The Reality of AI and the Crisis of Meaning – address by Matthew Harvey Sanders to the Catholic Bishops of England and Wales, 23 April 2026, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "I want to start with the deepest pastoral fear many of you may already have, because it’s the right fear and it deserves a direct answer. The fear isn’t that AI is stupid. The fear is that AI will be trusted as if it were wise. The fear is that a thirteen-year-old girl with a conscience-burdened question will take that question not to a priest, not to her mother, not even to her friend, but to a chatbot. The fear is that a lonely widower in Portsmouth will pour his grief into an app whose business model is to keep him talking.... The problem in front of us isn’t, in the end, computer science. It’s an assault on the face and the voice. It’s an attempt, at industrial scale, to engineer substitutes for the two things that make a Catholic sacramental life possible: the human face, and the human voice.... With all of that in view, four things these systems simply cannot do. (1) They cannot know you. They have no interior life. (2) They cannot love you. Love is the willing of the good of the other. A machine has no will. (3) They cannot forgive you.... (4) They cannot accompany you. They can only be in the room.... Your parishioners aren’t in danger of believing the machine is God. They’re in danger of forgetting that they aren’t machines.... The great crisis of our century won’t be scarcity. It will be despair. A Universal Basic Income can’t fill a hole in the soul."
I devoured classic novels as a teenager. In a world of distractions, can I relearn how to read them? – article by Ioan Marc Jones in The Guardian. "A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon the Guardian’s new list of the 100 best novels. I nearly collapsed with smugness. I’d read 68 of the books and decided on the spot to read the remaining 32.... I found my concentration lagging. I kept checking the football scores and I don’t really care about football.... Have we all changed? Or was it just me?... The page makes few demands. It is linear and monologic, allowing us to focus on a single task. The page has no pop-ups, no calls to action, no ads clamouring for attention. But screens, according to research by psychologist Gloria Mark, compel us to switch attention, push us towards new shiny things. We focus on interfaces, ads, dialogic elements, rather than the content. Online, according to research by Chartbeat, one in three readers spend less than 15 seconds on any given article. Many who started reading this piece will have not made it this far.... Screens have altered the way we read. They promote a shallower reading experience, encourage skimming and scanning. Reading on screen has undermined reading in general. And our dependence on screens has led to a form of text fatigue.... Work exacerbates the problem. More of us now occupy managerial rather than manual roles, according to the National Readership Survey. We spend days staring at screens, drowning in instant messages, emails and work slop. People do not want to spend their leisure time reading Victorian classics, after all that bad reading.... In less than a decade, I’d lost the ability to read some of the best books ever written. I had no idea how that had happened. The experts I spoke to told me, over and over again, that classics require patience and practice. A good reader needs to learn or relearn how to read them. So how do I practise the classics? The most common bit of advice: start small. Katie Garner, a senior lecturer in 19th-century literature at St Andrews, advocates the 'Read like a Victorian' strategy: 'Replicate the experience of reading Victorian classics in the serialised form in which they were originally published.'... You can break a book into chunks, or simply pick smaller books.... More recent classics tend to ease the reader into reading.... Or perhaps read old books that continue to define our world, old books that feel profoundly new.... Audiobooks improve accessibility and we should welcome anything that helps people read.... Supplementary materials improve accessibility.... It is perhaps best to end with some words of wisdom from Virginia Woolf, the one writer to appear on the Guardian’s list five times: 'The only advice that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions.'”
‘The CGI would have cost millions. I spent $2,000.’ Is Dreams of Violets AI slop, or the future of film-making? – article by Cath Clarke in The Guardian. "Next week a breakthrough 75-minute drama about the brutal crackdown in Iran on anti-government protesters in January will premiere at the Tribeca film festival in New York. It is called Dreams of Violets and is based on journalism, video footage and eyewitness accounts. 'I would say 80% of it is a recreation of events that actually happened,' says its Iranian-British director Ash Koosha. But Dreams of Violets is a work of fiction, not a documentary: a drama following a group of strangers caught up in the protests, who meet by chance in an alleyway. How on earth has Koosha managed to pull together a drama about the killings in less than six months? The answer, it turns out, is by using artificial intelligence. Every image and character in Dreams of Violets is AI-generated. Koosha says he created the characters by describing their physical appearances, using people he has known in the past as references. It would be too dangerous to base characters on living people in Iran, he says. 'Because of the security issue, it would not be safe for the characters to even remotely resemble someone.' Where Dreams of Violets is breaking new ground is that it is the first fully-AI live action feature accepted at a major film festival. ... Koosha says that Dreams of Violets would be '100% impossible' to bring to the screen in the traditional way. 'If you wanted to do it in CGI, it would cost millions. I spent under $2,000.' He also points out the difficulties in raising finance and pre-production. 'It would take probably a year or two to get this right. The notion of making films at the speed of news itself is something I’m super interested in.' He also sees a role for AI in producing movies that look like massive studio productions at a fraction of the cost – removing the barriers for independent film-makers. 'An indie film-maker mind is often a lot more fresh and creative than an industrial film-maker mind. In my view most stories that are told with $100m should be told through the lens of an indie film-maker.'”
