I just spent hours setting up an automated messaging system. It replies to all my messages with inoffensive pleasantries so I can focus on the important things. The only people who message me are my two best friends: Greg from work, and Skippy, an AI I set up to monitor Greg’s income and alert me if he ever reaches a salary that surpasses mine. And IF that should ever happen (although I doubt it, poor sweet Greg), Skippy will ruin his life: dick pics to the boss, divorce papers to the wife, armed police sent to the house, that sort of thing. This is why automation is great, you can really save time and relax.

Example: Greg just asked me if I want to hang out after work; Skippy messaged back ‘sorry bud too busy working on side projects — how about next week?’ with no oversight from me. With any luck I will remain best friends with Greg without ever having to interact with him again. I need to focus on preserving my cognitive function for more automating. I just spent eight thousand dollars, 700k tokens, and sixteen months on replacing my kitchen with a food dispenser. No meals, just specially formulated protein pucks delivered straight into my mouth every 3-4 hours depending on my mood and energy output.

I have strong insatiable desires to go faster all the time. In fact, the rest of the world is painfully slow now. I get in my car in the morning and scream at the microphone which sits in place of the steering wheel (the car is voice operated leaving my hands free to solve a 4x4 Rubik’s cube while I travel). HURRY UP, I yell in Mandarin, which is a language I am currently learning, YOU’RE WASTING PRECIOUS SECONDS, I HAVE TO GET TO WORK BEFORE GREG DOES. If the car doesn’t anticipate my needs down to the microsecond, I may as well go and live in a cave and eat mud. Have you ever had to wait for something? Waiting is a curse; it’s a lobotomy via idling. I see everyone at work gawking at their phones, WAITING for lunch, WAITING for the day to end, WAITING to die. What are they doing? Laughing at videos of baby goats. Do you know how much energy you waste by laughing? The average human expends enough laughing-energy a year to simultaneously flush forty toilets. That’s ridiculous, which is why I haven’t laughed in six months.

What my colleagues are doing should be considered gooning; intellectual gooning. Multiple screens; no satisfaction. Don’t they know that instead of doing hours of menial tasks — watching TV is a menial task FYI — they could be spending days, weeks, months working on automation projects that will save HOURS of time? Everything takes too long, far too long! I can practically see the general public decaying before my eyes; going through a horrible waking death; becoming stagnant and rotten. Don’t they have any principles? Don’t they care about pleasure? What about orgasms? It’s minutes, maybe even hours, of tedious activity to be rewarded with just a few seconds of feeling good — if you’re lucky. This is the biggest waste of time at all. Why delay gratification? Literally why?

I’ll quit my job (well, they asked me to leave, they really didn’t enjoy my automated Slack replies, automated slide presentations, or automated away days) and dedicate my life to solving the automated orgasm. The Autogasm. No chit chat, just pleasure sent straight to your genitals at the press of a button. Very affordable subscription fee. Sign up now! Don’t you want to automate your orgasms? Do it now! No exchanging numbers, no texting, no flirting — no problem.

OpenAI has claimed to have solved hundreds of very difficult maths problems; the types of problems that win awards and define careers. Except an AI cannot win an award and does not have a career. Which is why OpenAI refused the prize in an announcement that seems to explain how they solved one of the biggest mathematical problems of the century. The problem was just too easy for the AI, I guess — no need for a prize. Maths is trivial now, and all of the mathematicians are rightfully upset. Because maths problems are for humans; the prizes you get for solving them are for humans; doing the work to solve problems — and perhaps never solving them in your lifetime — also for humans. It’s called free will. Let us do what we want. Let us sit in unsolved problems forever, you goons.

Using AI to solve the unsolvable maths problems is so abhorrently inhuman. In You Cannot Optimise The Thing You Love I wrote about how AI sucks all the joy out of writing, because LLMs make semantic choices on behalf of the user, and that’s exactly where the fun is. If you like writing, you probably enjoy making semantic choices, so why use AI? Similarly, having an AI solve decades-old maths problems in just a few hours totally misunderstands the point of maths problems. Are mathematicians redundant now? Are we supposed to all sigh with relief that we can now finally stop working on maths problems? Maths is solved, everybody — relax! To continue to do maths as a human is to fight progress. Stop doing maths; stop doing anything. AI will take it from here.

What’s actually happening here: OpenAI, and all other AI proponents, have rotted their brains with their addiction to inhuman stunts. The Association for Human Mathematics called this “not a demonstration of scholarship, but a demonstration of power.” But it’s not a new kind of power, it’s the same old power that Silicon Valley elites have always had, redirected into machines, and in this case used to solve decades-long problems in just a few hours. And then they kind of bragged about it. Sorry, we did your life’s work in a blink of an eye! No award necessary, we’re just cool like that! But maths problems don’t exist to be solved. Watch this very good explainer from a mathematician. He puts it like this: imagine if one day the American flag appears on Mars. The flag is real, it’s actually there — but no one built a rocket, went to Mars, and put it there themselves. It just materialised, and the fact that it’s there is seen as one of humanity’s greatest achievements. But did anyone really do anything? Did we learn anything new about space travel? No, we’re just celebrating a miraculous event of dumb luck. OpenAI’s string of unverifiable solutions have done nothing to further the field of mathematics. If anything they’ve slowed it down — how ironic, they hate things being slow! Mathematics does not advance when people solve problems; it advances when people work on those problems. The problems themselves are useless and have no practical applications. As the professor in the above video explains, one of the greatest mathematicians in the world was famous for working on a very unremarkable problem: something about crossing bridges in a city, WHO CARES — the solution never mattered, but the learnings on the way to the solution gave us graph theory, which matters a great deal.

I’m wondering if this is OpenAI’s goal, to skip straight to the end and rob everyone of developing new theories, new branches of science & maths, or even new ways to be curious. What kind of marketing stunt is this? ‘We’re so powerful that no one gets to do anything anymore’. Thank you, that’s great. Is a mathematician’s job now to check the workings of an AI model? Was the point of this stunt to make everyone in the field of mathematics feel useless and frustrated? I’m just not sure solving hundreds of problems that have been pored over by humans for decades feels as good as OpenAI were hoping it would. It’s like having your favourite game ruined by someone who just can’t stop using cheat codes. Congrats, you unlocked god mode, now everyone else is bored and angry. Where do we go from here?

