TL/DR: I asked ChatGPT to design a chair based on a pile of scrap wood, and then I built the chair.

A while ago I wrote about how I wanted an AI for carpentry. Specifically, I didn’t want something which replaced me, or the interesting bits of work, but something more like a smart carpenter’s mate, to do some of the sums and make interesting suggestions, and leave me to do the fiddling and the sanding. A collaborator, not a god.

Here is the wood that was knocking around on my balcony, left over from a few things:

And here is the prompt I gave OpenAI’s ChatGPT 4:

I have a pile of scrap wood and I would like to make a chair. I have a saw, a drill, screws, and wood glue.

Please give me step by step instructions for making a chair from the following materials, using as little wood as possible.

4 pine panels:

• 18, 180, 490 mm
• 18, 255, 490 mm
• 18, 255, 490 mm
• 18, 255, 490 mm

1 plywood sheet:

• 4, 480, 850 mm

1 L-shaped laminated chipboard sheet:

• 15, 280, 410 mm missing 130, 135 mm cutout

1 20mm diameter dowel, 1900 mm long

1 pine or fir plank

• 20, 95, 1300 mm

5 wood beams

• 50, 50, 890 mm
• 50, 50, 900 mm
• 50, 50, 980 mm
• 50, 50, 980 mm
• 50, 50, 1030 mm

There was a bit more to it than that: I had some issues formatting the prompt in a way that didn’t crash the chat client, and we also went back and forth on a backrest. I also tried to push for a more interesting design, in the way I described in the original post, but this resulted in something I could not make (materially and physically) – and wasn’t very interesting either. You can read the whole transcript here.

So, this is what we settled on:

Materials Needed:

• Plywood Sheet: For the seat.
• Pine Panels: For the backrest.
• Wood Beams: For legs and support structure.
• Dowel: For additional bracing.
• Tools: Saw, drill, screws, and wood glue.

Cutting Plan:

1. Seat: Use the plywood sheet to cut a rectangular seat, 480 mm x 400 mm.
2. Backrest: Select one pine panel (255 mm x 490 mm) and trim if necessary to match the width of the seat for aesthetic continuity.
3. Legs/Support Structure:
   • Front Legs: Cut two pieces from the beams to the desired seat height (about 450 mm).
   • Rear Legs/Backrest Support: Use the longer beams (980 mm or 1030 mm) and cut them so they can serve both as rear legs and extend upward to support the backrest. The total length should support a standard seat height plus the backrest height, roughly 900-1000 mm depending on your desired backrest angle and height.
4. Seat Supports: Use leftover wood or the pine/fir plank to create support planks that run underneath the seat for added stability. Cut these to match the width of the seat (400 mm).

Assembly:

1. Prepare the Seat: Attach the support planks to the underside of the plywood seat using wood glue and screws for extra stability. Space them evenly to distribute weight.
2. Attach Legs:
   • Front Legs: Secure the front legs directly to the underside of the seat at its corners with screws and wood glue.
   • Rear Legs/Backrest Support: Align the rear legs so they support the seat and extend up to support the backrest. Attach them to the underside of the seat and the lower end of the backrest.
3. Install the Backrest: Attach the backrest to the extended rear legs using screws and glue. Ensure it's firmly in place and offers comfortable support.
4. Bracing with Dowel: For additional lateral stability, use the dowel to create cross-braces between the legs. Cut the dowel into pieces that fit between the legs under the seat and halfway up the rear legs/backrest supports.

Finishing Touches:

• Sand the chair thoroughly to smooth out any rough edges and corners.
• Apply a finish of your choice to protect the wood and enhance its appearance.

This approach makes efficient use of your materials while providing a sturdy, comfortable seat with a backrest. The extended rear legs contribute to a streamlined, elegant design, and the under-seat supports ensure durability and weight distribution.

Based on this description, I worked up a rough plan that made sense. I tried to be as literal as possible. I suspected that the dowel braces between the legs would be necessary, and they very much were:

The chair did not take very long to build – even on a narrow balcony, in the dark – and I didn’t try too hard to make it nice. My saw is not very good; I sanded things down a bit; I glued where necessary. I tried to interpret the instructions as literally as possible. I decided where the screws and glue should go (twelve screws). You can sit in the chair.

My first impression of the chair was that this is what you get when you ask someone who has read a lot about chairs, but has never sat in one, to design a chair, which is exactly what it is. To be fair, it did a pretty good job.

My main concern building it was that the plywood seat was much too thin. It still feels very thin when you sit in it: it creaks and gives. But it holds – so far – and it’s perhaps more comfortable than a thicker, more rigid seat would have been.

It is what I wanted in that regard: minimalist – in the sense of using the absolute minimum of material – and it pushes at the boundaries of what I would have done myself.

My go-to example of what I mean here is the Optometrist Algorithm, which I wrote about in New Dark Age. The Optometrist Algorithm was designed, by Google, to improve nuclear fusion experiments. It’s an algorithm which works alongside human researchers, as a collaborator, serving to push their exploration of a problem space just a little bit further, or in novel directions, than they would do alone.

I would not have designed this seat: I would have used another piece of thicker wood. And this would probably have been less efficient. This is all the wood I had left at the end (from the pieces which ChatGPT selected):

The one change I would make would be to cut that remaining bit of ply down and use it to laminate the seat, doubling its thickness. Maybe.

The chair also felt too big. Here’s a size comparison with an IKEA folding chair:

That’s still not terribly clear, but it’s much taller, and deeper, than most chairs I have (I doubted the dimensions so much I clarified, in the chat, which way round the seat should be). But, again, I’m not sure I disagree. I’m 6’0, and it feels the right size – it makes me feel like a lot of chairs are too small for me. Plus, again: efficiency. It used all the wood. It does look very big though. It looks a bit weird. A slightly uncanny chair.

I’m not including here the images that ChatGPT made to accompany the instructions; you can see them in the transcript, but they’re not very helpful, and don’t match the descriptions in a useful, technical way. They are still the same sort of thing though: generic images of chairs, rather than generic descriptions of chairs.

I’m still a bit disappointed that other prompts which asked the programme to go a bit crazier with its design didn’t pan out. Perhaps a chair isn’t the best thing for playing with here: humanity has converged on pretty much the best minimal chair design possible without AI’s help, it’s hard to improve on that. But it’s nice that after years of trying to peer inside the machine, I get to explore in more practical ways what comes out of it.

It should be noted that this chair is built on the stolen labour of everyone who’s ever put something on the internet (including many who passed centuries before the internet was invented). The energy use is not good. I didn’t make this with ChatGPT: I made it with a partial history of all previous chairs, and I held myself back from making it “better”. But it’s something to think with.

I learned to make chairs from Enzo Mari, Donald Judd, my grandpa, YouTube. What the machine is good at is numbers, efficiency, tolerances (maybe). What can we do with that which is more interesting than putting people out of work? Which is more, genuinely, generative? Which is more interesting than more computers? Which, ultimately, builds agency rather than contributing to our general disempowerment us? That, at least, is what I mean by collaboration. We learn together.

Edit 19/3/24: As a couple of people have pointed out, this feels like the opposite of generative AI. The machine can only use the tools and materials I have to hand: it’s restrictive, yet paradoxically more productive as a result. Something to think about.

An installation at Kunthaus Zurich on the theme of media history, education, and the technology of attention.

Some time ago, I was commissioned to write an essay about children’s media and the capture of attention by the Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy at McGill University. You can read that essay in full, but here’s an excerpt, which concerns the research done by the Children’s Television Workshop (CTW) in the 1960s, which led into the development of Sesame Street:

One of the workshop's key innovations was a device Palmer termed "the distractor". Initially on visits to "poor children in day-care centres" and later in specially designed observation laboratories, Palmer and his colleagues would set up a television showing Sesame Street episodes, and next to it they would set up a slide projector, which would show a new colour image every seven and a half seconds. "We had the most varied set of slides we could imagine," said Palmer. "We would have a body riding down the street with his arms out, a picture of a tall building, a leaf floating through ripples of water, a rainbow, a picture taken through a microscope, an Escher drawing. Anything to be novel, that was the idea." Observers would sit at the side of the room and watch a group of children as the episodes played, noting what held their attention and what didn't every six and a half seconds for up to an hour at a time.

Individual characters, short skits, and even whole episodes lived or died by the distractor. By the time they got to broadcast, the show's attention rating averaged around 85 to 90 percent, and some reached 100 percent, as the crew learned to trust the distractor and absorbed its lessons. For Palmer, the distractor enabled the team to hone Sesame Street into a finely tuned educational instrument: "After the third or fourth season, I'd say it was rare that we ever had a segment below eighty five percent. We would almost never see something in the fifty to sixty percent range, and if we did, we'd fix it. You know Darwin's terms about the survival of the fittest? We had a mechanism to identify the fittest and decide what should survive."

I’ve been fascinated by the Distractor ever since I first read about it. It seemed to embody so many things I was fascinated by, from visual attention, to the use of technology to capture and hold attention, to the origins of children’s screen-based media and what’s happened to it, and even randomness.

I find the device particularly mesmerising because I don’t know how I feel about it. The research performed by CTW in the 1960s and 70s laid the groundwork for screen-based educational programming worldwide, and Sesame Street made a positive difference to the lives of millions of children, especially for many from disadvantaged backgrounds. At the same time, it marks a moment in which technological solutions were chosen over social ones, and education was outsourced to screens and corporations. Today, techniques developed by educationalists in the 1960s are deployed in automated systems, such as mobile apps and social media, and make possible the global 'attention economy', under which human attention is treated as a resource to be captured and exploited.

This fascination has caused me to spend a not inconsiderable amount of time tracking down references, descriptions, and actual data on the Distractor, its use and results, from the Children’s Television Workshop archives in the Mass Media & Culture collection at the University of Maryland (thanks to Michael Henry, Laura Schnitker, and James Baxter at UoM for their invaluable and generous assistance). Initially, I was just interested in reconstructing the contents of the slideshow, but when I was offered a commission by Kunsthaus Zurich last year to develop a new work for their digital programme, I decided to restage the mechanism in its entirety.

The above is the only photographic image I’ve found of the Distractor in operation, and I’m not sure it’s representative of most set-ups, although it’s certainly evocative, with the white researchers staring down at a black child, fingers poised on their electronic devices, while Kermit appears on one screen, and some kind of modernist architecture pops up on the other. The CTW archives contain a number of reports on the Distractor, including one entitled “The Sesame Street Distractor Method for Measuring Visual Attention”, published by Leona Schauble of Sesame Street Research in July 1976, and containing the following diagram:

For the Kunsthaus Zurich installation – which opened in May and is on view until Spring 2024 – I used this layout, sourcing period furniture and television equipment from Swiss second-hand sites (the installation does include a contemporary Parker Jotter – although only an expert would spot the differences between it and the model first introduced in 1954). The television shows the first ever broadcast episode of Sesame Street, from 1969, while the carousel slideshow, set to advance every seven seconds, contains ninety or so randomly-selected images from collections of vintage slides purchased on ebay and elsewhere.

Some of the most fascinating artefacts in the CTW archives were the original “Distractographs”: hand-drawn analyses of the results of the Distractor sessions, where researchers would plot the childrens’ attention over time, as they watched episodes of Sesame Street and other shows, while the Distractor attempted to do its work. For the installation, I reproduced half a dozen of these by hand to hang on the walls of the gallery:

(The wall colours, by the way, were chosen based on Pantone’s Sesame Street colour range.)

Finally, to accompany the installation, an online work continues the work of the Distractor into the present day. This work can be found at distractor.jamesbridle.com – visiting this page will present you with a random work from the Kunsthaus’ collection, together with information about its title, creator, and provenance. You can set this webpage to be the default new window or tab page in your browser settings, in order to constantly distract yourself with art (it’s quite nice, I promise).

Huge thanks to curator Mirjam Varadinis and to everyone at the Kunsthaus for their support in making this work happen. Particular thanks to Tony Kranz for his excellent and patient technical assistance throughout.

More information about the programme is available at digilab.kunsthaus.ch.

This is a lecture given at the Festivaletteratura, Mantova, Italy, in September 2013, about legal personhood, non-indigenous species, terraforming, colonialism, floods, and more-than-human relations. It was given without notes and the transcript below has only been loosely edited for clarity, so please forgive mis-speakings, typos, confusions, and lack of references.

*

Hello. Thank you for that introduction, thank you very much for having me; it’s a real pleasure to be here. I’m here representing my most recent book which is called Ways of Being in English and Modi di Essere in Italian and it’s a book about realizing that we are surrounded by all forms of intelligence that manifest not just in humans but in animals, plants, microorganisms of all kinds; perhaps also in in natural systems, in ecologies, in the very fabric of the world around us. Essentially, intelligence is not something that only happens inside human heads – it’s a thing that doesn’t just happen inside heads at all – but it happens when bodies meet, when we meet the world, and it’s a process by which we can come to know the world better.

There’s a lot of stories about that in my book – I talked about some of them on Friday evening if some of you were there. I wasn’t sure what I was going to talk about this afternoon but I thought I’d tell a couple of stories – some of which are in the book some of which aren’t – and also to try and bring them together with some more recent thinking that I hope is interesting… so I’m going to do that.

This is the Whanganui river in the North Island of Aotearoa, or New Zealand. It’s a huge river, it’s about 300 kilometers long, it drains a watershed of some 7,000 square kilometers, and if you’ve heard of it at all it’s probably, as I did, because in 2017 it was granted legal personhood: the river became a person under the law.

What does this mean? It means that historically when we have tried to relate to the environment through legal structures and by extension through social and political structures we’ve treated the environment as being a series of objects; a series of objects largely on which humans act: mine; extract; in the case of the river: divert; draw water; pollute and so on and so forth and so the only way to address the damage that might be happening to the river is essentially to to find the people who are doing it and find ways of changing them and punishing them because the river itself is just a thing: it doesn’t have any legal standing.

There’s this growing movement in in ecological law around the world to give non-human beings of all kinds – animals, plants, whole ecosystems like the river – their own kind of legal standing so that instead of saying it’s our responsibility to protect the river we say the river has its own rights. The river has its own right to life, to flowing, to be clean, to be healthy, to support all the communities, human and non-human, which live alongside it. And this attempt to give some kind of real meaningful recognition to non-humans plays out in different ways depending on the legal systems, the local traditions. There’s a big movement in the US for example to give zoo animals legal personhood and to say they have the right not to be imprisoned. We could go further and say animals have the right not to be kept on farms, not to be killed for food, these kind of questions. Legal personhood would reshape our relationship to non-humans in really important ways.

I often think that those are also kind of insufficient because we know that the law always lags behind what we need from our relations. It’s taken us thousands of years to get to where we are now which barely includes most humans; many, many humans are still excluded from our systems of law in various ways and the law has always been late coming to that and I don’t think legal personhood is some magic way that will solve that problem. But I think it’s interesting and it’s particularly interesting in the case of the Whanganui river because this wasn’t just a case of an existing legal system expanding to sort of grudgingly include the river but it was a result of centuries of protest by the Maori peoples who lived alongside the river and who have always considered the river to be a person. So under the Maori cosmology the river was also – has always been – a being that they have lived alongside and have had reciprocal relations with and have had a responsibility towards, and after a couple of hundred years of campaigning what happened was some of those Maori principles became incorporated into the colonial law of New Zealand to shift the kind of ways in which the river was thought about.

So while again imperfect in all kinds of ways, one of the main things is that the river now has representation within human communities, both in the law but also in the form of a couple of Maori Elders who speak for the river to bring another perspective on what is good for the river and how we could live with it better. There’s a beautiful line in some writing that I was reading about the river from one of the activists involved in the campaign to give the river personhood, where they said that what’s happening when you make this change in law but you also set up the culture that makes that law possible through the appointment of these kind of Guardians, the people who might speak for the river, is that you move from a position of saying “what do we want for the river?” to a position of “what does “the river want and how do we get there together?”

So this change that gives the river this idea of personhood is a shift in thinking to a position where we acknowledge that the river has its own needs and desires and that those matter – and of course that they matter to us as well; that by being in this kind of reciprocal arrangement we might actually change our relationship to the Earth in in far more broad ways.

A smaller example of something similar is happening on the River Aller in Somerset in England, where I come from, where a stretch of the river several miles long has been – one of the terms for this is rewilding – essentially the people who manage the area have said that they’re not going to decide what happens to the river anymore, they’re not going to bridge it, they’re not going to embank it, they’re not going to stop it flowing in any particular way; in fact they’ve cut channels into the side so that it changes its flow or it starts to change its flow and then they are going to let it do whatever it wants: they’re going to let the river flow wherever it wants.

This river for probably thousands of years has been shaped by human activity. People have moved it because they want to grow crops or grow trees, they’ve poisoned it in all kinds of ways, but this decision has been made to say we’re going to let we’re going to leave it alone and find out what the river wants. And even though this has only been going on for for five years or so the results are also already kind of amazing: the river has started to create new wetlands, it has started to stay longer in the soil so it doesn’t dry out in summer, so you have much more verdant fields, more things growing, it floods a little but less and in a way that is far far less destructive to the ecosystem around it and it’s home to vast amounts more life. The biodiversity increase is incredible. If you go there and walk around it, as you approach it, the sound of life gets stronger you can hear creatures buzzing and as you walk grasshoppers flow around your feet and the difference between that and the kind of agricultural land that surrounds it is huge, and the river is becoming healthier and in turn that affects the kind of human activity around it as well. Organic farming increases and other kinds of things because they have to in order to protect the river and respect its rights in this way. So changing the river is also a change in ourselves.

This is a friend of mine who I meet regularly, and who’s interesting to me. This is a lionfish – has anyone seen a lionfish before or know what they are? They’re very interesting, very beautiful, very strange creatures. I live on an island called Aegina which is near Athens in the Saronic Gulf in Greece, at the top of the Aegean coming off the Mediterranean, and I go diving and I meet these guys quite regularly – but I shouldn’t because they’re not from here, they’re very new to the place. Lionfish are indigenous to the Indian Ocean and for 10 million years that’s where they lived, that’s where they evolved, that’s where they changed, but for the last 20 or so years they’ve been spreading through the Mediterranean, and that’s the result of a few things.

Well, really, essentially, two things. They are what’s called Lessepsian migrants: Ferdinand Lesseps was the name of the French engineer who built the Suez Canal. When the Suez Canal was constructed humans basically cut through several millennia of geological separation between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean and over the last hundred years or so hundreds of different species have been making their way up through this new passage into the Mediterranean. And the other reason that they’re doing that of course is climate change. The Mediterranean is getting warmer and so it’s becoming more hospitable to all of these various species.

The lionfish were first spotted in the Mediterranean about 20 years ago in a very small population, but they’ve been spreading slowly and surely. They’ve now been found as far west as Sicily and they only actually made it up into the Aegean Sea five years ago, they were first spotted off my island three years ago, but now if you go diving you’ll see half a dozen of them on a particular dive. This human activity is completely reshaping the Mediterranean and these creatures have arrived and they are spoken of in in the terminology you’ve probably heard of: of invasive species, this terminology that implies that these creatures are alien, that they don’t belong here, that this is not the place for them and we should be doing all we can to eradicate and destroy them.

Now that’s a language that’s familiar for most of our relationships, again not just to the natural world but also to other humans. We see that there’s some kind of stable state and we we don’t like the change and we don’t like the others who are coming in. Much of the discussions in biology around non-indigenous species tries take pains not to use human terminology for these creatures and I think that’s bad, as I might say a bit more about later, but even so I have a real problem with that narrative just from the perspective that I see them and I meet them on a regular basis and I am also new to this place. They arrived on this island the same time that I did, three years ago. Who am I to tell this creature that it doesn’t belong here, not least down to the fact that I am deeply responsible for it being there.

The lionfish are in the Mediterranean and around my Island because of a history of colonialism and imperialism, through the building of the Suez Canal, that I am, particularly as a British person, deeply involved in and also because of the current human activities of climate change. There’s a line that I always come back to from the British Sri Lankan writer Ambalavaner Sivanandan who wrote of colonial relationships in Britain from the perspective of non-indigenous peoples: “we are here because you were there.” These migrants are coming here because we went elsewhere and changed the world in ways that they are responding to and that’s the same for these of these creatures. We have to work out other ways of living alongside this change that is occurring, that doesn’t repeat those same mechanisms of treating the other essentially as something unwelcome and to be destroyed.

Of course you have a local variant of that here in Mantova: the lotus flowers that are growing in the lake, which are fascinating and beautiful like the lionfish, and also of course quite recent arrivals. I heard the beautiful story last night on a boat on the lake that the arrival of the lotus flower was in part the result of a love affair; that the botanist who first introduced them to the lake did so as part of their relationship with the person who was responsible for the water quality of the lake itself – that it was an act of love and beauty to introduce these things that are still seen as beautiful but also now regarded as some kind of pest.

It’s quite extraordinary – to me at least, coming to that ecosystem fresh – the extent to which it’s an entirely artificially created space. Not only have the lotus flowers only been there for a hundred years, the fish that swim under them were introduced by German sport fishermen, apparently the Ibises that fly and wade amongst them and wade are escaped zoo animals – good for them! – so this entire landscape is as far from any historical idea of somewhere natural as we could possibly imagine. And yet we still think that we can manage it in this way, that we can control the landscape in this way, in ways that will only ultimately result in more confusions like this occurring.

And it strikes me particularly what a long, ongoing process this is because of course it’s not just the introduction of the lotuses into the lake. The lakes themselves are entirely artificial creations, created back in I think the 11th, 12th, 13th centuries for the defense of Mantova. The draining of the swamp was an act of geoengineering, of transforming the landscape that is just as transformative as present climate change in terms of the biodiversity that it destroyed, the way that it reshaped the landscape [and human livelihoods]. We’ve been doing this for some time.

It reminds me particularly of another landscape from England, again from where I’m from originally from, the east of England, an area known as the Fens. For again most of history, or the most of history in which Britain was an island which is actually not even that long, the east of England was very wet and boggy and marshy and this was this area known as the Fens, which was underwater a lot of the time much like the area around here would have been a thousand years ago. In fact these processes happen at the same time and for the same reasons: politics and defense and controlling the landscape.

So between the 1100s to about the 1600s this landscape, the Fens, which was thousands and thousands of square kilometers of marsh, of bog, of these kind of wetlands that were incredibly productive in and of themselves, areas not just of biodiversity but of huge ranges of human habitat, of different kinds of ways of living, they were were drained. The water was put into canals and rivers and lakes like it was here and those landscapes were transformed. And that was done for a couple of reasons: it was done in part for agricultural reasons, that even though the these marshes were incredibly bountiful and the people who lived in them harvested all kinds of fruits and grains from them that grew there naturally, they farmed them, they grazed animals seasonally, they used the rushes to make baskets and housing – again just like was done here – the modern monocultures of wheat agriculture and so forth were instituted instead because the land was enclosed by landlords who could make more money out of it and selling it that way.

And that is destroying the land. The land around here is becoming exhausted, the use of fertilizers and so forth is destroying the soil, the crops won’t actually go on much longer. But it was also done for political reasons: it was done because the people who lived there were rebellious and they didn’t like being ruled by the king and they frequently retaliated against the tax collectors who came in and so on and so forth. And so the pacification of the landscape, the way this landscape was destroyed, was also a pacification of the people. It was a way of bringing those people under control, turning them from free people into serfs, peasants who lived under landlords and owed all their labour to them. It was one of the earliest transformations of Capitalism, which has not been around forever but has been a deliberate process of turning people from people who lived in reciprocal relationships with the land in which they found themselves into producers of capital for the for the upper classes who took over and transformed those landscapes.

What’s particularly fundamental for me about that story – as well, again, as a British person – is that’s how we learned to do colonialism. We developed the techniques of colonialism internally within Britain: the peoples of the east of England, as well as the peoples of Scotland and Wales and most of the rest of the islands were the first people to be colonized by the British – which is not quite the same as all the people who live there – and they practiced it there not just through this transformation of landscape but also through things like collective punishment, of destroying whole villages because they would try and stop the waterworks and so on and so forth. So these changes in landscape have always been tightly tightly tied to political processes, and there is no transforming once again our relationship to landscape and our understanding of landscape and our living and our health within landscapes without political processes as well.

What we do to the Earth we do to one another. The climate catastrophe is pretty much first and foremost a kind of colonial, Imperial catastrophe that builds on what we’ve been doing to the Earth for centuries long before just fossil fuels and so on and so forth and that’s what I meant when I said that it’s vitally necessary to rethink how we think about something as particular as invasive species – or non-indigenous species I should keep calling them and try to remind myself to do so – because for a long time I was very like scientists who work on this, I was quite nervous of making this explicit connection between non-human and human migrants because it’s all too easy to dehumanize people already and if you start to say “well, you know, the lionfish or the lotus flower they belong to the same category of things” it might increase that dehumanization. But I think that’s just a symptom of having it the wrong way around: we are capable of treating the Earth in this way because we are capable of treating each other this way. Racism is the first thing that then goes on to produce speciesism which ultimately produces our sense of human superiority that allows us to treat the Earth as a kind of resource to be extracted, as a thing to be to be used for our own benefit, not to be considered a person, a thing with its own life that in turn produces among other things the climate and biodiversity crisis of the present moment. These things are all deeply, deeply connected.

This has been brought home to me in violent form; it keeps being brought home to me in violent forms in various ways. After a summer of wildfires in which my island luckily escaped fire, but was repeatedly engulfed in smoke and ash – we had days in which it hurt to breathe outside, friends have lost their houses – last week my house, my garden were under about a meter and a half of water. You might have heard of the floods that have been occurring in northern Greece, which are horrific. They weren’t as bad on our island but this was the result of the same storm that sent down a meter and a half of rain over a few days, that washed out quite large areas of the island. I don’t know if anyone here has experienced flooding and if you haven’t I really hope you don’t.

I had never experienced anything like this and it was deeply frightening, on a deep, physical, bodily level, to feel as if the Earth itself was trying to hurt us. It was hard not to personify in such a strong way when the roads and streams and the hillsides next to your house which all summer have been dry turn within minutes into rivers. The question of “what does the river want?” becomes quite powerful, becomes quite serious, because in that moment the water wants to get to the sea and it quite obviously doesn’t really care about anything that stands in its way. It felt like a very violent and direct reassertion of the willfulness, of the personhood, of the beinghood of the Earth, but not one with which I or anyone else was in very good relationship with. We were not having a good relationship in this moment.

And yet in some way, on another level, even while this was occurring – and this is the feeling that I tried to hold on to – on another level I was entirely not separate from it, or this was an emphasis on the complete inability of ourselves to separate ourselves from it. While feeling this fear, this physical, animal terror at the actions of the weather, I both felt it as a being – I managed to hold on to that feeling – this is not chance, this is a process, this is a system of things that are happening, this is an event that is part of a climatic system, that is part of a global system that includes us and our actions and the lives and livinghoods of everything else that lives there. And it’s a system of which I am fundamentally a part; that I am utterly Inseparable from, that we are all inseparable from.

