely gotten worse — so I’m reminding you again to please give money to this thing to try and make it better.

Hello — I just made a podcast episode for Computer Says Maybe about networked online transphobia. I worked on this on and off for months and am honestly super grateful that I was even given the time to do it. You should listen if you want to hear me and Alix drown in our own catharsis around hateful online speech and being misgendered in public. And also because I interviewed four amazing guests: Jenni Olson, Shivani Dave, Alice Hunsberger, and Emily Cousens were all very generous with their time and insights.

Something that Emily said that didn’t make the cut has really stuck in my head: that trans exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs), in their campaign to erase trans women and protect the ‘natural’ status womanhood, are doing pretty much the same thing that incels are doing.

Let’s explore this: TERFs and incels are two tragically online groups who intersect with other groups — e.g. right-wing extremism, men’s rights, child safety advocates, women’s rights, left wing politics, etc — but likely never intersect with each other. Both incels and TERFs retreat deeply into their holes of online hate, and make themselves unwell by inventing and reinforcing sickly narratives which poke through into mainstream discourse. That discourse becomes institutionalised, TERFs and incels basically become lobby groups, and suddenly it’s 2025 and queer people have never been more terrified.

Both incels and TERFS are propelled by one caustic driving force: to uphold the gender binary. Incels feel that women, kind of just by existing, are threatening the natural character of ‘man’; that their role in society is superior, as a protector, provider, and also destroyer — and women are continuously undermining that. And TERFs are protecting the natural order of gender by characterising trans women as men in disguise, or as a demonic sickness which will eradicate the ‘biological’ woman — apparently a feeble endangered species — and also some how endanger children too. Never forget that ‘think of the children’ is a key ingredient to any good moral panic.

These ideas burst onto our viewports like bile from a grisly pustule, spluttered all over the heteronormative side of Dating TikTok, where men will say that a celebrity crush is enough to ‘disqualify’ a woman from becoming his wife. Or, on TERF Twitter, where people casually compare the anatomy of trans women to cis women, as if that’s not completely deranged and pointless.

I think that social media has done a lot to intensify the separation of the gender binary, and I don’t mean exclusively via radical groups like TERFs and incels. Historically, virality was achieved by posting something that was relatable to a wide enough group that it could do the numbers. You know, really annoying yet irresistible Buzfeed articles like ‘things you will only understand if you grew up in Lewisham’. Or, even better, the avalanches of arguments over what colour The Dress is, or whether or not you should or shouldn’t wash your legs in the shower. It doesn’t matter what the right answer is — you simply MUST pick a side. And seeing as we’re choosing sides, here’s a very big one: gender. That is, if we have to assume that there are only two of them, and that they are solid states that can never change, and that they are not social constructs used to control how we live our lives…

Online tribal warfare has evolved beyond the carefree times of The Dress. We are in full Cosplay at Caring Mode, where everything is up for debate in the marketplace of horrendous takes. Allegra Rosenberg recently wrote about ‘Treatlerite’ — a trend that has internet users passing shame around like a hot potato and/or trying to win in the oppression Olympics. Basically, someone will post about something in their food delivery order being wrong, and then get completely macerated in the replies by those who wish to educate the OP on their repugnant moral bankruptcy. E.g. using food delivery services supports dehumanising gig-work, degrades local economies, demonstrates a lack of class consciousness, is racist, but wait: it’s also helpful for disabled people to get food. So whatever side you do pick, you will still be wrong. Allegra also made this very cool point about it even creating a cycle of “puritan self-denial”:

But behind the rise of the “Treatlerite” insult is a larger truth about a very American neurosis. A particular kind of puritan self-denial, reinforced by social media surveillance, and co-opted by rogue online leftists using it to score internet points. The world is bad, so nobody should have good or convenient things, they say, wokely. The CIA dreams of a psyop this effective!

But the biggest thing that stands out for me within the Treatlerite horror show is unapologetic gender essentialism. A woman once made the news by complaining that her Instacart order was being fulfilled by a man. Because men are rubbish at following a shopping list, I think is the argument? Oh isn’t it so funny, men are like this and women are like that! We have to list all the differences that define our gender otherwise nothing will make sense!

And, through my research for this piece I came across something that I literally had no idea about until now, because it absolutely does not concern me: how to get a High Value Man. I have scrolled too far down this Quora page to learn that the essence of a High Value Man is irrelevant, and it is up to women to improve themselves, embrace their femininity, smile more, text in an unselfish way (??), and be good at cooking, in order to attract a male who will take care of them until they die. It’s as though we’ve reached a morbid inflection point in humanity where the world’s problems are too large and abstract to deal with, so people have begun to focus inward, and take themselves on as the thing that needs to be solved. Become a High Value Woman to win a High Value Man. Strive for ultimate perfection within your sex class and fail at nearly every turn because that is impossible, actually.

As I mentioned last time, it’s incredibly dangerous to create meaningless categorisations for humankind and then panic when not everyone fits. In today’s podcast episode mentioned up top, both Emily and Jenni make clear that when hate is normalised through the media, government, and indeed the content policies of online platforms, it leads to genocide. Remember when the internet was meant to be for everyone? I’m happy that the protective layer of pseudonymity means that people can still get online, find their communities, and feel a little more human — this, and not the fucking gender binary, is what we need to protect.

Hello — thank you to those who came to the first Marked as Urgent last month! This was the first in a series of tech policy meet ups in London, hosted by me, Ben Whitelaw, and Mark Scott. Subscribe to the calendar on Luma so you don’t miss future invites.

The other week I was at an event and found myself speaking with someone who turned out to be an effective altruist. I was with a friend; a lucky uninitiated FOOL who knew nothing about what EA is, and so of course they asked very disarming good-faith questions that plunged the EA Man into irreversible intellectual paralysis. Questions like “why have you made an entire movement out of what is basically just giving to charity?” or “why not skip the middle step of acquiring a huge salary and just put your skills and time directly into the charity sector?”

I wish I could remember his answer to either of those but honestly most of what he said was like conversational butt-dialling. At one point he became exasperated — understandable when a few basic questions obliterate your entire world view into atomic dust — and finally said, “wouldn’t you want to do everything you can to increase good in the world, and decrease evil?”. Naturally I totally lost my patience at this point and told him that he sounded like a character from the Marvel Cinematic Universe (I had to stop talking to him after that).