Our tech overlords are planning for conscious AI to conquer the cosmos. What could go wrong? – article by Eduardo Porter in The Guardian. “It would be a mistake to understand these weird worldviews as an ultimately harmless take by techies who grew up on a diet of dystopian science fiction. The notion that we are approaching the end of the homo sapiens, as defined since Darwin’s day, is coalescing into a durable body of belief among the elites at the helm of our technological future…. In their minds, they are on their way to build the next phase of humanity, a ‘transhuman’ future. In this future, they can satisfy their desire for immortality and assert power over the cosmos as transhumans multiply and expand across the galaxy. Their ultimate goal: to execute on a techno-mystical dream to distill the essence of what it is to be human, consciousness and all, into bits of information to be downloaded as binary code on to some non-biological substrate such as a silicon chip, or beamed through space as electromagnetic waves. … The danger, for the rest of us, is how the technological oligarchy’s aspirations will reshape the economies and societies of our present, as they redirect resources – capital, energy, minerals, water – to turbocharge AI and bring about the transhuman dream at the expense of healthcare, education or poverty reduction in the here and now.… How should society intervene? Does our political system provide the tools to help steer the process in a pro-social direction?… The Trump administration has shown little interest so far in resisting the tech oligarch’s fantasy. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the valley oligarchs’ project of techno-domination is inevitable. Misgivings are emerging among the Maga base…Other signs of trouble are brewing for the AI project – from college graduates booing commencement speakers who extol AI, to Trump’s brief moment of concern over the potential criminal capabilities of Anthropic’s new Mythos model before deciding not to regulate the thing after all.… Perhaps the most forceful, pro-human position has come from the Holy Father himself. On Monday, Pope Leo published the encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, pushing back against the unfettered development of AI at the expense of jobs and social equity. ‘This creates a paradox of material progress and anthropological regression that undermines the foundations of a just and stable social peace,‘ he added…. One might also take comfort in the fact that the oligarchs’ dreamscape is so far-fetched. … Forget the part where human consciousness is rendered in digital form, merged with AI and beamed across the galaxy. The ostensibly more down-to-earth proposition that conscious AI is not just possible but around the corner is in fundamental tension with our tenuous grasp of what consciousness is. Even more mundane objectives, such as getting artificial intelligence to train itself, keep getting pushed forward into the event horizon.… Maybe the transhuman project will give way to a more or less recognizably human future with some cool new AI plugins. Maybe it can even be achieved in a way that serves our long-forgotten dream of equitable prosperity. So far, though, our technological visionaries are pushing for something else, a future marked by vast concentrations of wealth and power, indifferent to the humdrum aspirations of the unwashed many.“
The Traveller by Andrea Wulf: an 18th century explorer far ahead of his time – review by Nick Bartlett in The Guardian. “At a time when racism pervaded public opinion as well as the philosophical texts of luminaries such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant, Forster moved brazenly to critique and correct them… It is unusual to devote almost half a biography to only three years of a subject’s life. But the decision tells us something about the weight the author places on the time Forster spent travelling the world as the assistant naturalist on board Captain James Cook’s HMS Resolution, beginning when he was just 17. Unlike the ship’s crew, Forster was concerned by how the expedition’s presence in the Pacific islands would damage social relations and disrupt local economies. In his diary, he wrote that the people who received them had every right ‘to look on our men as a set of invaders‘. He deplored the ‘vengeful‘ nature of his fellow sailors and spent his time with the Indigenous people they made contact with, among them the Māori, Easter Islanders and Tahitians. He admired the Tahitians’ unique conception of property and their absence of class distinctions. Towards the end of the journey a man from Bora Bora, named Hitihiti, voluntarily joined the crew, and he and Forster became close friends, teaching one another words from their respective mother tongues…. Despite his departures from mainstream opinion, Forster was lauded for his intellect and daring spirit, invited to address King George III and regularly called on by foreign envoys and European royals. In his celebrated account of the expedition, A Voyage Round the World (1777), he condemned the violence committed by the crew against Indigenous people and espoused what he termed ‘the general rights of mankind‘. The appeal to what we’d now call human rights was unprecedented and radical for its inclusion of everyone, regardless of race.“
The Children by Melissa Albert: intriguing fairytale of creativity’s dangers – review by Sam Leith in The Guardian. “Children’s writers are sometimes cruel, and often damaged.… The Children’s protagonist is Guinevere Sharpe, who as a grown woman is trapped by a very public version of her childhood. Her mother, Edith, a sort of JK Rowling/Enid Blyton composite, wrote an era-defining run of children’s portal fantasies called the Ninth City series, in which Guin and her older brother Ennis appeared as the named protagonists. They didn’t know it at the time, but they were becoming as famous as Christopher Robin – with all that implies. In the present day of the novel, grown-up Guin is the custodian of her mother’s literary legacy. She is releasing a ghostwritten and somewhat saccharine memoir about the years that she and Ennis spent running wild in rural isolation while Edith wrote the books that were to define their lives. But the truth, as Albert’s sometimes unwieldy triple time scheme lets us know bit by bit, is darker than Guin’s memoir suggests…. In the present tense of the novel,… Edith and Llewellyn have died in a fire that consumed the house; the sixth and last book in the Ninth City series never got written; and Guin and Ennis, once so close, have been on nonspeakers for two decades. A conceptual artist who builds uncanny installations, Ennis has always refused to talk about his childhood and the Ninth City books – but just as Guin is publicising her memoir, he announces a new show called Mother. The now of the story tracks Guin’s panicky peregrinations as we count down to its opening day and the inevitable confrontation. Meanwhile, a third time strand fills in Guin’s experiences between the death of her parents and the present…. One of the pleasures of The Children is that you’re quite some way through it before you figure out what, exactly, it is. Is it a psychological drama, a haunted house story, or a dark fairytale? We’re certainly closing in on a secret, or rather a whole passel of them.”