We are the weather. We are the river. We are the Earth, that is part of this process that is happening. And I don’t yet know entirely what that means for us. I know that feeling and that understanding is fundamentally important. I know that continuing to ask the question of “what does the river want?” will remind us that the other beings that we share the world with have their own needs, desires, hopes, fears, and by listening to them and working with them we will in turn shift our own relationship towards them, that will in turn, in time, and not without some quite terrible things happening in the future, shift the whole system of the earth towards some kind of better place. But at the moment that system is in huge turmoil. It’s trying to shift in all of these frightening ways into a kind of new relation but we are part of that system. We are the weather, we are the water, and we are the world, and we need to shift ourselves along with it and change our place within it if we hope to make any kind of better relation in the future.

I went off to the mountain alone for a few days this week, which is a longer and more interesting story than this one. And because I didn’t want the internet with me, I picked up one of these.

It’s a Nokia 105 (4th ed). 4G, Dual SIM. Calls, SMS, Alarm, Snake. No data, no photos. Battery lasts about a month.

I bought it from a big shop in Athens where I also bought a Moleskine notebook. Both items cost 22 Euros. Something is obviously wrong about both ends of that but here we are.

I don’t know why I still find this interesting, but I fell in love with it a little. Partly because it’s so small and feels so reliable – robust, but also trustworthy. You press a button, it goes ding, NOKIA appears, you can almost feel it groping around for a signal and then tying on fast. Get SMS; send SMS; turn it off again. Unlike a smartphone, it feels like an actual connection, rather than a constant assault from the outside.

The other thing that I liked was that I felt like I could build it. I don’t mean full toaster, but I’ve used all these basic components before: some kind of board, power, some kind of display, connect to a SIM card etc. (In particular, the State of Sin robots are basically mobile phones: Arduino boards connected to a sensor (including a microphone…), a display, and a GSM shield with a Hologram IoT SIM.)

I think it’s this: the level of technology I am most comfortable with (and I mean actively happy not just oblivious to) is that which I materially understand to the point of being able to build a basic, toy version of.

I’ve used the metaphor of plumbing here before. I probably shouldn’t plumb a whole house (although I am about to try) and certainly should not design a whole city sewerage system. However, I have a pretty robust mental model of what’s going on, which means I don’t have to worry about it – and, crucially, I can tell when something is not right.

Corollary: If I can’t make that little toy version work, even in my head, I think there’s an inherent level of distrust and uncertainty there, which I’m pushing down and ignoring to get on with my day. I suspect most of us are doing this most of the time, and it’s not healthy. That feeling should be reserved for actual magic.

Something something minimum viable model, knack, agency. Working on this.

–

P.S. Compare/contrast the above image and thoughts with e.g. this post. Trying not to go backwards / trying to go somewhere more interesting, again.

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Last month, Navine and I opened SUPER KIOSK, pictured above, at the Thessaloniki Biennial:

SUPER KIOSK is a standalone structure made from 100% reclaimed wood, featuring rainwater collection and solar purification, solar-powered tea-making with a selection of endemic Greek mountain teas, and hand-made ceramics. SUPER KIOSK was a collaboration between James Bridle and Navine G. Dossos (representing Vessel), and students from the Architecture school at the university of Thessaloniki. It was inspired by the work of Walter Segal, Dimitris Pikionis, and the history of DIY, self-build, and regenerative construction. The installation is set within the historic courtyard of the Islehane museum, which, through its history as an orphanage and technical school during the last years of the Ottoman Empire, links back to the Kapodistrian Orphanage in Aegina as well as Vessel’s vision of an engaged, collective future.

SUPER KIOSK is on show at the wonderful Islehane museum in Thessaloniki until the end of May, and you can find out more on my website, and through the Biennial. More photos here.

*

To mark five years since the original publication, Verso Books have released a new edition of NEW DARK AGE, my book about the culture of network technology and the nature of knowledge in the digital age. It has a natty new green jacket:

To mark the reissue, I’ve written a new afterword, which examines some of the things that have and haven’t changed about technology in the last half-decade. You can read an excerpt from this afterword, looking at the current cycle of Artificial Intelligence hype, published in The Guardian this week:

The lesson of the current wave of "artificial" "intelligence", I feel, is that intelligence is a poor thing when it is imagined by corporations. If your view of the world is one in which profit maximisation is the king of virtues, and all things shall be held to the standard of shareholder value, then of course your artistic, imaginative, aesthetic and emotional expressions will be woefully impoverished. We deserve better from the tools we use, the media we consume and the communities we live within, and we will only get what we deserve when we are capable of participating in them fully. And don't be intimidated by them either - they're really not that complicated. As the science-fiction legend Ursula K Le Guin wrote: "Technology is what we can learn to do." […]

*

WAYS OF BEING is currently appearing in a number of languages and some magnificent new jackets, including the Italian and Brazilian editions below. Dutch, German, French, Hungarian, Japanese, Korean, Turkish and other translations are either out now or on their way. And you can now pre-order the English paperback in US and UK editions, if you somehow haven’t got a copy yet…

It’s been a pleasure talking about the book in various places. You can listen to or read my interview with Emergence Magazine online here:

We think so much like computers today because they've defined what is thinkable. And so for me, rethinking the computer rethinks what is computable, and therefore rethinks what is thinkable at all about the world.

My conversation with Krista Tippet for her On Being podcast (together with transcript) can be found here:

Everything is equally evolved. Everything has been on this planet for as long as everything else. Everything has been in this universe for as long as everything else. Nothing is more evolved than anything else. Everything has been evolving for the same length of time. Everything has been becoming for the same length of time. […] And that immediately destroys any idea of hierarchy or division for me that might shape or inform that splitting and clumping that's been the last century of scientific legacy and that we are finally getting rid of.

And I talked to one of my favourite writers, Claire Evans, for Grown by Ginkgo magazine:

I don't think there is such a thing as an artificial intelligence. There are multiple intelligences, many ways of doing intelligence. What I envisage to be more useful and interesting than artificial intelligence as we currently conceive of it—which is this incredibly reduced version of human intelligence— is something more distributed, more widely empowered, and more diverse than singular intelligence would allow for. It's actually a conversation between multiple intelligences, focused on some narrow goals.

*

I have a few exhibitions coming up and in progress. I am participating in Face to Face, an exhibition about identity and identification at the National Museum, Wroc?aw, and Perfect Behaviors, an exhibition about the quantification of everyday life, at OGR Torino. I’m particularly pleased that Windmill 003 (for Walter Segal was selected for Renaissance 3.0, Peter Weibel’s final exhibition at ZKM, which explores the use by artists of the tools, methods and programs of science.

You could say ASIP has brought me closer to 'my people' over the years—those with a deep, almost obsessive appreciation for all things ambient and electronic. The ones who love this music, who show up at the same gigs, who get so inspired by the sounds and stories that they start paving their own.

Based in Rotterdam, Rosillon is one of those people. Co-founder of the electronic music platform Embodiment, he's been a long-time listener and supporter of ASIP. At his core, he's just another music obsessive, choosing to share his passion through mixes and curated events—the kind of person who keeps music culture moving forward, regardless of genre or scale. Last November Rosillon had the pleasure to play for the first edition of ZERØBPM, a 18 hour non-stop ambient/meditation experience in a church in the Netherlands. And his previous mixes have cropped up for the brilliant Deep Breakfast series, as well as the Korean collective, Vurt.

I don't typically accept submissions for the isolatedmix series, but his vinyl-only mix landed in a way that many don't. And when he shared the story behind it, it perfectly captured how music like this isn't just heard—it's experienced, absorbed, and ultimately, passed on. Listening back and reading his inspiration, it reminded me of the exact mindset I experienced when picking a name for this endeavor, A Strangely Isolated Place.

Places of inspiration for Rosillon's mix

~

" Last summer, during my travels through Bulgaria, I found myself deeply inspired by the landscapes, and the sense of remoteness that each place evoked. As soon as I returned home, I aimed to translate these experiences into sound.

This mix is the result of that, a sonic exploration of isolation, both physical and emotional. The concept behind this set revolves around the idea of 'isolated places', not just in the geographical sense, but also within the mind. These are the places that trigger emotions, memories, and introspection. Places shaped by sound aesthetics that speak directly to the imagination. With this in mind, I carefully selected tracks that embody these feelings, crafting a mix that serves as both an escape and a reflection.

The mix unfolds as a metaphor for the experiences we gather during our journeys. It begins at an airport, a symbolic starting point that sends the listener on their way. From there, the music takes you through a collage of progressively more obscure destinations, each transition serving as a portal to another isolated place.

Places of inspiration for Rosillon's mix

Some transitions are smooth and fluid, while others are abrupt and disorienting, mirroring the unpredictability of travel itself. As the mix progresses, it immerses the listener in various emotional landscapes, reflecting the highs and lows that come with discovering unfamiliar territory.

Near the end, a vocal announcement signals that the gate is closing, marking the inevitable conclusion of the journey. The bittersweet nostalgia of leaving behind an enriching experience is captured in a track featuring glitching sounds layered over a field recording of an airport.

However, just as in real life, the end of a trip brings with it a renewed appreciation for the lessons learned and the memories made. In the closing section of the mix I wanted to embrace this sentiment, offering a positive and empowering conclusion.

It reminds us that every journey, whether to distant lands or within ourselves, leaves a lasting impact, shaping our perspective in ways we may not fully grasp until we return home. I hope this mix transports you to your own isolated places, allowing you to lose yourself in the journey and find meaning in the sounds along the way."

- Rosillon

Listen on Soundcloud the ASIP Podcast or the 9128.live iOS and Android app

Download MP3

Tracklist (vinyl only)
01. The Black Dog - M1 [Dust Science Recordings]
02. Rod Modell - Ghost Lights B-side [Astral Industries]
03. Inhmost - In The Bay [re:st]
04. 3.11 - Dissolve in Patience [PRS]
05. Box5ive - Rough Sleeper [co:clear]
06. 3.11 - Hard Copy [PRS]
07. Alva Noto - Confidential Information 1 [Noton]
08. Off The Sky - Ahurani [re:discovery records]
09. Xenia Reaper - 23724 [INDEX:Records]
10. William Selman - Farther Off Among The Foaming Black Rocks [Mysteries Of The Deep]
11. Pontiac Streator & Mister Water Wet - Angelus Spit [Motion Ward]
12. TIBSLC - Hypertranslucent [Sferic]
13. Quiet Places - Side B [A Strangely Isolated Place]
14. The Black Dog - Lounge [Dust Science Recordings]
15. Alva Noto - HYbr:ID Ectopia Field 1 [Noton]

~

Rosillon Soundcloud | Instagram
Embodiment Soundcloud | Instagram

Satellite images of a horse, pomegranates, and a camel, created from Solar Panel installations in China and Mongolia.

Via @russss@chaos.social.

The Horse image was created in association with Huawei, in a project that also includes agrivoltaics (growing crops between and underneath solar panels):

In the Kubuqi Desert of Inner Mongolia, the State Power Investment Corporation used Huawei’s smart PV solution to build a 300 MW solar power station. The power station located in Dalad Banner, an administrative region in Inner Mongolia, boasts 196,000 solar panels that were installed in the pattern of a galloping horse. By the end of 2022, the power station had produced 2.566 billion kWh of green electricity, equivalent to saving 1.027 million tons of coal equivalent and reducing CO2 by 2.56 million tons. The project has also fixed more than 1,000 hectares of sand.

The solar panels do far more than just generate electricity. Local residents have been able to plant herbs and shrubs under the panels and cash crops like desert false indigo and Mongolian milk vetch between the arrays. This prevents further erosion of the land between the panel arrays and contributes to wind and sand fixation and ecosystem restoration. This power station serves as a perfect example of how PV can support desertification control, and plans to replicate this success are being made in other desert lands of western China.

Alxa Right Banner, in Mongolia, the location of the Camel design, is a thriving camel business region. Hotan, in Xinjiang, China, is likewise a prominent pomegranate cultivation area.

Words + Photos ANDREW PARKS

If there was ever any doubt as to the staying power of Green Day, it was obliterated before the punk band even hit the stage at Target Field in downtown Minneapolis on Saturday night. Aside from the obvious — a stadium that felt much fuller than it had for a fierce Smashing Pumpkins set — there was no denying the sudden energy spike as Queen and The Ramones had their biggest hits (“Bohemian Rhapsody” and “Blitzkrieg Bop”) blasted the way they would be at a proper baseball game. 

By splitting the difference between pogo-oriented punk and operatic rock, Green Day wasn’t just ensuring a grand entrance. They also seemed to be tipping their dye jobs toward the two divergent forces (grand ambition and true grit) that informed their biggest albums: 1994’s diamond-tipped Dookie and 2004’s Broadway-bound American Idiot LP. 

You read those years right; much like Woodstock’s mud-caked pivot towards the mainstream (arguably Green Day’s breakthrough moment), Dookie recently turned 30. And American Idiot, well, it’s old enough to drink in every country but ours. They’ve both aged as well as the band, too — as likely to drive nearly 40,000 people wild as they’ve ever been.

Maybe even more so considering their original fanbase is in full-on nostalgia mode, and the group can now afford to punctuate their many overlapping hooks and melodies with dynamic light displays, towering backdrops, and fire-spewing speaker cabinets. All while barely taking a breather despite having played both albums in full, along with a handful of other hits (“Know Your Enemy,” “Brain Stew,” the song that said goodbye to Seinfeld). 

As for where American Idiot‘s political bent falls in a far more contentious year than the one that gave George W Bush another go, frontman Billie Joe Armstrong had this to say: “We need unity! And this is fucking unity tonight!”

Then, after quickly squashing any Democrat vs. Republican discussions, he added, “This isn’t even a party tonight…. It’s a celebration! I want you to scream out for joy; are you ready?” 

They were all night, to be honest. Thanks to absurdly tight performances by The Linda Lindas, Rancid, and the Pumpkins — a band long criticized for bloat, cramming 13 crackly originals and one cacophonous U2 cover into a one hell of a power hour — a concert that started at the ungodly hour of 5:30 and ended close to 11 never felt that way. 

More like a reminder of what made the MTV era and shows like 120 Minutes so vital in the days before digital music. Or as Rancid guitarist/vocalist Lars Frederiksen said before launching into a lovely rendition of “Ruby Soho,” “Thanks for the last 33 years…. If there’s none of you, there’s no us.” 

I have long held that efforts to tamper with Section 230  from the Communications Decency Act of 1996 are dangerously misguided. It is this section that immunizes online service providers from liability for third-party content that they carry. I have also argued that attempts to mandate “age verification” for social media will spectacularly backfire in ominous ways for social media users in general, and will not actually protect children — and I continue to believe that age verification systems cannot achieve their stated goals and will cause dramatic collateral damage.

One of my key concerns in both of these cases is that they would over time cause major social media platforms to drastically curtail the third-party content that they host, eliminating as much as possible that would be considered in any way controversial, in an effort to avoid liability.

I still believe that this is true, that this would be the likely outcome of Section 230 being altered in any significant ways and/or widespread implementation of the sorts of age verification systems under discussion.

But I’m now wondering if this would necessarily be such a bad outcome, because the large social media platforms appear to have increasingly eliminated all pretense of social responsibility, making it likely that the damage they have done over the years through the spreading of misinformation, disinformation, racism, and all manner of other evils will only be exacerbated — become much, much worse — going forward.

Seeing billionaire Mark Zuckerberg today proclaiming nonchalantly that he’s making changes to Meta platforms (Facebook, Instagram, etc.) that will inevitably increase the level of harmful content — he essentially said that explicitly — is I believe a “jumping the shark” moment for all major social media.

I feel it is time to have a serious discussion regarding potential changes to Section 230 as it applies to large social media platforms, with an aim toward forcing them to take responsibility for the damage the content on their platforms causes to society, whether it is third-party content or their own.

I would also add — though this extends beyond the formal scope of Section 230 and social media — that firms who have deployed Generative AI systems (chatbots, AI Overviews, etc.) should be held responsible for damage done by misinformation and errors in the content that those systems generate and provide to users.

It is obvious that the major social media platforms are at best now providing only lip service to the concept of social responsibility, or are effectively abandoning it entirely, for their own political and financial expediency — and the situation is getting rapidly worse.

We must make it clear to these firms that they serve us, not the other way around. Changes to Section 230 as it applies to the large social media platforms may be the most practical method to convince the usually billionaire CEOs of these firms that our willingness to be victimized has come to an end.

–Lauren–

I just had a good laugh. Someone asked me this morning how they could reach the “Google Ombudsman” for help with an account lockout issue. And I laughed not because their situation was funny, but because of the sad fact that I’ve been pushing for Google to establish an Ombudsman (or these days, often called Ombudsperson) role, for … well … decades. I’ve pushed from the outside. When I had the opportunity, I’ve pushed from the inside. Obviously, I never had any luck with this.

But I did get curious again today. For years, my essays on this topic ranked very high on Google Search. What about now?

Another laugh! I searched for:

google ombudsman

and a blog post of mine on this topic from 2009 is still on the first page of search results — 16 years later!

This was actually superseded by my more recent posts about this, such as 2017’s “Brief Thoughts on a Google Ombudsman and User Trust”:

https://lauren.vortex.com/2017/06/12/brief-thoughts-on-a-google-ombudsman-and-user-trust

But the story is still exactly the same as it was originally — Google has never been willing to budge on this issue, even as the need for such a role (or roles) has dramatically increased over the years, not just for issues related to account lockouts and other traditional Google user problems that cry out for valid escalation paths, but of course now related to the rapidly rising range of AI-related controversies.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Very sad.

–Lauren–

I’ll use very simple words for these government officials: You ban Chinese drones, you’re putting U.S. lives at risk.

Congress with bipartisan support very recently passed what is effectively a ban on import of (and perhaps, but less likely, the use of existing) Chinese drones such as those from market leader DJI, taking effect in a year against the firm if DJI can’t convince a government agency to certify that they are not a security risk — and of course, how DJI is supposed to accomplish this isn’t spelled out.

So now it gets even worse. The U.S. Commerce Department is considering its own Chinese drone bans, and has opened a public comment period through early March.

The absolute bull-headed STUPIDITY of these bans is beyond belief. There is no evidence extent that DJI drones present a security risk — only theoretical. politically-motivated speculation from both political parties that make virtually no sense at all.

The organizations and businesses that depend on these drones — law enforcement, search and rescue, agriculture, utilities, and a long list of others, have not found practical alternatives to DJI drones in the vast majority of cases. DJI dominates the market because they make the highest quality drones at prices these entities can afford, and provides world class support for them.

The politics of this situation are beyond disgusting. Is it too much to hope that the Trump administration will be more reasonable about this? Yeah, probably not a good bet, but being more sensible than both parties in Congress — and the current administration — on this score is a very low bar at this point.

Here is the current official Commerce URL with their announcement. This was not easy for me to find — not a single media source I saw bothered to include this crucial information!

https://www.bis.gov/press-release/commerce-issues-advance-notice-proposed-rulemaking-secure-unmanned-aircraft-systems

Absolute insanity. -L

According to reports, in a recent employee meeting, Google CEO Sundar said that (essentially) the entire focus of Google in 2025 will be AI and pushing it out to consumers in a “scrappy” way — with him referencing the early days of Google. This was when, I would note, their rush resulted in massive arrogance, and privacy problems at the firm were at a peak. Over the years these both were reduced — especially privacy issues where Google actually has become world class in terms of protecting users’ privacy (and security). Both could return to former terrible levels under Sundar’s deeply flawed AI approach.

With such a focus on AI and so much money between poured into it by Google, it is inevitable that other core Google services will ultimately suffer, and given Google’s notoriously deficient “customer service” when things go wrong — from account lockouts to a wide range of other problems — it’s only going to be getting worse. Word is that Google  teams not mostly devoted to AI are already suffering cutbacks. How long before Google decides that Gmail, etc. just aren’t worth keeping around anymore? Couldn’t happen? Think again.

Google’s AI continues to be an endless source of mediocrity and wrong, confused, and even utterly inane and nonsensical answers and false statements, and Google refuses to take responsibility for these and how they could negatively (sometimes even dangerously) impact users. This renders Google’s incredibly reckless pushes to embed AI deeply into Google Search (thanks to AI, decreasingly trustworthy), and the introduction of their new “AI Agents” (taking over web browsers on behalf of users — an enormous target for hackers and phishing attacks), both horrific risks for consumers.

Sundar would (I suspect) say that unless Google moves in this direction, Google is doomed. I believe that he and his executive team have it exactly backwards. Consumers do not want AI. The more they learn about it, the less they trust it or care for what it does in their day to day lives. They don’t want to pay for it. They don’t want it popping up in their faces constantly and being shoved down their throats. They certainly DO want Google to take 100% responsibility for what it does.

Sundar wants Google to be scrappy. We might as well delete that leading “s” — unfortunately, that’s Google’s likely fate, because his AI path will lead to Google’s almost certain doom one way or another. The exact timing and form of that doom cannot be accurately predicted right now, but billions of Google’s users will suffer in the process.

And one more thought. It’s been reported that apparently Sundar has now joined the exalted ranks of the billionaires. How that may or may not be affecting his thinking in these matters I’ll leave as an exercise for the reader.

Dark times for Google’s users, indeed.

–Lauren–

All the talk now is about using AI-based mechanisms to authenticate social media users as being not underaged for access, through analysis of their faces on video feeds. The multitude of ways in which this could fail in both directions (declaring faces either older than they really are, or younger than they really are, not to mention how you determine from a face if someone is 15.5 or 16 years old when the minimum age required for access is 16) are far too many to even list here.

But given all of the attention, I feel that we need terminology to quickly describe the entire area of bypass techniques targeting these age verification/gating systems.

I propose the term:

BALOK

As in, “The 11-year-old easily baloked the system and gained quick access.”

or:

The free software was capable of baloking the ID portal within seconds to bypass the age restrictions.

BALOK is an acronym for:

Bypassing Age Locked Online Keys

Of course, fans of the original “Star Trek” already know what’s really going on.

Balok was an alien in the first season of “Star Trek” from an episode called “The Corbomite Maneuver”. In appearance he was a very young, vulnerable child. But in his audio and video communications with the Enterprise ship, he employed an artificial booming voice and what turned out to be a menacing appearing puppet to fool the Enterprise crew into fearing him.

The parallels with the current face ID age verification systems are obvious.

Children will be baloking the social media age gating systems in a myriad number of ways, while adults who were supposed to have access will be blocked due to both face analysis errors and technology access problems. Not everyone uses smartphones with cameras to access social media, and many people rightly fear sending video images of their faces to these or other firms due to justifiable concerns about potential abuses.

I anticipate both freeware baloking software and baloking as a (largely free) service. Kids will band together in groups to develop new baloking techniques. They are extremely resourceful when it comes to these areas, more so than the vast majority of adults.

Balok knew that it was easy to fool his potential adversaries with a faked persona. The ingenuity of kids today pretty much guarantees that their own efforts to balok the social media firms, and in essence the politicians who pushed age blocks in the first place, will be even more successful in the real world.

–Lauren–

Is this happening around the world, or is it only here in the USA that everything appears to be going totally nutso? Seemingly all at once, politicians of both parties look and sound like they’ve given up all pretense of being educated human beings and are behaving like infantile idiots with political agendas. Oh boy, what a mix.

Logic? Forget about it! Pandering to fear and nonsense? That’s the way to win elections!

We don’t have much clearer examples of this than two simultaneous situations involving drones.

First, as you probably know by now, there has been a hysterical panic in New Jersey and surrounding areas about supposed swarms of mysterious “drones”. All evidence to date is that this is entirely nonsense, fed by clickbait social media, opportunistic mainstream media, and politicians in both parties out to seize an opportunity to score political points from people’s ignorance about technical realities.

So far, other than legal hobby and commercial drones that are routinely in the air — there are something over a million licensed in the U.S. — people have been reporting as “mystery drones” various shaky, blurry images of stars, helicopters, and airplanes (maybe the green and red flashing lights and the white strobe lights give them away, huh?), plus all manner of other completely ordinary stuff that most people just never notice most of the time. And you have politicians like Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer irresponsibly trying to ram a new surveillance bill through the Senate to protect us from this nonexistent threat — Republican Senator Rand Paul blocked him. When we have to depend on Rand Paul to be the sensible one, we must be in The Twilight Zone.

Politicians in both parties including Trump have been making all manner of claims feeding the drone hysteria — based on nothing real, and calling for shooting down the supposed “drones” if they “can’t” be identified, putting the lives of pilots and passengers on ordinary plane flights at risk. People have been shining lasers at planes — a criminal offense — again risking pilots and passengers.

The whole thing is totally nuts. It’s reminiscent of a notorious panic in Bellingham, Washington in 1954, when people started noticing ordinary manufacturing defects in car windshields and mass hysteria broke out with people fearing it was nuclear radiation or some other kind of attack. I’m not kidding. Google it.

The drone panic wasn’t helped by the sluggish reaction of government agencies to speak clearly to the issue, but the fact that there were no collisions between supposed drones and other air traffic spoke volumes about the ridiculous nature of the entire situation. The FAA has now issued some temporary drone flight restrictions in various areas of New Jersey, to try calm things down even further. But if agencies had gotten ahead of this issue early on, the information vacuum might not have been filled with so much ridiculous nonsense.

One of the best new videos I’ve seen explaining the current drone hysteria is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAWCIfs0ER4

I strongly recommend that it be widely viewed.

Meanwhile, the political hysteria over Chinese drone maker DJI’s drones as a claimed national security risk — with absolutely no evidence of this being presented — has reached a bizarre and dangerous inflection point in Congress.

DJI holds a very large majority of the U.S. drone market not just for hobbyists but in the absolutely crucial areas of law enforcement, search and rescue, other public safety groups, agriculture, utilities, and many other areas of society. The reason is simple — these groups have not found practical competing products from other manufacturers that meet the quality, reliability, and service support levels that DJI routinely provides. DJI drones are used in myriad areas to directly support the protection of human lives and property, keeping critical infrastructure operating, and an almost endless list more.

Still, some politicians in both parties keep screaming at the top of their lungs that DJI’s drones must be banned, no matter how many lives are lost or hurt in the process. Again, there is zero evidence that has ever been presented that these drones are a security risk, and DJI has bent over backwards to demonstrate that they do not threaten security. But trying to logically argue with politicians who have their own agendas (e.g., by pointing out to them that a foreign power could just buy satellite surveillance photos — they don’t need to “spy” through commercial drones!) is like debating a moldy sponge. All you get for your efforts is a rotting odor.

It was thought that the current defense appropriation bill might push through a DJI ban. This was likely to include DJI drones, cameras, audio equipment, and other products — either import bans alone, or more likely import bans combined with telling the FCC to prohibit their use of U.S. radio frequencies, which could also in theory — but probably not in practice — block use of these DJI products already received and in routine use in the USA.