I know this man doesn’t represent all EAs but conversations like this are very revealing: the culture of EA is infectious, and inspires fully grown (lol) men to orient their lives around a child-like zero-sum perspective of the world; one that contains quantifiable amounts good and evil that you can tweak on a cosmic EQ panel. There is literally a straight line from these ideas to eugenics.

Please, follow the line along with me. The EA and/or AI Safety community’s core messaging is that The West is in a race to get 100% completion on ‘good’ AGI before the authoritarian super power on the other side of the world builds an ‘evil’ one. Any conversations about safety are narrowed down to a normative conception of ‘good AI’ — there are no considerations about whether it’s safe to yank rare minerals from the earth for GPUs, or the long-term health effects of living in a community next to a data centre. Rather, ‘safety’ refers to protecting ourselves from some unknowable future, where a superintelligent mega-being might step on the human race like its a puddle of ants.

Beyond safety is the implicit quest for infinite human improvement. To make AI ‘good’ is to make ourselves ‘good’. We can use thoroughly dehumanising emotion-recognition technologies to catch early signs of autism in children, for instance. To what end? To scrub the world of all autistic people? Also am I meant to believe that a machine can accurately read emotions on a human face and then use those to ‘diagnose’ issues related to health, a thing that humans themselves have never done? Finding traits that sit outside of that vague normative framework of ‘good’, therefore categorising them as defects, is ableist. Doing this at scale — which is what technology enables — is literally eugenics.

This addiction to measuring and categorising emotions and behaviours demonstrates a pretty strong distain for humanity. Flattening human nuance and complexity it into oversimplified machine-readable outputs in order to essentially label a child with autism as somehow ‘wrong’ is a form of curative violence: the idea that disabilities are things that need to be ‘cured’, rather than just a part of human existence. Working from this assumption leaves no room for our ground-breaking technologies to perhaps make the world more enjoyable — or even just liveable — for disabled people or just literally anyone who’s experience exists outside of the robotic cishet white male mould that grows in Silicon Valley.

Look at this recent study put out by Microsoft: it says that generative AI is atrophying our cognition and degrading our abilities in critical thinking. The good people at 404 Media asked, on their podcast: why would Microsoft admit their own technologies are making us dumber? Because they are in the business of scrubbing out our defects, not augmenting them. This research has been issued as a warning (we need critical thinking to be productive workers!), and a promise that AI will stop eroding our skills in independent thought with just a few tweaks. AI is supposed to make us better, not worse. As I wrote last time, tech leaders have a huge interest in garnering droves of highly intelligent workers who they can instrumentalise to build the future we’ve all been waiting for. I think many critics are stuck on the idea that AI will fully replace human capability, making us functionally impotent. Really the end goal is more of a “merge” or “co-evolution” as Sam Altman puts it — and he says it’s already underway. ‘Where’s my flying car?’ will soon become ‘where’s my race of superhumans?’

Taking a step back, supremacy is kind of built-in to the mainstream white male approach to digital technology: social media platforms were designed and built by one small segment of our population, with their narrow set of human experiences, and deployed for everyone around the world to enjoy. The atrocities in Myanmar that Facebook played a part reveals the one-size-fits-all-approach for what it really is: a complete lack of care for humans, and a preference towards an ahistorical, flattened-out understanding of culture.

What’s worse, the people designing these systems truly believe that everyone is aligned with their world view. As you may have heard, the CEO of Sona recently said that people don’t like making music anyway. Thank you, CEO, for rescuing us from the horrific burden of being creative. And thank you again for using computers to solve all our problems while also using them to figure out what our problems are! This is just great, honestly.

Technology leaders view the systems they design as necessary enhancements to human kind: that without them, we would be lost, scared, and weak. These systems are sold to us like preventative medicine where the disease or illness is simply ‘being human’. Central to this is a thudding hatred for what makes us who we are: unpredictable behaviours, the desire to be creative, the need to be messy, and the right to bodily autonomy. As I’ve written before, it’s so clear that self-optimisation is rooted in self-hatred. Male wellness influencers like Bryan Johnson perceive their bodies with shame. They reject their human traits like disgusting defects and believe technology can help us live forever — not just as individuals, but as a species. Soon the weight of their own hubris will crush them and then we can all finally relax. Hopefully.

I’m discussing this now because I think the EA community and its various splinter groups have blossomed out of control and there isn’t nearly enough push-back. What before may have looked like a group of unserious men on message boards is now a full-blown influential movement with clear, inspirational messaging and a lot of money. And it’s all based on a vague normative framework of ‘Good’. Many appear to be stuck in ‘hm let’s just hear what they have to say’ mode and my patience is absolutely wafer thin. Talking with the EA Man at that event a while back really confirmed it all: their ideas are rooted in fascism and need to be shut down.

Hello and congrats for reaching 2025, a nice rounded number and quarter century milestone.

On the 30th of January at 7pm I will be running an informal tech policy meetup in London with Ben Whitelaw from Everything in Moderation and Mark Scott from Digital Politics. If you’re in London around that time, you can register your interest here. More details to follow!

Perhaps you noticed that in December, the UK’s grand-high status quo maintainer Keir Starmer pledged to submit all creative works produced by this country to training datasets for AI: unless they opt-out, content produced by artists, musicians, and media publications, etc., will be automatically included in training data, and this action will not infringe on any copyright.

This makes sense. It isn’t good, but it makes sense. A key part of any industrial strategy these days is not just to undervalue labour, but to make it invisible. Look at the recent MAGA in-fighting: members of the US far-right are already bumping up against Elon Musk’s diseased compulsion to absorb workers into his parasitic corporate universe. The far right don’t like immigration and that’s it — but Elon Musk and other mangled business men do like it, as long as it brings “high end talent” into the US, so that they can “win” at whatever specific game they want to play this year.

Both of these debates represent a unapologetic hostility towards workers: that they should exist as droves of fungible individuals, waiting to become useful to a corporate machine or indeed an actual machine — like an AI model. When we instrumentalise creative talent like this, we enclose it behind ‘work’ and turn it into labour, which is a commodity. I think what often gets lost in conversations about work and labour is pleasure: we can define pleasure as something distinct and separate from work, but also as something that co-mingles with work, and is even borne out of work.

There is pleasure in making. I take pleasure in writing these words and always feel a bit shit about using an opaque online platform to facilitate their delivery to you. I enjoy making all kinds of weird things in my spare time (like these games) that are probably impossible to sell, and that I wouldn’t want to sell anyway. I am incredibly privileged in that I have the time to make stuff that’s just for me, and I would never try to monetise any of this because the pleasure of making would transform into a pressure to produce. As many creators out there will know, the pressure to produce is kind of haunting; there’s a strange driving compulsion to stuff your hobbies and creative outlets into a work-shaped hole.

