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Thinking By Hand

The highlight of last week’s holiday in Madrid was a trip to the Prado. It is a perfect size for a national art museum, large enough to feel grand without sprawling like the Louvre. The layout is simple, organised around one long central gallery with rooms opening off it. The collection, rather than being a confusingly eclectic mix of every era and tradition, is concentrated on Spanish, Italian and Dutch painters from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries.

I loved seeing Tintoretto’s depiction of Jesus washing the feet of his disciples. It’s a vast canvas with a stunning trick of perspective: on whichever side you stand, it seems to be pointing towards you. He also does this crazily radical thing of putting his central subject at the far edge instead of in the centre, perhaps to emphasise Jesus’s humility.

But my favourite part was hanging out with Velázquez. I knew it would be. I am no art expert but I know what I like, and I really like Velázquez. I’m not qualified to tell you why he’s so great, but to me he is something like the Roger Federer of art; the one who makes the hardest things look effortless. There’s a lightness, grace and fluidity to his brushstrokes that makes everything he depicts shimmer, as if on the verge of dissolution.

He often doesn’t bother with backgrounds, presenting his figures in blank space, and sometimes leaves the edges of his figures unfinished or blurred. Not only does this make other painters look like dutiful plodders but it conveys a sense of souls floating in time and space, captured in oil and powder for a fleeting moment. The courtier portrayed below, so jolly and so sad, is a vital presence yet also a fragile one, as if about to disappear into the void he stands in. There’s always mystery in a Velázquez painting. He never tells us anything, only gives hints and poses questions.

He’s also an X-ray machine. He zeroes in on a person’s inner life and character, generous but unsentimental. Without flattery, his portraits bring out what is most noble or beautiful about his subjects, while reminding them and us that, however grand we may be, we’re just passing through.

Unlike his older contemporary, Rubens, who was an artistic megastar, féted across Europe, Velázquez wasn’t famous in his lifetime. He spent most of his professional career at the Spanish court, working for his lugubrious-looking patron, Philip IV. His artistic reputation grew steadily after his death until it overtook even Rubens.

Velázquez’s most famous painting, and the painting that plenty of critics would vote for as the GOAT, is Las Meninas (above, top). I’d seen it once before and now feel lucky to have seen it twice. At the Prado it is on the back wall of a large room, so you view it from a distance as you approach.1 You can, if you like, do what Kenneth Clark liked to do: repeatedly walk towards it until the figures dissolve and all you can see are Velázquez’s loose, louche brushstrokes. Clark was trying to work out the exact point that the spell was cast; when the painting stopped and the illusion began. He never could.

Las Meninas is so complex that I can’t do it justice here. If you’d like to read more about it I’d recommend this BBC piece by the art critic Kelly Grovier. The book that really fed my Velázquez obsession was The Vanishing Man by Laura Cumming, one of the most satisfying nonfiction books I’ve read.

In plain terms, here’s what we’re looking at: the artist himself painting his patrons, the king and queen of Spain, in the company of their five year-old daughter and assorted attendants. In the dim room, the little princess shines, under the eyes of her parents, just out of frame. We can only see the king and queen in a mirror, and that’s because, in the illusory space of the painting, they are standing where we’re standing.

This is what makes Las Meninas so disorienting and enchanting. Both the artist and the Infanta are gazing at us. It’s our gaze which lights up the Infanta, now long gone from the world. It’s us that Velázquez is so coolly appraising, and while we stand in front of his painting, it’s us that he’s creating. Meanwhile, a servant waits, slightly impatiently, to usher us into the next room. We have an appointment that can’t be missed.

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Velázquez weaves together the mundane and the ethereal, the worldly and the transcendent. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the red cross painted on his chest. The cross marks him as a Knight of Santiago, an ancient and exclusive Catholic order. Las Meninas was painted in the 1650s, when Velázquez was in his fifties (he died at the age of 61), at a time when officials were thwarting his efforts to join the order. By this stage he was a highly valued courtier but he longed for the aristocratic prestige that came with membership. He kept prompting the king to make applications to the Pope on his behalf and spent a lot of time poring over his family tree, searching for evidence to prove he was worthy.

It’s funny and oddly reassuring that a supreme artist should care so much about worldly status. What he did with the brush was worth infinitely more than membership of any society. But it didn’t seem like that to him, or perhaps it did, but only fleetingly. Reading about Velázquez’s social climbing reminded me of Shakespeare. The two artists are often seen as kindred spirits, with the same miraculous ability to see into any human soul. But both had these worldly worries too.