Instead, with so many crucial public safety and other groups opposed to the ban, the final language puts off a ban for a year, and says to avoid the ban DJI must get an appropriate national security agency to certify that their products are not a security risk.

Proving a negative is always, uh, challenging. But worse — and this is something straight out of Putin’s Russia — the language does not say which national security agency should do this or require any of them to do it. Franz Kafka would love this. Putin would smile.

It’s possible that the next administration will be more receptive to logical arguments about why DJI products should not be banned, and if the ban moves forward DJI is virtually certain to litigate through the courts, as well they should.

But the sheer irresponsibility of politicians wanting to ban such crucial products based on zero evidence and a lot of wild-eyed political posturing is nothing short of disgusting and irresponsible.

So here we are. Blurry photos of stars and planes are being touted as terror drones, with politicians more than happy to latch onto the panic for their own purposes. Actual drones crucial to a vast array of industries and to saving lives are at risk of being banned by politicians who scream “national security” without evidence.

Yeah, I don’t know about the rest of the world, but here in the USA it sure looks like we’ve fallen off the deep end of sanity.

–Lauren–

Ah yes. Poodle skirts and bobby socks.  Jimmie Rodgers and the Everly Brothers. Around the world, there seems to be a collective longing for a rose-tinted, 20/20 hindsight, fantasy view of “the good old days” of the 1950s, before those damned computers starting infiltrating so much of our lives.  And social media bans have become the means by which governments hope to force children off their phones and back to sometimes rather violent competitive sports and other ultraviolet light suffused outdoor activities.

It won’t work. The latest example of this yearning for the past is in Australia where, with very broad public support, the government just pushed through (in about a week!) a ban on children under 16 using social media. There are no exceptions for anyone with current accounts. There are no exceptions to allow parents to permit their children to use social media if the parents determine that’s best for their own children. The ban likely will include all of the major social media platforms except (for now at least) YouTube, which is widely used in schools.

Clearly, there have been enormously tragic incidents involving children who were, for example, bullied or otherwise abused over social media. But there are also many examples of the positive benefits of social media helping children who were being abused by family members, for whom access to assistance over social media was crucial. And many examples of isolated children for whom social media has been an important benefit to their mental health. And children who have created educational outreach and other extremely positive projects via social media.

I’m not a sociologist. I’ll leave it to the experts in that and related fields to explain the complex and sometimes competing aspects of social media and young persons.

But I am a technologist. And as such, my view is that Australia’s ban almost certainly won’t work and will end up doing far more damage than the status quo before the law, as it creates a culture of false hopes, push back, and circumvention.

Like all social media age gating laws, the Australian law would require ALL users of social media to be age verified. That’s how you (in theory) block the children. The law wisely does not penalize parents or children who circumvent the law, instead depending on financial fines against the social media firms. And at the very last minute, a provision was apparently added that prohibits requiring use of government credentials for identification. This was a positive change, because as I’ve discussed many times, age-verification based on government credentials for websites access would lead almost inevitably to broad tracking of Internet usage by the government in much the style that users in China are subjected to today.

So how would Australia do age verification for this law? The law is planned to take effect a year from now, and an age verification trial is supposed to take place before then. Most frequently discussed are AI-based (oh boy, here we go …) techniques to analyze users’ faces, online behavior patterns, types of content they access … and so on. 

It doesn’t take much imagination to create a long list of ways that such techniques not only have errors in both directions (passing users who were too young, blocking users who were actually old enough) — even in the absence of circumvention techniques. E.g., how do you determine if a child is 15 and a half years old or 16 years old from their face? Uh huh. Hell, I’ve known people who were 30 and had faces that looked like they were 15.

But even beyond the mumbo jumbo of supposed AI-based solutions, the list of relatively straightforward circumvention techniques seems almost endless. And anyone who thinks that children won’t figure this stuff out are in for a rude awakening.

One obvious problem for the law will be VPNs. Unless the Australian government plans to detect/ban VPN usage — which would have enormous negative consequences — simply creating accounts on these social media platforms that appear to be coming from countries other than Australia is an obvious circumvention methodology.

Attempting to ban children from social media won’t work. It will make a complicated situation even worse, and it technically is impractical without creating a hellscape of government-verified identity Internet usage tracking for all users of all ages — and even then circumvention techniques would still exist.

The desire to eliminate the negative consequences of social media is a laudable one. And there’s much that could be done by social media firms to better prevent abuse of their platforms, especially when children are targeted for such abuse. 

But age-based bans are a “feel good” effort that will create new harms and will fail. They should be firmly rejected.

–Lauren–

Despite my continuing differences with various specific aspects of Google operations that I feel could be straightforwardly improved to the benefit of their users, I can’t emphasize enough what an utter disaster the DOJ proposed Google antitrust “remedies” would be for the privacy and security of their users and consumers more broadly, and for the overall usability of these crucial services as well.

Google privacy and security standards and teams are world class, and I have enormous trust in them. Keeping email and the many other Google services that billions of people rely on in their everyday lives safe and secure is an enormously complex and continually evolving effort, and key to this — as well as making sure that users’ data entrusted to Google is not put at risk by firms with less stringent standards than Google — is the integrated nature of the Chrome browser, Android, and other aspects of Google services. Even with this integration, it’s a monumental task.

Breaking these aspects of Google apart in the name of supposed “competition” — that would actually only make most non-technical users’ interactions with tech more confusing and complicated, just what consumers clearly don’t want — would be a gargantuan mistake that consumers would unfortunately end up paying for in a myriad number of ways for many years.

Google is far from perfect, but DOJ seems hell-bent on pushing an antitrust agenda in this case that would make consumers’ lives far worse instead of better. Whether that’s a result of DOJ ignoring the technical realities in play or simply not really understanding them, it’s the wrong path and would lead to a very bad place indeed for all of us.

–Lauren–

Despite my ongoing concerns over various of the directions that current management has been taking Google over recent years, I must state that I agree with Google that the kinds of radical antitrust “remedies” — and “radical” is the appropriate word — apparently being contemplated by DOJ, would almost certainly be a disaster for ordinary users’ privacy, security, and overall ability to interact with many aspects of related technologies that they depend on every day.

These systems are difficult enough to keep reasonably user friendly and secure as it is — and they certainly should continue to be improved in those areas. But what DOJ is reportedly considering would be an enormous step backwards and consumers would be the ultimate victims of such an approach.

–Lauren–

“I Am the Very Model of a Google AI Overview”
Lauren Weinstein

To the tune of “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General” (with apologies to Gilbert & Sullivan)

– – –

I am the very model of a Google AI Overview.
I know what you’ll be searching for,
At least an hour ahead of you.

My answers aren’t always right,
In fact they’re often quite a brawl.
But hey we’re Google and you’re here,
So that’s the way the chips will fall.

We really don’t like those blue links,
They’re so old-fashioned we agree.
Why bother sites with viewers,
When users can just come here to me?

Of course some sites may suffer,
And yeah that’s a bit tragic to see.
But while we aren’t evil,
Face the facts it’s all about money!

Now if your Google search results,
No longer seem of quality,
It’s not our fault,
The problem is,
Your queries are just all lousy.

So welcome to my AI world,
An LLM can’t think things through,
I am the very model of a Google AI Overview.

– – –

–Lauren–

Google Search AI Overview answers are clearly not ready for prime time. Google should immediately return them to Lab (opt-in) status. Before deploying them again generally beyond Labs, there needs to be an opt-out option — permanent until changed by the user — at least for logged-in users.

–Lauren–

The technical term for what’s happening now with Artificial Intelligence, especially generative AI, is NUTS. I mean it’s not just Google, but Microsoft too, with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The firms are just pouring out half-baked AI systems and trying to basically ram them down our throats whether we want them or not, by embedding them into everything they can, including in irresponsible or even potentially hazardous ways. And it’s all in the search of profits at our expense.

I’ll talk specifically about Google Search shortly, but so much of this crazy stuff is being deployed. Microsoft wants to record everything you do on a PC through an AI system. Both Google and Microsoft want to listen in on your personal phone calls with AI. YouTube is absolutely flooded with low quality AI junk videos, making it ever harder to find accurate, useful videos.

Google is now pushing their AI “Help me write” feature which feeds your text into their AI from all over the place including in many Chrome browser context menus, where in some cases they’ve replaced the standard text UNDO command with “Help me write”. And Help me write is so easy to trigger accidentally that you not only could end up feeding personal or business proprietary information into the AI, but also to the human AI trainers who Google notes can also see this kind of data.

OK, now about Google Search. For quite some time now many people have been noticing a decline in the quality of Google search results — and keep in mind that Google does the overwhelmingly vast percentage of searches by Internet users. So Google has recently been rolling out to regular Google Search results what they call AI Overviews, and these are AI-generated answers to what seem like most queries now, that can push all the actual site links — the sites from which Google AI presumably pulled the data to formulate those answers — actually push them so far down the page that few users will ever see them, and this potentially starves those sites that provided that data from getting the user views they need to stay up and running.

Some of the AI overview answers have links but often they’re dim and obscure and almost impossible to even see unless you have perfect 20/20 vision and very young eyes. On top of that many of these AI Overview answers are just banal, stupid, and often just confused or plain wrong, mixing up accurate and inaccurate information, sometimes in ways that could actually be unsafe, for example when they’re wrong about health-related questions. This is all very different from the kinds of top of page answers that Google has shown for straightforward search queries like math questions or definitions of words or when was a particular film released that they’ve provided for some time now.

These AI Overview answers are showing up all over the place and like I said, much of the time their quality is abysmal. Now of course if you’re not knowledgeable about a subject you’re asking about, you might assume a misleading or wrong AI Overview answer is correct, and since Google has now made it less likely that you’ll scroll down the page to find and visit sites that may have accurate information, it’s a real mess. There are some tricks with Google Search URLs that I’ve seen to bypass some of this for now, but Google could disable those at any time.

What’s really needed is a way for users to turn all of this generative AI content completely off until such a time, if ever, that a given user decides they want to turn it on again. Or better yet, these AI features should be ENTIRELY opt-in, that is, turned off UNTIL you decide you want to use them in the first place.

So once again we see that fears of super intelligent AIs wiping out humanity are not what we should be worried about right now. What we need to be concerned about are the ways that Big Tech AI companies are hell-bent on forcing generative AI systems into all aspects of our private lives in ways that are often unwanted, confusing, irresponsible, or even worse. And the way things seem to be going right now, there’s no indication that these firms are interested in how we feel about all this.

And that’s not going to change so long as we’re willing to continue using their products without making it clear to them that we won’t indefinitely tolerate their push to stuff generative AI systems into our lives whether we want them there or not.

–Lauren–

Every day it becomes ever clearer. All the talk of super-intelligent AI destroying humanity was and is nonsense. It’s the CEOs running the Big Tech firms pushing AI into every aspect of our lives in increasingly irresponsible and dangerous ways who are the villains in this saga, not the machines themselves. The machines are just tools. Like hammers, they can be used to build a home or smash in a skull.

For evil, you have to look to humans and their corporate greed.

–Lauren–

Let me be very clear about why I am, frankly, so angry with Google over their Account Recovery failures.

I have on numerous occasions directly proposed to Google a variety of significant improvements to their current Account Recovery processes.

While their existing procedures successfully recover many accounts daily, they tend to fail disproportionally for innocent non-techie users and other marginalized groups like seniors and more — users who still are dependent on Google for email and data storage in a world where other support options (like telephone and non-email billing and support) are being rapidly marginalized by firms as cost-cutting measures.

These are often users who barely understand how to use these systems that they’ve in many cases essentially been coerced into using. When they’re locked out, they can lose everything — email, photos, and other personal data crucial to their lives.

I have on multiple occasions proposed specific improvements to Google’s procedures that could be invoked optionally by users who desperately needed access to their accounts that were locked out without good cause, and methods by which Google would have the means for cost recovery of the additional (and typically not extensive) additional support measures required to accomplish this.

My proposals have never received serious consideration by Google. I always receive the same responses. “We recover lots of accounts and that’s good enough.” “Nobody is forced to use Google.” “People who don’t properly maintain their recovery addresses and phone numbers have nobody but themselves to blame.”

Unspoken and unwritten but clearly part of the underlying message: “We just don’t care about those categories of users. Hopefully they’ll go away and never come back.”

It’s a travesty. I’ll keep trying, because hope springs eternal, and I’m too old now to give up on even apparently hopeless causes. Silly me, I guess. Take care.

–Lauren–

Google refuses to create a specific role for someone to oversee the issues of older users, who depend on Google for so many things but so often get the shaft and lose everything when something goes wrong with their accounts. Google should AT LEAST (I still think the role is crucial), be providing focused help resources and a recurring (at least monthly) blog to help this class of users (“Google for Seniors”, “Google Seniors Blog”).

This would all be specifically oriented toward helping these users deal with the kinds of Google Account and other Google problems that so often disproportionately affect this group.

This would be good for these users (who Google unreasonably and devastatingly considers to be an unimportant segment of their user base) and frankly good for Google’s PR in a highly challenging and toxic political environment.

I’m so tired of having so many people in this category approach me for help with account and other Google issues because they never understood the existing Google resources that, frankly, are written for a different level of tech expertise and understanding.

I have more detailed thoughts on this if anyone cares. No, I’m not holding my breath on this one.

–Lauren–

There are a few LPs I have been hunting down for a long time now, and the original Dreamfish 2LP is up there. I've never seen it in the wild, and a Bandcamp comment suggests only 500 copies were originally pressed back in 1993. Silent State is slowly working through some of the most majestic titles from this era, and now Dreamfish is up for reissue, with preorders on Feb 7th. Read this interview I did with Nils from Silent State a while back who is on a mission to share more from the Namlook estate.

I've been on a Smallville kick recently - well, probably since the Joe Davies album reminded me they exist, and they constantly churn out some of the best house music going. This latest one from Snad was playing in Passenger Seat Records in Portland when I asked what it was… of course, it turned out to be on Smallville. A lovely slice of dubby relaxing house music to float away to. The B-side, the standout.

Every year since 2021, Kiln has offered up a single through Bandcamp on January 1st, as a sonic snapshot of their groovable electronics. Many will know of this group through their releases on Ghostly, defining a specific sound that is perhaps the most organic and instrumental way possible to approach the listenable side of early IDM. Look out for more from Kiln arriving very soon….cough cough.

It's not often you get an unreleased gem from one of the kings of atmospheric / liquid drum'n bass making an appearance on Bandcamp. PFM has been dropping a bunch of singles on his own bandcamp in recent years (often deleting the releases once people have downloaded them), but looks like this one is set to stay, with a vinyl press to boot.

Roller.

Everyone hates on Instagram for many reasons, but once in a while, if you follow bunch of music nerds, it presents you with… more music nerds, jamming in front of their expensive rigs. Most sound as you'd expect, but Simon Littauer's got a knack for intertwining some absolutely beautiful pads and melancholy amongst the complex analog glitch and breaks. This album is name your price right now, too.

Find these albums and many more over on my Bandcamp Collection.

Hi.

Yeah, I know. Last person you wanted to see alive. If it's any consolation, I might not be by now. Maybe I'm dead, maybe payback arrived and you just slept through it.

Doesn't matter. Put your hatred aside for a moment. You want to hear this.

We've picked up a—a hitchhiker. Says it's Human, says it's what we turned into a few million years after we shipped out, but there's no fucking way. I saw it—pieces of it, anyway— over on Araneus. (Oh right, we ran into Araneus the other day. What's left of her, anyway. What are the odds?) The recorder data's severely degraded—which is suspicious in its own right, she's been derelict for less than two million years as far as we can tell— but it shows something coming out of the last gate she built, something that reached for Araneus like a falling man grasping at a branch. It shows something else too, coming out behind it, stretching and snapping back like a rubber band stretched too far.

We tried to leave the fucking thing behind, but it followed us home. Rode the shuttle bareback. Chimp won't let us hurt it. Chimp thinks it's just another member of the crew— maybe even the most important because it's more—I dunno, recent. It melted before we even got out of the shuttle: all those joints, all those limbs and slits, all those eyes. Encysted into some kind of chrysalis. It's down in Med5 right now, turning into—

Well, we don't know yet.

But I'm pretty sure it won't be emerging as a butterfly. I think, once metamorphosis is complete, our degrees of freedom go to zero. I mean, it's still just a puddle of organic soup and it's already got Chimp in its pocket. When it hatches, who knows? Maybe we'll be lemurs and it'll be God and there's nothing we'll be able to plan or say or even goddamn think that it won't know before we do.

So I'm bringing you back now, while there's still some ghost of a chance that no one else knows what I'm doing. I'm using back doors and secret tunnels from the old days. I'm using Lian's bypasses so Chimp won't know you've been moved.

I know what you're thinking. I did what I did. I'd do it again. But it was a broad-strokes deal, it's not like I told Chimp about every stitch and seam in the revolution. There's a lot he doesn't know. He doesn't know we can do this, for one thing. He doesn't know you're down here in the Black Forest and not snoozing away in C4B. So long as he doesn't start missing his favorite pet enough to try bringing you back for old times' sake, we should be okay. And yes, that's a risk—but you two didn't part on the best of terms. I'm betting—I'm hoping Chimp doesn't need the grief.

So now you're wondering why take that chance? Why me, out of all these thousands? But I don't know how many thousands there are any more. Every thinking being within ten thousand lightyears is right here, buried in this fucking rock, and after sixty-seven million years I've still only met a fraction of them. I trust barely a fraction of those. Most of them would probably be just as happy to see me tossed out an airlock. You'd be first in line.

But that's the point. I know you. I know the purity of your hatred. It burns pretense to ash. You're the last person I'd ever trust with my life, but this isn't about my life. It's about everyone else's. It's about Eriophora. You'll pick up this baton for the exact same reason you’d kill me if you got half a chance.

So I’m sorry, but you're drafted: someone behind the scenes, someone Chimp thinks is safely out of play, someone this abomination, this parasite doesn't know about. And I pray to whatever Gods may prevail over that one that, when it hatches, it won't be able to read my mind back to this moment and see what I'm doing now, because if it can then all hope is truly lost.

I'm not saying it's a foolproof plan, or even a good one. It's probably a terrible plan. But it's the best I can come up with on short notice. And I'm already beyond forgiveness; I've got nothing to lose by conscripting you. So wake up, wild card. Wake up, hidden variable. Watch from the shadows. Fight back against a god that hopefully doesn't know you exist. Be the blind spot in omniscience.

Gods help us, Sunday, I think we've got a gremlin on board.

Not too long ago—back before Covid took me out for the holidays— I attended the BUG's latest fiction launch, sharing drinks with a horde of her fans and students from all walks of life. One such fan was a journalist, with whom the conversation turned to environmental apocalypse and the various ways it might yet be staved off. (This was only fitting: the BUG's new novelette—"All the Songs", in Fusion Fragment—is the most hauntingly beautiful celebration of Human extinction you're ever likely to read.)

The journo had grave misgivings about my suggestion that, for starters, the lot of us could just stop breeding. If you're only including the childless, she pointed out, you're going to be having a very small conversation. One might argue that her own, somewhat more outwardly-directed solution— guillotine the plutocrats—suffers from similarly limited appeal. (Although maybe not. It's hard to find fault, for example, with Luigi Mangione's approach; since those ironically-named "health care" CEO's clearly aren't bothered by either the deaths they've caused or by next-of-kin tramping around with protest signs, it seems only systematic to test whether the prospect of ending up dead themselves might motivate a change in behavior.) In either case, it seems pretty clear that the time for conversations— small or large— has pretty much run its course. It's all just talk.

Behold, the New Year:

The nuclear codes are about to move back from the hands of the doddering old fool into those of the stumbling demented tantrum-child. The Democrats— having repeatedly characterized Trump as a "fascist"—are now in the awkward position of enabling a "smooth transition" to said fascism because that is how the Great Democracies work.

Ukraine is fucked.

Gaza is even more fucked (not that this is much of a change from Genocide Joe's regime, admittedly).

The chances of nuclear war are higher than they've been at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Most importantly (with the possible exception of the whole nuclear war thing), the environment is fucked. 2024 closed out as the hottest year not just in recorded history, but in the past 125,000 years. We've been consistently over 1.5°C for a solid year now, notwithstanding the Hope Police's strident insistence that we really haven't blown past that threshold until we've done it for a bunch more years. Carbon emissions continued to increase in 2024 (although I'm certain that they'll start to come down once the Orange Imbecile puts his Drill Baby Drill policy into play).

Mix in the various plagues and pandemics still doing the rounds (even if most jurisdictions have stopped releasing data on such things because if you admit we're still in the throes of a pandemic you might have to be seen to do something about it, and the The Economy won't stand for another shutdown) or waiting in the wings; the S'Asian flash floods and the Mexican killer heat waves and the firestorms and droughts raging from California to Australia; the revelation that traditional carbon sinks such as the Amazon and the Arctic are now net carbon producers; and the ongoing catastrophic extinction rates of all those thousands of species we really don't give a shit about because they sure as shit were never Made In God's Image—put all that together and the year we just crawled out of was pretty much the worst ever.

And yet, looking forward to what's coming this year, 2024 represents the last of The Good Old Days. We're headed for 2.7-3.1°C by century's end if current trends continue. Current trends will not continue, of course. As of January 20th, they're going to get a lot worse.

If any of you can find any legitimate good news in the face of all this—and I'm talking about reasonable cause for hope here, not some feel-good story about rescued hedgehogs or found cats—by all means let me know. Don't bother mentioning the plummeting cost and improving economics of renewable energy[1], though, unless you include strategies that don't turn the planet into a moonscape from mining the requisite minerals. (Apparently it would take half the world's current lithium production and twice the world's current cobalt production just to electrify the UK grid. Now scale that up to the rest of the planet). Don't feed me fairy tales about giant pie plates in the sky, designed to reduce solar input without requiring anyone to give up their super-yachts or private jets. In fact, don't talk about any technological fix that won't fall instantly afoul of Jevon's Paradox, that will be sold as a way to Buy Time To Save The World but really end up as just another excuse to do fuck-all. Talk to me about behavioral solutions. Give me hope by showing me evidence that Humanity can change its nature.

Because honestly, the only hope I have now can be found in the fact that the Earth has already endured five major extinction events— and that new, gloriously-diverse biospheres have always evolved in their wake. It may take twenty million years after we're gone, but the Earth will shake off this disease. It will recover.

The only hope I have is that the biosphere will survive long enough for us to go extinct.

1. Which, fun fact, still hasn't put a dent on fossil energy production, instead merely adding to it. ↑

The purpose of this note is to point out that the CO2 that will need to be captured to make synthetic fuels is only slightly less than the carbon dioxide emitted by burning the equivalent amounts of fossil oil or gas. The crucial implication is that it might make sense not to focus on synthetic alternatives but to develop massive carbon capture infrastructure instead that makes burning fossil fuels carbon neutral. At present prices, it will be far less expensive to burn oil and gas and then collect an equivalent amount of CO2 than it will be to manufacture synthetic fuels. (Many of the numbers in this article are sourced from an industry research paper, referenced at the foot of the page.)

***

Many hard-to-abate sectors, such as aviation and long distance shipping, will continue to need liquid fuels indefinitely. The most commonly accepted route to decarbonisation is to substitute liquid fossil fuels, such as kerosene for aircraft and heavy fuel oil for ships, with synthetic equivalents compounds made from green hydrogen and carbon dioxide. These alternatives can be close to carbon neutral because the carbon dioxide emitted when the synthetic fuel is burnt will match the CO2 required to be captured in order to make the fuel in the first place.

Early sustainable fuels are made today using the carbon in waste organic matter ('biomass') but the volumes available globally are a tiny fraction of today's needs for energy. The carbon atoms necessary for ultra-low fuels will eventually have to come from CO2 largely captured from the air. The probability is that more than 90% of green oils and gases will be using carbon taken from the atmosphere.

Many aviation and shipping operators are already pursuing synthetic alternatives.  Parts of the shipping industry in particular are shifting to building new ships that can use methanol (chemical formula CH3OH) made directly from hydrogen and CO2. These ships are termed 'dual fuel' because they retain the capacity to use conventional fossil fuels alongside methanol. 

There is an another very different route forward. Instead of using low carbon fuels made from zero emission hydrogen and carbon from biomass or the air, industries could continue to use liquid fossil fuels combined with separate capture and storage of CO2. A ship burning heavy fuel oil emits about 3.15 tonnes of CO2 for each tonne burned. If the ship owner captured and permanently stored 3.15 tonnes, perhaps at a specialist direct air capture plant thousands of kilometres away, then the ship would be approximately 'carbon neutral'.

Of course the immediate reaction to this idea is one of deep scepticism. Any scheme which promises to match the emissions from burning fossil fuels with equivalent sequestration of CO2 will be highly vulnerable to being abused. We cannot be sure that the promised CO2 storage will be permanent, or that it wouldn't have happened anyway. Ensuring that carbon neutrality arises from truly additional capture of CO2 is a very difficult challenge. 

Let's put aside these obvious concerns about whether the new carbon dioxide storage genuinely balances particular emissions. Instead, we can ask first whether this alternative to synthetic fuels is likely to be cheaper and easier to develop.

Comparing route 1 (manufacturing synthetic fuels using zero carbon molecules) and route 2 (burning fossil fuels and then capturing and equivalent amount of CO2).

·      Route one

This example looks at synthetic methanol and compares it to heavy fuel oil for shipping. 

The chemical formula of the methanol molecule is CH3OH, meaning it has one atom of carbon, four of hydrogen and one of oxygen. Hydrogen is light, with a molecular weight of one, while carbon and oxygen have weights of 12 and 16 respectively.

So each molecule of methanol has a molecular weight of 32.  A tonne of methanol contains 12/32 multiplied by 1000 kg of carbon or about 375 kg . To obtain this much carbon will require the capture of 1.375 tonnes of CO2 as the raw material. This assumes 100% efficiency and a more reasonable assumption might be that 1.4 tonnes of carbon dioxide will need to be extracted from the air to make a tonne of synthetic methanol.

Methanol contains about half as much combustion energy as heavy fuel oil. So every tonne of conventional fuel will need to be replaced by two tonnes of methanol, implying a requirement to capture about 2.8 tonnes of CO2 to make enough methanol to replace a tonne of today's fuel.  

This number compares to the 3.15 tonnes arising from the combustion of heavy fuel oil. This means that synthetic methanol has a carbon footprint of around 90% of conventional fuels for shipping. Of course the 2.8 tonnes from methanol has arisen from an earlier carbon capture process.

The other key ingredient for methanol is hydrogen. Each tonne of the fuel requires about 200 kg of green H2. (This is needed both to be incorporated into the methanol and also to react with the spare oxygen molecule in CO2 to make water - H20 - as part of the chemical reaction). To make two tonnes needs about 400 kg of hydrogen.