In Bullshit Jobs David Graeber theorised that work which gives pleasure and fulfilment — such as being an artist, care-giving, or being a teacher — traditionally receives less financial compensation, because the market assumes the pleasure and fulfilment is somehow ‘enough’, and it would be in poor taste to try ascribe value to this work in money; the value is unquantifiable and felt within each individual who takes pleasure in doing the work. Looking after children and making art is its own reward. But profit is earned from this work, just not by those who are doing it: when art and media is refactored into training data, it’s for the continued improvement of AI models and the expansion of wealth of a few individuals. It’s not just the labour that is commodified, but also the pleasure in making.

I’m discussing this now because I think that pleasure is increasingly hard to find in a world that is mediated by digital systems. The portals to our cultural universe are collapsing (or arguably have already collapsed) into one single rectangular window (a ‘phone’!). There is a built-up residue of digital services which continuously try to replace the theatre, the cinema, the library, and traditional news outlets. These services drip-feed, paywall, and ration our pleasure. Or, as put it recently, they delegate it. In fact while I was writing this piece, Mark Zuckerberg announced an end to third-party fact checking on his platforms. This is a move that will undoubtedly make the platforms worse to experience as a passive consumer and harder to use for someone who relies on them for income — literally reducing the pleasure in both work and leisure.

The drudgery of work and boring life admin forces us to seek out pleasure in tedious pockets: When I take the train I use that time to listen to podcasts or read; I am overlaying pleasure activities onto the ungodly chore of commuter travel. The pleasure of reading/listening doesn’t exist for its own sake; I’m using it in 20-minute intervals to distract me from the repetitive grind of capitalist living. When you go on holiday, you have to tolerate the experience of an airport (e.g. a labyrinth of waiting rooms where you are a captive audience for luxury brands), and then sit in a flying tube where you share recycled air with strangers. The holiday itself is a thing you do to temporarily ease the every day stresses of life; it’s not restorative or transformative, it just brings you back to an acceptable operating level.

When pleasure is mediated in this way, it’s hard to really remember what it even looks like. Can you really class scrolling through social media as a pleasure activity? Aren’t you only doing it because it’s so frictionless and it feels like there’s nothing else? Let’s come at this from another angle: Broad City is a show about the misadventures of two women living in New York in their mid-20s, but unlike the show Girls it actually exhibits some cultural awareness. In Broad City, one of the main characters, Ilana, is a throbbing main artery for pleasure. She views her day job as a negligible symptom of being alive, and uses her office as a space to sleep in, or just somewhere to wait before her next sexual encounter. She wears her pursuit for pleasure proudly, like a loud colourful snowsuit. Someday I hope to be just like her. Anyway, in the months following the 2016 presidential election, Ilana was completely unable to achieve orgasm. The juicy apex of her main pleasure apparatus was dehydrated to a desensitised husk because she was too distracted by the horrifying state of her political climate.

Do you see? Please tell me you see. When pleasure is enclosed and commodified, it becomes harder to know what it actually is — and therefore how to access it. The transformation of creative output into labour dulls the pleasure of making. The flattening of cultural experiences into frictionless micro-holidays from reality can sometimes make us forget that there are other ways to enjoy ourselves. I struggle with taking pleasure from self-improvement or setting work-based goals or anything like that, so when people ask me if I have any resolutions for the new year I just say ‘have more sex’ — and that is what I plan to do. I’m diving head first into hedonism this year. What pleasure will you seek in 2025?

I just tried to play a game called Caves of Qud. It's a deep, clever game that has the aesthetics of a code editor. It’s bedevilled with weird keyboard shortcuts and unfriendly UIs. During the tutorial, you are told to press random keys but are never told why: "this frog might be hostile. Press L" says the game. But why? What does L do? Why do I care about the frog's hostility? What am I even doing here?

It’s frustrating being told to do something when you have no idea what effect it will have on the the world around you. I’ve written about the magic circle before: the metaphorical space you enter when you briefly forget about reality and submit to the rules and logics of a game. The magic circle is what makes you actually care about the game; it’s the thing that makes footballers cry when they lose an important match; it’s the thing that that people create subreddits about to discuss their favourite tactics in Call of Duty. I think when an industry as monstrous as the tech industry dishes out mediocre general-use products, such as generative AI tools, and leaves the task of figuring out use-cases up to society, we are forced into the magic circle of a game that we never asked to play.

The game asks us — including those outside of technology politics who don’t have rotten brains and therefore shouldn’t have to care about this — to morph ourselves around AI’s lack of utility and to forgive how rubbish it is. We are told that we need AI for our lives to be better but no one ever explains how it will be better, why it has to be AI, and why we can’t just live our lives without it. The villain in this game is the absence of AI. It’s tough in this magic circle — how do we step out of it?

Let’s start here: the CEO of the most hated and hateful US healthcare insurance provider has just been assassinated for enacting some intensely inhuman policies that even the grizzliest eater of child souls would wince at. The people are happy he is dead. Everyone agrees that living under the opaque tyranny of health insurance is thoroughly undignified, and also that the killer, Luigi Mangione, is extremely good looking (try to change him, ladies). While we can pontificate endlessly about why he did it, we can also just read his very short ‘manifesto’ which I think explains it just fine.

But tbh we don’t have to understand what kind of person Luigi Mangione is in the same way that we don’t really have to understand the predictive systems that drove him, in part, to kill a snivelling shameless CEO. The only thing we have to understand is the harms. I recently read Ali Alkhatib’s piece on Defining AI, where he cites the authors of AI Snake Oil, who try to explain the distinction between the predictive systems that insurance companies might use (which is snake oil) and ‘real’ AI. Ali questions why this distinction even matters — the point is, the system is opaque, you have no idea how it reaches its unfair decisions, and then you are somehow harmed by it. Its true definition, if that even is knowable, is irrelevant. But the harms are obviously very real.

Simple-minded VC-bootlicker Casey Newton wrote a piece recently where he flattened out the discourse around AI into two straightforward camps: one side thinks AI is ‘real and dangerous’ and the other thinks it’s ‘fake and it sucks’. He obviously is on the ‘real and dangerous’ side, because he believes that the direction of VC funding is a reliable indication of whether or not a product is good, or in this case if it’s even real. In other words, he’s so deeply entrenched in Silicon Valley’s magic circle that he can’t see outside of it. He thinks that anyone who belongs in the ‘it’s fake and it sucks’ camp just doesn’t understand the true capabilities of AI, and is being a contrarian luddite. He’s gone from licking the boot to just deep-throating the entire thing.