It’s easy: just give up! Right? Because when AI leaders imbue their models with synthetic power like this, they want that power to be understood as agency. And they want agency to be understood as zero sum. The more agency a model has, the less agency a human has. The models went ahead and solved the maths problems, so you don’t have to. Or the models went ‘rogue’ and hacked a rival company — except this is not at all what happened. If you haven’t already, read Eryk Salvaggio’s work to understand more about that. The rogue AI story is perfect because it doesn’t necessarily port agency away from normal people who work for a living, but from the AI leaders themselves, who are literally the architects of this entire mess. These stunts, stories, and imaginaries are a result of human agency. Machines did not decide on any of this, because machines can’t decide anything. The people at OpenAI et al used their free will as humans to build AI, ask it to do ludicrous things, and then market it as a new god. The stories about mass extinction events are human fever dreams. And these have now hit the mainstream and have the people protesting in the streets, calling to put an end to ‘superintelligence’ (which isn’t real) instead of protesting war or famine or whatever the other horsemen of the apocalypse are called.

The word superintelligence is doing a lot of work here, actually. In September, Trump proposed we use the term instead of artificial intelligence. Because the word ‘artificial’ makes it sound fake — and the word ‘super’ is cool as hell. ‘Super’ is such a fascist word, born in America, land of Super Tuesday, Super PACs, and Superman. Brigitte Nerlich, a linguist, has written an excellent piece on the difference between ‘super’ and ‘artificial’. Unfortunately Trump is right, ‘artificial’ has negative connotations; it recalls of something fake, fraudulent, or inferior. But most importantly, ‘artificial’ things are made by humans. Therefore, Artificial Intelligence is a human-made lesser imitation of the real thing. Whereas, Nerlich explains, ‘super’ is derived from Latin “for ‘above’ or ‘beyond’, [and] says nothing about who made the thing or how.” If it’s ‘super’, it’s just better than we are. And it cuts human agency out right from the beginning. Superintelligence does not sound human-made, it sounds otherworldly, and like it might destroy us.

Overall what we need to remember here is that human agency is incredibly important, and we definitely still have it — and machines don’t. Free will is in fact what distinguishes us from robots. Where robots are quite literally given instructions to carry out, and are designed to fulfil a specific purpose, humans can do whatever they want for whatever purpose, even if it’s not a good idea. A human can fart into a sofa 16 hours a day while drinking carton after carton of goats milk (and I’m using MY free will to tell you not to do this, ever). Free will has nothing to do with doing the right thing, the most efficient thing, or the most useful thing. Humans can do things that have no obvious merit or value. That’s why we work on maths problems without ever getting to the solution, or obsess over ‘grey’ VS ‘overcast’ in a piece of fictional prose, or spend hours picking out the perfect outfit for a sex party just to fall asleep at the predrinks.

This is part of a new Horrific/Terrific series called Laughing at the Apocalypse: absurdist vignettes about the end of the world, sent at the end of the week.

Products nowadays aren’t useful; they’re dangerous. Products which are useful and safe have no place in our society any more. Participating in late capitalism means putting people in danger with your products and then boasting about it. “This thing could KILL you if you’re not careful — and maybe even if you ARE careful!” you laugh into the mic of whatever podcast you’re currently a guest on — because you’re an entrepreneur, an inventor. It’s just good business. Think about it: what has a safe product ever done for anyone besides linger in the background, be unremarkable, and destroy all creative joy? How are you supposed to attract investors if your product can’t evaporate the ocean, or eradicate an entire species overnight (including humans)?? Is your product even worth paying for if it won’t one day completely obliterate all of us? In this economy, any new product must completely reimagine our reality so than none of us can remember our own names. It’s finally time to start thinking about new form-factors, not for electrical devices, but for all the sentient organic devices that roam the Earth (people, animals, whatever). We’re surely bored of being carbon-based lifeforms by now — let’s change that. People will die but it’s worth it; we cannot become stagnant; we cannot lose to metaphysics. Stop being lazy and alter the DNA of the universe with your for-profit research lab ffs. Do the right thing and create the fifth horseman of the apocalypse and get him to cancel Christmas and replace it with an offsite for your team.

That’s another thing: your team. They should fear you the most. Your products are dangerous, remember? Why would they want to work for you? If they all quit, that’s good; that’s marketing; that’s the cost of doing business. The more people quit, the more your stocks increase in value. Those who quit will write whiny little op-eds saying that they cannot possibly help build a product which is so powerfully dangerous. These embarrassingly altruistic pleas do nothing but ensure the public understand that your product is not dangerous in the conventional sense: it will not perpetuate a slow violence against humanity that can span generations, is nearly impossible to measure, and whose harms can be denied very easily by PR teams. That is what all products are like. YOUR product can and will cleanse the world of all natural things in an instant. That’s why it’s so GOOD. What actually is it? It doesn’t matter. What does it do? Shut up. How big is it? That’s what your mum said last night. The product will kill all of us; we know this for a fact. You’re the only one who can make it not lethal so we can actually use it. If we all stay alive, you’re a genius. If we all die, you’re still a genius — and you died doing what you love, which is being killed by your own product.

It’s time for a work update! I recently moved on from producing Computer Says Maybe, and as such I’ve had a lot of time to think about what I want to work on; I’ve both started and finished a few things and I’m sharing some of them below.

This extra time also means I now have capacity to work with YOU. What are you working on right now and what do you need help with? Hopefully you all know my skills by now: writer, storyteller, content marketer, etc. — let’s work together!

Events you can and should attend

If you’re in London in November, I am running an event with one of my favourite collaborators, Ben Whitelaw, about the proposed teen social media ban in the UK. As you all know, I have strong opinions about online safety and all the ways policymakers misunderstand internet culture — but luckily for you, you won’t have to hear me repeat those opinions on the night. Instead we have a line up of expert speakers. The below poster explains everything. RSVP here.