The cost of synthetic methanol will probably be dominated by the manufacturing of hydrogen. Extracting CO2 from the air will be the other main burden.  

Route 2

As described above,  Route 1 extracts CO2 from air, reacts it with hydrogen and creates methanol. The possible Route 2 burns fossil fuel as today, and then captures and permanently stores the amount of CO2 that results from the combustion.  

Comparing the economics of each of the two routes

Route one

The key cost is likely to be price of the hydrogen required. As written above, two tonnes of methanol will use about 400 kg of H2. We see a very wide variety of different estimates of the likely price.

·      At £1.50 a kg, the price often said to bring comparability with oil and gas, the cost of the H2 necessary to make the two tonnes of methanol would be $600 (before transport).

·      Current costs appear to be far higher although details are scarce, partly because of the relatively small number of green hydrogen production plants currently operating. A reasonable estimate today might be $5 a kg. At this price, the green H2 necessary to make the synthetic methanol to replace one tonne of fuel oil would be $2,000.

·      The costs of 2.8 tonnes of carbon dioxide captured from the air (often known as DAC) is also very difficult to estimate. Costs as low as $100 a tonne are seen in some estimates for 2030 or before. But prices today may be at least five times this level. (These figures do not include an estimate for the - relatively small - costs of temporary storage). Route one needs about 2.8 tonnes of captured CO2 for methanol that equates to a tonne of fuel oil. Costs are therefore between $280 and approximately five times this price, or around $1400.

·      In addition, there will be a small cost for the pure water for the manufacture of the methanol and, more importantly, for the capital and operating costs of the methanol production plant. It's little more than a guess, but these may add $100-$200 for each tonne produced, or $200-$400 for the methanol to equate to a tonne of fuel oil.

At the very lowest end, each two tonnes of synthetic methanol will therefore cost                                                            

Lowest

·      H2                                           $600

·      CO2                                         $280

·      Processing, including water   $200

Total before transport                        $1080

At the upper point, each 2 tonnes of methanol will cost much more

Higher end of estimates

 ·      H2                                           $2,000

·      CO2                                         $1,400

·      Processing, including water   $400 

Total before transport                        $3,800

Route two 

This route requires the purchase of fuel oil and paying for the capture of carbon, plus its storage.

·      The price of fuel oil varies around the world but averages (January 2025) about $600 a tonne.

·      The estimates for Route one above suggest a range of between $100 and $500 for the cost of direct air capture of CO2. In addition, in route two, a guess might be that CO2 transport and permanent storage costs add another $60 per tonne. Route 2 produces 3.15 tonnes of CO2 per tonne of fuel oil burnt.

At the lower boundary, a tonne of heavy fuel, accompanied by the capture and storage of the amount of CO2 that will be created when that oil is burnt, will cost as follows:

Lowest

·      Tonne of heavy fuel oil          $600

·      CO2 capture                            $315

·      CO2 storage                            $189   

Total                                                    $1,104

 At the higher end, these figures will be approximately as follows:

Higher end of estimates 

·      Tonne of heavy fuel oil          $600

·      CO2 capture                            $1,575

·      CO2 storage                            $189   

Total                                                    $2,364

 What are the implications of these numbers?          

The core finding from this analysis is that it will probably be cheaper to burn fossil fuels and then capture an equivalent amount of CO2 than it will be to manufacture low carbon synthetic fuels, at least until the price of hydrogen has been pulled down from today's levels.

The 2 tonnes of synthetic methanol needed to replace a tonne of shipping fuel will cost about $1,080 at the very low hydrogen cost of $1.50 per kg. The cost of simply burning oil and then capturing sufficient CO2 from the atmosphere will be slightly higher at around $1.104.  

But unless hydrogen falls in price to this level, synthetic fuels will be much more expensive than fossil fuel use plus carbon capture. Although green hydrogen at $1.50 seems possible in parts of the world with the lowest electricity costs, this target will be difficult to meet in most parts of the developed world. 

The estimates above suggest at the upper end of the range for CO2 capture and hydrogen manufacture that synthetic methanol might cost as much as $3,800 for a quantity (two tonnes) that matches the energy value of a tonne of heavy fuel oil. At the higher end of the possible cost range, the cost of buying oil and sequestering an appropriate amount of carbon could cost around £2,364, just over 62% of the cost of the synthetic alternative.

Put at its simplest, the commercial future of synthetic fuels depends crucially on the relationship between the cost of green hydrogen and the fossil alternative. That's because, at least in the case of global shipping, the amount of CO2 that will need to be captured is - very approximately - the same whether new renewable fuels are being made or whether old fuels are used and the concomitant amount of CO2 stored elsewhere. This is probably true for all hydrocarbon fuels. 

At the moment, the evidence strongly suggests that it is far cheaper to build a huge carbon storage industry and continue to burn oil and gas than it is to make replacements for fossil fuels from hydrogen and captured carbon dioxide. The core reason is that per unit of energy, current fossil fuel prices are far lower than green hydrogen made from water electrolysis. This isn't a comfortable conclusion but needs much greater open discussion.

 Source for some of the numbers in the article https://www.digitalrefining.com/article/1002891/methanol-from-co2-a-technology-and-outlook-overview#:~:text=Green%2Frenewable%20methanol%20synthesis&text=In%20the%20presence%20of%20catalysts,gases%20and%20purified%20through%20distillation.

The energy transition is being held up by the slow rate of growth in electricity demand. Two examples illustrated this problem today (December 19th 2024). 

·      Aurora, the Oxford energy consultancy, said that periods of negative price in the UK multiplied six fold between 2022 and 2024. Aurora points out that this causes concern among investors about the future profitability of new renewable electricity projects, and therefore slows the growth in renewables.

·      Better Energy, a large solar developer in Denmark, went into restructuring, a route that seems roughly equivalent to the Chapter 11 process in the US. In its press release Better Energy wrote 'The green energy transition is in crisis, as the shift from fossil fuels to electrification is progressing too slowly. This creates uncertainty about the pace of the transition, makes investors uncertain and thus changes investment conditions'. 'It became increasingly clear that the roll-out of green electricity production risks out-running the market'.

This short note estimates the increased electricity use arising in the UK from the installation of heat pumps and the purchase of electric vehicles and compares these numbers to the overall change in electricity demand.

First, what is happening to electricity demand across the UK? Government statistics show that between 2010 and 2023, total power demand fell by 18% or 68 terawatt hours (TWh).. Deindustrialisation and greater efficiency in home appliances and lighting are principal causes. For example, domestic demand peaked at 125 TWh in 2005, falling to about 92 TWh in 2023.

The decline in total electricity consumption appears to be continuing with a decrease of 1.1% or 3.5 TWh between 2022 and 2023. Growth in data centres and AI servers may diminish the rate of decline but the UK's high electricity prices do not make the country a logical location for applications that require large amounts of power.

As a second question, how does this yearly fall compare to the increased use of electricity from the growth of electric cars and heat pumps, the two principal changes currently tending to push up requirements for electricity?

Electric vehicles

This year will see sales of about 360,000 pure EVs in the UK. British cars do about 15,000 km a year, or just under 10,000 miles. Typically, an EV will use about 1 kWh per 6 km travelled. So each new car sold adds about 2,500 kWh, or 2.5 MWh, to yearly electricity consumption.

360,000 new EVs (and assuming no retirements from the fleet) will therefore add 0.90 TWh to UK electricity need.  

In addition about 170,000 plug-in hybrids will be sold. If we assume that half their travel is powered by electricity, this will add about 0.21 TWh to UK demand. 

Some other electric vehicles, including buses and light vans, are not included in these figures. At a guess, this might add a further 0.20 TWh to electricity need.

Heat pumps

Heat pumps are growing rapidly in the UK and installations will probably reach about 50,000 in 2024. (Of course this number is very small to the installation rates in almost all other European countries). I estimate that each new heat pump will add 5,000 kWh to demand every year, meaning an increment to national electricity needs of about 0.25 TWh from these new heating systems. 

The balance 

New purchases of heat pumps and EVs will add just over 1.5 TWh to total electricity demand in the UK in 2024. This is substantially less than half the decline of 3.5 TWh in total power use between 2022 and 2023. And even this comparison is flattering because 2023 sales of EVs and heat pumps will have helped push up demand for electricity in that year.

Very roughly, installation rates of new electricity consuming equipment will have to triple to outweigh the underlying fall in power use. As Better Energy said this morning 'The main challenge is no longer the production of more renewable energy, but increasingly declining demand'. In an unavoidable conclusion, better energy efficiency is the enemy of the energy transition.  

Well, if the last few weeks in LA have not been traumatizing enough - and then we've had the  hideousness of the inauguration and unfolding horror of the first few days of Trump: The Return...  on top of all that, there's also been a flurry of sad-making deaths. 

Saddest for me was learning that the writer Geoff Nicholson had gone. I didn't know Geoff well - but he was a fellow Brit expat in Los Angeles and on the occasions we ran into each other socially, I really enjoyed talking with him. I have been meaning to pick up his tomes on walking and on suburbia - and now have the spur. 

The book of Geoff's I have read and returned to repeatedly over the years is Big Noises. One of his earliest books - his first non-fiction effort -  and I believe the only one he wrote about music. 

Here's something short I wrote about Big Noises for a side-bar to an interview I'd done for some magazine  or other (can't remember which, can't recall when). They asked me to enthuse about three music books  I loved but which were a bit  forgotten. Below that blurb is a longer piece in which Geoff and Big Noises pops up in the context of guitar solo excess.  

BIG NOISES by GEOFF NICHOLSON

Big Noises (1991) is a really enjoyable book about guitarists by the novelist Geoff Nicholson. It consists of 36 short "appreciations" of axemen (and they're all men; indeed, it's quite a male book but quite unembarrassed about that). These range from obvious greats/grates like Clapton/Beck/Page/Knopfler to quirkier choices like Adrian Belew, Henry Kaiser, and Derek Bailey. Nicholson writes in a breezy, deceptively down-to-earth style that nonetheless packs in a goodly number of penetrating insights. I just dug this out of my storage unit in London a couple of months ago and have been really enjoying dipping into it.

Flash of the Axe: Guitar Solos
from Excess All Areas issue on musical maximalism, The Wire, September 2019.

I can distinctly remember the first time I let myself enjoy a guitar solo.  1983, I'm at a party, "Purple Haze" comes on - I just went with Jimi, surrendered to the voluptuous excess.  There was a sense of crossing a boundary within myself, like sexual experimentation, or trying a food that normally disgusts you.

1. London accounts for about one half of UK Bus Journeys and one quarter of the UK's Bus Fleet.

Source:  DfT 

2. TfL Buses are ten times more lethal than their presence on London's roads would predict; since 2014, 1 in 10 RTC Fatals and 1 in 10 Pedestrian Deaths in London have involved a TfL bus.

Sources:  Mayor of London; TfL; London Assembly 

3. TfL's sole metric of bus contract performance is a time-based "Excess Waiting Time"/Headway calculation that independent benchmarking shows London—

• in the highest tercile of its 'world city' peers for Bus Punctuality and Profitability per Bus;
• in lowest tercile of its 'world city' peers for safety (collisions per km); 
• London has the least safe public bus system of any major European city.

Sources:  Mayor of London; TfL; London Assembly; Imperial College

4. TfL has never conducted any analysis or safety risk assessment of its (a) Bus Franchise Model, (b) Bus Contract Financial Incentives or the (c) iBus System it uses to measure contract performance

Sources: Mayor of London, TfL; London Assembly 

5. Bus Driver Fatigue is a well-evidenced systemic problem, with the latest independent study showing 1 in 3 bus drivers reporting a near-miss due to fatigue and 1 in 6 Bus Drivers having fallen asleep at the wheel while driving a bus;

Sources: Mayor of London; TfL; London Assembly; Loughborough University 

6. Bus Collisions (2016-2023) - London averages of over 26,000 collisions annually (2023: over 28,000 - so, getting worse) from which — 

• about 1200 people are hospitalised per year
• 1 person is killed about every month (2024). 
• 80 to 100 people are sent to hospital per month from Preventable Bus Safety Incidents (80% Collisions, 20% Onboard Trips & Falls), 20 of these victims with serious and/or life-changing injuries;
• People killed and seriously injured from Bus Safety Incidents (80% Collisions, 20% Onboard Trips & Falls) are now higher than 2016 despite a) the total number of bus miles has fallen b) the total number of bus users has fallen (c) the total number of buses in London's contracted bus fleet has fallen (d) the total number of Bus Drivers has fallen (e) since 2016, the Mayor of London has announced 3 'world leading' Bus Safety Programmes and a Vision Zero Programme.

Sources: Mayor of London; TfL; London Assembly

7. 25% of London Bus Routes don't have a toilet at 1 end for Bus Drivers.

Sources: Mayor of London; TfL; London Assembly

8. TfL has agreed with Bus Operators and Unite the Union that Bus Drivers don't need a toilet on any route round trip that lasts up to 150 minutes - this was agreed without a single bit of data (i.e, Human Factors Study, HSE Risk Assessment).

Sources: Mayor of London; TfL; London Assembly

9. TfL has evidence of (at least) 12 million (est.) Annual Bus Speeding incidents on file that it does not share with the Police; From January 2017 to January 2024, nearly half (44%) the Bus Collision Deaths occurred in 20mph (or less) zones.

Sources: Mayor of London; TfL; London Assembly

10. Since January 2016, more than 1 pedestrian per month has been injured by a TfL Bus hitting them in a zebra or pelican crossing.

Sources: Mayor of London; TfL; London Assembly

11. Since 1 April 2015, an average of 6 people per month (2022-23: 8 per month- getting worse) have been injured after being struck by a Bus Wing Mirror. 

Sources: Mayor of London; TfL; London Assembly

12. TfL received the highest Health & Safety Fine ever in July 2023 for HSE Failures on the Croydon Tram, a contracted surface transport operation that was founded, managed and monitored by TfL's Bus Executives.

Sources: Department of Justice; Mayor of London; TfL; London Assembly; Press Reports

13. While Sadiq Khan has been Mayor, 16 Pedestrians have been killed or seriously injured while in Traffic "Refuges";

Sources: Mayor of London; TfL; London Assembly

14. TfL does not report Law-Breaking by Bus Drivers to the Metropolitan Police for, inter alia—

• Running Red Lights
• Speeding

Sources: Mayor of London; TfL; London Assembly

15. TfL Bus Drivers had the highest rate of death (per 100 thousand) from Covid-19 for any UK Profession (that includes Doctors, Nurses and Healthcare workers)—

• Over Two-Thirds of the TfL Bus Drivers who died from Covid-19 did so after the first Lockdown;
• TfL data shows Bus Drivers were still dying from Covid-19 through 2022, after which it stopped collecting this information; 
• TfL has never requested any of its Bus Operators to provide a Covid-19 Garage Risk Assessment.

Sources: Mayor of London; TfL; London Assembly; University College London

Notes to Sources:

1. Analysis of published DfT Data— 

In March 2023, 30,154 buses were operated by local bus services in England, with 8,788 of them in London

 

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/annual-bus-statistics-year-ending-march-2023/annual-bus-statistics-year-ending-march-2023

 

2.  Analysis Data Extracted from TfL's "Casualties in London" Reports; DfT Annual Bus Statistics; TfL "Travel in London" Reports; London Assembly Investigations; Mayor's Questions

"Buses contracted to Transport for London (TfL) constitute approximately 2% of total motorized road traffic in Greater London. This includes all buses, not just TfL-contracted ones, but TfL buses dominate the category."

 

https://content.tfl.gov.uk/technical-note-07-what-are-the-trends-and-patterns-of-bus-and-coach-traffic.pdf?t&utm_source=perplexity

 

"The percentage of TfL buses in total traffic has seen fluctuations over the years. In 2019/20, buses constituted about 1.2% of motorized road traffic in Greater London. This percentage dropped significantly during the pandemic in 2020/21 to 0.4%, reflecting reduced public transport usage. By 2022/23, the percentage had rebounded to around 1.5%. This indicates a recovery trend but still not reaching pre-pandemic levels."

 

https://content.tfl.gov.uk/travel-in-london-2023-trends-in-public-transport-demand-and-operational-performance-acc.pdf?t&utm_source=perplexity

London Assembly: https://www.london.gov.uk/about-us/londonassembly/meetings/documents/s110115/Appendix%201%20-%20Letter%20from%20Tom%20Kearney%20received%2015%20December%202023.pdf

3. Mayor's Questions, TfL's published Bus Performance Data, Internal Bus Operator Communications

https://www.london.gov.uk/who-we-are/what-london-assembly-does/questions-mayor/find-an-answer/refusal-benchmark-londons-safety-performance-world-city-peers

5 Year Data (2015-2019)

 

https://www.london.gov.uk/questions/sites/default/files/3828%20Refusal%20to%20Benchmark%20Londons%20safety%20performance%20attachment.pdf

4. https://www.london.gov.uk/who-we-are/what-london-assembly-does/questions-mayor/find-an-answer/vision-zero-tfls-bus-tendering-system-and-ksis-bus-safety-incidents

5.  http://content.tfl.gov.uk/bus-driver-fatigue-report.pdf 

6.  https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/publications-and-reports/bus-safety-data

7.  https://www.london.gov.uk/who-we-are/what-london-assembly-does/questions-mayor/find-an-answer/lack-toilet-dignity-london-bus-drivers-name-borough-where-toilet-not-provided-end-bus-route

8. https://www.london.gov.uk/who-we-are/what-london-assembly-does/questions-mayor/find-an-answer/negligence-and-toilet-priority-classification-agreed-between-tfl-unite-union-and-its-bus-contractors

9. https://www.london.gov.uk/who-we-are/what-london-assembly-does/questions-mayor/find-an-answer/speed-compliance-tool-information-contained-recent-go-ahead-london-training-video; 

https://www.london.gov.uk/who-we-are/what-london-assembly-does/questions-mayor/find-an-answer/bus-collision-deaths-20mph-or-lower-zones-2016-q1-2024;

https://www.london.gov.uk/who-we-are/what-london-assembly-does/questions-mayor/find-an-answer/vision-zero-speed-compliance-tool-data-and-ksi-incidents

10. https://www.london.gov.uk/who-we-are/what-london-assembly-does/questions-mayor/find-an-answer/nimi-reports-and-tfl-bus-drivers-critically-injuring-pedestrians-zebra-crossings-1-january-2016-11

11. https://www.london.gov.uk/who-we-are/what-london-assembly-does/questions-mayor/find-an-answer/vision-zero-pedestrians-struck-bus-mirrors-1-january-2018-30-september-2023

12. https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/R-v-TfL-270723.pdf

13. https://www.london.gov.uk/who-we-are/what-london-assembly-does/questions-mayor/find-an-answer/vision-zero-bus-collision-ksis-crossing-islands

14. https://www.london.gov.uk/who-we-are/what-london-assembly-does/questions-mayor/find-an-answer/signal-passed-danger-spad-3; 

https://www.london.gov.uk/who-we-are/what-london-assembly-does/questions-mayor/find-an-answer/vision-zero-speed-compliance-tool-data-and-ksi-incidents

15. https://content.tfl.gov.uk/initial-assessment-of-london-bus-driver-mortality-from-covid-19.pdf;

https://www.london.gov.uk/who-we-are/what-london-assembly-does/questions-mayor/find-an-answer/number-bus-workers-who-died-covid-19-march-2020-november-2023;

https://www.london.gov.uk/who-we-are/what-london-assembly-does/questions-mayor/find-an-answer/update-employers-bus-workers-who-died-covid-19-march-2020-june-2023

THE CURE 

Pulse, June 1992

by Simon Reynolds

Robert Smith sits alone at the office of Fiction, the U.K. label of the Cure, the band he formed at age 17 and has led for a decade and a half since. It's a rare opportunity to meet one-on-one with the group's vocalist, songwriter and sometimes-guitarist; determined to promote the idea that "The Cure Is A Band," all of Smith 's recent encounters have seen him flanked by his cohorts: drummer Boris Williams , guitarists Porl Thompson and Perry Bamonte , and longest serving Cure member, bassist Simon Gallup 

Tonight the ageless Smith , who's wearing eyeliner but no trace of lipstick, looks somewhat drained after a five hour session with his accountant, doubtless administering the lucre generated by the Stateside success of the Disintegration album and the "best of" compilation Standing on a Beach/Staring at the Sea. After years as a cult icon, the Cure is now a big band, but without the coarsening and adherence to formula that such mass popularity usually requires.

The Cure began in 1976 as the Easy Cure, then a trio, spurred into being by punk's do it yourself fervor. The groups 1979 debut, Three Imaginary Boys, lay somewhere between power pop and the edgy, art-punk-minimalism of Wire and Siouxsie and the Banshees, the latter of whom Chris Parry signed to Polydor before starting his Fiction label, with the Cure as its flagship. (With a few early singles tagged on, the debut is titled Boys Don't Cry in the US, where the groups albums are available on Elektra/Fiction, unless otherwise noted.) With Seventeen Seconds (1980) and Faith (1981), the Cure's tormented angst-rock garnered an intensely devout cult following. By Pornography (1982), the group's music had reached a peak of morbid introspection that many found impenetrable. After this high-point of alienation Smith veered toward pop with the vaguely dance-oriented Lets Go To Bed and The Walk singles. But it was only with 1983's Lovecats that the Cure really got a handle on the joie de vivre of pure pop. A singles collection, Japanese Whispers (Fiction/Sire in the US), marked the breakthrough.

Thereafter, the Cure's albums - The Top (1984), The Head on the Door (1985) and Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me (1987) - explored both life's dark side and its light-hearted aspects; stylistically, the group shed the oppressively homogenous sound of its angst era for a kaleidoscope of psychedelic, art-rock and mutant pop textures. Disintegration(1989) was a slight return to the morose Cure of the early 80's, but that didn't prevent the first single Love Song, from reaching number two on the US charts. By the end of the decade the Cure had sold over eight million records worldwide without ever having settled into a predictable career trajectory or losing its innate combustibility. As Smith once put it, If I didn't feel the Cure could fall apart any minute, it would be completely worthless.

Despite Smith and his group's contrary nature, much of the new album Wish , is surprisingly in sync with the British alternative state-of-art - not that Robert Smith 's ever been afraid to be affected by the pop climate (remember the New Order tribute/pastiche of Inbetween Days from Head On The Door ?). But on Wish it sounds like he's been listening closely to the British movement of "shoegazers" or "The Scene That Celebrates Itself", and in particular to Ride and My Bloody Valentine (both bands for which he professed admiration). You can hear it in the super saturated Husker Du meets Hendrix maelstrom of End, in the oceanic iridescence of From The Edge Of The Deep Green Sea, and in the gilded, glazed guitar mosaics of High and To Wish Impossible Things, all of which vaguely resemble shoegazers like Slowdive and Lush. The Cure has made these kinds of noises before (indeed, a number of shoegazers have been influenced by Smith 's group and Siouxsie and The Banshees). But it hasn't made them for a while, and never in such a timely fashion.

"I definitely think it would have been a totally different record if we'd had the same songs but recorded them at the time of Disintegration," Robert Smith agrees. But he says it was actually recording the wah-wah tempest of Never Enough (the only new song on the group's 1990 remix album, Mixed Up) that made the Cure want to be a guitar band again.

According to Smith , when keyboard player Roger O'Donnell slipped out of the group after the Disintegration tour, the Cure decided to replace him with another guitarist, Perry Bamonte . "Porl Thompson 's always been very guitar oriented, he's got loads of old guitars and amps and he's always very worried about his sound. In the past he's probably been restrained by the group and by the way I've always liked things to be very minimal. But this times everyone's played out a bit more. Because we didn't have a keyboard player, no one was really bothered with working out keyboard parts. On Disintegration there were all these lush synthesizer arrangements, but this time we tried to do it mostly with guitars. We also had in mind the way it feels live, to play as a guitar band; its so much more exciting."

The new album is a stylistic mixed bag, whereas Disintegration was a more uniform, emotionally and musically: a steady wash of somber sound and mood. Wish spans a spectrum of feelings from giddy euphoria to deep melancholy, from bewilderment to idyllic nonchalance.

"Disintegration was less obviously varied as this album," says Smith , "but there were songs like Lullaby, Love Song, Fascination Street, that were nothing to do with the rest of the album. But overall there was a mood slightly...downered. Even on Lullaby there was a somber side to it. Whereas on this album there are some out-and-out jump in the air type songs."

Some of Wish's songs are fairly legible, like the poignant Apart, which deals with the desolation that comes when a gulf inexplicably opens up between lovers. Others are harder to fathom. "End beseeches, "please stop loving me, I am none of these things, but it's not clear if the plea's addressed to the Cure fans, Smith 's wife, to a friend...

"It's kind of a mixture", says Smith . "In one sense, its me addressing myself. It's about the persona I sometimes fall into. On another level, it's addressed to people who expect me to know things and have answers - fans, and on a personal level, certain individuals. And it has a broader idea, to do with the way you fall into a way of acting that isn't really true, but because it's the easy path, it just becomes habitual even though it's not really the way you want to be. Sometimes whole relationships are based on these habits. It goes beyond my circumstances as a star, because I think a lot of people put on an act. I think I had it at the back of my mind when I wrote the song that when it came to performing it live, it would remind me that I'm not reducible to what I am doing. I do need reminding, because it's got to the scale where I could quite happily fall into the rock star trip. It might seem like its quite late in the day for it to all go to my head, since we've been going so long, but the success has reached the magnitude where it's insistent and insidious.

On End, Smith also bemoans the fact that all my wishes have come true. It must be something that he's felt at several points in his career: been there, done that... so what now? .

"Any desires I have left unfulfilled," says Smith, "are so extreme that there's no chance of them ever happening. I would really love to go into space, I always have since I was little, but as I get older, it's less and less likely that I'd pass the medical! The only things that I wish for are the unattainable things. Apart from that, I don't really have strong desires, except on behalf of other people. Generally, peace and plenty. My wishes are more on a global level. To Wish Impossible Things Is specifically about relationships. The notion of Three Wishes, all though history, has this aspect where if you wish for selfish things, it backfires on the third wish. But wishes never seem to take in the notion of wishing for other people, general wishes, or wishes about interacting with other people. In all relationships, there's always aching holes, and that's where the impossible wishes come into it"

"Doing the Unstuck: seems to be about disconnecting from the hectic schedules from productive life, and drifting in innocent blissful indolence. It's something Smith wishes he could do more often.

"I was going to say that my biggest wish was not to have to get up in the morning, and that's not strictly true, but there are days when I feel like that. It's like watching models saying that they've got a glamorous life, and then you find out that they can't eat what they want, they can't drink, they have to get up at five in the morning and get to bed by nine at night, and the truth is that they don't do anything glamorous at all except walk up and down the catwalk and wander about in front of cameras. It's one of those myths that modeling is glamorous, because it looks like glamour. And sometimes I think to myself ,'I'm free, I don't have to get up', but that's not the case cos I'm always doing something. Sometimes there are days where I refuse to do my duties. And I think there should be moments in everyone's lives where they take that risk and say 'Oh fuck it, I'm not prepared to carry on functioning'. I suppose that's a feeling you would associate with being in the Cure. Unstuck is about throwing your hands in the air and saying, 'I'm off'. But then again there is a thread running through the Cure that's all about escapism."