‘You’re treated like this is the end’: Meet the dementia rebels, diagnosed and determined to change people’s minds – article by Anne Karpf in The Guardian. “People diagnosed with dementia are still routinely being advised to disengage from life as they know it and prepare to die – something that Kate Swaffer, an internationally known Australian dementia campaigner, calls ‘prescribed disengagement‘ – or given a bunch of leaflets, without any genuine support beyond groups in which many people living with dementia feel patronised. After diagnosis, Swaffer immediately lost her job…. [She is one of a number of] dementia activists, people living with dementia who are angry about the stereotypes surrounding the condition and the lack of support after diagnosis. It is a hybrid of ageism and ableism that combine, they believe, to perpetuate fear and anxiety. Instead of disengaging, they choose to engage even more vigorously: all four have thrown themselves into dementia activism, establishing new groups…
Project a Black Planet: spits out dreary academic theory where it should sing – review by Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. “The exhibition does not sing. It spits out theory instead. Every section is framed as an essay, with artworks chosen to illustrate an argument: one bay is based around the ideas of sociologist Stuart Hall, which the works don’t seem to illustrate anyway. This is a show that wants to conjure up a utopian place, Panafrica, and make it real, which would be a powerful piece of political enchantment. To do that it needed to be put together with artistic flair. Instead the curators approach their poetic fiction with leaden prosaicness. Rather than carrying you away to Panafrica on wings of imagination they keep stopping to recalibrate their academic echo-location machine. As a result the huge mix of art, from mid 20th-century sculptor Ronald Moody to a Marlene Dumas painting via a poster for Do the Right Thing, becomes an incoherent, often tedious stew. And there’s worse. This exhibition is so in thrall to theoretical musings around Panafrica it loses sight of … Africa. While this utopian dream of an imaginary continent was being constructed across the 20th and 21st centuries what was happening, you wonder, in Africa and to people worldwide of African descent?“
Young, ambitious and out of work: ‘I’ve gone from Oxford to zero jobs. It’s a bit of a fall’ - article by Sammy Gecsoyler in The Guardian. “Thomas doesn’t leave the house much. Apart from walking his dog, the only other excursion the 24-year-old regularly makes is a ‘humiliating’ weekly trip to Iceland, where he stocks up on seven £1 frozen meals…. Like all of the young people interviewed for this piece, Thomas has been unemployed for more than a year. He is one of 82,000 16- to 24-year-olds in England in the same grim predicament. Thomas, who lives in Warrington, gets £311 a month in universal credit. After his bills are paid and his dog’s food is accounted for, he has about £25 for the month. He is hardly lazy, having worked since he was 16. But this changed in October 2024 when he lost his job as a pub manager. Despite applying for about 2,000 jobs since, he’s had no luck.… Sadly, Thomas’s experience is the new normal for many young people across the UK.… Alan Milburn’s report on young people and work … says that about 1 million 16- to 24-year-olds are not in employment, education or training (Neet).”
‘A poisoned chalice’: will Doctor Who survive Russell T Davies’s exit? – article by Martin Belam in The Guardian. “The announcement that the BBC has abandoned the planned Doctor Who Christmas special, and is ending its partnership with showrunner Russell T Davies and Bad Wolf production company, will not have come as much of a surprise to many fans…. Viewing figures [have dipped] to the lowest in the show’s history – although the current streaming landscape makes it difficult to make like-for-like comparisons with previous eras….When 1980s producer John Nathan-Turner suspected the show faced cancellation, he and script editor Andrew Cartmel carefully left the series open ended. Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred walked off into the distance with a monologue from him that became fandom lore…. Davies and Bad Wolf, conversely, have left the show on a series of cliffhangers that are unlikely ever to be resolved. Why did we suddenly get flashing psychic messages from the Doctor’s granddaughter in the middle of the Interstellar Song Contest? Why did the Doctor appear to regenerate into the face of a former companion? The 2005 revival worked because Davies threw away the continuity baggage, only gradually reintroducing old elements. Assuming a new production company wants a clean slate – a new showrunner, Doctor, companions and a reimagining of the concept – the end of The Reality War and the lingering question of: 'Is or isn’t Billie Piper the new Doctor?' feel like a poisoned chalice. Part of the problem remains that the BBC is unclear as to what it wants the show to be. It is a valuable franchise and a British cultural touchstone, but it lacks the global reach of Star Wars or Marvel, despite having to compete against them for attention. At the same time, the BBC still thinks it can use it on Saturday linear TV to unite a family audience that probably no longer exists. Putting the show out to tender suggests they are looking for somebody else to square those circles.“
This is Rambert: 100th birthday knees-up is a big leap forward – review by Lyndsey Winship in The Guardian. “Britain’s oldest dance company is celebrating its 100th anniversary but this celebratory tour is decidedly no exercise in nostalgia. As the title, This is Rambert, makes clear, it’s a mission statement, a manifesto, and all about the present moment. So no harking back to the company’s beginnings in the early years of British ballet, or the deliberate shift into modern dance in the 1960s. The Rambert brand has gone through some chameleonic changes across the last century, settling for a while into a pattern of reputable, reliable, something-for-everyone shows. Current artistic director Benoit Swan Pouffer wants to shake things up, to prove there’s nothing geriatric about this centenarian…. What does [the programme] say about Rambert’s mission, then? To move fast, but not necessarily break everything. To continue commissioning new choreography and keep a stunning set of dancers in forward motion. This is all very good, and everything tonight is good, even if only some of it really thrills – that’s the necessary risk of new work. Let’s hope they’re still dancing in another 100 years.”