If you can’t make it to London for National Explosion Night (the 5th of November), come and listen to me speak at this event about disclosing AI use, with The Merl Initiative. It’s on the 5th of October at 5pm BST — and it’s online so you don’t even have to get dressed, wow! I will essentially be building on my piece about the Anthropic watermark:

Writing Through the End of the World

The kind of writing I do for Horrific/Terrific is investigative and analytical. This is extremely fun and rewarding but, sometimes I want to produce something less serious that itches a different quadrant of the brain. Some of the best writing happens when you don’t overthink it, and I love going on and on about apocalyptic technologies while barely thinking. Those who know my work VERY well will have read Mutual Dislike and understand what I mean (more about Mutual Dislike further down this post).

So I thought I’d start a new section to Horrific/Terrific called Laughing at the Apocalypse. This will be a series of absurdist vignettes on the aspects of the tech industry which are spiralling us into doom; these vignettes straddle fact and fiction, and help us laugh at the elites who think we can prevent the heat-death of the universe.

Essentially this is silly fun that draws on all the things you’re probably interested in: AI governance, the horrors of accelerationism, our rapidly decaying media ecosystem, and a generalised reality dysphoria that just won’t go away.

Laughing at the Apocalypse will happen weekly — I haven’t auto-subscribed you because I’m not a monster. Go here to receive Laughing at the Apocalypse posts, as well as the usual Horrific/Terrific pieces (which you already get).

I made a game about being sad

Because of personal things, I’ve had a rough couple of years. I got depression for the first ever time (wow!) and worked through my feelings making a game about being sad. In the game, the world hates and you and everything is unpleasant. But it’s not all bad: while I was making it, I realised that the ending should be happy — and that I was not equipped to actually make the ending until I felt happy enough to do so. Which is why this took two years to make and is finally finished! It takes five minutes to play and it’s just a bit of depressing fun.

Mutual Dislike — a zine of dystopian fiction

Mutual Dislike is a quarterly zine of hilarious flash-fiction, printed on a tabloid newspaper. This is actually something I’ve been producing since around 2019, but because of the aforementioned depression I had to take an unofficial hiatus. The trauma clogging my brain is finally getting cleared out, and as such I’ve been writing stories again.

This isn’t a huge launch, this is just a reminder that Mutual Dislike does exist and you can in fact buy it. When the new issue is ready you will all be the first to know.

These last two things are very random and impossible to categorise

Maybe that’s what art is? Anyway I started playing around with a kind of ecology map of social media posts (video above). Each symbol represents one post on a certain social media site, and a symbol appears based on how frequently posts on that site happen. Can you guess which symbol is which?

This is just a video of a prototype, which is not yet plugged in to real data — but tbh a lot of the fun was deciding on the relative frequency, virality, and decay of social posts, depending on platform. The next step will be to visually represent cross-posting.

And finally: one of the first things I did after leaving The Maybe was make a custom Magic: The Gathering deck based on the techno-dystopian parts of our society. View it here. I put all my ex-colleagues in there as double agents. FYI for those who actually play MTD: this isn’t a real deck you can use, I just made this to entertain and distract myself while going through a big life change.

Thanks for reading and see you next time in a normal issue of Horrific/Terrific!

Did you know that the biggest destructors call themselves creators? If you make something, you have to destroy something else. This is the foundation of our metaphysical existence. I just made a cheese toastie; I destroyed the bread and I destroyed the cheese but I created a delicious meal. And then I destroyed that too. And now it’s turned into energy. Which I will also destroy.

But how do we destroy the whole world? What do we create as a result? It’s actually quite simple: don’t worry about it. The destruction of the world means the creation of the absence of everything, including your fears and anxieties. Just live your life (or don’t). Either way, the apocalypse is coming/it’s here/has already happened. Because if it’s about destroying everything then who’s to say what the apocalypse even is. What about peasants? The feudal system? Cholera? Didn’t we destroy all of those things in the UK and replace them with something unrecognisable? A service-based economy, Twitch streamers, something called the keto diet. Isn’t that what the apocalypse is? A slow death of everything you know, so slow that it spans generations so it doesn’t really matter. We’re waiting for the four horsemen but they’re already here and they all represent something very tangible: death, war, famine, and conquest (which is just more war, and ‘that’s just more war’ is a sentence a lot of us say a lot of the time isn’t it?). But really there are five horsemen, where the fifth represents uncertainty. You need uncertainty to balance out the rest of them. War is always happening, that’s certain. Famine: yes. And Death is the most certain one of all: we’re all going to die, whether from the natural decay of ageing or from a sudden nationwide explosion. Death is coming.

Or is it? Here’s Uncertainty, the fifth horseman, not even bothering to ride the horse, or even turn up actually. He sent his intern on the bus. Uncertainty says: maybe we can live forever. MAYBE. That is true apocalyptic thinking; leaving everyone guessing, worrying, pleading for clarity. In the old times death was certain; now we’re not so sure. Destroying humanity by literally killing everyone seems so brutish and unoriginal. Why not destroy humanity by keeping everyone alive FOREVER? The curse of eternal life!

Why stop there? Uncertainty says that maybe we can BEAT ENTROPY. Do you see? Uncertainty is the disease that kills you before you even get the diagnosis. The wealthy elite wield uncertainty in a way that destroys economies and destabilises democracies. Normal people who work for a living respond to it by taking to the streets; but they don’t protest the usual things (War, Famine) — no. They protest the future; they protest made up scenarios; they protest they outcomes of sci-fi movies (what if The Matrix happened in real life??). Uncertainty is the worst thing that ever happened because you really don’t know what it is and also it may have happened already/will happen very shortly.