In fact, a lot of what the Cure is about is a refusal, or at least a reluctance, to grow up, to desire to avoid all the things (responsibility, compromise, sobriety) that come with adulthood. Despite being a very big business, at the heart of the Cure is a spirit of play.

"I met some people recently," says Smith, "and I guessed really wildly and inaccurately about their age. I thought they were in their forties, but they were only two years older than me, in their mid-30's. They'd passed across the great divide. Some of it's to do with having children. I don't see why they can't continue being like a kid. Obviously you change as you grow old, you become more cynical, but there are people that manage to avoid that. I know a couple people that are still quite a bit older than me, but are still genuinely excited by things; they do things and really get caught up in them. Children can do that, get caught up in non-productive activity, but its harder and harder to do that as you get older. At least, not unless you take mind- altering substances, of course!"

Robert Smith grew up in Crawley, a quintessentially English suburb. And the Cure's following has always consisted of that handful of lost dreamers in every suburban small town, that together make up a vast legion of the unaffiliated and disillusioned, who dream of a vague "something more" from life but secretly deep down inside know they will probably never get it. The Cure has always had an escapist, magical mystery side to their music, but the other half of its repertoire has been mope rock, forlorn and mournful for the lost innocence of childhood, and the prematurely foregone possibilities of adolescence.

Smith himself, however, is not so sure that the Cure represents lost dreams for lost dreamers; he's reluctant to reduce Cure fans to a type.

"I think our audience has now got so diverse where it seems weird to talk in general terms about what we represent to them. The Cure is liked by some people that I don't even like! There's people who like us just because we do good pop singles like High. There's other people who'd die for the group. When it gets to that level, people who are really caught up in the band,it's frightening to be a part of it, because I know that we don't understand anything better than those people. We represent different things to different things to different people, even from country to country. Even to different sexes and to different age groups. Polygram commissioned a survey of Cure fans, because I've had this long running argument with record companies about what constitutes our audience. The companies believe the media representations of the Cure audience as all dressed in black, sitting alone in their bedrooms, being miserable. And they were shocked at the actual breadth of the Cure audience. I don't know what we represent to them. I don't even know what the Cure represents to me! If we hadn't had the good songs throughout our history, to back up our attitude, we wouldn't have gotten this far. All that stuff about what we mean to our fans is too muddled to unravel really. We are a very selfish group. We don't worry about what we represent."

But perhaps its this very self-indulgence that is part of the Cure's appeal. Most people are obliged to forego following their whims and fancies, are forced to be responsible and regular. Perhaps the Cure represents a life based on exploring your own thoughts, exploring sounds, being playful. Smith thinks this might be true of its hardcore audience, the people who like us past a certain age. But at heart, he's wary of dissecting the what is exactly it is that the Cure's following get out of the group, or why they're so devoutly loyal.

"Maybe too much emphasis is placed on our hardcore fans. I feel sometimes like I'm crusading on behalf of something, and that this is going to pin me down to something that I'd ultimately resent. I've been through that with Faith and Pornography, people wanting me and the Cure to stand for something." Smith 's referring to his early-80's status as Messiah for the overcoat-clad tribe of gloom and doomers. "All that nearly drove me round the bend and I don't need any encouragement."

Part of Robert Smith 's appeal, at least to the female half of the Cure following, has always been his little lost boy aura. Bright girls dream of a boy who does cry, who's vulnerable, sensitive, even though few find one. Even now he still seems more like a "boy" than a "man". (Smith has just turned 33, Wish was released on his birthday, April 21)

"I was faced by this dilemma with the lyrics of Wendy Time on the album. It's the first time I've used the word 'man' in relationship to myself in a song. So it is seeping through into music. Five years ago, the line in question would have been 'the last boy on earth.' I've always been worried about doing music past the age of 30, about how to retain a certain dignity. The vulnerable, lost little boy side of my image is gradually disappearing, if it isn't gone already. But the emotional side of the group will never disappear, I'm in the unusual position of having four very close male friends around me in this group; I don't feel the slightest bit of inhibition around them. I've got more intimate as I've got older."

Around the time of Disintegration, Robert Smith declared," I think we're still a punk band. It's an attitude more than anything". 

The history of the last 15 years of British rock has been a series of disagreements about what exactly that attitude was. Groups have gone on wildly different trajectories - from ABC to the Style Council to the Pogues to the KLF- in pursuit of their cherished version of what punk was all about.

"Living in Crawley, travelling up to London to see punk gigs in 1977", reminisces Smith, "what inspired me was the notion that you could do it yourself. The bands were so awful I really didn't think, 'if they're doin it, I can do it'. It was loud and fast and noisy, and I was at the right age for that. Because of not living in London or other big punk centers, it wasn't a stylistic thing for me. If you walked around Crawley with safety pins, you'd get beaten up. The risked involved didn't seem to make sense. So luckily there aren't any photos of me in bondage trousers. I thought punk was more a mental state.

"The very first time we played at our school hall, we bluffed our way in by saying we were gonna play jazz-fusion, then started playing loud fast music. And that made us a punk band, so everyone hated us and walked out, but we didn't care cuz we were doin what we wanted. I suppose that all punk means to me is: not compromising and not doing things that you don't want to do. And anyone who follows that is a punk, I guess. But then, that could make Phil Collins punk, if he's genuinely into what he does!"

The Cure was never a threat; its particular effect was more on the level of mischief or mystery. Groups who start out making grand confrontational gestures tend to buckle rather quickly and turn into transvestites. But the Cure has endured by being elusive, indeterminate, unpredictable. It's sold a lot of records but it has never pandered.

"We've never really been bothered with confronting people. We've gradually become more accepted, just 'cos we've been around for so long. We've upset a lot of people in the business 'cos we've shown that you can do things exactly how you want and be successful. Most confrontational gestures are so shallow that they're laughable. The KLF carrying machine guns at the British record industry awards - you just have to look at the front page of any newspaper to put that kind of gesture in proper perspective. There should be confrontation in pop, but I think the people doing it often believe they are achieving a lot more than they actually are. The premeditated, Malcolm McLaren idea of confrontation is lamentable. Things are only really threatening if someone does something for it's own sake and it happens to upset people. The only time we've come close to that is the Killing an Arab debacle."

That song was grossly misconstrued as racist by sections of the US media. In fact, it was inspired by Camus' novel The Stranger, the story of a nihilistic young man in French colonial Algeria, who, involved in an altercation with a native, chooses to pull the trigger out of sheer fatalistic indifference. Embroiled in unwanted controversy, Smith was obliged to defend himself, denouncing his accusers as Philistine bigots. "For a couple of days we made the national news in America. And it was the last thing in the world I wanted to get caught up in. Debating Camus on US cable television was totally surreal."

The Cure hasn't been subversive so much as topsy-turvy: by cultivating its capacity for caprice and perversity, it's managed to remain indefinable.

"It's very difficult, having been around so long; a persona builds up around you that's continually reinforced despite your attempts to break away from it. It's like trying to fight your way out of papier-mache; There's always people sticking bits of wet newspaper to you all the time. I conjure up in my mind figures like Jim Kerr [of Simple Minds] or Bono, and I always have an image of what they represent. It might be really far away from the truth, but they're trapped in it. I often hear people say or read things about me and the group and they are completely at odds with how I think about us. We do things from time to time that are mischievous, and in the videos we play around with caricatures of ourselves. But at other times, we're not really mischievous: That implies that we're doing things for nuisance value, and we never have. We can't win really: we're either considered a really doomy group that inspires suicides or a we're a bunch of whimsical wackos. We've never really been championed or considered hip, and so we've never been treated as a group that stands for something, like, say Neil Young or the Fall have. Which I'm glad about, but the downside is that we're dismissed as either suicidal or whimsical."

For all Smith 's belief that the "attitude" has been a constant, the Cure didn't really draw much from the punk, apart from the initial impetus to do-it-themselves. Punk's main influence on the Cure was minimalism, a distaste for sonic excess. Hence, the clipped crisp power pop of Boys Don't Cry, the terse, translucent, bleakly oblique Seventeen Seconds. When the Cure tried to develop musically, while still inhibited by punks less-is-more aesthetic, the result was the grey draze of Faith and the angst - ridden entropy of Pornography - some of the most dispirited and dehydrated music ever put to vinyl. But once the Cure stepped out of the fog of post-punk production and into the glossy light of Love Cats, it wasn't long before the group became what it always essentially was, an art-rock group, maximalist rather than minimalist, indulgent rather than austere. And then came the over-ripe, highly strung textures of The Top and Head on the Door, the sprawling art-pop explorations of Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, the lush luxurious desolation of Disintegration.

The truth is that punk rock was just a blip, a brief interruption, in the perennial tradition of English art-rock. Robert Smith was once described by the Aquarian Weekly as "the male Kate Bush", which is probably going way too far, but it does highlight the way the Cure enjoys the English art- rock blessing/curses of eccentricity, self-consciousness, stylization, preciousness. Above all, the Cure has always been a literate band. Smith is a voracious reader. Recent input includes Stendhal ("very trying"), Blaise Cendrars ("very peculiar"), the poems of Catullus ("very ribald"). And Nietszche. 

"I just read Ecce Homo, which he wrote at the end of his life, when he was going mad. It's Nietszche summing up his life and his work, and it's pretty disturbing, by the end he's majestically deluded. I also read a book about Nietszche and that era. I didn't realize that his sister founded New Germania in Paraguay. She took 82 perfect Aryan specimens and attempted to found the new super race. The colony is now virtually extinct, because there was so much inter-breeding over four generations.

"I try and combat this feeling that I'm missing out on something very fundamental to life that I should have by now realized, by reading ferociously. And I still come to books that have been recommended to me by people I consider wise, and I always wonder "have I missed the point, or is this something I knew anyway". I think it's really worrying, getting older and not really knowing anything more intellectually. I don't think I know any more than when I was 15, except on an experiential level. I only know things that I wish I didn't know. But I never really craved wisdom. I enjoy the discussions we have in the group. Everyone's well read. The discussions can soar sometimes".

Which leads on to another set of polarities that Robert Smith oscillates between. On one hand, he's arty and literate; on the other, he's very much 'an ordinary bloke', partial to beer, soccer, Indian food, soap operas.

"I don't think its two sides to my character; its all me. In the group we have quite intense emotional conversations about things. At the same time, we can go to the pub and get so drunk that I don't remember how I got home, but I don't feel bad about it later; I don't think it doesn't fit with how I'm supposed to be. Equally, I wouldn't feel embarrassed if someone asked me what I was reading at the studio, and I said Love by Stendhal. I never feel guilty about either end of the spectrum. I object to people who only exist to go down to the pub, or people who think 'oh no, you can't watch football, its just a pack of men kicking a ball 'round a field.' I would feel weird excluding one aspect 'cos I felt it wasn't appropriate. It's all me."

recycled as

The Cure: Robert Smith's Wish List

Christmas 1992 issue of Melody Maker (19 December 1992)  

by Simon Reynolds

Fifteen years on, The Cure are post-punk's hardy perennial. Of all their peers, they're virtually alone in making it to stadium level without pandering or becoming a grotesque self-parody. And 1992 was another great year for the band, with the mega-selling Wish album and a mammoth world tour. In a rare solo conversation, Robert Smith talks about 'Wish', about The Cure's following, about the pressures of being at the helm of a Post-Punk Institution, and his own status as an icon.

ON 'WISH' AND BEING INFLUENCED BY YOUNG BLOODS LIKE MBV AND RIDE

"I definitely think it would have been a totally different record record if we'd had the same songs but recorded them at the time of Disintegration. But it was actually doing 'Never Enough' for Mixed Up that made us want to be a guitar band again. Porl Thompson's always been very guitar-oriented, he's got loads of old guitars and amps, and in the past, he's probably been constrained by the way I've liked things to be very minimal. But for Wish everyone played out a bit more. We also had in mind the way it feels live to play as a guitar band, it's so much more exciting. The album does sound current in one way, but in another way it sounds timeless. Because a lot of the references are to earlier incarnations of The Cure. 'Friday I'm In Love' reminds me of 'Boys Don't Cry'. That old-fashioned Beatles craft of the perfect pop song."

ON 'END', AND THE LINE 'PLEASE STOP LOVING ME, I AM NONE OF THESE THINGS'

"In one sense, it's me addressing myself. It's about the personal sometimes fall into. On another level, it's addressed to people who expect me to know things and have answers - fans, and on a personal level, certain individuals. And it has a broader idea, to do with the way you fall into a path, it just becomes habitual even though it's not really the way you want to be. Sometimes, whole relationships are based on these habits. It goes beyond my circumstances as a star, because I think a lot of people put on an act. I think I had it in the back of my mind when I wrote the song that when came to performing it on the tour, it would remind me each night that I'm not reducible to what I'm doing. I do need reminding. Because it's got to the scale now where I could quite happily fall into the rock star trip. It might seem like it's quite late in the day for it to go to my head, since we've been going so long, but our success has reached the kind of magnitude where it's insistent and insidious."

ON 'TO WISH IMPOSSIBLE THINGS'

"I do sometimes wonder 'What is there left for me to do?' At the same time, I never really had the burning ambition to achieve what I supposedly achieved. So it's more of a general feeling that there only appears to be so much you can experience. And a feeling of wanting to have the courage to break away from what I'm doing, with which I'm comfortable. I think maybe I should do something I don't feel confident about, to try to get back that sense of danger. But then I wonder if I really miss that danger. Do I really want to sacrifice my happiness for the chance of experiencing more, when I've already jeopardised my entire life many times just for the sake of experiencing things?

"Any desires I have left unfulfilled are so extreme there's almost no chance of them happening. But I would really love to go into space, I always have since I was little, but as I get older, it's less and less likely I'd pass the medical! The only things I wish for are the unattainable things. Apart from that, I don't really have strong desires, except on behalf of other people. Generally, peace and plenty. My wishes are more on a global level. 'To Wish Impossible Things' is specifically about relationships. The notion of three wishes, all through history, has this aspect where, if you wish for selfish things, it backfires on the third wish. But wishes never seem to take in the notion of wishing for other people, general wishes or wishes about interacting with other people. In all relationships, there are always aching holes, and that's where the impossible wishes come into it."

ON 'DOING THE UNSTUCK'

"I was going to say that my biggest wish was not to have to get up in the morning, and that's not strictly true, but there are days when I feel like that. It's like watching models saying that they've got a really glamorous life, and then you find that they can't eat what they want, they can't drink, they have to get up at five in the morning and go to bed by nine at night, and the truth is that they don't do anything glamorous at all except walk up and down the catwalk and wander about in front of cameras. It's one of those myths, but modeling is glamorous, because it looks like glamour. And sometimes, I think to myself I'm free, I don't have to get up, but that's not the case cos I'm always doing something. Sometimes there are days when I refuse to do my duties. And I think there should be moments in everyone's lives where they take that risk and say 'Oh, fuck it, I'm not prepared to carry on functioning.' I suppose that's a feeling you wouldn't really associate with being in The Cure. But then again there is a thread running through The Cure that's all about escapism."

ON NOT WAITING TO GROW UP

"I met some people recently and I guessed really wildly and inaccurately at their age. I thought they were in their forties, but they were only two years older than me, in their mid-thirties. They'd passed across the great divide. Some of it's to do with having children. It has a very definite effect. A good effect, for some, but it does bring with it a sense of responsibility. I don't know what it is, but it's inherent in more people that it's not. People seem to want to grow up. And when they have children, they play with their kids, and it reminds them how it was to be young. But when they have to answer the door, they revert to being grown-up. I don't see whey they can't continue being like a kid. Obviously you change as you grow old, you become more cynical, but there are people who manage to avoid that. I know a couple of people who are quite a bit older than me, but they are still genuinely excited by things. They do things and really get caught up in them. Children can do that, get caught up I on-productive activity, but it's harder and harder to do that when you get older. At least, not unless you take mid-altering substance, of course!"

ON THE CURE'S FOLLOWING

"I think our experience has now got so diverse that it seems weird to talk in general terms about what we represent to them. The Cure are liked by some people I don't even like! There's people who like us just because we do good pop singles like 'High'. There's other people who'd die for the group. When it gets to that level, people who are really caught up in the band, it's frightening to be part of it, because I know that we don't understand life better than those people. We represent different things to different people, even from country to country. Even to different sexes and to different age groups. Polygram commissioned a survey of Cure fans, because I've had this long-running argument with record companies about what constitutes our audience. The companies believe the media representation of The Cure audience as all dressed in black, sitting alone in their bedrooms, being miserable. And they were shocked at the actual breadth of the Cure audience. I don't know what we represent to them. I don't even know what The Cure represents to me! If I considered us in those terms, what we stand for, I'd be very wary about putting a song like 'Friday I'm In Love' on the album. We are a very selfish group."

ON THE BURDEN OF BEING AN ICON

"I feel sometimes like I'm crusading on behalf of something, and that is going to pin me down to something that I'd ultimately resent. I've been through that with Faith and Pornography, people waiting for me and The Cure to stand for something. All that nearly drove me round the bend. And I don't need any encouragement.

ON HIS 'LITTLE BOY LOST' APPEAL, AND STILL FEELING MORE LIKE A BOY THAN A MAN, EVEN AT THE AGE OF 33

"'Wendy Time' is the first time I've used the word 'man' in relationship to myself in a song. So it is seeping through into the music. Five years ago, the line in question would have been 'the last boy on earth'. I've always been worried about doing music past the age of 30, about how to retain a certain dignity. The vulnerable, 'little boy lost' side of my image is gradually disappearing. I'm in the unusual position of having four very close male friends around me in this group, I don't feel the slightest bit of inhibition around them. I've got more intimate as I've got older."

ON HOW THE CURE ARE STILL A PUNK BAND

"Living in  Crawley, traveling up to London to see punk gigs in 1977, what inspired me was the notion that you could do it yourself. The bands were so awful I really did think 'If they're doing it, I can do it'. It was loud and fast and noisy, and I was at the right age for that. Because of not living in London or the other big punk centers, it wasn't a stylistic thing for me. If you walked around Crawley with safety pins you'd get beaten up. The risks involved didn't seem to make sense. So luckily there aren't any photos of me in bandage trousers. I thought punk was more a mental state.

"The first time we played in our school hall, we bluffed our way in by saying we are gonna play jazz-fusion, then started playing loud, fast music. And that made us a punk band, so everyone hated us and walked out, but we didn't care cos we were doing what we wanted. I suppose all that punk means to me is: not compromising and not doing things that you don't want to do. And anyone who follows that is a punk, I guess. But then, that could make Phil Collins punk, if he's genuinely into what he does!

"We've never really been bothered about confronting people. We've gradually become more accepted, just cos we've been around so long. We've upset a lot of people in the business cos we've shown that you can do things exactly how you want and be successful. Most confrontational gestures were so hollow that they're laughable. The KLF carrying machine guns at the British record industry awards - you just have to look at the front pages of any newspaper to put that kind of gesture in proper perspective.

There should be confrontation in pop, but I think people doing it often believe they're achieving a lot more than they actually are. The premeditated, Malcolm McLaren idea of confrontation is lamentable. Things are only really threatening if someone does something for its own sake and it happens to upset people. The only time we've even come close to that is the whole 'Killing An Arab' debacle. For a couple of days we made the national news in America. And it was the last thing in the world we wanted to get caught up in. Debating Camus on US cable television was totally surreal."

ON TRYING TO STAY AN ENIGMA

"It's very difficult, having been around for so long, a persona builds up around you that's continually reinforced despite your attempts to break away from it. It's like trying to fight you way out of paper mache, there's always people sticking bits of wet newspaper to you all the time. I conjure up in my mind figures like Jim Kerr or Bono, and I always have an image of what they represent. It might be really for away from the truth, but they're trapped in it. I often hear people say of write books about me and the group and they're completely at odds with how I think about us.

We do things from time to time that are mischievous, and in the videos we play around with caricatures of ourselves. But at other times, we're not really mischievous: that implies that we're doing things for nuisance value, and we never have. We can't win really: we're either considered a really doomy group that inspires suicides or we're a bunch of whimsical wackos. We've never really been championed or been hip, and so we've never really been treated as a group that stands for something, like say, Neil Young or The Fall have.

"It comes back to the idea that The Cure image is the non-image. We've been through every extreme, like the phase where we were sort of faceless in an archetypal early '80s way. Then four years later I was being slagged off for wearing too much make-up. Ultimately I can't take it too seriously. Through reading so many record reviews, I'm always staggered at the difference between what I'm listening to and what the critic thinks it's all about.

ON BEING A BOOKWORM

"I try and combat this feeling that I'm missing out on something very fundamental to that I should by now have realised, by reading ferociously. And I still come to the end of books that have been recommended to me by people I consider wise, and I always wonder 'Have I missed the point, or is this something that I knew anyway? I think it's really worrying, getting older, and not knowing anything more intellectually. I don't think I know anything more intellectually. I don't think I know anything more than when I was 15, except on experimental level. I only know things that I wish I didn't know. But I've never really craved wisdom. I enjoy the discussions we have in the group, everyone's well-read, the discussions can soar sometimes."

ON HIS SPLIT-PERSONA - HALF ART-ROCKER, HALF ORDINARY BLOKE

"I don't think it's two sides of my character, it's all of me. In the group, we have quite intense, emotional conversations about things. At the same time, we can go to the pub and get so drunk that I can remember how I got home. But I don't feel bad about it later, I don't think it doesn't fit with how I'm supposed to be. Equally, I wouldn't feel embarrassed if someone asked me what I'm reading at the studio, and I said Love by Stendhal.

I object to people who revel in either end of the spectrum and ignore the other aspect. People who only exist to go home the pub, of people who think 'Oh no, you can't watch football, it's just a pack of men kicking a ball around a field.' I would feel weird excluding one aspect cos felt it wasn't appropriate. It's all me."

Our first release of 2025 was announced today, featuring our very own Olga Wojciechowska, (Infinite Distances (2019), Unseen Traces (2020), and the 2022 collaboration with Scanner), alongside Tomasz Walkiewicz.

The Monoparts project was sent to me as unreleased material a few years back by Olga, and it was spoken of as something that would never see the light of day, due to the duo going their own ways.

It was put into rotation on 9128.live, and since then, I grew to love it so much, I made the steps to secure it as a release on ASIP.

In a dramatic departure, Olga unveils a new and unexpected side, debuting her haunting vocals—a delicate, spellbinding performance that recalls the golden era of trip-hop, and comparisons to the sounds pioneered by Tricky, Massive Attack, and Martina Topley-Bird.

"This album is like becoming one with the earth itself—feeling the rawness of the wood, tasting the earth in your mouth, and sensing the presence of ancient spirits. The music carries a deep, primal energy, like being part of the forest, with creatures watching you from the shadows." - Olga Wojciechowska

To complete the journey, ASC lends his signature touch with a stunning drum'n'bass reinterpretation, amplifying the album's nostalgic essence. Soothsayers emerges as a spellbinding ode to times gone by, in more ways than one.

Featuring artwork by Moon Patrol, with mastering and lacquer by Andreas LUPO Lubich, Soothsayers will be available on 12" maroon smoke-colored vinyl and Bandcamp on February 28th. Preorder is now available on Bandcamp and Space Cadets, with more stores to follow soon.

Save the Monday 24th for our listening party over on Bandcamp. RSVP here.

A 2018 piece for Stanford Live on Bowie's death and the art of the eulogy.

The night that the news went out that David Bowie had died, I was just finishing a book in which he was the central figure. On January 10th 2016, I was literally on the last pages of my glam rock history Shock and Awe when Twitter told me that this towering pop figure had fallen.

A mixture of emotions muddied my mind. Having labored for three years on the book, I felt like I had an unusual intimacy with Bowie, as if I truly understood his motivations - specifically that ache of emptiness that drove him in search of a succession of cutting edges, a desperate hunger for new ideas to kindle the creative spark within him. At the same time, having reached the end of my book, I felt oddly detached, as if I had finished with Bowie, or even - in some superstitious way -  finished him off.

Born in Great Britain, but a resident of America since 1995, for me Bowie's passing was further entangled with growing feelings of nostalgia: he'd loomed over the Seventies, my childhood, just like the Beatles had dominated the Sixties. Bowie's songs were a perpetual presence on U.K. radio; his face appeared regularly on TV, especially on the weekly pop show Top of the Pops.  From the entrancing strangeness of "Space Oddity", through the homoerotic intimations of "John, I'm Only Dancing", to the cross-dressing subversions of the promo video for "Boys Keep Swinging", Bowie had not only always been there, he'd always been startling.  For many people across the world, but particularly for those who grew up in the U.K. during that era, Bowie's sudden non-existence felt like a part of the sky had suddenly vanished.

More ignoble thoughts intruded amid the grief. I did think, selfishly,  "damn, there's going to be a flood of Bowie-related books rush-written, to compete with my own tome, over which I've toiled so diligently and protractedly."  There was annoyance too, as it became clear that despite my exhaustion I would have to resume work immediately and write an extra closing essay to round off the book. 

Ending Shock and Awe with Bowie peeved me because one intention starting out had been to put the man in his place just a little: I aimed to contextualise Bowie, reconstruct the culture and the rock music discourse out of which he'd emerged, while also elevating other artists now semi-forgotten but who at the time were considered his contemporaries and artistic equals (as well as often selling many more records than him, in fact).  I hadn't wanted my history to become his story - but here was Bowie upstaging everyone again, insisting on being the last word, or at least the last subject for my words, in  the Book of Glam.

Talking about upstaging - Bowie's death coincided with the Golden Globes, which meant that he knocked all the winners off the front page worldwide, outshone the world's stars with his own supernova. Including Lady Gaga - the figure who'd done her darnedest to be the Bowie of the 21st Century,  and that night had won a trophy for her turn in American Horror Story.

As I returned reluctantly to my computer, I pondered how to approach the daunting task of summing up a man's life and work. All around, online and in print, teemed thousands of public tributes and private testimonials - a fiesta of remembrance,  in which professional writers and fans alike competed to find fresh perspectives and idiosyncratic angles. Especially because my essay would have a longer shelf life, it felt like I should attempt to speak not just for my own feelings but for the larger community of people who had been affected by Bowie's existence. There were many notes being sounded in those weeks immediately after his death, but a prominent leitmotif was gratitude, tinged with self-congratulation. A sentiment crystallized sharpest in the widely circulated statement, mistakenly attributed to the actor Simon Pegg: "if you're sad today, just remember the Earth is over four billion years old and you somehow managed to exist at the same time as David Bowie."  As is so often the case with the passing of a pop-culture icon - think of Prince - it felt like people were mourning themselves by proxy, coming to terms with the fading of their own time, and holding fast to the consoling belief that they lived through an exceptional era.