When he was a young man, Shakespeare spent years petitioning the College of Heralds to grant his father a coat of arms. He was finally granted it in 1596. It clearly meant a lot to him. In practice it meant he got to put “gentleman” after his name (though not “sir” before it - he was still ranked below knights). The motto he chose for his coat of arms, Non Sanz Droict (Old French for "Not Without Right") is surprisingly lame. I often think that if I could meet anyone from history, it would Shakespeare, but I’m haunted by the thought that the author of Hamlet would only want to talk to me about how he came to choose a specific shade of gold for his escutcheon.2

Michelangelo also suffered from chronic status anxiety, despite being the most acclaimed and wealthy artist of his time. He was obsessed with the supposedly aristocratic origins of his family, the Buonarroti. According to what his biographer, William E. Wallace, calls “the creative genealogy of the day”, the Buonarrotis were descended from the counts of Canossa, an ancient and legendary family. Michelangelo believed that “imperial blood” flowed in his veins.

Being known only by one name sounds rather chic to us but Michelangelo might not have been so pleased to hear how he is referred to now. In his world, being able to use a surname in correspondence was a sign of status. After 1526, he stopped signing letters Michelangelo “sculptor” and started signing them with patronymic and surname: Lionardo di Buonarroto Buonarroti Simoni.

He was very keen that his relatives should burnish the family’s image. In a letter, he urges his nephew to acquire a larger, more impressive house: “I say this because a noble house in the city brings much honour, because it is more visible than other possessions, and because we are citizens descended from one of the noblest families.” (You can imagine his nephew wincing at once again having to read Uncle Mike droning on about the need to keep up appearances).

Michelangelo saw himself as an aristocrat who made art rather than an artist with aristocratic connections. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the social status of artists increased, partly thanks to the grandeur of Michelangelo) and because it became more legitimate to attribute nobility to achievement and virtue, rather than just to birth. But Shakespeare and Velázquez still remained stuck in the liminal zone, convinced that it was their work which made them great but uncertain if anyone else saw things quite the same way.

Both were capable of reflecting on the ironies of their position. In The Tempest, Prospero, with whom Shakespeare seems to identify, floats far above the concerns of mere mortals, yet is also desperate to remind everyone he is the real Duke of Milan. “Every third thought shall be my grave”, he says. I take this to mean that when he’s not having deep thoughts about mortality he’s obsessing over how the hell to recover his kingdom and his title.

In Las Meninas, the artist, having arrived at court thirty years earlier as a mere servant, steps boldly into the frame while relegating his master to a blurry image at the back of the room. It’s as if he’s reminding Philip that the king’s prestige is built on Velázquez’s image-making. But the painting doesn’t quite tell us if Velázquez is an all-powerful magician or a member of staff.

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This one is free to read so feel free to hit the green button and share. After the jump: why I doubt that the Nowak case was really about anti-racism. Plus a Rattle Bag of good things, including my thoughts on the new McCartney album. The Ruffian depends on paid subscribers. Please consider taking one out, it’s very good value, and very high status.

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All the Photos I Couldn’t Use For ‘John & Paul’
Why Writers Should Use AI More
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Pain Is a Mind Game
Who The Hell Is Wesley Streeting?
Thinking By Hand

Lucky for you I was on holiday last week, otherwise this might have been an actual essay.

For those of you blissfully unaware: last week Tony Blair published a 6k word essay about where Labour is going wrong. He followed it up with a media round. The result was an entire discourse explosion; endless counter-essays, interviews, podcasts, columns, posts. The current Prime Minister and the two most likely candidates to succeed him felt compelled to write lengthy pieces in response.

That a man who left political office almost twenty years ago can still bend elite discourse to his will is partly because he is polarising and therefore perfect for the age of outrage. But it’s not just that; it’s also because he has something interesting to say - a rare commodity in British politics.

The essay’s political philosophy is shallow. It makes sweeping assertions that are hard to stand up. It fails to address the current political landscape in any detail. It is also head and shoulders above anything written by any current Labour politician, before or after its publication. In that sense it succeeded in its minimal task. It has exposed the problem that has been obscured by all the leadership chatter: Labour isn’t thinking.

