May Diary
Hello,
Obligatory shilling. This month I wrote at THE ZONE about walking, government and growth, World War Two and historical memory, the far right rainbow coalition, 9/11 conspiracy theories, the primitive and the modern, philosophical terrorists, Sabu, AI and writing and the limits of conservatism.
I wrote for The Critic about media ageism, the police, why Britain is not an “immigrant nation”, the Biden cover-up, Gary Lineker, cricket, Michael Gove and Douglas Murray’s new book on Israel.
The summer of loathe. The world is five years on from the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, which saw the people who had said that you couldn’t see your family and friends because of the pandemic say that you could have mass gatherings in an act of ill-defined protest against rare illegitimate police killings in the USA. To the extent that there has been a “vibe shift” at all, I think that it has had a lot to do with the psychological repercussions of the sheer insanity of this.
Patterns and prejudices. Twice this month, excitable online right-wingers embarrassed us all by insisting that violent incidents, first in Hamburg and then in Liverpool, must have been perpetrated by jihadists when they had not. Sadly, a lot of people on the right, as well as a lot of people on the left, don’t understand patterns. A left-winger might deny that it is disproportionately probable that a mass casualty incident will be caused by a Muslim. Some right-wingers, on the other hand, will deny that they can be caused by anybody else.
Politics and podcasts. Allegedly, the Democrats are looking for a liberal Joe Rogan. It won’t work. Rogan didn’t build his platform on talking about right-leaning politics — he built his platform on talking about martial arts, conspiracy theories, drugs et cetera and then used this platform to talk about right-leaning politics. A lot of his fans — myself included — think that has made him far more tedious. You can be a famous political commentator — a Ben Shapiro, say — but it’s difficult to be a truly mainstream figure because talking about politics, for most people, gets boring and weird. People are wise that way.
No surprises. The knives are out for Thom Yorke among leftists online because the Radiohead singer took a somewhat centrist position on Israel and Palestine. Look, I’m not saying that art and politics are never connected. It would be ridiculous to read George Orwell and think “can’t this guy just focus on art for art’s sake?” Equally, though, it seems a bit ridiculous to listen to The Bends and OK Computer and think, “I’m really going to get invested in this guy’s geopolitical analysis”.
The dark side of the … As a big fan of Vice’s Dark Side of the Ring documentary series, I couldn’t help watching an episode of their spin-off The Dark Side of Comedy on one of my favourite comedians, Norm Macdonald. Here we learned such revelations as that Macdonald had a gambling problem. Woah! Next we’ll hear that Rodney Dangerfield had issues with being disrespected. Trivial as it was, the show gave me a bit of an identity crisis. Commentating is easy. Doing something worth being commentated on is a lot more difficult.
AIuthors. Will Storr speculates that AI is making bank on Substack:
It seems to me that a rubicon has been crossed. AI is genuinely touching human hearts, and it’s making money, and at least some readers don’t seem to care. More scary: this is only the beginning. Right now, once it’s pointed out, the taste of gruel is obvious. But the better these models become, the better able they’ll be able to hide themselves, and the better able they’ll be to truly, deeply move people. And then what will we do?
Will Storr suggests that AI is creating essays on Substack. It is affecting people and generating income. As these models become more sophisticated, they will be more effective and harder to identify. If you’d like me to dig deeper into any specific articles or search for more recent examples, let me know!
The A.I. mind meld. On a similar theme, Nic Rowan discusses how large language models are shaping human communication:
The thing works like a boa constrictor: as more people use L.L.M.s and come to rely on them, the range of expression narrows, especially when the A.I. of the future is itself trained on A.I.-written texts. The future of language will be relentless, groundbreaking, and elevated.
Fukuyama’s laughter. David Polansky argues that, despite what we have heard, we do not live in an age of deep ideological upheaval:
The management of issues like foreign threats or public wealth is basically an unavoidable fact of organized social life. It’s just that doing so does not necessarily cash out in terms of a particular ideological commitment, even though we continue to assign ideological properties to them out of sheer habit.
The dreary reality is that we do not have grand causes; we have petty causes dressed up as something finer, and little that has happened in the past decade has changed that for all its excitement.
No-leisure Cruise. Matt Feeney reflects on the bizarre charisma of Tom Cruise:
The impressive self-creation and self-mythologising of Tom Cruise have woven his roles as actor, producer, stuntman, and celebrity into a single entity, so to speak, one consuming presence so looming and powerful it turns the usual actor-movie relationship inside out. When you drift into those distracted reflections as he does his unlikely stunts, it starts to feel less like Tom Cruise is an actor in the latest Mission: Impossible than that the latest Mission: Impossible is a prop in the epic saga of Tom Cruise, an elaborate demonstration that he can do anything, that he’s big enough to contain anything. Tom Cruise isn’t in Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning. Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning is in Tom Cruise.
Kindergarten radicalism. Pierre d’Alancaisez critiques the cultural establishment:
The UK’s cultural institutions are in shameful denial that the social contract under which they operated in the past decades is now irreparably broken. That contract had elite liberal cadres begrudgingly telling the populace how to think. Today, the hoi polloi have no problem asserting their views with their feet, or indeed, at the ballot box. The institutions don’t like it. Yet, as if it were 2016 (the year of the Brexit vote and Trump’s first election), museum staffers still insist that it’s the people who have erred. Not once in the past ten years did they consider that it is them who turned the institutions into a childish farce.
Down by the river. Becca Rothfeld considers nature and anthropocentrism:
Why, then, insist on calling it alive? On cramming it into a cramped human category? It is the very strangeness of rivers and mountains and other inanimate solidities that moves and compels us. We venerate them because they are so strikingly unlike us, because their mode of being is not remotely recognizable.
Have a lovely month,
Ben