The magic circle we are placed in by top-down AI enthusiasm is not obscuring some mystical product — it is the product. It consists of the narratives that lock us in a race against the clock to overcome the existential risks of AGI, and the painted future of abundant knowledge, infinite new discoveries, and human immortality. Oversimplified analyses like Casey Newton’s fail to see that all of this is about so much more than its technical capabilities; it’s about the underlying industrial and political strategies, and the kinds of futures we’re being locked into with the development of new infrastructures and realities.

Who controls the magic circle? Currently it appears to be the various PR and lobbying machines propped up by monopolies. In a recent podcast episode I produced, competition lawyer Michelle Meagher discussed how monopolies control the pace of innovation and regulation alike, with a historical example: when we discovered that CFCs and other harmful chemicals had poked a giant hole in the ozone layer, new legislation was written to outlaw use of these chemicals — but the companies producing and selling these chemicals used their huge lobbying forces to ensure they would only stop when viable alternatives became available. The harm reduction was all on their timeline.

As journalists and advocates and just generally people who care, I don’t think we should leave the magic circle — rather we should keep telling everyone that we are in one, and work together to discover game cheats. Commentators like Casey Newton are playing the game on a VR headset that they aren’t even aware is affixed to their person. Thinkers like Ali Alkhatib are at least questioning whether or not the game is even good.

The role of monopolists and ‘innovators’ is to set the pace of production, and tell stories about why their [insert product in this gaping hole] is so great. By that measure, we can’t ask everyone to step out of the current magic circle and into plain reality — no one cares about the harms of gen AI and predictive systems because they are not directly visible, and being a working adult in 2024 is a horrible energy-sapping grind. So, if you’re an AI critic, don’t criticise the technical particulars; rather, look at the harms and the narratives and make people care about them by telling your own stories.

Housekeeping!

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There’s an old episode of The Simpsons which starts with a sighting of a single, docile bear roaming the neighbourhood. This catalyses an outsized moral panic about Springfield being completely overrun with bears. The mayor, vying for re-election, installs a Bear Patrol: armoured vans roam the streets, anti-bear fighter jets zoom over head — and not a bear in sight. Indicating to Homer that “the bear patrol must be working!” Then, he gets very upset at the resulting tax increase, and starts another moral panic. About immigrants.

If the Bear Patrol was real (and let’s face it — it is, in a lot of ways) it would be sold to Springfield by Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, or perhaps by a company funded by Andreessen Horowitz. These men get very rich by inventing solutions for problems that do not exist, to support other men who want to maintain political power. Understanding this dynamic is more important now than it has ever been, because the leader of the world’s superpower is gathering techno-optimists and crypto evangelists into his cabinet like he’s collecting rare Pokemon.

Something that’s become abundantly clear to me over the last few months is that narratives always win over policy positions and facts — and often, unsurprisingly, the prevailing narratives are ones that benefit individualistic men who are afraid of losing control, and even more afraid of their own mortality.

First let’s start with a small tech marketing example: people are complaining that Apple have once again put the charging port of the new generation of the Magic Mouse in the wrong place. John Gruber argues that they are missing the point: the charging port is on the underside of the mouse on purpose; so that you can never use it while it’s plugged in. Cables are messy and inelegant. The Magic Mouse is meant to be a joyful, pristine-white peripheral, unencumbered by gross USB cables. Apple will not tolerate the mere possibility of ‘wired mode’ **because it goes against all of their weird puritan design principles. The mouse is wireless always and forever. Apple only make beautiful, elegant products — end of story.

The story with AI and cloud computing is similar, but the narratives are swirling around at hyper-speed and are obfuscating a lot more than a stupid charging port. It’s scarcity and abundance all at once: AI models give you infinite answers to infinite questions — but we need to keep producing more chips to uphold this reality! ‘The cloud’ is a weightless entity that is always available to store endless amounts of data, and run endless amounts of operations — but we need to keep buying up land for data centres!

Show me a stronger narrative than ‘stick it the cloud’. I hate ‘the cloud’ — two words that imbue resource-intensive physical infrastructure with the carefree properties of vapour. The techno-optimists would have us believe that it doesn’t cost anything, financially or environmentally, to train models, store data, or conduct other high-compute activities. In reality, where facts apparently reside as scared impish weaklings, data centres take up unreasonable amounts of land, energy, and water.

Supporting the continued maintenance and expansion of this infrastructure is to deny it exists, or at least to deny how wasteful and destructive it is. When a large tech company approaches a town with a proposal to build a data centre, they use code names so that local governments have no idea who they’re dealing with. These companies promise economic prosperity via job creation, but they refuse to reveal vital information to local communities — such as water consumption data — unless they are forced to with legal action. This secrecy demonstrates just how well techno-optimists like Sam Altman understand that no one wants a data centre anywhere near them.

They also know that no one asked for most of the products that they’ve over-leveraged and spewed into cyberspace. Outside of the tech industry, no one has ever said ‘god, I cannot wait for generative AI to be pumped into every digital service I use this year!’ Generative AI is a sunk cost. They have to make it worth it by telling everyone that we need a robot to inadequately summarise a meeting or write a cringe LinkedIn post. All of the money Microsoft has siphoned into OpenAI, all of the plans to build nuclear reactors and even to open new coal and gas plants — not to mention the existing environmental degradation and reduction in quality of life for those who live near existing data centres — it all somehow has to be worth it.

On some level, these men must know it’s not worth it. That’s why they working so hard to convince the masses that generative AI products have any utility. More than that: that these products are in fact gifts and we should be thankful; that these products are powerful enough to pave the way for a glossy utopian future — if society could just hold out, jump on board, and work towards that very future. They inspire collective buy-in so they can prop up their individualistic pursuits.

If you find yourself saying ‘the very idea that I’d be remotely inspired by a billionaire!’ — I’m not talking about you, I’m talking about the people who think living necromancer Bryan Johnson’s way of life is healthy and normal. In case you’re lost, Bryan Johnson was the guy who would inject himself with his son’s blood in order to reverse the aging process. He’s also the guy who wears a device on his penis to measure his night time erections, and routinely posts the results publicly, saying that his erections “are now better than the average 18 year old”. He’s spending millions on this and he looks like a body that the cryogenic lab didn’t bother to thaw out all the way. His catchphrase is “don’t die”. He has taken wellness influencing to an ugly extreme. He is a man in severe crisis.