The response from Labour MPs and left-wing pundits has for the most part been defensive, sneering, and superficial. Much of it is ad hominem. I suspect it is rooted in insecurity. I want to say to these people: calm down. Be more confident. If Blair’s piece is outdated, irrelevant and compromised, as you claim, then you can happily ignore it and him. If, however, he makes important points, then why not acknowledge them, before moving on to what he gets wrong or misses out?

I don’t believe Blair set out to convert his party to a particular political strategy or policy program. He just wants it to grow up and get serious about the problems facing the country. It’s spectacularly pointless to insult him or to loudly declare “nothing to see here”, just as it would be useless to pretend his piece provides answers to all Labour’s problems. The point is to use his piece to improve your thinking and your arguments. That’s how productive political debate is meant to work. It’s called the dialectical method, comrades.

It is Blair’s style of argument, as much as the argument itself, which matters. The way he starts from first principles (what is Labour for?) and moves from step to logical step, expressing his ideas cleanly and simply. The way he takes care to separate policy from political strategy from tactics and communication. The way he looks outwards to the world rather than inwards to the party. The way he is excited about the future rather than nostalgic for the past. The way he assumes that the right policies will be good for everyone and not just for ‘our people’.

Many Labour people have forgotten how to argue in this manner, if they ever learnt it. And anyway, they don’t want to have to think through the difficult and unpleasant things that come with the responsibility of governing. How many Labour MPs have done real thinking about how to help the private sector create wealth; how to give our AI sector a fighting chance; how to cut the welfare bill? How many of them have thought deeply about Britain’s economic and diplomatic relationship with China; about our defence capabilities, or our energy strategy, or about how all these questions interact? No - they would much rather sing the old songs about inequality and neo-liberalism and propose more ways to redistribute all the income we don’t have, while taking pot shots at colleagues.

Blair is asking Labour MPs and ministers to engage intelligently on these questions and others - questions which, even two years into government, they have mostly failed to confront or even consider in depth. That’s the reason so many of them find his piece so bothersome. It reminds them that they know and care too little about the job they’re supposed to be doing.

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The most worrying thing about the responses is that they reveal quite how much Labour politicians are now operating in an alternative reality. Burnham thinks the cause of Britain’s housing crisis is that Thatcher sold off council houses. This is so wrong it’s hard to know where to start, but a simple refutation is that we already have an exceptionally high proportion of social housing. If you want to make this argument, you have to explain this fact.

Or take Burnham’s “forty years of neo-liberalism” line which he stubbornly repeats after Blair called him on it, or Streeting’s contention that inequality is the most urgent problem we face. British income inequality is the lowest it has been since 1986.

Wealth inequality is higher but it’s driven by an ageing population and sky-high house prices (and thus housing shortage). Burnham cites the financial crisis, rightly, as a pivotal economic disaster for us. But the share of income flowing to the richest 1% is now lower than it was in 2008. The tax system is much more redistributive than it was at the start of the century, partly due to fiscal drag, and is one of the most progressive in Europe. The top 1% pay a substantially greater share of income tax than they did twenty years ago.1

We have one of the highest statutory minimum wages in the world relative to average income. It is set at 65% of the median British income, higher than the EU average. Our housing and energy sectors are struggling under accumulated weight of regulations that have been accreting for decades. Our biggest supermarket is currently fighting, and so far losing, a legal battle to pay different wages to workers doing different jobs, because it somehow contravenes Labour’s equality legislation.

I know “neo-liberalism” is a baggy concept, but can it really stretch this far?

Of course not. It’s just a slogan or buzzword used to avoid thinking about the hard questions. Voters are feeling miserable because their living standards aren’t rising. But that's not because all the income is going to the rich, and it’s not because the government isn’t taxing or regulating enough. It’s because their incomes aren’t rising. And that’s because they’re living in a low growth country.

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To his credit, Burnham at least adopted the right tone in his essay. He welcomed Blair’s intervention and praised his piece. He didn’t sound put out or threatened by it, even if his own ideas fell woefully short of convincing. Starmer was civil, though his piece revealed the same blind spots he has exhibited as Prime Minister, and he is anyway beyond redemption at this point. Wes Streeting adopted the most petulant tone of all three, perhaps because he fears being associated with Blair. That might have been excusable if he had anything of substance to say but to me his piece reinforced the impression of a talented tactician who hasn’t matured at the rate that his fans, including me, hoped he would.

Tony Blair doesn’t have all the answers to Labour’s predicament or to Britain’s malaise. But he’s asking better questions than anyone else.