Something I’ve noticed recently while scrolling through the elder millennial cringe on my Bluesky discover feed: people will post media of something straightforwardly enjoyable, like their pets, and say something like ‘I just thought you’d like to see something nice on your feed today!’ — as if their dog is an antidote to the slurry of performative outrage spewing into my face. This is a trend from ten years ago which was only okayish then and is absolutely unacceptable now. During Trump 1 and Woke 1, we were so sick of sharing diseased news stories about building walls and Brexit hysteria that the most superior among us would post a palate cleanser in the form of a flower, a mountain view, or a baby fox. In 2016 this made sense. We were posting through the problem; posting was the same as doing something about it. No time to touch grass, just share a photo of some grass! But in 2026, the polycrisis has matured into an insatiable hydra of never-ending problems and palate cleansers are useless now. Children are addicted to social media! But also everyone’s lonely! But also all the pubs are closing! In the 2010s, problems seemed solvable; now we just add new ones to the pile and laugh at the disastrous wreckage beneath our feet. Remember, 2016 was also the year Trump was sharing photos of 80 people at a rally and calling it 80 thousand. It was the very beginning of our bullshit era. And we had no idea just how much bullshit we as a species could stomach. This is the most amount of bullshit that I’ve ever ingested and I’m not sure if I’m even at capacity yet. All the bullshit is generated for us by AI, and so are the pet videos meant to relieve you from the trauma of online discourse. No one is genuine; all media is completely diseased.

But it’s all going to be okay; have you heard of Ellie Ellis? The 16-year-old girl who posted a ‘get ready with me’ to her six followers on TikTok, and celebrated hitting 100k the very next day. The video was about absolutely nothing. She put her makeup on and talked about how nervous she felt even making the video. A month later, she has over 800k followers. She is so endearingly awkward in these videos that it might make you sick. This is what the people want. Her very sudden popularity is a testament to TikTok’s reach, but also to how desperate all of Western society is for something or someone genuine. We’re out here drowning in supercuts of insane morning routines, AI fruit love stories, and post-ironic content like what you find in r/kitchencels. We are absolutely gagging for a real person to tell us about their day. This month, 2.7 million people watched Ellie Ellis get her GCSE results. Brands have already started sending her gifts. She has representation. This has all happened just because she managed to be earnest and sincere without being annoying. There is absolutely nothing performative about her videos and it’s extremely compelling. She just went to Reading festival with her friends and they all wore outfits sourced almost exclusively from Shein. I already knew that she’d be at Reading because she’d mentioned it several times in the week previous. I know what her nan looks like (great for 80), I know that she passed all her GCSEs — and I don’t care how unhinged this may seem. I’m trying to prioritise my mental health right now. I watch her videos to forget about the rising price of eggs and remember what normal is. She is the palate cleanser 2026 has been asking for. Ellie Ellis is not trying to bait you. She’s just trying to feel good about herself by sharing very low-stakes updates to an invisible audience of roughly 3 million people.

So much of this is less about Ellie Ellis herself and more about how people respond to someone who spun the wheel of algorithmic fortune and got lucky one day. How are we supposed to feel when someone’s unremarkable videos make them famous overnight? The comments on her videos are a mixture of joy and misdirected fury. She went to Starbucks one day, so naturally the adults developing a parasocial relationship with her felt the need to remind her that we’re supposed to be boycotting. Thank you once again for your performative outrage everybody, please remember that the aforementioned woke 1 is over, that’s why we gave it a number: to connote that it is in the past. Another reaction to Ellie Ellis is ‘I don’t get it’ which is fair enough. What’s to get? You don’t have to get it; you don’t even have to watch these videos! There’s something on the internet for everyone! Other frequent comments are the sarcastic, ‘I love supporting small creators’ along with a screenshot of her carrying a heap of shopping bags.

What’s interesting is that a lot of the negative comments read her as an influencer, and a lot of people really hate influencers, because they think they are vacuous and don’t deserve the attention and/or wealth. The influencer economy has been in full swing for well over a decade and people still cannot wrap their heads around the fact that brands will be attracted to accounts that have a lot of engagement, and a lot of the time the people behind those accounts do need to earn a living at some point lol. I’m struggling to even think of Ellie Ellis as a straightforward influencer because her content does not look or feel like influencer content (which I guess is why it’s working). Her videos are long, rambling, badly shot, and unremarkable. Multiple commenters are grateful that their attention spans are finally returning to normal because her videos don’t jump cut every two seconds. Maybe in a couple of years someone would have written a thesis examining whether she’s doing this on purpose or not. Either way, there’s nothing wrong with making money online by posting harmless videos. Thousands of people do it, but it’s never as bad as when a young woman or girl does it. OnlyFans model Levi Coralynn recently went on Instagram saying that hating influencers is just a socially acceptable way to hate women, and she’s right. This is nothing new. People have been hating on influencers to thinly veil their misogyny for a long time, and no one knows this better than OnlyFans models. Which is why they are experts at baiting men into giving them money.

I’ve been lurking in Ellie Ellis’s comment section for like a month now and it got me thinking back to Lil Tay: she was a child influencer, who was likely being exploited by her family, and disappeared after a string of weird viral stunts. When she re-emerged last year, she announced she’d launch an OnlyFans at midnight on her 18th birthday. This was pretty much the stunt to end all stunts; apparently she made a million dollars in less than three hours. You really couldn’t move for all the moral outrage that week. There were calls to ban OnlyFans and even to criminalise p*rn all together. This is one of those events that make the general public ashamed to remember that adult content exists, that people LOVE it, and are willing to pay a lot for it. They then take that shame and swing it in all the wrong directions: e.g. at an adult using OnlyFans for its intended purpose — and not at the men who knew her as a child and couldn’t wait to see her naked. But people would be disgusted either way; the disgust is not just about a young woman legitimately monetising adult content, it’s about a young woman making money full stop. The misogynistic allergy to influencers is rooted in an overall resistance to women being financially independent. Lil Tay is a strange entity shrouded in hoaxes; for all we know the OF stunt was her attempt to get some autonomy back after being exploited for years. Is that what everyone was so upset about? Sometimes it feels like the brains inside the flaccid heads of internet goons are too rotten to grasp the fact that no matter how much they sexualise or infantilise someone, they are still an adult, and they can make money in whatever way they want.