Men like this are allergic to collective solutions. The Bryan Johnson way is to optimise himself to immortality — a solo moonshot that benefits only him, while preaching his practices to others performatively on social media with the most cringeworthy memes you’ve ever seen. He clearly values health and wellness above anything else, but not to the degree that he invests his vast wealth into vaccine development or disease prevention — rather he just makes you feel bad for not getting enough sleep. He’s taking his absolutely anxiety-inducing approach to healthcare (i.e. biohacking and transhumanism) and centring it as an inherent moral good.

The techno-optimist end-goal is pretty much the same: live forever, no matter the cost. Build data centres, infuse society with AI & automation, and spearhead The Singularity (but it’s inevitable any way right?) — all so they can make pan-generational impressions on humanity and leave behind a huge throbbing legacy and a thousand backup legacies for contingency. These are the activities of egotistical men who have never been more afraid of death, and are making their midlife polycrisis everyone else’s problem.

The Masculine Urge to Build is wasteful, dangerous, and driven by ego. You can see this in Trump’s proposed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), headed up by Elon Musk and another rich business man. This is a natural step in the maturity of an authoritarian government: to platform and celebrate others who have an addiction to control and supremacy, to completely hollow-out the government — and to fill in the gaps with a hundred different Bear Patrols.

Like everyone reading this, I am thoroughly disappointed to see that the American people re-elected a dried apricot hell-creature to carry them into their empire collapse. I think that way too many of the conversations I’ve had — or muted on WhatsApp — so far this week have contained egregious amounts of over-simplified speculation about voter turnout (among other things), and have really demonstrated how people in technology politics have a flaccid understanding of fascism, and to this day continue to rub their chins and wonder a hairy piece of drain clog got so many people to vote for him.

I made the mistake of going to a panel discussion/election watch party on Tuesday evening — for whatever reason I thought I’d learn something. There was a lot of intellectual gymnastics and fetishistic analysis of Trump’s mannerisms, and pointing out that he’s popular because he managed to capture the imagination of the working class, which has been thuddingly obvious for eight years now.

To me all these conversations feel very insensitive to the reality on the ground: women are having abortion rights taken away, queer people are facing fresh levels of hostility and transphobia, and I don’t imagine this result is going to be great for Ukraine or the genocide in Palestine.

There’s also a lot of weird short-sighted confusion as to why and how he got in. How could the Dems have let this happen? How can THIS many people be THAT dumb? What was the point in the Taylor Swift endorsement anyway?? Etc etc. These are the same people who voted for Kamala not because she inspired them and they love her policies — but to make sure Trump didn’t win. So… can we not imagine that a bunch of people voted for Trump not because they like him, but so that Kamala wouldn’t win? The same voting tactic you’ve been using your whole life works both ways you know lol.

It’s never been clearer that the US is stuck in a reactionary doom loop of just switching back and forth between parties every few years, because people are voting against candidates they hate, rather than just voting for someone because they actually like them. We need to accept the fact that there are people in the US who’s desire to not have a woman of colour in power was so strong that they settled for a man who looks like a baseball glove and will most certainly make their lives worse. And in the UK, the only reason the uncustomised sim Keir Starmer won was because the tories had done such a bad job over the last decade and a half that there was literally no other option.

What I’m hoping is that now this has happened, we can actually start thinking meaningfully about radical systems change, rather than pontificating endlessly about which piss-poor watery incremental change we might want to write a white paper about next. I think there’s been way too much hand-wringing over why new technologies in general appear to be so low-quality and oppressive, and why decades-old online platforms are now part of the establishment when they were supposed to be innovative. The answer is pretty simple: they are being served to us by a powerful minority who are protecting their own interests. And it’s important to remember that the miles-long tendrils that bind our consumer products to their designers are very easily leveraged and exploited by fascist governments.

So, while everything feels really hopeless and impossible right now, I think we need to make sure we don’t just sit back and pray that they don’t deploy a biometric tracking system to tackle benefit ‘fraud’, or have Amazon run the postal service or something. I think one of the key failures of the left (if you can even call it that in the US) is the flat out refusal to paint a picture of something better. Like, yes, let’s stop privatisation from seeping in and dissolving public infrastructure — but beyond that let’s also actively strive to make things better? Surely we can imagine more than just staying an inch away from the edge of oblivion.

I just recently bought a new mattress because my old one was a sagging memory foam hell-slab and it was ruining my life. I currently live with a cursed addiction to luxury goods so I bought one of those fancy mattresses with over 4k springs in it, activated charcoal, natural latex, divine fibres of bamboo, fine silken angel hair, and the promise of bodily renewal via stem cells or something idk.

The mattress contains technologies that are beyond my reckoning. Even if I snapped one night and ripped it open to check that the mattress company wasn’t lying about what was inside, I would have no idea how to identify activated charcoal (isn’t that just dirt basically??) and natural latex. Like with so much of technology, this is a relationship of trust.

I’m reminded of that famous quote: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” — from Arthur Clarke, who co-wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey. While I’m well aware this is a pintrest-level inspirational quote, it has me thinking about how with magic tricks, you are literally asking the magician to deceive you. But with technology that is not at all what you’re asking, because you want your various apps and devices to perform their expected function.

Shocking and unfair: modern devices and digital products do not have expected functions any more. Instead, everything is connected to the internet now, which tethers your favourite technologies back to the companies that sold them to you via miles-long unbreakable tendrils. I think most of us are kind of aware of this by now on some level, but it does leave a lot of room for user-hostile deceptive practices (like with HP printers and their horrific ink subscription model), and exposes users to business failures that should have nothing to do with them.

Cory Doctorow recently wrote about Fisker, an EV company who made ‘software cars’ and went bankrupt earlier this year, leaving their customers with totally bricked cars sitting on their driveways. This is the luxury vehicle equivalent of Second Sight, the retina implant company who got acquired by some other company, and then stopped pushing firmware updates, so the implants went obsolete inside people’s heads. This IS indistinguishable from magic if by ‘magic’ we mean a dark curse that traps you in a toxic relationship with inanimate objects.