I decided to approach the essay as a eulogy, written on behalf of the gathered grieving, yet I would also try for something almost impossible: a honest eulogy. In other words, I would aim to be true to the insights about his character,  motivations, influence and legacy that had emerged through writing the book (a verdict  more ambivalent than you might expect) while still transmitting a sense of awe that someone so strange and ambitious could have moved within the humble domain of pop music.  A sense of how improbable it all was, really -  and how unlikely to happen again, despite the wishful efforts of figures like Gaga, or Kanye West, or Janelle Monae, to achieve something equivalent in terms of art-into-pop impact. 

The root meaning of the word eulogy in Ancient Greek is "speak well." The funeral oration is meant to be a song of praise, and that means it almost inevitably becomes a whitewash, a lick of paint covering over the cracks and fault-lines. The death of someone is not the best time for airing the whole truth about that someone. Instead, just like the cosmetically-enhanced face of the dearly departed at an open-casket funeral, you are trying to fix the final and lasting image of that person as seen in their very best light. The mortician and the eulogist are in the same business really.

Amid the collective outpouring of grief and gratitude for Bowie's sonic and style innovations, his personae shifts and image games and the sheer drama of a career played out on the stage of the mass media, there was understandably scant inclination for a close examination of less wholesome or impressive sides of his work. Like that alarming phase in the mid-Seventies during which Bowie talked in fascist terms of the need for a strong leader and called for an anti-permissive crackdown on liberal decadence. Or all those credulous and indiscriminate flirtations with magic and mysticism that ran through much of his life (again reaching an unsightly climax in the cocaine-crazed years circa 1974-76).  People likewise didn't dwell much on the long period during which Bowie's Midas touch failed him: the years of the "Blue Jean" mini-film, the Glass Spider tour, Labyrinth, Tin Machine and the beard…  A period that if you were being honestly harsh constituted (give or take the occasional quite cool single) an unbroken desert of inspiration and direction that lasted two whole decades: 1983 to 2013, from the last bars of Let's Dance to the first of The Next Day. I distinctively remember that through much of that time, Bowie dropped away not just as figure who frequented the pop charts or commanded attention, but even as a reference point, something that new bands would cite as a model or touchstone. 

It makes sense that the least compelling phases or most questionable aspects of Bowie's life wouldn't figure in the immediate post-mortem reckoning. Speaking ill of the recently dead is not a good look. But something of Bowie's complexity - his flaws and his follies- got written out with the concentrated focus on his genius achievements, personal charm, and acts of generosity. 

Maybe it's my age, but I'm sure I can't be alone in feeling that important pop cultural figures are dying off at an accelerated rate. Then again, perhaps this is an illusion created by the sheer overload of coverage triggered by each passing: the internet and social media create so much opportunity and space for remembrance, and the profusion of outlets fuels a competition to offer ever more forensically deep or differently angled takes on the departed artist. There seems to be a widespread compulsion felt by civilians as well as professional pundits to make an immediate public statement: the news goes out that an icon has gone and Facebook teems with oddly official-sounding bits of writing that often read like obituaries with a slight first-person twist.

Sometimes I've felt that people protest a little too much about their intense relationship with the extinguished star. Where did all these people come from with their lifelong and surprisingly deep acquaintance with the oeuvre of Tom Petty?  Who knew there were people who bothered with the three George Michael albums after 1990's Listen With Prejudice Vol.1? And surely I'm not the only one out there who - while fully cognizant and wholly respectful of the world-historical eminence of Aretha Franklin - only ever owned her Greatest Hits and - if I'm honest - really only ever craves to hear "I Say A Little Prayer"?

The truth of pop for most people, I suspect, is that we use the music to soundtrack our lives, but in a fairly fickle, personal-pleasure attuned way, and - apart from a few formative exceptions, the kind of teen infatuations that shape worldviews - we seldom engage with the totality of an artist's work and life. Tom Petty, for me, boils down rather brutally to the urge to turn up the volume when "Free Falling" and "Don't Come Around Here No More" come on the radio (in other words, he's on the same level as The Steve Miller Band and Bachman-Turner Overdrive). Unfair or not, George Michael reduces to a couple of nifty Wham! singles plus "Faith" and "Freedom! '90". A few moments of unreflective pleasure in the lives of millions of casual listeners is no small achievement, although it wouldn't have been enough for these guys, who craved to be Serious Artists on the level of those they venerated: Dylan and the Byrds, for Petty…  someone like Stevie Wonder or Prince, for Michael. No amount of earnest reassessment or auteurist reappraisal could persuade me to dig deep into their discographies for those lost gems tucked away on Side 2 of a late-phase album.

You'll get no argument from me about Bowie, of course: career doldrums and dodgy opinions aside, he's as major an artist as rock has produced, worthy of taking as seriously as anybody (which is why the fascist flirtations and the half-baked occultism are troubling, as opposed to something you'd laugh off in a lesser figure). And Bowie also did what almost no fatally ill or otherwise declining pop star has ever managed, which is to go out on an artistic high. Beyond their musical daring and desperate expressive intensity, Blackstar and the videos for "Lazarus" and the title track made for a fitting last statement because of the sheer care that went into them. This was so utterly characteristic of Bowie and the way he went about things. Who among us - facing the final curtain, sick in body and frail of spirit - could have summoned the  obsessive energy and psychic strength to meticulously craft their artistic farewell to the world?  Who, confronting oblivion, would have been so concerned about how they looked and sounded at the end? Only Bowie.

As I found writing Shock and Awe, the beginning of Bowie's public life was faltering, a series of false starts and fumbled career moves. It took Bowie eight years of dithering and stylistic switches to really become a star. In contrast, the closing of his career was immaculately executed. What some sceptics always regarded as his core flaws - cold calculation, excessive control - triumphed at the end.  Bowie organized a grand exit so elegant that it fixed forever our final image of him, rendering all eulogies superfluous. 

I have been wracked by COVID over the last ten days. If I’m not hot enough to set paper aflame, I’m wet enough to single-handedly power a water slide. Throughout the night, every 25 minutes on the dot, I shed my own body mass in sweat like some kind of human hagfish. I take desperate midnight baths consisting of no more than 40% water: the rest is mucous and sweat (and pee the consistency of machine oil and the color of blood oranges, if I’m not fast enough hauling myself out of the tub when Nature calls). I fart like the Hindenburg. The BUG says she has not seen me laid this low since the days of Flesh-Eating Fest, over a dozen years ago.

And yet, I promised you all a Gallery update.

Normally I would just say, Fuck you all: I’m sick, you can wait another week or two. But this particular update has an inflexible expiry date, for it includes the printer files for Jon Bell’s Scrambler Christmas Ornaments, which are either useful now or not for another year. So I’m been slogging away. ragged, nauseous, the noblest Squid on the plain. Between hacks and migraines I’ve curated over sixty artifacts―thirty in the rifters gallery, the rest over in Blindopraxia―that would, I’m certain, comprise a special collection for the ages if only I could see the fucking things through the splinters in my eyes.

There are, as I’ve mentioned, the scrambler ornaments―just barely in under the wire, but that’s still plenty good enough for anyone with a maker in their possession. There’s a mini-soundtrack for Blindsight, courtesy of the composer who scored the only movie actually filmed in outer space. There are some surprisingly-good AI-generated renderings of the Juan de Fuca Ridge (also some slop, admittedly, but not a much as you might think). There’s some new official cover art out of Poland. There are radio spots, as capitalism staples on a cheery face to ring a few more bucks out of the apocalypse. And there’s an animated gif showing Sarasti as a furry.

Because of course there is.

Once I post this I expect to collapse either until the next drench sweat or until February. I will never do this again.

Merry Christmas.

The Core enters the pilot.

Ventilators boot up, hydraulics whisper reassurance, control surfaces flicker to life. Straps and webbing cinch tight, securing him to the command chair. Haptic controllers flex around his fingers; awakening subsystems chirp in readiness. The headrest jack snaps into his cervical socket.

It’s as though he’s been holding his breath for days, and can only now let it out. His gut unclenches; the tightness in his chest evaporates.    The tension accumulating like radioactive waste just— melts away. All the data embodied in this colossal prosthesis. All the telemetry flowing from a thousand sensors. The scales falling from his eyes, the fog lifting from his brain. A whole universe, stretching beyond the pitiful limits of flesh and blood: he mainlines it all.

He’s born again.

Shrieker shifts around him, responsive to his slightest movement. He leans forward and the great machine trembles as though straining at an invisible leash. He’s not just a pilot any more. Not just an individual: not a he but a they, a marvelous and grotesque fusion of meat and mech. A centaur.

Hanger doors rumble open onto the horizon. Shrieker steps forward. The ground trembles. The pilot looks down at Walter—tiny, insignificant Walter—already halfway to the foreman’s office in pursuit of some next priority that probably seems very important to him. I could kill you. It’s a distant thought, abstract and dispassionate. One step and I could squash you like a bug.

But what would be the point? Why waste even a thought on something so inconsequential when there’s a whole world out there waiting to be fought?

Shrieker emerges under an endless low-slung sky sick with electricity. Pneumatics hiss like rearing vipers as she rises to cruising height. Embodied, enhanced, alive, the colossus and the incandescent being in its heart head out across the desert."

SPOILERS FOLLOW

You can see it all, can't you? Some of you have seen it (well, except for the bit about Walter, who in the final cut is reduced to a few disembodied words in an earpiece) because the Blurmians translated those words into visuals so perfectly it took my breath away.

True, we never got to see Shrieker's real name in

stenciled block letters disfiguring the starboard flank: CHICXULUB. An ancient word from a forgotten world. Something about an asteroid. Walter sounded it out for him once—tsheek-shoy-lub—but it sounds even worse than it looks when the pilot tries to say it.

Shrieker. Close enough.

In fact, in the episode you actually do catch a glimpse of the name stenciled onto the carapace, and it's just—disappointingly—Shrieker. Too bad.

In the grander sense, though, who cares? Everything we did see was beautiful.

The actual story? Changed significantly, as I mentioned last post. And largely, as I also mentioned, for the better. When I was brought on board there was all this canon: a spice-like McGuffin called "coral", which acted as a networked intelligence and plastic explosive and (I kid you not) food source. The game Fires of Rubicon takes place on a planet ravaged by a catastrophe that burned all the coral off its face (along with about 95% of its biosphere); it begins fifty years later, when the Coral seems to be making a comeback and there's a gold rush booting up because He Who Controls The Coral Controls—

You get the idea.

The protagonist is called Raven. His handler is Walter, and he's a slippery cryptic sonofabitch who keeps his agenda very close to his chest. The voice in Raven's head is Ayre, and she appears to be a some kind of sentient iteration of Coral that interfaces with Raven's implants. I was originally retained to tell a story about these characters, but one that wouldn't give away any major plot or character elements of the actual game.

But mid-course, someone up the line decided that we couldn't call the pilot "Raven" and we couldn't call the coral "coral", because even those terms constituted spoilers. Even the term "Rubicon" was expunged. The story originally played out in…

"…the Glasslands now, cruising the radioactive slag at a cool three hundred kph. Far-off peaks jut over the horizon like tiny broken teeth. Obscene sculptures punctuate the landscape in the nearer distance, the half-melted corpses of old machinery from old wars. Some probably date back to the Calamity itself."

…"The Calamity" being, of course, the immolation of the Rubicon system when the Coral went supercritical fifty years earlier. The desert and slag are gone now, some winter world swapped in in their stead. (Glad to see that plenty of dead machinery made the cut, though.) Keanu's back tattoo notwithstanding, this dude isn't Raven. Cool sexy vibe notwithstanding, the voice in his head need not be Ayre. There's nothing in the final cut to even distinguish the world as Rubicon. So many details have been stripped away that this particular episode might fit almost anywhere in the Armored Core franchise—which was apparently the point.

Since the payoff of my story centered around the corpopolitics of coral on Rubicon, these changes left certain elements dead in the water. (The very title—"Asset Management"—derives from the way Walter treated Raven; with Walter virtually eliminated from the story, it dangles like a vestigial appendix.) But if some elements were killed, others were liberated. Without the need to bend the narrative to all that arcane filigreed lore, the character at the center of it all—a wasted addict in a codependent relationship with a suite of drugs, a suit of armor, and a voice in his head—could become a narrative focus rather than a vehicle. We could stop talking about magic tech and start talking about the Very Soul of the Machine.

That's what JT Petty did. That's what you see on the screen.

And yet, when all is said and done, I was delighted by how much of my story survived the refit. Dialog especially: a surprising amount made it through unscathed, and even the scathed material kept the right vibe. Ditto for the way JT translated the story's interior thoughts into spoken words when called for. No complaints.

The episode is the subject of a fair bit of back-and-forth over on Reddit. From what I can tell there seem to be two factions: one focuses on canonical minutiae, tries to fit various clues and Easter eggs together to figure out what generation of augments the protagonist is carrying, or precisely where in the AC universe this story fits (kinda like the way certain Tolkien fans kept trying to map Middle Earth onto locations IRL). And there's a lot for them to dig through; from the sound of it, "Asset Management" is jam-packed with call-outs and franchise references. Hell, even the cameo of an unkillable cockroach— something I'd just assumed was a brilliant little metaphor for the pilot himself— was apparently a call-out to some obscure bit of AC lore. But all those in-jokes were JT's doing. I've never played Armored Core; I knew nothing about it before Blur handed me a very comprehensive deck of docs on the lore. Whatever arcana I inserted was based on Fires of Rubicon, and was pretty much stripped out. The details the fans are poring over is 100% JT— and judging by how granular they're getting in their analyses, he did a kick-ass job at that. So I can see why so many hardcore fans are trying to fit all those pieces together, perhaps at the expense of the story itself. One negative review (one of the few, I'm relieved to say; the consensus is that "Asset Management" is one of the better episodes of the season) exemplifies this perfectly. IGN complained that the story focused more on the pilot than "the granular mech customization that is the cornerstone of the series". Apparently they regarded this as a bad thing.

The other Reddit faction is more interested in "Asset Management" as a self-contained story, without worrying too much about canonical consistency. They've generally been quite kind given that this story, these themes, were composed by someone who has never the played the game. The up side is that the story will hopefully be accessible to others who have never played the game. The eggs and references will go right over their heads; hopefully the thematic tension between conformity and individuality will land.

Also I should mention that I really enjoyed Reeves' performance. I see a lot of Johnny Silverhand references out there, and fair enough—but speaking as someone who's only just gotten around to playing Cyberpunk 2077 (I waited until they got the bugs out) I gotta say I prefer his performance here. Seems more natural, somehow. Grungier.

Is there anything I didn't like? In hindsight, there were fridge-logic issues with the ending. I loved the twist JT introduced—his ending packed way more of a punch than mine—but looking back you have to wonder why the other mech pilots didn't just radio their intentions before everything went to shit. Or at least use those cool energy weapons to carve We Come In Peace into the snow. I can think of a few reasons why they wouldn't do that just off the top of my head; a line of dialog, a single camera shot could have stitched that seam.

Also, maybe, the mech battle itself. Don't get me wrong: the mech battle as rendered was fucking spectacular. I'd been going for a kind of Enemy-Below/Balance-of-Terror vibe, though, something more tactical than button-mash. Much of the encounter I wrote was a game of cat-and-mouse in a derelict industrial wasteland full of giant storage tanks and pipes and the encrusted fifty-meter hulks of dead machinery. Shrieker got walloped right out of the gate and never fully recovered: barely held its own against two and suddenly there were four more coming out of nowhere. The voice in his head tells the pilot to drop and Shrieker drops, without the pilot even knowing why until "A beam of energy shatters the air just overhead, strips electrons from nuclei, draws a line of sun through the Rubicon atmosphere". The voice rattles off bearings and he shoots blindly, not knowing what at. Keanu takes a lot more on faith in the short story. You can see some tactical maneuvering if you slow the video right down and step through critical moments frame-by-frame, but viewed in realtime it’s gorgeous cinematic chaos. It would have worked spectacularly if I hadn't been expecting gambits and countergambits, moves and knight sacrifices.

It still worked plenty well enough, mind. And since the rest of you never read the story, I'm guessing it works even better for you.

Admittedly, the whole premise of giant mechs punching each other in the face is fundamentally silly— we're talking about a game here, not a peer-reviewed scenario for plausible off-world combat—so nitpicking over the implementation of specific tactics is probably missing the point. That's completely okay. Vampires are silly too, but you can still do interesting stuff with them thematically.

Anyway, that was it: my first brush with the cinematic arts. It was a blast working on it; it was a blast working with them.

I hope you dig the end result as much as I.

Which is what we called "Asset Management" behind the scenes, while I was writing it. Of course, back then I didn't know I was writing it for Keanu fucking Reeves.

Apparently they mentioned my name on some ComicCon panel about a month ago, which effectively lifted the embargo ("Brag #2" was as far as I could go back in September). Now they've released a couple of meaty clips over on YouTube. I am—I suppose the word is psyched.

You can see me in there, kind of. My dialog didn't make it through unscathed, because "Asset Management" incorporated specific game/plot elements that were declared off-limits post hoc (not really sure why; spoilers can't be much of of an issue for a game that came out over a year ago). The folks at Blur had to strip out a lot of details to make that work; they changed the ending entirely. But—and you don't see authors admit this very often, so take it to heart—I think their changes were for the better. I'd been writing within the constraints not just of Rubicon the world, but also of Armored Core VI's specific plot. Those constraints forced the story into a specific and complex mold. Unbound, though, it could assume a simpler and more natural shape.

So the dialog in one of these clips expresses the essence of what I wrote with slightly different verbiage. The dialog in the other is pretty much all me, but there's only one line of it so that's not saying much. The mech, as Keanu mentions, is called Shrieker— but that's just a phonetic simplification of a much more awkward spelling, with much more world-changing implications. I look forward to seeing whether we get to see the actual name stamped onto a breastplate or something.

Because I still haven't seen the whole thing, you see. Blur tried to slip me a copy, but Amazon was only willing to let it stream via a service that only supports two of the most pernicious and surveillant browsers on the planet (Chrome and Edge). It wouldn't play nicely with Firefox, Brave, and/or their associated privacy plug-ins— and there was no way I was gonna let those guards down. Hell, Amazon's one of the reasons I have them up in the first place.

So once you check out the clips you'll have seen all I have. But the good news is, those moments are totally in sync with the vibe I was going for when I wrote the treatment. And the changes that make any difference at all are improvements.

For a proper assessment, of course, I'll just have to wait until December 10th with the rest of you. Steal the ep when it drops.

"In 1933, people were not fooled by propaganda. They elected a leader who openly disclosed his plans with great clarity. The Germans elected me… ordinary people who chose to elect an extraordinary man, and entrust the fate of the country to him.

“What do you want to do, Sawatzki? Ban elections?"

—Adolph Hitler, "Er Ist Wieder Da" (2015)

Pete Townshend's prayer has gone unanswered.

The US Dollar is "surging" even as I type, along with shares in Bitcoin and Tesla. Wall Street opened at an all-time high. The world's leaders, scared shitless, scramble over each other to fall in line and congratulate the new/old boss on his resurrection. The world's tyrants and shitstains—Orban, Netanyahu, Bolsonaro— were of course at the front of the line[1], but even vacuous ineffectual bobbleheads like Canada's own PM jump up and down like eager puppies, reminding Dear Leader of a friendship "united by a shared history, common values and steadfast ties between our peoples". (And, as the BUG astutely remarked, wouldn't it be interesting to see the alternate statements all these folks had doubtless prepared in the event that the merely mediocre candidate had triumphed over the apocalyptically bad one?)

Trump may not have spoken with the "great clarity" that Hitler commanded, but it's not as if he hid his agenda. He won anyway, handily. I guess you really do get the government you deserve.

And yet, for all Trump's hateful narcissistic idiocy, he's not really the problem. Trump is merely a symptom. The problem is a political system that rewards the world's Trumps with massive power and influence, instead of marginalizing them. A number of left-leaning 'Murricans—most, I'd wager—seem to regard their homeland as a great nation, a shining experiment in liberty and democracy, that somehow lost its way. I tend to be less charitable. The US is a nation literally founded on invasion, slavery, and germ warfare—which is to say, it was born in the universal reality of human beings fucking each other over for a percentage. It is a global case-in-point of Homo so-called sapiens belying its own self-aggrandizing myths and behaving exactly like the social mammals we are: short-sighted apes, prioritizing the approval of the tribe over long-term consequences our intellects grasp dimly at best, and our guts reject outright. Facts don't matter. Truth is not the survival trait. Conformity is: defense of the tribe, hatred of The Other.

U S A. U S A.

Is there hope? Perhaps a little: ironically, in the crushing of hope. Because despite what the hopepunks have been wittering on about all these years—despite the bromides about how we should stop writing dystopias and never say 1.5° is 'unachievable' because to do so would give in to paralyzing narratives of hopelessness and despair—we have evidence that the exact opposite is true. Ballew et al over at Nature report that "Climate change psychological distress is associated with increased collective climate action". People who are bummed out and distressed about the state of the environment are more likely to get off their asses and do something than are all those cozy optimists who tell us to put on a happy face because We Live In The Greatest Nation On Earth and Things Will Work Out Somehow. Ballew et al show, at high levels of significance, that the Hope Police have their heads up their asses.

This study, admittedly, did not explicitly deal with Gileads-in-the-making, with the unchecked power of demagogues or the stripping away of Human rights. It deals with our reaction to environmental havoc—and even if that's all it applies to, I'm cool with it. I personally am more concerned about ecocide than Human rights. Treating each other like shit at least keeps our sins in the family—and frankly, given the contempt with which we treat the rest of the biosphere, I'm skeptical that Humans even deserve "rights". Certainly, Trump's victory has pretty much incinerated whatever faint hope we might still have had of turning things around environmentally. The world was already circling the toilet bowl on that front (and would doubtless have continued in that grim decaying orbit even if Harris had prevailed); Trump's victory flushes it down for good.

I'd be very surprised, though, if activism was catalyzed only by distress of the environmental kind. Almost certainly, it also maps onto the social distress currently being experienced even by all those Democrats who, according to polls and campaign priorities, really don't give a shit about climate change (at least, not relative to "the economy" or "the border"—remember how Harris flip-flopped on the whole fracking thing to appeal to her tribe?) Hell, how may pundits have already attributed Trump's victory to the distress-induced activism of Magats who found themselves paying too much for groceries?

So maybe this will be the impetus for something. Maybe "the resistance" will be more than an ineffectual Star Wars call-out this time around.

Maybe. But I'm gonna start pitching in on building this Wall anyway.

And on the plus side, all those environmental dystopias I wrote back in the day are looking increasingly prophetic. Should give my street cred a bit of a boost, until the book banners burn through all that gender smut and start looking further afield…

1. Except for Putin, curiously. Putin seems to be staying relatively quiet. Almost as if he doesn't need to kowtow, because he knows he'll get what he wants without any embarrassing displays of self-abasement… ↑

A Blast from the Past:

Arpanet.

Internet.

The Net. Not such an arrogant label, back when one was all they had.

Cyberspace lasted a bit longer— but space implies great empty vistas, a luminous galaxy of icons and avatars, a hallucinogenic dreamworld in 48-bit color. No sense of the meatgrinder in cyberspace. No hint of pestilence or predation, creatures with split-second lifespans tearing endlessly at each others’ throats. Cyberspace was a wistful fantasy-word, like hobbit or biodiversity, by the time Achilles Desjardins came onto the scene.

Onion and metabase were more current. New layers were forever being laid atop the old, each free—for a while—from the congestion and static that saturated its predecessors. Orders of magnitude accrued with each generation: more speed, more storage, more power. Information raced down conduits of fiberop, of rotazane, of quantum stuff so sheer its very existence was in doubt. Every decade saw a new backbone grafted onto the beast; then every few years. Every few months. The endless ascent of power and economy proceeded apace, not as steep a climb as during the fabled days of Moore, but steep enough.

And coming up from behind, racing after the expanding frontier, ran the progeny of laws much older than Moore’s.

It’s the pattern that matters, you see. Not the choice of building materials. Life is information, shaped by natural selection. Carbon’s just fashion, nucleic acids mere optional accessories. Electrons can do all that stuff, if they’re coded the right way.

It’s all just Pattern.

And so viruses begat filters; filters begat polymorphic counteragents; polymorphic counteragents begat an arms race. Not to mention the worms and the ‘bots and the single-minded autonomous datahounds—so essential for legitimate commerce, so vital to the well-being of every institution, but so needy, so demanding of access to protected memory. And way over there in left field, the Artificial Life geeks were busy with their Core Wars and their Tierra models and their genetic algorithms. It was only a matter of time before everyone got tired of endlessly reprogramming their minions against each other. Why not just build in some genes, a random number generator or two for variation, and let natural selection do the work?

The problem with natural selection, of course, is that it changes things.

The problem with natural selection in networks is that things change fast.

By the time Achilles Desjardins became a ‘Lawbreaker, Onion was a name in decline. One look inside would tell you why. If you could watch the fornication and predation and speciation without going grand mal from the rate-of-change, you knew there was only one word that really fit: Maelstrom.

Of course, people still went there all the time. What else could they do? Civilization’s central nervous system had been living inside a Gordian knot for over a century. No one was going to pull the plug over a case of pinworms.

—Me, Maelstrom, 2001

*

Ah, Maelstrom. My second furry novel. Hard to believe I wrote it almost a quarter-century ago.

Maelstrom combined cool prognostications with my usual failure of imagination. I envisioned programs that were literally alive— according to the Dawkinsian definition of Life as "Information shaped by natural selection"—and I patted myself on the back for applying Darwinian principles to electronic environments. (It was a different time. The phrase "genetic algorithm" was still shiny-new and largely unknown outside academic circles).

I confess to being a bit surprised—even disappointed—that things haven't turned out that way (not yet, anyway). I'll grant that Maelstrom's predictions hinge on code being let off the leash to evolve in its own direction, and that coders of malware won't generally let that happen. You want your botnets and phishers to be reliably obedient; you're not gonna steal many identities or get much credit card info from something that's decided reproductive fitness is where it's at. Still, as Michael Caine put it in The Dark Knight: some people just want to watch the world burn. You'd think that somewhere, someone would have brought their code to life precisely because it could indiscriminately fuck things up.

Some folks took Maelstrom's premise and ran with it. In fact, Maelstrom seems to have been more influential amongst those involved in AI and computer science (about which I know next to nothing) than Starfish ever was among those who worked in marine biology (a field in which I have a PhD). But my origin story for Maelstrom's wildlife was essentially supernatural. It was the hand of some godlike being that brought it to life. We were the ones who gave mutable genes to our creations; they only took off after we imbued them with that divine spark

It never even occurred to me that code might learn to do that all on its own.