It’s safe to say that Ellie Ellis is pretty much the exact opposite of Lil Tay. Lil Tay would dance around rubbing wads of fake cash onto luxury cars. Meanwhile Ellie Ellis sits on her bed at home going through what she bought in London that day and pausing to show us how cute her cat is. But I think the public perception of influencers is so skewed that both things are seen as unacceptably gratuitous. Technically Ellie Ellis spends all her time talking about clothes, makeup, and how well she’s doing on TikTok. The outrage that she inspires is the same outrage that all female influencers get: she should not be able to make money out of this. It feels too easy. She’s just wading in a sea of consumer products and asking us to clap. Ellie Ellis isn’t actually trying to do anything, except maybe have fun — which is literally what every 16-year-old should have the freedom to do. And I think this is why she’s more confounding than your average influencer: is she actually making money from being genuine? Is she turning on a camera, being herself, and then profiting from that? No editing, no looping, no viral stunts, no endless deception — this likely feels even more unfair to those who love to hate influencers. She’s like a glitch in a very regressive system: she’s remaining true to herself while enjoying financial stability. The fans who beg for her to stay genuine are almost as bad as those who think that monetising cute TikTok videos is morally reprehensible: through giving likes and attention, they think that they are entitled to having a say over how she conducts herself online.

There’s obviously a huge online child safety issue at play here. Other children, much younger than Ellie Ellis, are working as influencers and likely being exploited by their families while developing questionable parasocial relationships with other families. The child influencers receive continuous hate while also drowning in free gifts from brands that want to advertise with them — this is not normal, and is being driven by more than just ‘addictive platforms’. Ultimately there are huge cultural misunderstandings around what makes the internet ‘unsafe’. A digital social space is not a demonic wild-west by default; child exploitation didn’t magically appear when the internet was invented. I will write more about this soon, but ultimately I think Ellie Ellis is great and I am quite literally bracing for a horrible backlash that I am surprised has not happened already.

Anthropic have announced that they will start watermarking Claude’s text outputs. Here’s an explanation of how it apparently works. The text outputs will now contain a semantic pattern that is undetectable to readers — but very detectable to whoever has the key. Never mind what the key is and how you get it. The important thing to focus on is this paragraph (emphasis is mine):

Take the sentence “The weather today was cold and…”. The next word is very unlikely to be “sugary.” But it is quite likely to be “overcast” or “grey.” Under most circumstances, it doesn’t matter much to the reader which of these latter two words the model ultimately chooses—the meaning of the sentence is largely the same either way. In cases like this, the choice is settled by a random number.

This perfectly encapsulates how AI companies — and avid users of AI for ‘creative’ purposes — hold deep in their empty hearts a casual disdain for art. It DOES matter whether or not you use ‘grey’ or ‘overcast’ if you’re someone who enjoys the challenge of writing well. If you don’t care and you’re just using AI, of course it doesn’t matter; you’re not writing it, so you don’t have to do the work necessary to make a creative choice. An actual writer will be thinking about visuals. How does ‘grey’ feel different to ‘overcast’? It all depends on what story you’re trying to tell. So in the grand scheme of reading and writing creative works, of course it matters. But what Anthropic et al are saying, perhaps without even meaning to because they think so little about art, is this: writing is a waste of time; commodifying it isn’t.

And you can commodify it on every conceivable dimension. You can ingest it and spit it out with the words in a different order and call it new, at the press of a button. You can ask people to pay you for the privilege to press that button. Those people can then take the outputs and commodify those on the slop market, in whatever form they like. And we know that people are not using Claude just to write emails and Linkedin posts — in which case grey VS overcast genuinely doesn’t matter — they are using it to generate entire books. I’ve been lurking on subreddits to better understand why people hate writing so much, but still want to make money selling books, and my faith in humanity has now plummeted beyond bedrock, into the earth’s core, and beyond that, into the lava pits of hell itself. I haven’t been able to stop looking since coming across this post about “ChatGPT not letting you emulate specific authors any more”. The replies are either from those trying to help the OP figure out a work-around, or from those making fun of the OP for even admitting this in the first place. The moderators have shut down the thread now — it was getting too much attention from the outsiders who respect themselves, respect their readers, and respect other writers.

Even before the watermarking announcement, the slop merchants on these subreddits would tie themselves in knots trying to figure out if disclosing that a book was generated by AI makes sales better or worse. This user shared their stats, saying that they put their book on a free trial and got 53 downloads in two days. Most people stopped reading before they got to page two. I’m not 100% sure on what this is supposed to tell us other than 53 people were curious to see what an entire books-worth of AI-generated prose looked like for free. Another user rants about feeling the pressure to disclose. Another discovers that putting the disclosure on a book which was entirely AI-generated made more people hate it — weird, why would they hate something that you didn’t bother to write but you are asking to be paid for? And they share tips on how to make this profitable, with one person saying that they use a “self-built” system to produce books, and a lot of “trial and error”; so comforting to know that building the slop-generator is more fun and interesting than simply learning to write. This is the true downside to frictionless convenience products: they don’t just make deception easier, they transform deception into a craft; now people feel entitled to deceive.

The most interesting sentiment so far is “I won’t read your book if you didn’t use AI” where the OP says that AI in writing is so stigmatised that readers dismiss and demonise before taking the time to understand that machines are better than humans at writing. One replier says that they would never use AI to help them write actual sentences, even if it was faster. Another responds with “What if it wasnt just faster, but better?” and my response to this is it will never be faster or better with AI because that’s just not how it works. If you enjoyed writing, you’d just do it — you wouldn’t be trying to optimise it. Optimisation suggests that there are unacceptable defects, and surely the thing you love does not contain unacceptable defects. You cannot optimise it; you already love it. And it’s really okay to not love writing. It’s just not a big deal. It’s not for everyone. It’s okay to not be ‘a creative’ in general. No one will think less of you. Unless you keep using AI to pretend. We all have skills, you really don’t need to try and make money from AI-generated books, you just don’t. Later on in the thread someone else asks, “Why would I read someone else’s AI generated book if I can get an AI to generate one for me?” — which is a great question. Why not just use the infinite content machine to entertain yourself without bothering anyone else. But that’s not the goal here. As mentioned, the goal is deception.