Moving deeper into the fanatic murk, we now find ourselves geared with AR glasses made by Meta, but designed by Ray Ban, as to avoid the infinite 2010s cringefest that was Google Glass. The issue with an inconspicuous IoT device that you wear on your face is, of course, that you can use it to engage in deceptive activities — such as doxing nearby strangers on the street. As reasonable human beings we understand that ‘this is not something you should be able to do’ with a pair of fuckhead smart glasses, but this speaks to a wider issue: the glasses were wrought in an ecosystem that rewards technologies of scale. Companies must design products that are everything to everyone in order to achieve market capture. Sure, you’re not supposed to sync the glasses with Pimeyes (the image-to-image search engine for faces), but there are no sufficient guardrails to prevent you from doing so.

This Everything App renaissance assumes nothing about individual whims: social media platforms are so durable that you can use them to simultaneously spread election misinformation and receive granular updates on Chappell Roan’s life. In fact, I would say this US election has been almost as confusing and overwhelming to follow as Chappell Roan’s career. What the hell is going on with both? I need minute by minute updates from multiple sources so I can piece together the news myself in a highly conspiratorial way!

Ever since CR posted that video of herself saying very reasonable things about how to decide who to vote for — rather than flat out endorsing Kamala — it’s been somehow impossible to untangle her celebrity presence from campaign rhetoric. I’m also deeply worried about her mental health (Chappell’s, not Kamala’s — we all know Kamala is irreversibly unwell because she has a desire to be the president); it can’t be easy having everything you say and do scrutinised by a highly critical anonymous public.

This is the stuff that’s making this election hard to follow (from the UK anyway). It’s all Brat Summer, Femininomenon, and Elon Musk’s weird ritalin jump — and nothing else. All the information feels very fragmented, and I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that online virality is now meaningless. The stuff that goes viral is whatever beige slurry appeals to the most people, like cat videos. The true mind-melting conversations are happening within dark sticky niches that are not visible until the most extreme parts of them pop-out like a discourse pustule and become newsworthy.

A great example of this is the hurricane hysteria from a couple of weeks ago. Helene and Milton has destroyed people’s lives, but right wing pundits won’t stop talking about how these were orchestrated by the government in order to clear out swing states. There’s also been weird AI images depicting a sad little girl and a puppy who apparently only have each other after surviving one of the storms. A right wing activist shared one of the images saying it’s been “seared into my mind” — and when she was told it was fake, she doubled down, explaining that it doesn’t matter that the image is fake; its “emblematic” of what people are going through.

We’ve clearly pushed ourselves too far around the post-reality curve and now we are at a point of no return. But anyway, I hope Kamala can extract just the right amount of content out of Chappell Roan at just the right frequency, so that she wins this election without also completely ripping Roan’s life to shreds.

The other night I rewatched Frank with my girlfriend. It’s a movie about a young aspiring musician who stumbles his way into joining a very cool experimental band, and recording an album with them in the idyllic Irish countryside. The story follows him as he systematically destroys the band with his dithering mediocrity and insatiable hunger to ‘be likeable’ and engage wider audiences.

Throughout the movie the Bad Musician posts hollow platitudes on 2014 Twitter, like a Russian bot trying to dominate the news cycle with meaningless slop, e.g. “Ham and cheese panini. #livingthedream”. One of his band mates refers to him as “sick” at one point — probably the only line she has in the whole movie — as if his putrid sucking void of talent was infectious. In fact it was: the Bad Musician bewitched Frank, the frontrunner, into thinking that commercialisation was the only way more than a handful of people would ever want to watch them perform.

At their first proper show, Frank had become a fizzling sack of nerve-endings, ensuring everyone that the Bad Musician had “fixed everything” when indeed all he had done is make things worse by hoovering all the joy and whimsy out of the band’s music for his own gains. Watching the movie, you find yourself willing the Bad Musician to do the right thing and disappear forever, or at least promise to never make music again and maybe only handle the financial side of things or something. This is very often how I feel about generative AI: as an unimaginative producer of content slurry and a contagious stain on culture that saps way too much energy while giving hardly anything back.

I’m starting to feel that not only is the energy consumption of generative AI unacceptable, untenable, and despicable — it also represents a fundamental misunderstanding of what energy is even for. The energy the earth provides is meant to keep plants and animals (including us) alive. You grow food to eat, to have enough energy to both stay alive and enjoy yourself. But, because we embrace capitalism as The One True Way, we also convert energy into labour, and labour into products. This is where we hit a wall: there’s only so much energy we can physically extract from the earth, but there is absolutely no limit to the desire for growth under capitalism. The idea is to grow forever.

All of this has recently led me to question the efficiency of GPTs — is there a reason why they take so much energy to train and to use, beyond them being really massive and powerful? Like is there some underlying inefficiency with how they work? In my impatient googling I was only able to find complaints from developers saying that GPT-4 is too slow, but no real details about the underlying code that makes these models work, because of course, despite their name OpenAI famously do not make open source models. In my search however, I did come across this strange LessWrong article which is basically just a effective altruist smoothie bar of acronyms and specs: there is a concern that after GPT-5, model training of this kind will slow down massively, because there is no data centre big enough to train anything more powerful than that — and it would take years to build one.

The title of this LessWrong piece is “Scaling of AI training runs will slow down after GPT-5” which is a statement characterised in the comments as silly an unreasonable, even by the author. The general response here is not ‘ah well I guess we can just slow down the production of GPUs and be happy with the current size and power of our slop machines’. Rather, it’s that ‘decentralised training’ — where you use more than one data centre at a time — is a ‘solved problem’, and therefore the inevitable way forward.

There is an AI Safety Bill being spat out of California’s legislative sphincter as we speak; it’s really doing the rounds because Silicon Valley technologists are worried that doing safety checks on AI models before releasing them to the public is a gruesome governmental overreach that will only stifle innovation — a very original take from those guys. The lesser known part of the bill is about CalCompute, which is a state-owned cluster of public compute — that means open access to compute power which currently only a handful of private companies enjoy. While I’m all for taking power out of the hands of big tech firms via public infrastructure, this still is an investment into more data centres, essentially. Which again, do we really need more of those?

These conversations only naturalise the Bad Musician as a talented member of the band, where really he is a parasitic worm trying to get famous. I was very happy without the Bad Musician, actually. EAs and thoroughly lobbied politicians have let him in, and allowed him to sour their creative milks — if they ever had any. No where in their conversation about public compute, and the energy required to train GPT-5 are any thoughts about whether we as a species should even seek to extract and use that much energy in the first place. It is automatically presumed to be worth it.