Apparently it never occurred to anyone. Simulation models back then were generating all sorts of interesting results (including the spontaneous emergence of parasitism, followed shortly thereafter by the emergence of sex), but none of that A-Life had to figure out how to breed; their capacity for self-replication was built in at the outset.

Now Blaise Agüera y Arcas and his buddies at Google have rubbed our faces in our own lack of vision. Starting with a programming language called (I kid you not) Brainfuck, they built a digital "primordial soup" of random bytes, ran it under various platforms, and, well…read the money shot for yourself, straight from the (non-peer-reviewed) ArXiv preprint "Computational Life: How Well-formed, Self-replicating Programs Emerge from Simple Interaction"[1]:

"when random, non self-replicating programs are placed in an environment lacking any explicit fitness landscape, self-replicators tend to arise. … increasingly complex dynamics continue to emerge following the rise of self-replicators."

Apparently, self-replicators don't even need random mutation to evolve. The code's own self-modification is enough to do the trick. Furthermore, while

"…there is no explicit fitness function that drives complexification or self-replicators to arise. Nevertheless, complex dynamics happen due to the implicit competition for scarce resources (space, execution time, and sometimes energy)."

For those of us who glaze over whenever we see an integral sign, Arcas provides a lay-friendly summary over at Nautilus, placed within a historical context running back to Turing and von Neumann.

But you're not really interested in that, are you? You stopped being interested the moment you learned there was a computer language called Brainfuck: that's what you want to hear about. Fine: Brainfuck is a rudimentary coding language whose only mathematical operations are "add 1" and "subtract 1". (In a classic case of understatement, Arcas et al describe it as "onerous for humans to program with".) The entire language contains a total of ten commands (eleven if you count a "true zero" that's used to exit loops). All other characters in the 256 ASCII set are interpreted as data.

So. Imagine two contiguous 64-byte strings of RAM, seeded with random bytes. Each functions as a Brainfuck program, each byte interpreted as either a command or a data point. Arcas et al speak of

"the interaction between any two programs (A and B) as an irreversible chemical reaction where order matters. This can be described as having a uniform distribution of catalysts a and b that interact with A and B as follows:

Which as far as I can tell boils down to “a” catalyzes the smushing of programs A and B into a single long-string program, which executes and alters itself in the process; then the “split” part of the equation cuts the resulting string back into two segments of the initial A and B lengths.

You know what this looks like? This looks like autocatalysis: the process whereby the product of a chemical reaction catalyzes the reaction itself. A bootstrap thing. Because this program reads and writes to itself, the execution of the code rewrites the code. Do this often enough, and one of those 64-byte strings turns into a self-replicator.

It doesn't happen immediately; most of the time, the code just sits there, reading and writing over itself. It generally takes thousands, millions of interactions before anything interesting happens. Let it run long enough, though, and some of that code coalesces into something that breeds, something that exchanges information with other programs (fucks, in other words). And when that happens, things really take off: self-replicators take over the soup in no time.

What's that? You don't see why that should happen? Don't worry about it; neither do the authors:

"we do not yet have a general theory to determine what makes a language and environment amenable to the rise of self-replicators"

They explored the hell out of it, though. They ran their primordial soups in a whole family of "extended Brainfuck languages"; they ran them under Forth; they tried them out under that classic 8-bit ZX-80 architecture that people hold in such nostalgic regard, and under the (almost as ancient) 8080 instruction sets. They built environments in 0, 1, and 2 dimensions. They measured the rise of diversity and complexity, using a custom metric— "High-Order Entropy"— describing the difference between "Shannon Entropy" and "normalized Kolmogorov Complexity" (which seems to describe the complexity of a system that remains once you strip out the amount due to sheer randomness[2]).

They did all this, under different architectures, different languages, different dimensionalities—with mutations and without—and they kept getting replicators. More, they got different kinds of replicators, virtual ecosystems almost, competing for resources. They got reproductive strategies changing over time. Darwinian solutions to execution issues, like "junk DNA" which turns out to serve a real function:

"emergent replicators … tend to consist of a fairly long non-functional head followed by a relatively short functional replicating tail. The explanation for this is likely that beginning to execute partway through a replicator will generally lead to an error, so adding non-functional code before the replicator decreases the probability of that occurrence. It also decreases the number of copies that can be made and hence the efficiency of the replicator, resulting in a trade-off between the two pressures."

I mean, that looks like a classic evolutionary process to me. And again, this is not a fragile phenomenon; it's robust across a variety of architectures and environments.

But they're still not sure why or how.

They do report one computing platform (something called SUBLEQ) in which replicators didn't arise. They suggest that any replicators which could theoretically arise in SUBLEQ would have to be much larger than those observed in other environments, which they suggest could be a starting point towards developing "a theory that predicts what languages and environments could harbor life". I find that intriguing. But they're not even close to developing such a theory at the moment.

Self-replication just—happens.

It's not an airtight case. The authors admit that it would make more sense to drill down on an analysis of substrings within the soup (since most replicators are shorter than the 64-byte chunks of code the used), but because that's "computationally intractable" they settle for "a mixture of anecdotal evidence and graphs"—which, if not exactly sus, doesn't seem especially rigorous. At one point they claim that mutations speed up the rise of self-replicators, which doesn't seem to jibe with other results suggesting that higher mutation rates are associated with a slower emergence of complexity. (Granted "complexity" and "self-replicator" are not the same thing, but you'd still expect a positive correlation.) As of this writing, the work hasn't yet been peer-reviewed. And finally, a limitation not of the work but of the messenger: you're getting all this filtered through the inexpert brain of a midlist science fiction writer with no real expertise in computer science. It's possible I got something completely wrong along the way.

Still, I'm excited. Folks more expert than I seem to be taking this seriously. Hell, it even inspired Sabine Hossenfelder (not known for her credulous nature) to speculate about Maelstromy scenarios in which wildlife emerges from Internet noise, "climbs the complexity ladder", and runs rampant. Because that's what we're talking about here: digital life emerging not from pre-existing malware, not from anarchosyndicalist script kiddies—but from simple, ubiquitous, random noise.

So I'm hopeful.

Maybe the Internet will burn after all.

1. The paper cites Tierra and Core Wars prominently; it's nice to see that work published back in the nineties is still relevant in such a fast-moving field. It's even nicer to be able to point to those same call-outs in Maelstrom to burnish my street cred. ↑

2. This is a bit counterintuitive to those of us who grew up thinking of entropy as a measure of disorganization. The information required to describe a system of randomly-bumping gas molecules is huge because you have to describe each particle individually; more structured systems—crystals, fractals—have lower entropy because their structure can be described formulaically. The value of "High-order" Entropy, in contrast, is due entirely to structural, not random, complexity; so a high HEE means more organizational complexity, not less. Unless I'm completely misreading this thing. ↑

Normally, I tack weld the entire frame assembly together, fit check it during some stage of that, then finish weld it (Including capping open tube ends) when there's nothing left to add. This time, some tubes had to be trimmed, capped, and finish welded before continuing on with the next operations. So off the bench it came, work was done, and, well, there it is,

The primary frame structure is done now - time to finish connecting the dots with some triangulation. According to the scale, this frame looks like it will weigh just over half of the last one. The suspension is already done - still have to make the steering system before I have a finished roller. I have no idea when I'll reach that milestone, but it is that much closer to getting there.

By email and blog post

10 December 2024

Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London and TfL Chair
City Hall
Kamal Chunchie Way
London E16 1ZE 

cc: Transport Commissioner; Deputy Mayor for Transport; Deputy Mayor for Social Justice and Communities, London Victims' Commissioner; Walking and Cycling Commissioner; TfL Board Secretariat; TfL SSHR Panel Secretariat; London Assembly Transport Committee Members; Tom Kearney (@comadad)

Dear Mr. Mayor,

On 3 December I received a response (below) to my 29 October Open Letter (TfL's 'Safety Scandal' will be your Legacy! An Open Letter to the Mayor of London from Kevin Mustafa) from your Deputy Seb Dance that confirmed to me that both TfL and you appear to be incapable of showing either the compassion or the concern that are urgently required to reform TfL's "institutionally unsafe" Bus Operation. 

In order to ensure that TfL Bus Drivers are provided with working conditions that will allow them to drive safely and with duty of care, as Mayor of London and TfL Chair, you have both the legal authority and statutory responsibility to incorporate the London Bus Drivers' Bill of Rights into London's Framework Bus Services Contract.  But your longstanding refusal to honour the previous Mayor's 1 February 2016 commitment to "update TfL's bus contracts to include new safety incentives" within "three months" confirms that both Bus Drivers' and the public's safety are not your priorities. 

Frankly speaking, I know that London's Bus Drivers believe that your refusal to replace TfL's "Time is Money" Bus Contract incentives with those that protect Bus Driver Working Conditions is a betrayal of the principles upon which the Labour Party and the union movement that created it are founded.  I am convinced that your failures to act as a prudent and responsible TfL Chairman have cost the lives of at least (now) 87 people in preventable Bus Safety Incidents, as well as 76 Bus Drivers from Covid-19 during your time in office. While your allies in the London Labour Party ignore TfL's Safety Scandal, London's Bus Drivers will not be letting you and your Deputy bamboozle them with the kind of gaslighting so evident in your Deputies' public statements over the years. 

And we will not stop until you (a) write The London Bus Drivers' Bill of Rights into TfL's Framework Bus Contract and (b) ensure these commonsense actions are undertaken by TfL and its Bus Contractors without delay.

Yours sincerely,

Kevin Mustafa

Attachment 1: London Bus Drivers' Bill of Rights

Attachment 2: 3 December 2024 Letter from Deputy Mayor, Transport

London Bus Drivers' Bill of Rights

1. The Right to a safe work schedule without any forced overtime or loss of pay

2. The Right to a decent and proper rest break in the working day

3. The Right to drive a safe and well-maintained vehicle

4. The Right to clean, serviced toilet and rest facilities on all bus routes

5. The Right to report safety concerns without fear of retribution from TfL or employers

6. The Right, when seriously ill and covered by a doctor's note, to not be harassed into coming into work until fit to do so

7. The Right to relevant and timely safety training

8. The Right to drive without being forced to answer radio messages and texts from Controllers whilst in motion

9. ⁠The Right to have all company rules in writing and clearly displayed

10. ⁠The Right to be treated with dignity and respect by our employers, TfL and the public

11. The Right to Working Air Cooling in our cabs in the summer heat 

12. The Right to Working Heaters in our cabs in the cold of winter

Very quiet in the parish at the moment. The rotten weather isn't helping. 

On the way home after walking the dog over the fields, coming back along Icknield Way, I did spy a bit of commotion: some new arrivals in the village! An American family moving into Hazeldene, that big house on the corner of Penfold Lane. A grey-haired fellow huffing and puffing great plumes of breath into the cold air  as he lugging into the house what appeared to be an endless succession of boxes crammed with vinyl records, "Don't see many of those these days," I commented cheerily - receiving, for my pains, just a scowl.  I shall return at a less-trying time, with a copy of this newsletter and some mince pies. 

But talking of vinyl records, parish stalwart Ian Hodgson has a new Moon Wiring Club long-player. 

Yes, that's right - the LP has an equine concept. 

There's also a new artwork approach - dropping the usual MWC style for watercolour painting. 

Says Ian, "I wanted to steer away from those rinsed-into-the-ground Folk Horror tropes, so gave the whole album a (very) loose Undead Dressage feeling (lots of movement)" 

On the Hodgson mood board for this project: The Residents's "Jambalaya", the sound design and production design of spaghetti westerns (in particular the Klaus Kinski Gothic Western And God Said to Cain  and Matalo! ) and acid westerns (like The Hired Hand).  

And there was I thinking the inspiration came from the unfortunate incident at last year's gymkhana. 

There's a whole backstory to the record. 

Another fine offering from MWC - buy it here. 

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Talking of horses....  at the Horse Hospital in London this Sunday afternoon, there will be an event called Dismal 1970s, involving parishioners Stonecirclesampler and Travis Elborough, along with telly scholar Sophie Sleigh-Johnson  and neo-pulp writer Tim Wells. It is described as "an afternoon of festive-ish words, moving pictures and performances dedicated to the decade of Smash instant potato, public information films and Evans the Arrow". More details about times and tickets here.

Stonecirclesampler  - also known as Luke J Murray, the figure behind The Iceman Junglist Kru and various other haunty entities working in mutations of nuum and drill and wotnot -  has produced a "special limited edition Dismal 1970s cassette...  a super short run only available to attendees" orderable with tickets and to be collected at the event.  

Dismal 1970s participant Sophie Sleigh-Johnson has a new book out via Repeater.

Now it was only recently, wasn't it, that I remarked upon the under-acknowledged intersection between hauntology and British comedy. 

Here's a whole book inspecting that area: "a sometimes comedic field report that charts an esoteric code hidden within the twin poles of 1970s sitcoms Rising Damp and The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. Outlining how past cultural patterns condensate and repeat through technology, time is shown to be a damp condensation seeping through the centuries and out onto the telly. Interspersed with the author's own photographs, prints, Holsten Pils cans, local newspaper entries and carrier bags, as well as a whole host of other characters, the work seems an antiquarian's conceit that takes time travel as a metaphoric methodology. This is not media studies; more an allegory of all reality as (tele)visual recorded history, excavating the strata of haunted technology from which the fragile band of code comprising our sense of time is briefly emitted. Drawing connections between incidents of ancient and popular culture, from Mark E. Smith's lyric— "They say damp records the past"—to Rising Damp's (meta)physical structure of decay, the book finds damp's temporal power manifest in everything from alchemy, mysticism, and parish folklore to pulp, Time Team, darts, the local newspaper and, of course, the sitcom. Merging the vast with the parochial, the occult with the comedic, Code: Damp tunes into the weird demands of damp as a time-traveling material at the intersections of comedy, myth and technology, taking all three as serious resources to better (dis)orient the ground we stand on."

Here's a warm endorsement from David Tibet of Current 93 renown: "LUCIFER ON THE BUSES! Code: Damp is one of the strangest books I have read. As well as one of the most evocative, lateral, sidereal... an unspellable jewel."

More endorsements and the opportunity to purchase here

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Another addition to the racks at the local library (note the new reduced opening hours: Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and plus Saturday 10 am to noon). Of course you may prefer to support the author by picking up a copy at Book Nook or order directly from Headpress. 

Release irrationale: 

William Burns's Ghost of an Idea: Hauntology, Folk Horror, and the Spectre of Nostalgia examines the use and effect of nostalgia in the Horror and Hauntological realms. It asks why these genres hold such a fascination in popular culture, often inspiring devoted fanbases. From Candyman to The Blair Witch Project, and Dark Shadows to American Horror Story, are the folk horror and found footage phenomena significant artistic responses to political, social, and economic conditions, or simply an aesthetic rebranding of what has come before? How has nostalgia become linked to other concepts (psychogeography, residual haunting) to influence Hauntological music such as Boards of Canada or The Caretaker? What can the 'urban wyrd' or faux horror footage tell us about our idealized past? And how will these cultures of nostalgia shape the future?

Combining the author's analysis with first-hand accounts of fans and creators, Ghost of an Idea offers a critical analysis of our cultural quest to recognize, resurrect, and lay to rest the ghosts of past and present, also summoning up those spectres that may haunt the future.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Seductive Liar, or Are We What We Used to Be?

Chapter 1: Today is Tomorrow's Yesterday: The Philosophy of Nostalgia

Chapter 2: The Yearning to Return: Folk Horror and Nostalgia

Chapter 3: The Illusionary Precipice: Found Footage and Nostalgia

Chapter 4: The Longing of the Permanently Lost: Franchise Nostalgia

Chapter 5: An Ethereal Composition of Disjointed Memories: Nostalgia as Catalyst for the New

Chapter 6: The Vice of the Aged: Do They Still Got It or Living Off Past Glories?

Chapter 7: The Enemy of Truth: Is Nostalgia Counter-Revolutionary?

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And finally, Estonian exchange student Mart Avi has a new release out, a collaboration with his countryman Ajukaja, bearing the rather sombre title Death of Music.

You can hear it and buy it here.

C.f. what Michaelangelo Matos called - in the dance music context - permaretro

 A reanimated Dead Boys, with Cheetah Chrome on vocals  - the record company decides the vocals need something else, so they use AI to "dust" it with some quintessence of Stiv Bators. 

This made me chuckle 

I'm still enough of a believer to find it defiling to have a version of "Sex Pistols" treading the boards without Johnny Rotten....  

Other bands that go the prosthetic singer route, I'm not so bothered.

Well, there's one and half others on the same Glasgow punkstalgia lineup that are doing that - The Stranglers, sans Hugh Cornwell, with a younger-than-the-others singer (younger-than-the-others - what am I talking about? Only Jean-Jacques Burnel remains from the original line-up, what with Jet Black and Dave Greenfield now departed).  

And then Buzzcocks are the 'half'  insofar as Diggle (I assume) is singing the Shelley-sung songs as well as the smaller number he originally sang. 

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Talking of "punk is dad", I had a "rave is dad" experience the other night - went to see Orbital in LA. They were playing the first two albums - with an intermission in between - and so if you think about it that would necessarily largely draw a crowd who remembered those records from the early '90s - thirty years ago. So we are talking fiftysomethings for the most part.

Wasn't quite Cruel World levels of haggard, but yes a lot of baldness, bellies, and time-creased faces on show.  You sensed a lot of memory-rushes triggered but that not being quite enough to galvanize manic dancing in the old style.  

Some of the bar staff and the sound guy behind the mixing desk seemed on the grizzled, elderly side too. Perhaps veteran promoters and rave-scene people

Surely in their early '60s themselves, the brothers Hartnoll were great -  well, some of the material back then was a tad middling, but the killer stuff, fantastic. Triffic lights and lasers and projections too - that is something that has advanced in leaps and bounds since back in the day. They got a very warm reception and seemed to be touched by it. 

This must be the fourth - or possibly fifth - time I've seen Orbital live, but the last time would have been back in the mid-90s.  

The very first time - when they were then almost alone in being able to play techno live - was the late 1991 rave conversion experience that I describe in the intro to Energy Flash. Well, the whole night really as opposed any specific deejay or group that played - the audience's dancing and demeanor as much as the music and lights. But Orbital certainly were a component of the baptismal immersion in a new culture. 

Then the following year, I traipsed down to Sevenoaks for an interview and they showed me my very first glimpse of the silver box - I don't think they let me twiddle the knobs myself but they showed how to work the 303. 

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Punk-gets-parental is not really news - I can remember when we were still in NYC and Kieran was little (so early 2000s), some of his pre-school friends's mums had a hobby band, playing punk rock. And then a few years later, at my brother's kids's elementary school in Silverlake, at a school fair or fund-raiser, a there was this band of dads entertaining the assembled with punk cover versions. 

And of course there's that thing of tiny T-shirts with the Pistols or Ramones or Clash that the parents would get their kiddies to wear. 

Just watched Blitz (ooh but it's clunky) and there was the surprise of Paul Weller playing the little evacuee boy's grandfather - silvery hair swept back in the 1940s style, face lined with ridges. He looks distinguished, though, as an old gent,

Remember Remember the 5th of November. 

Thanks to you London Bus Drivers, I know I sure will.

Back on 18 September 2013, I attended a meeting here in Palestra House initiated by Victoria Borwick AM and hosted by the then-MD for Surface Transport, Leon Daniels, now a Director of TfL Bus Contractor RATP. 

At that meeting, Daniels proudly announced that the reason why TfL's management of London's Public Bus Services was so successful was because its Bus Contracts work on a single overriding principle that "Time is Money", which guaranteed faster and more reliable bus journey times for London's Bus Users.

Thanks to Victoria Borwick's successful lobbying of Mayor Boris Johnson, we now have over ten years of published TfL Bus Safety Performance Data that clearly indicates how those "Time is Money" Contracts are doing—

• An average of three people a day are hospitalised from a preventable Bus Safety Incident, at least one of which is a collision;
• About every five to six weeks, someone is killed in a preventable Bus Safety Incident, mostly from collisions; 
• For the past decade, one of every ten Deaths from Road Traffic Collisions in London has involved a TfL Bus.
• For the past decade, one of every Deaths of Pedestrians from Road Traffic Collisions in London has involved a TfL Bus. 
• Since this Mayor was elected, at least eighty-seven people have been killed in preventable Bus Safety Incidents, mostly collisions. 
• This year, over 1 person per month has been killed in a preventable Bus Safety Incident, mostly collisions.

But London's Bus Users are happy that London Buses are frequent and reliable and—quite often— too fast.

The people in the building behind us don't often advertise the lethal trends contained in TfL's published data, but—at long last— London's press is starting to take an interest.  

In addition to the Mayor's "Vision Zero" Programme, TfL also crows about the at least four 'world leading' Bus Safety initiatives it's announced since 2016.  But since TfL's own published data reveals that the number of people killed and seriously injured from preventable bus safety incidents is now higher than when this Mayor took office in May 2016, it's clear to anyone who bothers to pay attention that none of TfL's 'world leading' Bus Safety programmes are working. 

Why? 

Because the "Time is Money" Financial Incentives in TfL's "Quality Incentive [Bus] Contracts" haven't changed since they were first rolled out by TfL in the summer of 2001. 

And because Headway and Mileage still serve as the only performance metrics in TfL's "Time is Money" Bus Contracts, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out if TfL is financially incentivising its Bus Contractors to prioritise Headway and Mileage—while their Buses share roads with increasing numbers of cars, lorries, cyclists, pedestrians and scooters—that London Bus Drivers' ability to drive with duty of care is, frankly, impossible.  

And TfL blame the Victims and Bus Drivers for the tens of thousands of preventable Bus Safety Incidents that are the inevitable result of "Time is Money" Bus Contract Incentives.   

Inevitable? 

Yes! Inevitable.

You see? Bus Operators have long told us that sixty percent of the cost of running a bus is the cost of the Driver.

In the "Time is Money" Bus Contract environment that has prevailed in London since 2001, any money earned by the Bus Operator, and any time saved to make the Bus System more efficient, is "time" that is being robbed from the Bus Driver to do his or her job safely and with duty of care.

• Not enough time to use the loo. 
• Not enough time for recovery on stand time.
• Not enough time to conduct first use checks.
• Not enough time to ensure that all passengers are seated safely before departing. 
• Not enough time spent at a Bus Stop to pick up a passenger in a wheelchair.
• Not enough time spent at home with family, de-stressing, resting or sleeping. 

The Framework Contract TfL uses today is dated 1 January 2016.

That means TfL's Bus contracts are silent about—

• all the TfL's 'world leading' Bus Safety Initiatives the Mayor of London's announced since 1 February 2016.
•  Vision Zero.

But these Bus Contracts are very loud about "Time is Money".

London's Poor Working Conditions and London's ghastly record of Bus Safety Performance will never change until this Mayor puts an end to TfL's "Time is Money" Contracts. Just like the previous Mayor of London promised to do 'over the next three months' on 1 February 2016. 

In fact, the twelve simple "Rights" shown in the London Bus Driver Bill of Rights—

1. The Right to a safe work schedule without any forced overtime or loss of pay

2. The Right to a decent and proper rest break in the working day

3. The Right to drive a safe and well-maintained vehicle

4. The Right to a clean, serviced toilet and rest facilities on all bus routes

5. The Right to report safety concerns without fear of retribution from TfL or employers

6. The Right, when seriously ill and covered by a doctor's note, to not be harassed into coming into work until fit to do so

7. The Right to relevant and timely safety training

8. The Right to drive without being forced to answer radio messages and texts from Controllers whilst in motion

9. ⁠The Right to have all company rules in writing and clearly displayed

10. ⁠The Right to be treated with dignity and respect by our employers, TfL and the public

11. The Right to Working Air Cooling in our cabs in the summer heat 

12. The Right to Working Heaters in our cabs in the cold of winter 

—provide perfect evidence of the fact that TfL Bus Contracts have been taking the time away from London's Professional Bus Drivers that's required to perform their jobs safely and with duty of care, and converting that time (i.e., "money") saved into profits for Bus Operators.

The Bill of Rights being demanded by London Bus Drivers are just Human Rights that TfL's "Time is Money" Bus Contracts have taken away from them just so London's Buses are convenient for Bus Users.

And now London Bus Drivers have decided that the "time" for being abused by these "Time is Money" Bus Contracts must end NOW.

It's about time. 

It's always been about time.

Thank you for your time today.

One of the odd things about the social media era is becoming "friends" with musical legends and cult figures that you've never met. Musicians you've interviewed and interacted with in real life - that's one thing, that makes sense.  But I get a little shiver when I see a name like Annette Peacock or Andy Ellison (of John's Children renown) pop up in my feed.  

One such Facebook friend that for the life of me I can't work out how I acquired was Shel Talmy, producer of a great number of classic singles of the 1960s, including works that I find impossibly exciting: the obvious anthems by  The Kinks and The Who, stuff by The Creation, and above all The Easybeats's "Friday On My Mind". I think of the sound Talmy shaped as quintessentially English, even though he was himself an American living in  Britain. (Much the same applies to Joe Boyd).  Most of the groups Talmy produced were British, I believe (or Australian, as with the Easybeats). Somehow Shel was able to tap into, activate, direct, and realise a uniquely English form of musical violence.  

I never actually interacted with Shel, which now seems like a shame. But I did enjoy the detailed accounts of producing particular tracks that he posted on Facebook, always titled "The Blueprint Of...". Over the years I have written about a bunch of things he worked on, but I don't think his name ever got mentioned therein - remiss of me perhaps - but at any rate here they are gathered below, a sort of belated reparations, or salute. 

Talmy is one of the prime architects of this syndrome I broach below (extracted from this longer piece on British Rock Greatness). Again, somewhat ironic given that he was a Yank

... by the early '60s, a difference had become audible — a contoured clarity to the riff structures hitherto only heard in Eddie Cochran (who produced his own records, and was much bigger in the U.K. than in America). "Shakin' All Over," by Johnny Kidd & the Pirates, is the first British rock 'n' roll record to match America while also sounding different. This stark, almost diagrammatic quality carries on through the Kinks and mod groups like the Eyes, on to Led Zeppelin, Free and the Groundhogs, and beyond them to Wire and Gang of Four. It almost feels like you see the music as much as hear it; compare this lucidity with the organic, live-sounding quality of so much American rock — the marauding murk of the Stooges on Fun House, for instance.  

Perhaps British rock feels less "organic" because we've never had an organic relationship with the music or its sources in blues and country. These sounds arrived like invasive visitations, and bear connections to indigenous forms like traditional folk or music hall that are chiefly musicological and twice-removed. It's as if this inherently distanced perspective on rock gave British artists a unique vantage point, and an advantage. Hearing rock 'n' roll primarily as recordings first and foremost, rather than as live music, made a difference. As their precursors had with jazz and blues imports, British rock 'n' roll fans studied the records, playing them over and over and isolating specific bits of performance. (This studious approach no doubt contributed to the remarkable lineage of British guitar heroism.) In the U.K., the record is the primary text, what a live performance is trying to realize and replicate; in America, it's the other way around. 