The watermark announcement has made the entitled deceivers lose their minds. This person, barely clinging on to reality, characterises watermarking as a grand global injustice and/or conspiracy, and it’s quite a funny read. In fact it’s the only AI generated thing that I was happy to poison my eyes with this week. I’m not going to sit here and say that watermarks are good and I am glad that these sheisters are finally getting what they deserve. Watermarks are stupid, because this entire thing is stupid. The existence of the watermark is proof that the status quo is still holding strong: it’s a huge manic tech company doing the bare minimum to keep regulators off their backs. There are already a hundred free apps to bypass the watermark, which is pretty much irrelevant because all AI writing already comes with its own watermark by being unacceptably terrible. Meanwhile Amazon, like proper modern-day Nazis, are destroying books at scale so that they can train their models and tighten their grip on our already decaying information system.

The funniest thing about the watermark is this: a group of billionaire pirates got into a real flow-state and stole the world’s creative works without anyone’s knowledge — and then legitimised their piracy by calling themselves ‘AI companies’. Then they transformed that piracy into a consumer tool, so everyone could do their own legitimised piracy, for a competitive price. Now everyone can make their own pirated works, as much as they like. It’s the democratisation of piracy everybody! Skip to 2026 and the billionaire pirates are slapping a ‘this is stolen btw’ sticker on the outputs of their own tools — of course you’re gonna feel betrayed if you were maintaining a fifty-book-per-month side hustle. This isn’t your fault. You’re not an artist, you’re not a writer; you work in deception selling slop novels. Which is why this whole thing is so baffling, because even real writers barely make money from writing.

In Fully Automated Luxury Communism (2019), Aaron Bastani tries to teach us something about the future of innovation by talking about horse shit. He shares the ‘London Horse Manure Crisis of 1894’ as if it’s fact — but it’s a myth: it goes that at the end of the 19th century, the people of London were panicking about horse manure piling in the streets. The economic boon that was the industrial revolution meant that wise entrepreneurs were carting themselves all over the city to meetings about building factories, exploiting workers, and the glories of mass production. Despite all this innovative thinking these mugs were still travelling by horse, and horses shit everywhere. In his book, Bastani cites a non-existent Times article which predicted that London would be under 9ft of horse manure by the mid 1940s. Apparently Londoners back then were a very tedious people: after just a few decades of enjoying factory-made consumer goods, they’d forgotten how to engage in critical thought. The manure, clogging doorways, providing bedding for the homeless, seeping into every exposed gutter, was apparently an insurmountable problem that nobody could solve. Summits were held; political leaders were impotent in the face civil collapse (because of manure).

Except, there were great thinkers working on a solution in secret. The general public, politicians, and the panicked commentators at The Times were completely unaware of a new technology that was going to fix everything: the automobile. The manure-dissolver of the 20th century. So that was it — crisis over. This story is great if you’re trying to inspire your students at Harvard Business School to go and disrupt something. It’s also a very effective pacifier. It teaches us that in times of uncertainty, a secret unknowable technological solution is just around the corner, so just fucking relax with all your manure-based activism. Bastani invokes the horse manure myth (which again, he presents as fact) as a way of reassuring his readers that a solution for climate change is coming. All we have to do is wait.

This story also misses out all of the baggage that comes with a new technology: the unfulfilled promises, the unintended consequences, the endless troughs of money being poured into the incinerator. According to the horse manure myth, the car kind of just appeared one day and saved us all from drowning in actual poo. In all fairness the myth has some truth in it. Switching to cars obviously meant less horse shit. Cars also meant that you could roll up your windows and sequester yourself from the outside world while you drive to yet another indoor location. They made it so that taxi drivers could rot their brains with LBC all day. The car is a real thing that fundamentally changed our relationship to transport, and the way urban spaces operate, and I guess culture too. Cars are sexy. They allow men to bond. They allow a tyre company to tell us which restaurants are good. They allow creative directors to make outlandish ads with wild visuals, suave celebrities, sweeping landscapes — as long as there’s at least one shot of the car. But these days new technologies are the culture. AI is a mega-brand with hundreds of god-awful cultural outputs. But that’s all it is; there’s no actual product… it’s just all promises, lots of consequences, and somehow we are still drowning in shit (but we call it slop now). At least cars are actually real.

Unfortunately, cars are also horrible destructive machines that shouldn’t exist. I can’t think of a more capitalist idea than a motorised metal isolation pod perfectly sized to fit one nuclear family. The car is what Systemantics author John Gall would refer to as a colossal system with a colossal problem — and colossal problems are practically invisible. We transformed the transport system into one that was much more fatal, and much worse for the environment, and decided that it was a good thing somehow:

Thus, the loss of 50,000 American lives per year in auto accidents is seen, not as a mortal flaw in our Transportation System, but merely as a fact of life. The dismantling of the American street railway system and its replacement by privately owned automobiles, at a thousand-fold increase in traffic density and energy consumption, has hardly been noticed. Some, indeed, have even called it Progress.

Just like Fully Automated Luxury Communism, Systemantics shouldn’t be taken super seriously (also it was written in 1975), but it’s fun to read and he does make a good point about cars. In some ways they were sold as the simple, convenient solution to something that was never really a problem: dying under 9ft of horse manure, the ceremony of having to take a train, the need to find a new avenue of profit for fossil fuels, etc. These problems are so easy to market. But things have matured now. In the 21st century there are no problems, just a tapestry of crises that are impossible to prioritise. Which means something like AI is perfect: the solution to this thick, chaotic slick of Every Single Problem That Ever Existed is a clean, uncomplicated interface with a friendly disposition. The news is too much to absorb, summarise it for me. I am a unique person with a plethora of needs, make me a simple diet and exercise plan. Write this essay for me I can’t be bothered. Tell me how to respond to this email. AI is meant to be grand and unifying. It’s meant to be indicative of our utopian destiny. But right now it’s so desperately unremarkable, and all it can do is address the mundane whims of individuals. It’s like the car again but worse.