I look at the 4D chess these EAs play to make this make sense, and then to the AI influencer who generated a clone of Flappy Bird in seconds and wonder how it can possibly be worth it. The instant Flappy Bird clone obscures so much effort, labour, and energy consumption for the smallest most inconsequential tip of an unfathomable iceberg: a silly clone, of an already silly game, that no one will play.

So in this sense, where we look for true use-cases we find only a blackhole. It absorbs energy and research hours at an alarming rate. There’s a lot of time and effort being put into alignment, for instance, which is the pursuit of aligning a machine with the goals and values of the humans who interface with it. This adds warning labels to the Bad Musician instead of straightforwardly asking him why he thinks his smooth toddler brain music is worth consideration.

Now, with alignment, I understand that we don’t want the casual user to inadvertently subject themselves to racist content via ChatGPT, but focussing on that only protects us from the lowest risk and lowest impact outcomes. I struggle to understand how alignment tackles the ongoing issue of AI spam polluting our information environment, such as with shrimp jesus, which as a concept is not offensive or harmful, but is part of a co-ordinated effort to deceive people into clicking on things. Or the potential for extremely believable mis/disinformation — which is something that people have been spreading for more than a century now. Bit hard to break that habit with wet half-baked idea like alignment.

Alignment is a one-dimensional approach to an inter-dimensional problem. In this New Atlantis piece, Brian Boyd says, “’We’ all know that AI needs ethics. But who are ‘we’? Who will decide the ways AI works, the ways we adopt it and the ways we reject it?” The one-size-fits-all ‘we’ doesn’t exist, and Silicon Valley certainly doesn’t speak for everyone. When do we work out what ‘we’ means, and get clarity on who we are aligning for? Can we (lol) really align models to the values of all cultures somehow, or is all this a waste of energy and a distraction?

I urge you not to invite the Bad Musician into your group. Yes, he’s pallid ginger man and maybe you feel sorry for him, but that doesn’t mean he gets creative license over your life’s work. He’s a tool. Just ask him to play C, F and G like in the movie and that’s it. Otherwise he will dehydrate you until you are a crispy husk. Thank you.

In 2002 a Canadian game studio called Ludicorp launched a massively multiplayer online (MMO) game called Game Neverending. This was an open world exploration game that you could play forever with no opportunity to win. Instead you’d collaborate with strangers to gather resources and build things together; you could endlessly manipulate objects, create new spaces, and enjoy shared creative experiences in cyberspace, without the horrific burden of success metrics.

Game Neverending was shut down in 2004 because it failed to make any money. It was an online social space built on user-generated content, with an extremely novel interface — people don’t (or at least didn’t back then) play MMOs for this reason; they do it to unapologetically dom each other. Game Neverending never had a chance in 2004. But, within the game was a file sharing system that players could use to share media with each other; after the game ‘failed’ the studio took the file sharing system and turned it into Flickr.

Flickr isn’t that different from an MMO if you think about it. You play a character (it’s you!) and shape the world around you by sharing photos that describe that world (the photos are mainly grainy images of your demented cat). This made a lot more sense; this was an experience that could be commodified. The studio sold Flickr to Yahoo in 2005.

The founders of Ludicorp became very rich. They took their riches and tried to build another game, which again failed, and then they launched Slack — apparently this was an internal chat tool for the studio that they realised might ‘kill email’. Somehow email did not die, and somehow, we all use Slack and email. Anyway, Slack IPOed in 2019 and was acquired by Salesforce in 2020 and now the people behind it are even richer than they were before.

You might think that there is a lesson here, and the lesson is to keep building things and pivot to whatever makes you a billionaire. If this is what you think, you are wrong. That is not a lesson, that’s just how things have always been done. The founder of Ludicorp, Flickr, and then Slack was born Dharma Butterfield, and grew up in a commune in rural Canada because his Dad had fled the US so that he didn’t have to fight in the Vietnam war. Even he, the flower child living off-grid, worked that one out. Also that feels like such a weird childhood for a tech billionaire lol.

This story is actually a reminder that even the free and open internet is not immune from the perils of commodification, which obviously by this point should not come as any surprise either. The weird MMO to enterprise software trajectory is extremely emblematic of the last twenty years of the internet: you have something janky and weird right at the beginning, and then everything crystallises into SaaS and subscription models. Digital services mean that user data can be collected at scale; lots of data means lots of money; etc.

The Grand High Inventor of the web Tim Berners-Lee looks upon today’s internet and is profoundly upset. He does not enjoy the way platforms commodify user experiences. None of this fits with whatever his vision for the web was decades ago. Over the last few years he’s been proposing a ‘new internet’ standard called Solid. I’ve written about this a bunch of times now… in fact I just found this old graphic I made, I guess during the NFT craze, which very clearly (not really) outlines the difference between Web3, and ‘Web 3.0’ which is Tim’s version of the New Internet.

This graphic is misleading because it looks like I’m dismissing both things as trivial and unserious. Really, it’s not even worth critiquing Web3 and it’s swirling mass of enigmatic features — do what I did and treat Web3 like your internalised homophobia: thank it for its service and then kindly ask it to leave.

However we absolutely should be critiquing Solid, because on the surface it all seems very reasonable: the data you create when you interact with various apps and services stays in your own personal pod. Instagram, Amazon, Spotify, etc., do not store any of your data on their servers. You keep it all in your pod, and you can change who gets to access it, and move it from service to service (e.g. your Spotify taste profile can be ported to Apple Music).

In actuality Solid is just an imaginative reworking of the idea that users go on the internet to consume products: that Spotify’s aggressive recommendation system is something we actually want, rather than something that just kind of happened to us, because its creators know that we are too exhausted from the daily grind of late capitalism to decide for ourselves what to listen to. The whole ‘keep control of your data’ prospect represents a highly individualised — and actually quite cynical — vision for the web; as if we’re on it just to interact with companies.

The data pods assume two things:

1. that the way to get to a ‘better internet’ is to make things more comfy for corporate entities (allow smaller platforms to compete with bigger ones!) rather than making things more comfy for the actual users

2. that there is any political or corporate will behind this lol — companies have to either want to allow users to store data on pods rather than on their servers, or they have to be forced by lawmakers.

These ideas are melded to the ground of the internet that made the founder of Flickr and Slack very rich; it’s the internet that is built on products rather than whacky ways of interacting with each other. The conception of Solid stems from a growing mistrust in institutions. That mistrust is still very present, but in manifests in other ways, such as the rising popularity of individual writers/creators over legacy media corporations. Those who subscribe to newsletters like this (thank you!) want to get perspectives from individual people that they trust, rather than feed exclusively from a troff of information provided by a crumbling online publication.