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How To Save Centrism

The Ruffian is running a limited service today, as I’ve been on holiday this week, in Madrid. (Great to get away from rainy old England.)

I recently wrote a short piece for the Guardian on the Beatles; a commentary on some photographs of the group’s last official gig, in 1966. Writing it got me thinking about all the pictures of John and Paul I wasn’t able to use for John & Paul, for reasons I’ll explain. In lieu of a full-fat Ruffian what follows is the first in an occasional series on this theme.

The picture above is one of a small group of photos taken on the night of March 18, 1965. The Beatles were staying at the Marietta Hotel, in Obertauern, Austria, where they were shooting skiing scenes for the movie Help! After dinner, John and Paul went for a drink in the bar (George and Ringo seem to have been elsewhere) and persuaded the house act - a group called Jacky and the Strangers - to let them take over for a while. And they just jammed. (Btw this post was written without notes to hand so if there are any mistakes I apologise, will correct later).

It’s a beautiful moment. The two of them were in the middle of a global maelstrom of fame and already tiring of the stress and boredom it imposed on them. And here they found this little escape hatch - a place where they could sing and play together for the sheer sweaty joy of it, just like they used to.

We don’t know exactly what they played, but apparently it was covers of old rock’n roll songs - the kinds of songs they played when they first became friends. They look drunk or stoned or both and I imagine it was pretty sloppy, but what fun.

After a few numbers, the manager restored order. After all, he pointed out, he had hired Jacky and the Strangers, not the Beatles.

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I love this picture and the others taken on the same night - see below. In fact, I originally wanted to use one of the pics below for the cover of John & Paul. That proved impossible, for reasons I’ll say more about.

But first, I want to give some background on the process of selecting photos for my book, and indeed for any book. This was the first book I’ve written in which photos were involved. I’m pleased with the selection we ended up with but my God what a hassle it was. Along with getting the Notes section in order it was one of the less enjoyable parts of putting the book together and certainly the most expensive.

Photos were often an important source of evidence for the story I was telling, or the argument I was making. With the Marietta pics, and in several other places in the book, I had to describe photos that I couldn’t include, in the knowledge that readers could, if they wished, easily look them up online. This is one of the odd aspects of this business - a photo can be all over the internet but if you want to use it in a book, you have to pay. And it really is you, the writer.

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Catch-up service:
Pod: Cass Sunstein on the politics of the Beatles
Pain Is a Mind Game
Who The Hell Is Wesley Streeting?
Thinking By Hand
How To Save Centrism
What the Fuck Are We Talking About When We Talk about Love?

On Wednesday 17 June, my choir will be performing a selection of operatic classics, with some stellar soloists. It’s going to be a brilliant night, full of huge tunes and amazing singing (not me). Tickets are available here. It’s at Cadogan Hall in Chelsea. Come along!

This week: two funny stories about AI and writing, plus a juicy Rattle Bag including notes on maybe the best gig I’ve ever been to.

Having posted on it recently, I wasn’t going to return to the topic of AI and writing for a while. But this week has delivered a pair of stories so juicy that it’s impossible not to comment on them. First up: a prestigious literary prize was awarded to a story that was almost certainly generated by ChatGPT. (As far as I can work out this story was broken by friend-of-The-Ruffian Nabeel Qureshi, on his X account.)

The story is called The Serpent In The Grove, by Jamir Nazir. It was awarded a Commonwealth Short Story Prize and published in Granta. The award dispenses five prizes to five different Commonwealth regions; Nazir, or “Nazir”, is the winner for the Caribbean region.

The Serpent In The Grove is set in an enchanted farmhouse (of course it is) and concerns a troubled marriage. You can read the whole thing, but here’s how it starts:

How do people know it’s AI-generated? They don’t know for certain, not yet anyway. But LLM prose has a certain flavour, and boy is it powerful here. This story is full of its stylistic and syntactical tics: weird metaphors which make no actual sense (“the breath of hills holding their heat like a secret”; many “not x, but y” sentence structures; over-use of certain words like “hums” and “quiet”.1 The entirely vacuous solemnity. The sense of someone, or something, straining to sound deep without having anything to say.

The grove ain’t forget.

Of course, all these things can be true of human-generated literary fiction, and none are infallible markers of LLM writing. But when they’re brought together like this, the flavour is unmistakable. Consider also that the only current internet presence of the author is a LinkedIn profile on which every post is clearly written with AI.