‘Once, Mandela was seen as the devil incarnate’: the TV show laying bare the true struggle against apartheid – article by Emine Saner in The Guardian. “We tend to look back at the campaign to end apartheid in South Africa, says Peter Hain… ‘as one of the great success stories of protests and Nelson Mandela as a global icon, and rightly so. But Mandela was considered the devil incarnate. He was denounced as a terrorist by Margaret Thatcher only a few years before his release. We were vilified.’ It was nothing compared to what Black people in South Africa faced, he stresses, but still he was targeted…. Dali Tambo grew up expecting the worst would happen to his father, Oliver Tambo, the ANC president in exile who had brought his family to London in 1960. Other activists who had left South Africa had been assassinated… In London, the ANC offices were bombed.… The British anti-apartheid movement was hugely significant, says Hain. ’Of course newly independent African countries were expressing solidarity, and the US [movement], particularly the Black community, which itself was suffering from enormous racism. But the British anti-apartheid movement [became] the centre of the international anti-apartheid struggle.’ Both Hain and Tambo harnessed sport and culture. Hain led the protests against the 1969 Springbok rugby tour of Britain and Ireland, and succeeded in getting the South African cricket tour cancelled the following year. ‘The sports campaign brought to millions of sports fans a sudden awareness: what’s apartheid about?’ Hain later became an MP, cabinet minister and now sits in the House of Lords.“
Free Nelson Mandela: this gripping documentary pulls no punches – review by Phil Harrison in The Guardian. “Nelson Mandela died in December 2013 but he had long before been canonised as a secular saint. Many people – particularly on the political right – found it convenient to forget that for decades they had regarded him as a terrorist. He had become the world’s grandad: an icon of spiritual generosity and reconciliation. This three-part series directed by James Rogan ends in 1994, when Mandela became president of South Africa and that process of sanctification was under way. It’s gripping, it’s revelatory and it pulls no punches. It evokes the grim reality faced by Mandela and his allies during their decades-long struggle against apartheid. It’s a world of white South Africans suggesting their Black compatriots had ‘only just come down from the trees‘. Of British young Conservatives with their ‘Hang Nelson Mandela‘ posters. Of physical violence, emotional torment and awful economic unfairness…. As Mandela and other ANC leaders languished in captivity, the series tracks the diasporic face of the resistance. Musicians Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela went into exile abroad but relentlessly spread the word. Via disrupted sporting events and street protests, the likes of Peter Hain engaged in activism in Britain. Inside South Africa, ANC fighters, such as James Mange were at the sharp end. Mange eventually ended up on Robben Island, where Mandela was startled by the movement’s new militancy. But events recorded in history books are barely half the story. This telling brutally emphasises the personal cost of Mandela’s resistance. He lost his mother and son in consecutive years and mourned them remotely. His wife Winnie, meanwhile, is a complex figure about whom the series is wisely nonjudgmental. If, eventually, her radicalism became incompatible with her husband’s gentle pragmatism, it is made clear that she had every justification for her rage…. [Mandela’s] three-way release negotiation – with the ANC, his fellow prisoners and the South African authorities – remains a miracle of diplomacy. It was helped … by a world waking up to South Africa…. The reminder of the BBC’s decision to screen Mandela’s 70th birthday concert in 1988 in the face of legal threats from Conservative MPs is poignant in the light of the BBC’s apparent unwillingness to interrogate hard right, anti-immigrant tropes. As Neil Kinnock puts it: ‘In the Commonwealth, South Africa’s only friend and defender was Margaret Thatcher.‘ Given the flux of the world in 1990, Mandela’s release seemed inevitable at the time. This series shows that it wasn’t, and demonstrates how much could have gone wrong. The conclusion alludes to the Truth and Reconciliation process that took place in South Africa through the 90s but steps away at this point – Mandela’s post-prison life is worthy of another series in itself.“
‘Why would you put a toxic product into the hands of a young child?’: director turned activist Beeban Kidron on why big tech needs its ‘tobacco moment’ – interview by Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian, on the publication of her book Users: How Big Tech Took Control and How to Fight Back. “The book Kidron has written ... isn’t simply furious. In parts it’s gossipy, even unexpectedly funny, as her old celebrity life as the director of movies such as Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason collides with her new political mission…. But the woman in front of me, makeup free and with her hair bundled up in a clip, is no Hollywood luvvie. Her expertise dates back to 2012, and a documentary she made when her own son and daughter were teenagers about how smartphones were changing childhood. That led to her founding the charity 5Rights Foundation, which campaigns for children’s rights online, and a search for solutions taking her from Silicon Valley boardrooms to the Vatican and many places in between. The book is an impassioned cri de coeur against an industry she sees as out of control, though she says it was written partly to show that we’re not powerless to put it back in its box: that in an attention economy, individuals have the ultimate sanction of withholding our attention from the platforms desperate for it. But it’s also an ‘absolute cry of rage against the political class’ for what she sees as successive governments’ failure to protect not just children but adults whose lives have also been reshaped by tech. ‘Come for the children, stay for humanity,’ she says drily.”