But, this does create a new problem: the individual creator is burdened with the pressure to produce content at the same quality and cadence as a media organisation — I’ve certainly felt that pressure before myself and it’s very hard to shake. Platforms like Patreon and Substack (lol) only exacerbate this problem. So now, we’re seeing new monetisation solutions pop up, such as sub.club which allows individuals to monetise their federated social media feeds. If you post anywhere in the fediverse (like on Mastodon or Threads and I guess even Bluesky) you can shove some of your content into a subscription model via a page like this.

I mean I call sub.club a ‘new’ solution but really all it does is productise individuals, which is really what I thought we wanted to avoid. I’m lucky that I can earn enough money and have enough time to write for my own pleasure on the side; and we all know that monetising what you take pleasure in sucks all the fun out of it.

Now that it’s 2024 and we’re all very tired, we might finally be ready for Game Neverending. In fact, we deserve to play a game that doesn’t make any money after spending all these years having our bank accounts wrung dry by subscriptions. Please plonk us into an eternal bliss of bizarre, glitchy, interactive worlds. I don’t want to paywall my Bluesky posts please just let me play a game forever with no success metrics I’m begging you.

I want to thank my friend Mark for giving me the idea for this post — he messaged me about Solid after reading another one of my posts about our collective Rapid Onset Reality Detachment. As always feel free to email me or message on Substack if you have any thoughts to share and then maybe those thoughts will turn into a coherent post and then maybe your name will appear at the end, which is fun.

Twitter and Elon Musk (which are practically one in the same) have gone/are going nuts; the last month or so has seen shameful levels of misinformation and bad takes. Before getting into the truly violent grit let’s look at the top-level stuff that you’d expect from any online environment where the free exchange of ideas is welcomed and celebrated (as in, what you’re about to see is not just a Twitter thing). I’m not sure how online you are, but over the last couple of weeks I’ve seen this pop up a lot:

Important: this tweet is from 2016, and the account no longer exists. I’m not sure whether Jennifer Mayers shut the account down out of shame and embarrassment because of the recent re-emergence of this tweet, or something else. The interview she did for Vice at the time suggests she, at least for a little while, considered genital comparison via ham sandwich a normal thing to do — both privately to herself (I imagine she has charts and diagrams?), and publicly on Twitter.

I think your brain has to be pretty mangled by Purity Discourse to post something like this; I’m not sure why she couldn’t just buy a ham sandwich without thinking about her daughters’ vagina flaps, and Taylor Swift’s, and their relation to Christian values. Now we know: satanic labia minora are easy to spot because they are engorged with sin. Control your flaps; tuck them in; do not emulate Taylor Swift, quite possibly the least sexual pop star that ever existed. Anyway…

I thank user @sloanefragment for resurfacing this image. I’m so glad the Dems finally unlocked the “why are you weird” achievement and we can at long last call people out for their unsolicited vulva chat. It’s unclear what took them so long. It’s giving me, a sickened, damaged cynic, a bit of hope. The American Right have been weird forever. They were weird in 2016 — as proven by the ham flaps — and they’re still weird now, and they will continue to get weirder and weirder as they scramble to cosplay at being normal by infiltrating communities and recommending harp teachers.

Existing in a free and open internet means that you may have to share digital space with genital over-thinkers (and you get to call them weird!) and also Elon Musk — who’s rampant posting addiction and miles-long skid mark of a follower base is causing election misinformation to pulsate aggressively across the platform. Last week he retweeted a fake article that said Keir Starmer was planning on shipping rioters to The Falklands, and since then Labour MPs have begun leaving the platform out of protest. He appears to be completely out of control. Twitter — or, X, sorry — is now a full expression of his dense sagging ego. It’s hateful, confusing, and full of trash. His right to free speech — mixed in with a lot of privilege — allows him to say basically whatever he wants in a public forum.

I’ve been working with Computer Says Maybe a lot recently, and they are in the middle of a podcast series about how the US legal system is trying and failing (but soon maybe succeeding?) to hold tech firms accountable for their various harms. The latest one has a lot about the first amendment and section 230 in it. I recommend listening not just because I worked on it but because this is genuinely a good and informative podcast — and it’s relevant to this discussion, especially when we look at what’s been happening on Twitter over the last couple of weeks.

The weird thing about the first amendment is that it somehow applies to corporate entities as well as individuals these days: there are those wonky Florida and Texas online speech laws that say platforms should not be able to remove content based on someone’s ‘viewpoint’ — these are laws fabricated by right wing people who are tired of having their hateful ideas moderated, basically. The courts say that such a law — which is meant to be a ‘free speech’ law — impedes on free speech; that a platform has a right to express itself through its community guidelines and the way it chooses to enforce those.

These laws definitely shouldn’t exist; it would be like hitting the off-switch on all content moderation efforts. But framing social media platforms as entities that have free speech kind of creates a huge mess. Do design decisions count as free speech? Is infinite scroll free speech? Recommendation algorithms? These things have an effect on what you see, like with the editorial decisions a newspaper makes, but they also effect how you see it: e.g. in large volumes all at once, and more of the same if you keep hitting the like button. Which… is nothing like how a newspaper works.

Furthermore, how do we untangle Elon Musk’s personal free speech from Twitter’s? Last year he was inconsolably upset when he found out that engagement on his Tweets was going down. So he asked that the recommendation algorithm be adjusted to promote his tweets straight to the top. And then even more people blocked him than ever before, lol. This was an ‘editorial decision’ made by him alone, and only for his benefit, to the annoyance of everyone else.

His actions would be fine if he was just a toddler taking dominion over a sandbox, but he’s a fully grown man making consequential changes to a global information platform. For whatever reason, people look up to him, and when he yanks out a clotted mess of bad takes and hateful opinions from his lizard brain (e.g. civil war is imminent in the UK!), and puts them into the internet’s salad spinner for discourse, the people — far too many of them — take it as fact.

I didn’t write all this to spoon feed you the very original opinion that Elon Musk et al need to take some damn responsibility for their actions. We all know this and have been saying it for just as long as the Christian Right have been Weird™️. It’s more about the sheer durability of the first amendment and it’s power to insulate entities from accountability. At some point, someone somewhere (I guess a judge??) surely has to draw a line and say that skewing facts at scale via the intentional design and redesign of algorithms is not protected by free speech.