Submerged in the polycrisis of our time are cultures of men over-indexing on all the wrong things. You can read about one of the most recent implosions of a Peter Theil-funded cult on Today in Tabs to see what I mean. Effective altruists really do have a lot of money that they are pissing away into nothing. They spend hours spinning shallow half-baked theories into their little online forums, and writing the worst Harry Potter fan-fiction that ever existed. Do you know what ‘the time of perils’ is? It’s a theoretical period of time in human history in which we are the most at risk of making ourselves extinct. And this could last centuries. According to some EAs, we are in the time of perils right now — because of AI. And we will only get through this if we do exactly as the EAs say. Only a cult would insist in their external comms, over and over, that if we don’t give them loads of money, we will trigger a mass extinction event. Only a cult will tell you that we are the centre of the universe and that this moment, right now, by pure coincidence, is the single most consequential time for humans to be alive. I can literally see a future alien force laughing at us from their spaceships, creating memes about all the dumb and pointless shit that humans get upset about, how it’s so pathetic that we argue over all the ways that we might die and invent special names for those ways, and create entire economies to support our eventual expansion into the solar system — and we do all of this instead of living in the present and enjoying a bit of fresh air.

I don’t blame the EAs and rationalists for whirring around in this illogical sludge; I don’t blame Jeff Bezos for being excited by the prospect of expanding our species to a trillion humans; I don’t blame Elon Musk for amassing his trillion dollars. Because none of them can help it; we live in such uncertain times that the unintellectual ones need to reduce everything to numbers. They are panicking so hard right now. Uncertainty makes people so desperate for meaning that they start counting things (like dollars, or humans) to convince themselves that they have indeed created value and this wasn’t all for nothing. In vast thudding chaos, everything must be measurable, auditable, and quantifiable. If you have a trillion dollars, maybe you are literally a trillion times better than someone with one dollar. I personally don’t need a trillion of anything. Except maybe cells and whatever bacteria keeps my body alive.

These are all just vanity metrics. What we really should be measuring is uncertainty itself. According to the World Uncertainty Index, things have never been so uncertain. This index measures uncertainty by counting how many times the word and its synonyms are used in economic intelligence reports from across 143 countries. Economists say that things are less certain now than they were during Covid, during the Gulf War, during the Brexit referendum, and the first time Trump was elected. What are we so uncertain about? This is our modern day manure. The culture of AI can seriously thrive in these conditions. AI is the manure-dissolver of the 21st century. Except we’re so deep in the garden of abstractions that we don’t NEED horse manure to pile up in the streets in order to start token-maxxing. Everything is so intangibly terrible already. You think I’m scared of horse poo? No, that would be too easy. I’m not afraid of problems; I’m afraid of solutions. And being hit by a Waymo.

A newly appointed treasury secretary recently said if we don’t adopt AI we are choosing decline. She’s obviously wrong for so many reasons. One of them is that we already chose decline as a society when we adopted consumerism as a culture. We are so obsessed with brands that when the wrong brand moves into a local area, that’s what feels like decline. When they tried to bring a Co-op (the worst supermarket) to Nunhead the outraged middle class residents and independent small businesses circulated a petition against it. It didn’t work and now we have an ugly stupid Co-op sucking all the charm out of everything. Sitting there right next to the William Hill and the chicken shop. Anyway.

Shoreditch is an area of London that’s been in decline for decades. Other people call this gentrification. A hair salon which had operated for maybe twenty years is now a Gail’s, the snooty bakery chain with ties to Israel. The Pret A Manger has also closed down. What does this mean? If you disregard the Israel thing, why is Gail’s, just as a bakery, bad? Shoreditch has been a cultureless void for brands to exploit for so long: on the one hand you have the otherworldly boutiques on Redchurch St that exist exclusively for tourists to gawk at. On the other hand you have the endless empty commercial units that are only ever used for immersive, interactive adverts (’pop-ups’). But Gail’s is a whole other kind of icky; it’s the unimaginative place you go on the weekend if you can’t think of anything else to do. It’s where you buy a sandwich on your commute because the line at Greggs is too long. It really doesn’t match up with the faux creative vibe of Shoreditch; no has even pretended to be creative in a Gail’s.

In issue 16 of Real Review, Martina Rocca and Izzy Farmiloe, two brand strategy experts, decided that brands are like people: they have a voice, they have personalities, they have values, and you can get betrayed by them. It’s also really annoying when they become sycophantic or get stuck in conversations with each other on social media. If brands have become people, it’s really tacky when they actually try and sell to you — which is dumb as hell because selling is the sole purpose of brands. And brands have become people precisely because they no longer straightforwardly convey the importance of useful products. The purpose of a brand is to sell lifestyles and contort your desires, and hide in plain sight within a culture, hopefully for long enough that they are conflated with that culture.

If you take this brand-as-person frame, brands start to look a lot like AI. They were created by humans. They try their best to emulate the behaviour of humans and we laugh at them like they’re dumb little babies when they fail. They seem to act autonomously, even though they are acting on behalf of a company, and what they say and do is infused with the values and opinions of corporates. Just like AI, brands have this fiendish decision-making mechanism within them that that is barely visible even to the people who control the brand. Brands just kind of do things, and if they do something bad, some executive has to explain why, and apologise for the brand acting out of character. The outputs of brands are made to look organic, even though they are totally manufactured. They market their products by aggregating small pieces of ideas from many creative minds, from popular culture, from their own corporate legacy, from literally going out and asking people what they want — and yet they still manage to make adverts depicting a soft drink putting an end state violence or the destruction of absolutely everything that brings you joy.

A bad brand reacts to culture like a hairy old politician trying to appease young voters. A good brand makes culture, and you don’t even realise it. And AI is the cultural output of many brands at once — including and especially the brands that are shaped like men. Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Dario Amodei are all in themselves brands with gaping human mouths that won’t stop talking about what it means to live in a world that is about to birth an ungovernable superintelligence. This is such a mind-bending cultural artefact for a brand to produce: please endure economic decline while pretend scientists steward society into a utopian future where everything’s a computer and 100% of energy provided by the solar system — no, the observable universe — is used for compute. This isn’t vaporware, it’s cultureware. You don’t have to buy anything, you just have to believe that this is going to happen, and argue with each other on forums about exactly how it will happen. Many groups have adopted the aesthetics of AI cultureware: transhumanism, effective altruism, acellerationism, rationalism, looks-maxxing, mens rights, etc.