How To Read A Novel – SubStack post by Steven Johnson, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “Last week, I happened on a tweet from Patrick Collison [asking] why we should read classic novels… I sketched out an answer to this question in my book Farsighted, arguing that novels (and fictional narratives in general) were extensions of the human mind’s marvelous aptitude for building simulations of potential events.… But my admiration for Middlemarch and Bleak House goes beyond their portrayal of the psychological interiority of their characters…. Both novels succeed at something else: they invite us to think across multiple scales of experience—and to make causal and associative connections between those different layers…. In Middlemarch, the key events of the narratives are all deeply influenced by forces existing at at least seven distinct bands of the spectrum: MIND (Dorothea’s emotional and sexual attraction to Ladislaw; her drive for intellectual autonomy) FAMILY (The possibility of having children; the impact on her choices on her father and sister) CAREER (Dorothea’s active oversight over the Lowick estate, and the social impact of 'improving' Lowick) COMMUNITY (The town gossip, which is effectively its own character in the novel) ECONOMY (The financial consequences of relinquishing Causabon’s fortune) TECHNOLOGY (The chaos of the railroad; the productivity of the new agricultural techniques.) POLITICS (The reform movement that catalyzed the events of 1832; Ladislaw’s political ambitions within that movement.)… Bleak House added a new band to the spectrum, one that becomes central in 20th-century classics like The Trial, 1984, or Terry Gilliam’s Brazil: the bureaucratic state, most famously the Court Of Chancery with its endless litigations and a whole comical troupe of nascent knowledge workers churning through ‘bills, cross-bills, answers, rejoinders, injunctions, affidavits, issues, references to masters, masters’ reports, mountains of costly nonsense.’ … why should we read these books? To me, the answer comes down to this: getting your brain to accurately assess the full spectrum takes effort, but it’s a valuable skill to have in life. If you over-index on one layer at the expense of the others, you’ll end up making less nuanced choices, both personally and professionally, because your mental model about what is actually happening at a given crossroads of your life will be too narrow. And so we should embrace any opportunity to practice thinking across scales, in part because most educational environments are deliberately designed to keep you specialized in one part of the spectrum. So in a way, I’ve come to think about books like Middlemarch or Bleak House—using the language of deep learning—as a source of training data for full-spectrum thinking. They are trial runs that prepare you for the real thing.“
‘Wow, it really worked!’: the 70s TV show that’s causing worldwide panic, 50 years later – article by Phil Tinline in The Guardian. “On 20 June 1977, an edition of Anglia Television’s Science Report was broadcast on ITV. It set out to investigate the ‘brain drain‘ of British scientists to the US. But it emerged that some of these scientists had vanished completely, while others had died in strange circumstances. The journalists had stumbled on something huge. As the host, former ITV newscaster Tim Brinton, solemnly explained, the greenhouse effect would soon make the Earth uninhabitable, and this had forced the powerful to choose between terrible alternative solutions. The American and Soviet governments had decided to work together in secret to implement ‘Alternative 3‘: building a launch base on the moon, and from there a ‘human survival colony‘ for the elite on Mars. The missing scientists had been co-opted to play their part; the dead ones had threatened to leak the plan. As you probably guessed, the ‘documentary’ was a drama – as signalled by end credits listing the actors who played the horrified reporters and terrified scientists. Science Report did not exist; the whole thing was invented by a screenwriter named David Ambrose.… The show was meant to be broadcast on April Fools’ Day, but fatefully, it had to be moved back, and went out on 20 June. Ambrose says he ‘intended to cause a flap’ – and he did. While those end credits did begin with a dateline saying 'April 1st', many people took the show seriously. ITV was hit by a barrage of calls from viewers – some protesting, others seeking reassurance the programme was fiction.… Ambrose’s fiction escaped its British origins to take up residence in the strange dreamscape of American conspiracy theory. As the political scientist Michael Barkun traces in A Culture of Conspiracy, the show’s notion that the elite was plotting to abandon Earth keyed into existing visions of imminent apocalypse.… Alternative 3’s afterlife really took off in 1991, when the conspiracist Milton William Cooper included it in his book Behold a Pale Horse. The book’s paranoid tales of secret government evil, 'evidenced' by fictions like Alternative 3, influenced not just paid-up conspiracy theorists such as Alex Jones, but everything from the UFO-obsessed, nothing-is-as-it-seems world of The X-Files to an array of hip-hop stars…. Cooper fused Alternative 3 with theories about Aids, depopulation and the Kennedy assassination, while insisting that Science Report was a real series. Another influential theorist, Jim Keith, wrote Casebook on Alternative 3, complete with a chapter on 'Missing Scientists'. The book begins by acknowledging the story appears to be a hoax. But what if that claim is just an elite trick? Meanwhile, other conspiracists were worrying about who would get to go to Mars: just how senior a Freemason did you need to be?“
The Uses of Utopia by Joad Raymond Wren: can the ideal society ever exist? – review by Steven Poole in The Guardian. “By definition, utopia cannot exist. In 1516, educated readers of Thomas More’s Utopia would have appreciated a tension between two possible derivations of this novel word: the Greek ‘eu-topos‘, meaning good place, and ‘ou-topos‘, meaning not a place at all. It might have been a compact warning that one should never attempt to turn utopias into reality. Those who have tried usually witnessed the model societies they founded devolving into grungily dysfunctional communes, weird sex cults, or both. In this richly diverting intellectual history of the idea, we begin, as we must, with Plato, and the zany prescriptions of his Republic… Passing in silence over the potentially utopian aspects of Jesus’s thinking, we arrive at More’s utopia, where ’nothing is private’, and so ’the common affairs be earnestly looked upon’. The great Renaissance scientist Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis portrays a