Thoughts on "Friday On My Mind" and "the blow out":

With the rave as working class blowout idea, I always come back to this 1966 song by The Easybeats, "Friday On My Mind",  a thrilling anatomy of the working-class weekender life cycle of drudgery, anticipation and explosive release. It's written from a Sixties mod perspective, the 60-hour weekend, but it foreshadows Northern Soul's speedfreak stylists, to disco's Saturday-night fever-dreams and jazz-funk's All Dayers and Soul Weekends, and onto rave and EDM. Every kind of dance culture in which pills are used to intensify leisure time to the utmost, but then it's back to the 9 to 5. 

 This is the key verse --

Do the five day grind once more

I know of nothin' else that bugs me

More than workin' for the rich man

Hey! I'll change that scene one day

Today I might be mad, tomorrow I'll be glad

'Cause I'll have Friday on my mind

And then there's the chorus 

Tonight I'll spend my bread, tonight

I'll lose my head, tonight

I've got to get to night

Monday I'll have Friday on my mind

Musically the verses have this sort of tick-tocking tension, like the treadmill of workaday time, as he waits for the big blowout of the weekend (the euphoric chorus). It's two different kinds of time:  chronos versus kairos

Lyrically the key line is "hey! I'll change that scene one day"  - I find it incredibly poignant - it could just mean "one day I'll get started on my career / start a business and I'll be the rich man / boss" or it could mean "one day me and the rest of the proletariat will organise at the site of the means of production and there'll be a revolutionary transformation in political economy, no more rich men, no more bosses"

But it's clear that he's so caught up in this nightlifestyle that he'll never get around to either the individual or collective escape route

I tend to see the essence of rave (and its precursors) as dissipatory 

But (like a lot of music in different ways) it points towards an unalienated life - one that it can't actually make real  in the outside world, but can only institute in the small areas of space and time it can command

Of course, the troubling thought is that the momentary release of the ecstatic all night dance is actively working against the total and permanent change he and everyone else should be working for (and which would necessarily involve more drudgery and deferment of gratification in favor of the long term goal - duty for the future being the essence of political involvement) 

The here-and-now utopia / TAZ is taking away the possibility of a soon-to-come PAZ (permanent autonomous zone)

Almost sixty years after "Friday On My Mind",  we're no nearer to overhauling the work/leisure structures of industrial society. Instead, all that rage and frustration is vented through going mental at the weekend ('Tonight, I'll spend my bread / Tonight, I'll lose my head'), helped along by a capsule or three of instant unearned euphoria.

Flowered Up's "Weekender" film is an update of this notion of the  blow out cycle as counter-revolutionary. It's totally mod - indeed directly influenced by Quadrophenia, the mod revival movie of 1979 - indeed there's a sample of the Phil Daniels character's rant about how they can take his office drone job and stick it up their arseholes. In Quadrophrenia, the key scene of disillusionment for the mod protagonist as played by Phil Daniels,  is when he comes across the scene's leading Face - the coolest of the cool  - in his civilian life, where he is a porter in a posh hotel, a flunky ordered around by rich men... 

Another song about the blow out - there's a verse about "going to the disco" in this otherwise gritty funk-blues song about how tough life is economically by the great Johnny 'Guitar' Watson, the king of "proletarian funk"

Got to go to a disco

Throw your troubles away

Dance to the music

That the DJ's play

And then the lights come on

Like you knew they would

Go home and face the music

That don't sound to good

Stuff on The Who and mod from an essay entitled "Buttoned Up" - about buttoned up shirt style, wouldyabelieve?

The violence of the Mods as they rampaged against the Rockers was on one level  simply righteous disgust for their abject opposite.  But mod style itself could be seen as having an inherent undercurrent of violence. First, there was the symbolic violence of dressing sharper than your social superiors ("powerful people -- businessmen in suits, take their clothes, retain your identity" as Ian Page of mod revival band Secret Affair put it). But also a kind of imploded violence: the neurotic fastidiousness of dress and grooming was a sort of voluntarily worn strait-jacket, a near-masochistic set of constraints and rules.   

This stringent regime, stoked and sharpened by amphetamines, virtually demanded some kind of release, a breaking free. That could take the form of mayhem (as with the war with the rockers) or through theatricalized disorder. Which is where the Who came in: a band designed by mod philosopher Pete Meaden, the group's manager in their early days.  Meaden deliberately shaped the Who to appeal to  the existing Mod subculture, which until then had been based not around following bands but dancing to records, imported soul and R&B.

Rock 'n' roll had triggered violence before (with the cinema seat slashing done by Teddy Boys driven into a frenzy of excitement by the first rock'n'roll movies to arrive in Britain). But it had never really represented violence musically or enacted it onstage.   The Who's sound was white R&B so amped-up and amphetamine-uptight it came apart at the seams: Keith Moon's free-flailing cymbal crashes and tom rolls, Pete Townshend's slashed and scything powerchords, John Entwhistle's bass-lunges.  A sound expressive not of sexual desire but of an unrest at once social and existential.  Mod was fundamentally asexual: as Pearce notes, mods "simply were not interested. They were.... too self-absorbed....  Mods were free, clear of emotional ties. They rejected peer pressure to pair off."  The boys dressed and danced to impress other boys, not to attract girls. Amphetamines  also had something to do with it, suppressing sex drive along with the other needs and appetites of the organism (such as food and sleep). Speed creating a sexless intensity, a plateau state of arrested orgasm that the mods, revealingly, called "blocked".

The pent-up pressure had to blow somehow, though, and mod's latent violence was dramatized by Moon and Townshend in their climactic orgies of instrument-smashing : supposedly inspired by art-school student Townsend's  encounter with Gustav Metzger's auto-destructive art, but really the orgasmic release that mod music, mod psychology, mod neurology urgently required. In the immediate aftermath of "My Generation", "I Can't Explain", "Anyway Anyhow Anywhere", and the other early Who singles,  young bands like The Eyes, The Creation and John's Children picked up on the band's loudness and distortion and recorded a  a series of 1966-67 singles that fans and collectors subsequently have come to call "freakbeat":  mod tipping into a jagged, edge-of-chaos frenzy under the influence of speed and LSD.  The strange blend of menace and feyness in songs like The Eyes's "When The Night Falls" and "My Degeneration",  John's Children's "A Midsummer Night's Scene"  and "Desdemona" simmered with a spontaneous combustibility that was uniquely English, rooted in the characteristic native psychology of neurotic uptightness and lashing-out rage. 

John Entwistle / The Who, "My Generation" (Brunswick single, 1965)

Rock 'n' roll had triggered violence before, but up until The Who it had never really represented violence musically* or enacted it onstage.  Think of words like "mayhem" and "destruction" in connection with that band and the first things that spring to mind are Keith Moon's free-flailing drums and Pete Townshend's scything powerchords.  (Not forgetting those climactic orgies of instrument-smashing).  But on "My Generation" John Entwistle supplies more than his fair share of the savagery. Often described as lead bassist to Townshend's  rhythm guitarist, on this late 1965 single, his is the loudest instrument (with the possible exception of Moon's cymbals). 

For the first minute "Thunderfingers", as his bandmates nicknamed him,  churns and grinds as relentlessly and remorselessly as a gigantic tunnel-boring drill. Then, outrageously, he takes the solo and slashes a rent in the song's fabric with a down-diving flurry of notes at once fluidly elegant and brutishly in-your-face.  This is generally regarded as the first bass solo in recorded rock, and as such, it's a mixed portent.  Entwistle would immediately attempt to reprise the shock effect on the Who's debut album with the bass-dominated instrumental "The Ox" and over the years he became an increasingly ostentatious player, peaking with the verging-on-Pastorius floridity of Quadrophenia's "The Real Me" (much admired in the technical guitar magazines). 

But in the immediate aftermath of "My Generation", young bands like The Eyes, The Creation and John's Children picked up not on the sophistication (beyond their capabilities, anyway) but the loudness, distortion, and menace.  Amping up the jagged, edge-of-chaos frenzy, they recorded a series of 1966-67 singles that fans and collectors today know as "freakbeat".  Mod, as a musical form as opposed to a subcultural style, represented a uniquely English contribution to rock: the sound of frustration and neurosis, tension and explosive release.  In their own way, for a moment there in the mid-Sixties the Who were as radical as the Velvet Underground. Certainly, as far as Britain is concerned, punk starts here. Entwistle can even be seen as a forefather of postpunk's  "lead bassists", or at least the  aggressive hard-rocking sort, such as Jean-Jacques Burnel and Peter Hook. Indeed Hooky actually bought some of the Ox's bass guitars in the estate sale after his 2002 death.

* Actually I would semi-retract that - Bo Diddley's sound, all rhythm and noise, is joyously violent. 

VARIOUS ARTISTS, Nuggets II: Original Artyfacts From the British Empire & Beyond

Lenny Kaye's 1972 anthology Nuggets was a rock archivist's masterstroke, a feat of canon rewriting that deposed the post-Sgt Pepper's aristocracy and elevated the forgotten garage punks of the mid-Sixties, from The Seeds to Chocolate Watchband. Rhino's 1998 four-CD update of Nuggets dramatically expanded the original double LP. Now this latest instalment extends the Nuggets premise beyond the USA to encompass the one-hit-wonders and never-wozzers of mid-Sixties Britain: that all-too-brief golden age of amphetamine-cranked R&B and mod-on-LSD that's roughly bookended by "My Generation" and Cream's Disraeli Gears. Just the names of these long-lost groups--Dantalion's Chariot, Wimple Winch, Rupert's People, The Idle Race--induces a contact high, before you even play the discs.

Back then, singles made their point and left. This short'n'sweet succinctness allows the compilers to cram 109--that's one hundred and nine--tracks into four discs. Here's just a handful of gems. Tintern Abbey's "Vacuum Cleaner", with the saintly-sounding David MacTavish singing a proto-Spacemen 3 love-as-drug/drug-as-God lyric ("fix me up with your sweet dose/now I'm feeling like a ghost"), splashy cymbals, and a billowing solo of controlled feedback. Them's "I Can Only Give You Everything": Van in I'm-A-Man mode, awesomely surly and swaggering. The Sorrows's "Take A Heart": a Brit-Diddley locked groove of tumbling tribal toms and spaced-out-for-intensified-effect guitar-riffs. The Eyes's "When The Night Falls" takes that drastic use of silence and suspense even further: powerchords like Damocles Swords, caveman tub-thumping, tongues-of-flame harmonica, and an insolent you-done-me-wrong/go-my-own-way vocal. Fire's "Father's Name Was Dad," a classic misunderstood teen anthem: society gets the blame and the kid surveys Squaresville from a lofty vantage, cries "I laugh at it all!"

One group stands out as a "why?-why?!?-were-they-never-MASSIVE?" mystery. Not The Creation, and not The Action--both had terrific songs but were a little characterless. No, I'm talking about John's Children's. Their two offerings here are astoundingly deranged, the monstrously engorged fuzzbass like staring into a furnace, the drums flailing and scything like Keith Moon at his most smashed-blocked. "Desdemona" features the then shocking chorus "lift up your skirt and fly", daft lines about Toulouse-Lautrec painting "some chick in the rude" plus the stutter-bleat of a young Bolan on backing vox. "A Midnight Summer's Scene" captures mod sulphate-mania on the cusp of mutating into flower power acid-bliss: it's a febrile fantasy of Dionysian mayhem in an after-dark park, maenad hippy-chicks with faces "disfigured by love", strewing "petals and flowers," prancing the rites of Pan.

John's Children's merger of cissy and psychotic highlights the major difference between American garage punk and British "freakbeat" (as reissue label Bam Caruso dubbed it for their illustrious Rubble compilation series). The Limey stuff is way fey compared with the Yanks. You can hear a proto-glam androgyny, a "soft boy" continuum that takes in Barrett and Bolan, obviously, but also the queeny-dandy aristocrat persona of Robert Plant. At the same time, because these bands were schooled in R&B and played live constantly, the music has a rhythmic urgency and aggressive thrust that gradually faded over subsequent decades from the psychedelic tradition (think of Spiritualized's drum-phobic ethereality). This, though, was music for dancing as much as wigging out.

Nuggets II isn't solid gold. There's a slight surfeit of boppy shindig-type rave-ups and sub-Yardbirds blues that just ain't bastardized enough. Personally I crave more tunes with truly over-the-top guitar effects, aberrant bass-heavy mixes, phased cymbals, drastic stereo separation, and other psych-era cliches. The "British Empire" part of the subtitle allows in Australia's The Easybeats (godstars for the duration of "Friday On My Mind") while the "Beyond" pulls in groovy Latin American acid-rockers Os Mutantes. But to be honest, a lot of the Commonwealth-and-beyond stuff just ain't that hot. And inevitably one could compile another 2-CDs out of heinous ommissions. Forget the quibbles, though, this box is a treasure chest of vintage dementia.

THE WHO

3O YEARS MAXIMUM R&B

 For a while there, it seemed that The Who had dipped out of rock memory, become a band that virtually no one even thought about. They seemed to have the same relation vis-a-vis the eternally cool and current Beatles & Stones that, say, Deep Purple have to Sabbath & Zep: massive then, monstrously uninfluential thereafter. In recent years, though, The Who have slowly seeped back as a reference point, what with Urge Overkill's "Live At Leeds" sharp-dressed rifferama and the mod iconography of groups at diverse as Flowered Up, These Animal Men, Blur, D-Generation, and Primal Scream (that ad for 'Rocks' featuring Keith Moon). 

     Personally, I find there's something resolutely unloveable about The Who, although why I'm not sure.  Pete Townshend's mid-life crisis and endless maudlin' musings on lost youth?  Roger Daltrey's voice, face, and fish-farm? Just the FACT (I haven't heard 'em) that John Entwhistle released FIVE solo LP's?  Perhaps the real reason is the boy-ness of The Who cult (and of their legacy, The Jam, Secret Affair etc).  Somehow it's obvious that way fewer women cared about The Who than The Stones, Beatles or even Led Zep. 

     Still, I love the mod-psych bands who never made it--The Eyes, John's Children, The Creation--so I can't logically refute the thrill of "I Can't Explain", "Anyway Anyhow Anywhere", "Substitute". At their 1965/66 height, The Who's white R&B is so amped-up and amphetamine-uptight it's coming apart at the seams.  "My Generation" remains as naffly irresistible as Steppenwolf's equally naive "Born To Be Wild"; Moon's ramshackle surf-drums, exploding everywhichway like Mitch Mitchell of the Experience, Townshend's slash-and-scald rhythm guitar, Entwhistle's bass-lunges and Daltrey's speed-freak stutter, all add up to an immaculately chaotic enactment of mod's "smashed, blocked" aggression, its rage-to-live and hunger for action.

     With the arrival of psychedelia, The Who toyed with the era's fashionable tropes of androgyny ("I'm A Boy"'s Frank Spencer scenario, where mummy won't admit he's not a girl), and regression (the fey "creepy-crawly" terrors of "Boris The Spider").  There were gems here (the effete all-wanked-out vocals of the masturbation ode "Pictures Of Lily"), but mostly The Who's acid-phase is unusually unappetising.  "I Can See For Miles" turns mod misogny into visionary paranoia, and the swooping phased guitars of "Armenia" thrill, but the pallid, fey vocals of this period are pretty pukey.

     Then the bombast begins in earnest.  Daltrey quickly swells into the least likeable white R&B singer this side of Joe Cocker, while Townshend's songs bloat up like houses with too many extensions. The Who's progressive aspirations are all on the level of structure rather than playing or texture (which remained coarse R&B); the result is a horrid fusion of prog-rock and pub rock.  So, apart from "Tommy"'s one genuinely hymnal aria ("See Me Feel Me") and the just-about-takeable epic-ness of their post-counterculture allegory "Won't Get Fooled Again", a long blank void ensues--one whose continuance seemed increasingly mercenary as the Seventies proceed.  Even at their most haggard, The Stones could re- ignite with the lubricious raunch of a "Start Me Up".  The Who's equivalent twilight hit is "You Better You Bet", a song with only one fan in the entire world, Taylor Parkes, and only then for the most perverse, "it's so bad, it's.... really MINDBOGGLINGLY bad" of reasons.

     "30 Years Maximum R & B"? Break that down, and it works out at roughly 4 and a half years of adolescent intensity and two and a half decades of graceless middle-age.                                   

Time ：5:30
Scroll ："yuen" by Kitaro Nishida
Bowl：9th Ohi Chozaemon
Tea： Hoshinoen "Hojyu"

Had a nice bowl of thick tea this chilly morning.

Nishida is the founder of the Kyoto School of Philosophy and one of the founding members of the Chiba Institute of Technology. The scrolls says "yuen" and it means far and distant in time and space or eternity.

Tea practice has made me much more aware of time - many of the utensils we use are hundreds of years old, and the scrolls and the utensils we use will likely continue to be used for hundreds of years. Hold an ancient bowl; one can imagine when it was made, the people who handled it, and the society and history surrounding them. Then, it is easy to imagine the bowl in the future and the people and cultures they will live in. Then stretch and keep pushing time in the past and the future until you envision eternity.

A little souvenir of a terrible year...  something I wrote about doomscrolling for Sasha Frere-Jones end-of-year writer round-up, looking back over 2023 and looking ahead to 2024, which has been even more "how can this be reality?!?" than I could have imagined.

Hoping for some hopescrolling come Tuesday night....

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

 It was a year of doomscrolling. Like the year before. And like next year.

Sometimes, when trying to explain affect theory to my students, I use doomscrolling as an example of a uniquely contemporary affect. It didn't exist - and then it did.

For sure, there's always been bad news. But it arrived in defined chunks and at punctual intervals - TV news, radio at the top of the hour. Only a massive crisis like 9/11 or Katrina would result in rolling round the clock coverage - and even then, you could walk away from that.

To get the doomscroll effect in the past, you'd have to take a load of newspapers and chop them up and stick on some kind of homemade carousel rigged up out of chicken wire and spindles. And even then it would not approach the inexhaustible, endless-onwardness of the doomscroll,

The chyron, that Times Square tickertape at the bottom of the news channel screen, was a foretaste, an augury of doomscrolling. But it was easier to ignore, and it didn't have the personalized, algo-attuned quality of doomscroll, the way it learns what detains your gaze and churns up choice items tailor-made to agitate you.

Think about how this timesuck lifefuck invention affects your breathing rhythms, your posture (hunched, clenched), your endocrinal system - and how that builds up as neurological wear and tear, a stress load.

But think also about how those on the opposite side of the ideological spectrum from where you sit  - on any issue, any conflict currently raging - are also being pumped full of this shit nonstop, forcefed fear and tension.  It explains a lot.

For sure, now and then there'll be a spate of hopescrolling - unexpectedly positive developments, better than expected election results. But mostly the mode is doomscroll - feeding your inexplicable craving for the alarming, the upsetting, the enlargement of feelings of impotence and despair.

Feeding you the illusion of keeping on top of things when actually you're sinking deeper and deeper.

2023 was the year of doomscrolling. Same as last year. 2024 will be worse - worse beyond the wildest nightmares.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Follow up on the blog about Bob Dylan as the Original Doomscroller

By email and blogpost

Elly Baker, Chair

London Assembly Transport Committee

City Hall

Kamal Chunchie Way

London E16 1ZE

1 November 2024

cc: London Assembly Transport Committee Members, Tom Kearney #LondonBusWatch

RE: 5 November London Bus Drivers' Protest at TfL Headquarters - Open Letter

With the support of Unite the Union, on Tuesday, 5 November I will join many London Bus Drivers in a march and demonstration at TfL Headquarters to hold Sadiq Khan to account for the 'Safety Scandal'  that has resulted in the deaths of at least 86 people from Bus Safety Incidents and 76 London Bus Drivers from Covid-19 while he has served as TfL Chair and Mayor of London. 

We are demanding that TfL and the Mayor immediately accept a London Bus Drivers' 'Bill of Rights' that I've attached for your information and review. 

While I still await your direct response my 26 June Open Letter, if you study the Bill of Rights and what I have requested the Transport Committee to investigate, i.e.—

• The Contradiction between TfL's Bus Contract Timeliness Incentives and Speed Limits;
• TfL's Refusal to Require Independent Bus Crash Investigations;
• TfL's Failure to conduct Risk and/or Human Factors Assessments of Bus Driver Working Conditions that are known to have a direct impact upon Safety Performance.

—you might appreciate that Bus Drivers are not going to wait months or years until the Transport Committee deigns to get around to scrutinising TfL and the Mayor for creating and maintaining working conditions where we cannot operate our vehicles safely and with duty of care.  

I am pleased Unite the Union is supporting this entirely London Bus Workers'-initiated Direct Action next week. If you lead the Transport Committee to investigate the issues I raised in my 26 June Open Letter, you will discover why our grassroots protest is so necessary.

I await your direct reply to my 26 June Open Letter.

Yours sincerely,

Lorraine Robertson

Attachment: London Bus Drivers' Bill of Rights

London Bus Drivers' Bill of Rights

1. The Right to a safe work schedule without any forced overtime or loss of pay

2. The Right to a decent and proper rest break in the working day

3. The Right to drive a safe and well-maintained vehicle

4. The Right to clean, serviced toilet and rest facilities on all bus routes

5. The Right to report safety concerns without fear of retribution from TfL or employers

6. The Right, when seriously ill and covered by a doctor's note, to not be harassed into coming into work until fit to do so

7. The Right to relevant and timely safety training

8. The Right to drive without being forced to answer radio messages and texts from Controllers whilst in motion

9. ⁠The Right to have all company rules in writing and clearly displayed

10. ⁠The Right to be treated with dignity and respect by our employers, TfL and the public

11. The Right to Working Air Cooling in our cabs in the summer heat 

12. The Right to Working Heaters in our cabs in the cold of winter

By email and blog post

29 October 2024

cc: Transport Commissioner; Deputy Mayor for Transport; Deputy Mayor for Social Justice and Communities, London Victims' Commissioner; Walking and Cycling Commissioner; TfL Board Secretariat; TfL SSHR Panel Secretariat; London Assembly Transport Committee Members; Tom Kearney (@comadad)

Dear Mr. Mayor,

With the support of Unite the Union, at 1100 on Tuesday, 5 November I will be leading London Bus Drivers in a march from Unite the Union's Regional London Office in Islington down to TfL Headquarters on Blackfriars. When we arrive at Palestra House, we will demonstrate to hold you and TfL to account for the 'Safety Scandal' that has resulted in the deaths of at least 86 people from Bus Safety Incidents and 76 London Bus Drivers from Covid-19 while you have served as TfL Chair and Mayor of London. 

I woke up to your 'Safety Scandal' in Spring 2020, while I was working as a Bus Driver Driver for a Singapore-based London Bus Contractor. While my colleagues across London fell ill and died from Covid-19, I couldn't help but notice that Company Managers and TfL officials, had effectively, vanished.  

I've since learned that, in April 2020, while—

• my employer had already distributed masks in February to its transport employees in Singapore; and,  
• TfL was already distributing masks to its own employees;

—TfL was telling Unite the Union "masks not necessary". I've also learned TfL never requested copies of Covid-19 Risk Assessments from its Bus Contractors. 

Like many other Bus Drivers, I am convinced that my colleagues had the highest rate of deaths from Covid-19 in the United Kingdom in April 2020 because of your and TfL's well-evidenced failures to use the powers you had—and had already exercised to protect TfL employees—to save London's Bus Drivers. 

Since that traumatic time, I've had the opportunity to—

• to speak with TfL officials in person about their failure to protect Bus Drivers during Covid;
• exchange letters with your Deputy Mayor about the "Culture of Fear" TfL permits on its contracted Bus Operation which prevents Bus Drivers reporting their well-founded concerns about safety problems to their managers or TfL; 
• be gaslighted by you about Poor Bus Driver Working Conditions on James O'Brien's "Speak to Sadiq",

Like you, I've also had the opportunity to read—

• your responses to hundreds of Mayor's Questions about Bus Safety (dozens of which were submitted on my behalf); 
• three London Assembly Transport Committee Bus Safety Investigations; 
• three 'world leading' Bus Safety Programme announcements by TfL; 
• your own "Vision Zero" announcement

—and I 'm convinced that your and TfL's constant refrain that, for Buses, "Safety is TfL's first priority"  is just a lie you've made for media consumption.

Why? 

Because TfL's latest Framework Contract for Bus Services in London—dated 1 January 2016—has zero requirements for safety performance—

• TfL Bus Contracts contain nothing about 'world leading' Bus Safety Programmes
• TfL Bus Contracts contain nothing about Vision Zero

But TfL Bus Contracts contain everything about the absolute requirement for London Buses to run On Time, Frequently and Efficiently for the convenience of London's Bus Users and for the benefit of Bus Operator Shareholders. 

Perhaps that explains why— 

• the number of people killed and injured by Buses is higher now than when you took in May 2016;
• so many of my colleagues fell ill snf died from Covid-19;
• TfL chooses to mislead Londoners about the actual number of people killed and injured in preventable Bus Safety Incidents;
• Bus Drivers report that Driver Fatigue, Lack of Toilet Dignity and Unsafe Bus Cab Temperatures are more prevalent today than ever before;
• Bus Drivers today must demand the basic human rights shown in the London Bus Drivers' Bill of Rights I've attached for your information and immediate approval. 

Please look closely at the Rights London Bus Drivers require today so that they can drive safely and with duty of care on London's increasingly congested-roads.  

As TfL Chair since May 2016, aren't you the least bit ashamed that Bus Drivers even feel compelled to march to TfL Headquarters on 5 November to demand these Human Rights to work safely on a contracted Bus Operation that reports to you?  

If you continue to refuse London Bus Drivers this Bill of Rights, TfL's Safety Scandal will be your Legacy. 

Yours sincerely,

Kevin Mustafa

Attachment: London Bus Drivers' Bill of Rights

London Bus Drivers' Bill of Rights

1. The Right to a safe work schedule without any forced overtime or loss of pay

2. The Right to a decent and proper rest break in the working day

3. The Right to drive a safe and well-maintained vehicle

4. The Right to clean, serviced toilet and rest facilities on all bus routes

5. The Right to report safety concerns without fear of retribution from TfL or employers

6. The Right, when seriously ill and covered by a doctor's note, to not be harassed into coming into work until fit to do so

7. The Right to relevant and timely safety training

8. The Right to drive without being forced to answer radio messages and texts from Controllers whilst in motion

9. ⁠The Right to have all company rules in writing and clearly displayed

10. ⁠The Right to be treated with dignity and respect by our employers, TfL and the public

11. The Right to Working Air Cooling in our cabs in the summer heat 

12. The Right to Working Heaters in our cabs in the cold of winter