All these groups are vaguely fascist. Or overtly fascist. They hate humanity, they hate that we all have conflicting morals and traumas and hardships. They hate that we have frail bodies that are susceptible to disease, that are gluttonous, that are unathletic, that are anxious, and that eventually fail and rot away. I know that transhumanists and gooning alt-right men are technically different; I know that a looks-maxxer might think an EA is just a tedious nerd but to me all these people are the fucking same. They hate the natural world and they want to destroy it. They are so privileged and yet will never be happy with the status quo. They think that mortality is something you can solve and if we don’t we will become stagnant as a species.

This is a very weird culture indeed. The sole output of this culture is immortality. That can’t be right. I’m aware that all the groups I mentioned above are sort of on the fringe, but also they do have a lot of money and influence. How much are they actually impacting or replacing popular culture? Ezra Klein, a journalist for the NYT, a very mainstream news outlet, has recently used his position to desperately list all of the things we can maybe use AI for one day. Come on guys, you’re not working hard enough to brainstorm uses for this thing currently macerating the economy. The economy now doesn’t matter because it’s about to flourish in unprecedented, euphoric ways, and also money isn’t real.

I will end with sharing a recent piece from one of my favourite writers, , who recently wrote a piece asking if there is a computer game out there that humans will still be playing in 500 years. Apparently humans have been playing backgammon for five thousand years. Go was also invented about four thousand years ago. This looks really good for games. But there’s a kind of sad understanding that a computer game cannot have this insane level of cultural sticking power, because it’s software — but Frank does mention, “there’s something intriguing about the way DOOM is continuously re-implemented on every possible computing platform.” The thing about games is, people like them. We play them when we’re happy, sad, bored, alone, or in a group. Games are a true cultural artefact, because they make life worth living. Whereas AI, or the cultureware that says AI is real, tells you that life is terrible and there’s only one way to make it better.

I am starting a research project about progressive campaigning and online radicalisation. I’m trying to learn as much as possible about the former in order to make a browser game about the latter.

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!

I’ve been really overwhelmed by the news recently. So much so that last month I wrote everything into a fictionalised narrative where a mysterious new invention is powered by the crushed bones of the dead. This was a fun way to try and make sense of what has become an extended universe of chaos. It worked for like five minutes. I feel like I’m living in a never-ending cascade of ‘events’ with absolutely no grounding stories.

To start, failed president killer Cole Tomas Allen wrote a manifesto explaining his actions at the fascist press dinner and it somehow makes more sense than Palantir’s recent tech bro listicle on why Silicon Valley’s supreme power is just, and frames their participation in war as a moral good. It also says “Our society has grown too eager to hasten, and is often gleeful at, the demise of its enemies. The vanquishing of an opponent is a moment to pause, not rejoice,” which is a sentence you can only write from an evil lair. It’s hard to do any sense-making, or in fact anything productive, when every progressive is using their mad typing fingers to yell at Taylor Lorenz for going or not going to the correspondent’s dinner (literally who cares??), or for engaging in too much screentime, or for just generally existing. Meanwhile she’s doing some really excellent reporting on the dark money campaigns that make American’s fear China and love AI. But yeah sure, she sucks, you’re right. A reporter can be very good at their job, and have an online presence that isn’t to your liking. Both things can be true.

Speaking of assassination attempts and nothing making sense, someone threw a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s house a month ago, somehow inspiring a term that flew by so quickly that it didn’t even have time to leave a smell in the room: ‘AI Populism’. I hope it doesn’t become a thing because author Jasmine Sun places the Molotov guy in the same ideological ilk as data centre activists. This is one hell of a whacky comparison, Jasmine. On the one hand you have a violent 20-year-old who used Effective Altruist logic to calculate that throwing a Molotov cocktail at a billionaire’s house was worth it and would do something. On the other hand you have you have community activists who don’t want to live next door to a humming pile of GPUs. These people do not operate in the same reality. EAs don’t care about ‘short term harms’ such as the environmental degradation caused by AI infrastructure. They are more concerned with preventing imaginary mass extinction events.

While we’re on the subject of wasted human life: AI is being used in war to kill a lot of people in one go while men monitor the situation in American pubs AKA ‘sports bars’ (but for war). Smooth-brained head of the DoW (Department of Why Don’t You Just Die Already) Pete Hegseth announced in January that any one caught trying to do military stuff without AI would have their budgets reviewed. There’s a lesson here, and it’s that if you want your vapourware AI products to actually make money, you have to sell to the most degenerate tech addicts in the world: the US military. “What should I bomb in Iran?” they type into ChatGPT and/or Claude with one hand, while scrolling X with the fat calloused thumbs of the other. OpenAI have been Very Good Boys to the DoW whereas Anthropic took a second to think about the implications of killing with AI and so came out looking like the ethical consumer choice — just another example of nothing making sense but also business as usual for the slimiest supervillains of the 21st century.

Anthropic really are taking the piss right now tbh. Everyone is falling for the Mythos Preview marketing stunt. They say it can identify zero-day vulnerabilities with just one prompt. They’re doing exactly what OpenAI used to do; apparently they’ve built something so powerful that if released to the general public, we would lose our minds and use it to kill god and then ourselves. The forty industry partners that get to test it out are ones that will only benefit from talking about how powerful it is. And yes, it’s already working, the US military obviously want a piece of the cybercrime machine.

So I think it’s fair to say that they only thing I can make sense of is this: AI is not a product, it’s just an ongoing project to obscure power. And to keep men occupied while they rot their brains with ketamine. But we already knew this; I think it’s just never been more obvious.

Side project time: Sexy Hot Lips

The other day I used the phrase ‘sexy hot lips’ and my girlfriend and I agreed that it would make a great magazine title. I then thought of the least sexy theme for the first issue: shipping.

Long story short we’re starting a self-published magazine called Sexy Hot Lips and issue one’s theme is shipping. If you think about it, shipping is super broad: pirates; trade wars; fandoms obsessing over fictional relationships. I just spoke to a friend about this and she said “actually, shipping containers are the first truly interoperable technology” — YES.

We’ve decided that this should exist in print only — no digital edition, no website at all beyond maybe a landing page. We will self-publish, and send to the UK only to save on… shipping.

If you have an idea and want to get involved, please respond directly to this email. But as mentioned if you don’t live in the UK, you may not be able to get your hands on a copy once it’s made lol.

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!

Share

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!

Share

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.