utopia of rational scientific experimentation – which, Wren suggests ingeniously, might have inspired Wakanda in the Marvel Black Panther films. The 17th-century duchess Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World imagines the author as a goddess elected by a world of human-animal hybrids who like science. In the 18th century, Sarah Scott’s Millenium [sic] Hall imagined an ideal society of women without men, as did Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland during the first world war… Inasmuch as utopias are primarily ‘organic machines for thinking about the premises of our thought’, Wren argues, they are more like science fiction – and some indeed have been science fiction. He mentions here the 1970s ’anarchist utopia’ of Ursula K Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, but probably the most popular strain of utopian fiction over the last few decades has been the epic series of Culture novels by Iain M Banks, which posits fully automated luxury communism in space among a pan-galactic society of augmented humans…. The best utopian fiction ... ends up implicitly anti-utopian as well; at its highest level of practise, perhaps, utopia vanishes into the great flow of literature itself.”
Cross purposes: how the England flag got caught in a tug-of-war between rightwing nationalists and football fans – article by Steve Rose in The Guardian. “We’re gearing up for a summer of both exciting international football and ugly far-right protests and riots, as recent events in Belfast and Southampton have shown. The England flag will be a prominent fixture of both – great news for flag sellers, but a confusing and anxious time for the rest of us. How did England’s national symbol come to evoke such mixed feelings and carry such contradictory meanings? … Our politicians have been as uncertain about this as everyone else. That became clear last summer, when England flags and union jacks suddenly began to appear on lamp-posts in towns and cities across the country. …The initiative was pushed by groups such as Raise the Colours, a self-described ‘grassroots movement‘ that proclaimed it was campaigning ‘to cover Britain in symbols of unity and patriotism‘ – but it clearly generated local support too… In the Southey Green area of Sheffield on Monday, every lamp-post along the main street still has both a St George’s cross and a union jack on it. One lamp-post at the top of the hill sports six flags: two St George’s crosses, a union jack, the Welsh and Scottish national flags, and a remembrance flag with poppies and planes…. Talking to people in the area – which swung from Labour to Reform in the recent local elections – most appear to be either in favour of the flags or indifferent to them. ‘There’s a lot of people who say: “Ooh, it’s racist.“ How is it racist?’ asks Danny, a 37-year-old white man, from the porch of a house draped in several England flags.… To him, he says, the flag simply means: ‘We’re proud of this country. And we want to be proud of his country again because in all fairness it’s gone to shit.‘ He is not racist, he says, but he’s opposed to ‘the ones that are coming across and getting everything for nowt‘. He claims to know of eastern European migrants who laugh and joke about different benefits and student grants they are getting from the government…. Many of the locals I spoke to evoked military patriotism in relation to the flags, saying they had relatives in the armed forces or had served themselves. There was a lot of national pride but also a sense of wounded pride, perhaps, mixed with nostalgia…. The line between flagging as a ‘grassroots’ initiative and as a provocation by the organised far right has begun to evaporate. Scarf and Hope Not Hate have both identified Raise the Colours figures as former members of far-right groups such as the English Defence League, the National Front, Britain First and the UK Independence party (which is now a Christian nationalist group). Many former members of Raise the Colours have reportedly left the organisation as it has become more extreme and anti-migrant… According to recent research by British Future, a non-partisan thinktank concerned with issues of integration, migration, identity and race, 62% of people in England agreed that: ’I would like to be able to fly an England flag without appearing to support the far right.’ And 81% of people in England, and 74% of ethnic minorities, saw the flying of England flags to support the country’s football teams in major tournaments as ’a healthy expression of English national pride’.”
Gig workers are endlessly exploited. AI could make more of us share their fate – article by Arielle Pardes in The Guardian. “In 2024, the buy-now-pay-later company Klarna announced that it would cut hundreds of customer service roles and begin using an artificial intelligence chatbot instead. The move was expected to save the company millions. But a year later, after customers complained about the degraded quality of customer service, Klarna began to recruit human customer service agents back. At first glance, the reversal appeared to be a victory for human workers in the age of AI. The reality was more complex. Instead of bringing on full-time customer service agents, [instead] an AI chatbot continues to handle most of customers’ basic queries, while a growing number of gig workers handle the more advanced ones.… Consider this a glimpse into one of the ways artificial intelligence is poised to transform work…. The optimistic interpretation of this is that AI will take on more of the menial tasks from human workers, freeing them up to do higher-level work. The cynical interpretation? As companies increasingly integrate AI, they will use it to hire fewer full-time employees, shifting toward a fragmented workforce that resembles the gig economy. ‘Gig work’ refers to flexible, short-term or on-demand work. The term originally comes from the music industry, like a band playing a ‘gig’. It’s now commonly used to describe workers on platforms like Uber, DoorDash or Taskrabbit. These jobs give workers some autonomy to choose when and how much to work, but they also lack most of the benefits afforded to full-time workers: paid time off, health insurance, workers’ compensation, overtime or even a minimum wage. ‘One of the things we talk about as sociologists who study work is this idea about work moving from the career to the job to the gig. And AI makes it even easier to do that,’ says Alexandrea Ravenelle, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill… This transformation is hitting white-collar desk workers hardest as companies strive to show efficiency gains from adopting AI.… ‘We are going to see it in every industry,’ says Ravenelle. ‘I don’t believe there’s any industry that’s safe from this.’”