The AI-detection service Pangram deems The Serpent In The Grove to be 100% AI-generated. I sometimes think these mini-scandals are cunningly planned PR campaigns for Pangram; they certainly make the most of them. After this one broke, they ran all of the Commonwealth Prize’s winning stories since 2012 through the model. It found them all to be human generated, except for one in 2025 and three in 2026, of which Nazir’s is one.2

The response from the publisher of Granta, Sigrid Rausing, has essentially been to shrug and say, “Who knows?”

We asked Claude, it wasn’t sure, so whatareyagunnado.3 Anyway maybe it’s racism. A separate statement, this one from the Commonwealth Foundation, said, confusingly, that they would never feed stories to an AI model because then the evil AI would steal the content. Sam Leith, literary editor of The Spectator, agrees with Rausing. Rausing is one of our greatest philanthropists and Leith one of our best critics. I find their attitudes bewilderingly passive.

In the absence of evidence to the contrary, it’s reasonable to assume the story is AI-generated based on reading alone. The Pangram analysis is confirmatory evidence. But a little due diligence would have worked wonders here. Have any of the prize administrators actually talked to Nazir? Have they tried to track down the nameless “books published and others forthcoming” referred to in the capsule biography he has provided for them? I am sure the prize runs on a shoestring but even so, none of this requires much effort. Behind the AI’s output is a real person, a dab hand at prompting. Somebody is getting paid the prize money. The point is not to engage in a witchhunt, but to do justice to all the authors who went to the trouble of writing their own story.

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I’ve been wondering why the prize administrators and judges are so slow to pick up on AI-inflected prose, whereas tech people can see it right away (especially those tech people who, like Nabeel, are voracious readers of literary fiction). I think it’s because literary people don’t spend much time reading LLM-generated writing. They just don’t use AI very much. The literary world has a fierce hostility to this technology, rooted in the fear that it’s about to destroy their livelihoods. If they used it more (but not to do their writing for them!) they would have better intuitions for what is AI writing and what isn’t.

They would also know that just asking Claude for a view isn’t enough, since the general models tend to equivocate on such questions and to be sensitive to the prompt (if they sense you want Answer A, that’s where they’ll lean). They would know that if you’re going to consult with AI, it’s much better to use a specialist model, trained specifically for this task.

Pangram works by taking millions of examples of human writing and generating an AI version of each one - a ‘synthetic mirror’. To distinguish between them the model is forced to focus on and recognise the stylistic fingerprints of machine writing. Perhaps it might be a useful exercise for writers to take a passage or scene from a favourite novel and prompt an LLM to do a version of it. They’ll soon get to know that distinctive flavour.

Right now, book people appear to be hostile to AI in general and lenient about its use in literary prizes. That seems like the wrong way around. Mishaps like this one should only remind us that literary fiction is relatively safe from AI. Indeed it has one of the biggest moats of any white collar endeavour. If fiction goes into terminal decline, it will be for other, broader reasons, and not because AIs can fake it. A story that isn’t written by a human has no purpose, and can only offer paltry satisfactions to a reader who knows this to be so.

Once people know a story or a book is AI-generated, they lose any interest they had in it (except perhaps, in these early days, some morbid fascination). The reader has to believe a story is written by a human in order to care about it. Yes, The Serpent In The Grove is terrible writing and shouldn’t have won an award, and yes, much handcrafted fiction is bad. But all these questions of quality are subordinate to that axiom. An AI-generated story simply can’t be ‘good’ in any sense but the most superficial.

It’s the mathematicians I feel sorry for.

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Right, on to the second screw-up of the week. This one is even funnier.

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I'm delighted to say that my guest for this episode is Cass Sunstein, a professor at Harvard Law School and one of America's pre-eminent legal scholars. Cass has been an adviser to President Obama and President Biden. He's also the author or co-author of numerous excellent books on a staggering variety of topics, from behavioural economics to conspiracy theories to fame to climate justice and more.

This conversation was sparked by his latest book, On Liberalism, a thought-provoking re-examination of what it means to be a political liberal in an age when liberalism is under attack. Cass is great at making connections between politics and culture, so I naturally wanted to talk to him about the Beatles, and whether they can be said to embody a liberal outlook on life. We start off by talking about his first love, Bob Dylan.

Paid subscribers will be able to access the second part of this conversation, published soon, in which we range further afield. Enjoy!