‘You can’t make billions without hurting people’: Cory Doctorow on Elon Musk, the AI bubble and bosses’ cruel fantasies – interview by Zoe Williams in The Guardian. "A 'centaur', in automation theory, is a person assisted by a machine, and a 'reverse centaur', hero of Cory Doctorow’s new book, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI, is a 'human who is conscripted into acting as an assistant to a machine'. Every warehouse worker who ever had to urinate in a water bottle because they couldn’t otherwise meet the fulfilment targets set by an algorithm is a reverse centaur. Reaching into the future, everyone who has to sit in a self-driving truck to make sure it doesn’t crash, presumably on minimum rather than truck-driver wages, is a reverse centaur; as is every lawyer no longer on lawyer’s money checking Gemini’s command of precedent, every indie band scraping a living doing covers of AI-generated hits, and so on. That, anyway, is the promise: AI is coming for your job, and it is coming for your kids’ jobs, and there is no point fighting it because the future’s already here.... [Doctorow] came to mass attention as a tech writer with his book Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It; it’s hard to believe it was only published last year, and impossible to remember what we did without that word. People now use 'enshittification' for everything, from the degradation of public services post-austerity to climate-crisis-related chaos events, when in fact Doctorow’s proposition had quite a specific use regarding tech: giant platforms lock you in and then make your experience worse on purpose. 'I’m not frustrated by that at all. I think it’s glorious. My first two languages are English and Yiddish, languages that don’t have language academies, where dictionaries are descriptive, not proscriptive, where words change meaning.'... Why, he wonders, are capital allocators allocating so much capital to [AI]? It’s because of a promise as old as the loom: that bosses will be able to replace their workers with machines. This isn’t just about money – often, when the machine is ultimately not as good as a human, or needs so much supervision from a human that it becomes more expensive, there’s still tremendous appetite for automation. 'The one thing a boss does not want is co-determination. Bosses are haunted by the knowledge that even though they fancy that they’re driving the car, if they don’t show up, everything continues to work. Whereas if the workers don’t show up, everything shuts down. And so perhaps they’re in the back seat with a toy steering wheel. AI is the promise of wiring that toy steering wheel directly into the drivetrain of the car. It’s products without product designers. Workplaces without workers, screenplays without screenwriters, movies without actors, hospitals without doctors and nurses. This is the promise.... Do you not remember when they said cryptocurrency would replace all of the world’s financial systems? They told us that the metaverse would be the default, that we wouldn’t have tourism or sex any more,' Doctorow says, with vaudeville outrage. 'We have such poor object permanence!' (This is fancy, child-development vocabulary for 'really bad memories'.) ... Whenever an exercise in automation fails and is abandoned – you may remember Amazon’s staff-less grocery stores, which actually required three people to be constantly watching each shopper on CCTV and guessing what they were putting in their baskets – it never dents the AI cheerleaders’ confidence that they’re speeding towards a post-worker world; nor, so far, the enthusiasm of investors. It’s got to the point where it’s more important to keep the narrative afloat than to consider whether it’s realistic.... Fundamentally, this is a Marxist analysis, I suggest: that labour and capital are elementally at odds, and the latter will exploit the former even if all value is lost in the process. 'I don’t necessarily disagree, but that’s not the argument I’m making. The argument I’m making is that bosses resent and work relentlessly to end co-determination as a class.' But that’s the same, I insist, and he shrugs, as if to say: we can bicker about Marx after we’ve stopped this runaway train."
The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI by Cory Doctorow: the real price of artificial intelligence – review by Dorian Lynskey in The Guardian. "As former Google CEO Eric Schmidt could tell you, AI is a hard sell these days. Last month, he tried talking up the AI revolution during a commencement address at the University of Arizona and was loudly booed by students about to enter an AI-ravaged job market. His discombobulation was telling.... AI’s public image has fallen to earth: it’s now widely seen as a job crusher, a fact mangler, a slop maker, a privacy invader, a climate trasher and a general pain in the neck. Never before has a new technology been rammed down our throats with such speed, determination and complete disregard for public opinion. Cory Doctorow’s book pithily explains why.... Doctorow, who has written several science fiction novels, cites one of the genre’s defining messages: 'The most important thing about the gadget isn’t what it does, it’s who it does it for and who it does it to.' Just as the Luddites weren’t angry with machines per se, most anti-AI sentiment is really anti-capitalist rather than anti-tech. Doctorow uses a framework a 19th-century socialist would recognise: the bosses will pull every trick to avoid paying workers more unless workers unionise to fight back. The problem with the AI business is the same thing that drives enshittification. The improbable price-to-sales ratios of tech companies are based on the promise of future growth, hence high-stakes bets like the Metaverse or the failed social media platform Google+. The AI sector’s colossal valuation derives largely from the salaries of the human workers it aims to replace – Morgan Stanley predicts it will add almost a trillion dollars a year to the S&P 500. And because the net worth of tech bosses is tied to stock value rather than actual profits, they have a personal incentive to keep investors excited: today AI may be a money pit, but just you wait.... One thing to give anti-AI hardliners pause is Doctorow’s suggestion that the industry is deliberately juicing outrage about things like AI-generated art as a form of hype: if people are this scared and angered, then the promise of replacing human labour must be real. In this book, at least, he isn’t animated by the headline-grabbing concerns, whether existential risk or AI psychosis, deepfake porn or election disinformation, because those are unintended consequences. His target is the revenue model and the bubble it has created: 'To be an effective AI critic, you need to strike at the source of AI’s power, which is the investment capital it attracts.'”
‘It’s where the poetry is written in cinema language’: the female editors behind cinema’s masterpieces – article by Bethany Elliott in The Guardian. "Behind every great director, to coin a phrase, is a great editor – and as the tributes paid earlier this month to the late Marcia Lucas, Oscar-winning editor of Star Wars: Episodes IV to VI, and former wife of creator George Lucas, reminded us, that editor is often a woman. In a historically male-dominated industry, this familiar Hollywood dynamic is a phenomenon that is worth investigating. It goes back decades. During the supermacho Hollywood new wave era, Dede Allen worked with Arthur Penn (Bonnie and Clyde) and Sidney Lumet (Dog Day Afternoon), and Thelma Schoonmaker edited Raging Bull, The King of Comedy and GoodFellas for Martin Scorsese (and much else besides). David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia may have contained no female speaking characters, but it won Anne V Coates an editing Oscar. Anne Bauchens was nominated for Cleopatra in 1934, when the Oscars’ editing category was created, and became its first female winner in 1940 for Cecil B DeMille’s North West Mounted Police. The received wisdom is that women came to occupy the editing suite while being excluded from other creative roles as it was assumed that editing was monotonous, unskilled labour and, as the male-dominated studio system emerged, editors were subordinate to the producer and director. This, however, may not be the full story. 'During the studio system, editing was not considered unskilled labour,' says JE Smyth, professor of history at the University of Warwick. 'Women were the best editors in the studio system; many had musical backgrounds which helped them with finding a flow.'"
‘Emotional and horrific’: volunteers ‘live’ as Somerset animals to study wildlife risks – article by Patrick Barkham in The Guardian. "What does a kestrel make of the dog sniffing in the long grass below? Why does an exhausted salmon pause before a weir? How will an otter experience the rumble of a passing train? Eighteen people have spent six weeks swimming, slithering and soaring as otters, salmon, earthworms, red deer and kestrels in an attempt to better document the risks for wild animals in our human-dominated landscape.... In the pioneering study – conducted by the University of the West of England and the Accelerator for Systemic Risk Assessment (ASRA), funded by the Ecological Citizen(s) Network – participants were given a detailed scientific briefing about the sensory powers of their chosen animal collaborators' and trained to undertake exercises in the wild. Encouraged to use a single key sense, they were advised by social anthropologists on the research team not to interpret, explain or evaluate, but simply to describe their experiences. By 'de-centering' human understanding, they were told they might allow another understanding to come through, before they reported their oral testimonies back to researchers.... The project reflects a growing interest in the rights of nature movement and the burgeoning More-Than-Human Life programme, and follows innovative thinkers such as Charles Foster, whose pioneering book Being a Beast documented him living as a fox, red deer, badger and swift."
For the Record: An Incomplete History of Music: it’s amazing that this staggering show exists – review by Stuart Heritage in The Guardian. "The consensus seemed to be that [documentary series like Kenneth Clark's Civilisation and Jacob Bronowski's Ascent of Man] – huge, cerebral, expensive – would simply not get made today, unless it was dumbed down and cut-price and rebranded ... So it comes as something of a surprise to learn that the Cosmic Shambles Network’s new documentary series, For the Record: An Incomplete History of Music, takes its title as seriously as it does.... I assumed, naively, that the series would largely be about the sort of music that was popularised in the 20th century, with a nod to classical along the way. Nope. The first 15 minutes are spent discussing the soundwaves produced by the Big Bang, explained via interviews with astrophysicists and theoretical cosmologists.... Then we learn what sound actually is, with digressions about how the size, shape and texture of a room can affect acoustics.... It is dense, unapologetically brainy stuff, and it’s enough to make you remember that this is the sort of show the BBC used to be famous for. It is dense, unapologetically brainy stuff, and it’s enough to make you remember that this is the sort of show the BBC used to be famous for... Still, this isn’t an alienatingly brainy series. Its trump card is its host, Charlotte Ritchie.... She is a vital presence, because the show has a lot of very big ideas that it needs to link together.... To reiterate the scale of the endeavour, by the end of the first episode we are still only at about 800BC. That leaves close to three millennia (the ones containing all the music that any of us will be familiar with) to get through in just eight episodes. Apparently No 2 will largely revolve around the ancient Mesopotamian use of Pythagorean tuning. I wouldn’t miss it for the world."