Catch-up service:
Who The Hell Is Wesley Streeting?
Thinking By Hand
How To Save Centrism
What the Fuck Are We Talking About When We Talk about Love?
Arteta vs Guardiola
Moon Joy

I have of late been going through a Martin Amis phase. I don’t mean that I’ve been reading him, or, God forbid, trying to write like him. I mean that I’ve been having teeth trouble.

Amis’s memoir, Experience, is deeply concerned with teeth. The famously expensive dental surgery he undertook in middle age was not a matter of cosmetics, but pain relief, and it made him reflect on the interaction of body and mind. As one critic has argued, the whole book can be read as proposing that “people are first and foremost bodies”, and that our ideas and feelings, including our ideas and feelings about other people, proceed from this ground truth.

Amis had a theory of why, despite knowing his teeth were dodgy, he stopped going to the dentist for decades, until it was too late to avert a crisis in middle age. Unconsciously, he had believed that losing them would enable him to effect a deep change in his personality - to grow up.

”It was a bad plan [not going to the dentist], but it had worked. My unconscious mind might not have thought much of the plan either, but it worked around that and made its preparations. Really, the conscious mind can afford to give itself a rest. The big jobs are done by the unconscious. The unconscious does it all.”

My teeth trouble is not on the scale of Mart’s but it’s enough to make me understand why he devoted so much of Experience to it. When you’re in the middle of teeth trouble it’s difficult to think about anything else.

Toothache is a mind game. If you get knocked in the knee, the pain is easy to comprehend; you intuitively know trigger and cause. Dental pain is more mysterious. You might know it’s something to do with spotty dental hygiene, sugar or smoking, but you don’t know why this particular tooth is hurting and not that one, and the answer is not always physical. ‘Referred pain’ can be felt in a tooth which isn’t even near the tooth that’s the source of the problem.

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A few months ago I had a long-running dispute with a molar on the upper right. After my regular dentist had tried and failed to resolve it I went to a specialist - an endodontist. The operation seemed to go fine but a couple of weeks later I was in quite a lot of pain. I convinced myself that the operation had failed, and felt quite anxious about it. So I called my endodontist, who exuded an air of effortless mastery. “It’s just an after-effect”, he said, in his reassuringly confident tone. “It’ll fade.” Almost the moment I got off the phone, the pain subsided, and soon disappeared for good.

I’m sure you’ve had similar experiences, whether it’s teeth or some other part of the anatomy. The mere act of having a worrying pain or ache explained, contextualised, made mundane by a doctor often goes some or all of the way towards alleviating the pain itself. The idea that physical pain has a mental component shouldn’t be surprising, but the mental part often counts for more than I expect.

The neuroscientific mechanism behind this phenomenon is explored in Andy Clark’s book The Experience Machine (I wrote about Clark’s book a couple of weeks ago and will return to it again - it’s very rich). Clark discusses an extraordinary case study from the British Medical Journal, about a builder who jumped from some scaffolding to the ground, only to land on a fifteen-inch nail.

After the jump - the rest of this piece plus a note on the race to depose Keir Starmer, plus a glorious Rattle Bag. The Ruffian depends on paid subscriptions. Many thanks to those of you who already support it.

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Wes Streeting is strongly rumoured to be launching a leadership challenge to Keir Starmer within the next 48 hours. If you want to know more about Streeting, I recommend my review of his memoir, which I originally wrote for the August 2023 edition of Prospect. Streeting’s life story is truly amazing - his book would be a compelling tale even if it wasn’t by a famous politician. The book is also revealing about his political psychology, perhaps in a way he didn’t intend.

After the review, I give my thoughts on Streeting in 2026, and what I’d like to see him do in his leadership campaign.

One Boy, Two Bills and a Fry Up: A Memoir of Getting Up and Getting On.
Wes Streeting

There are two genres of political memoir: what-I-did and who-I-am. Retired politicians write the former: long, self-justifying accounts of life on the political frontline; why I did this, why I didn’t do that; why we needn’t dwell on that. Ambitious politicians on the way up write the second kind: artfully shaped life stories peopled by loving mothers and deadbeat dads, or deadbeat mothers and loving dads, in which trials, tribulations and triumphs illuminate the author’s most deeply held values and position on tax reform.

The model for the first genre is Churchill, who had rather a lot of ground to cover. We await Liz Truss’s contribution with bated breath. The second genre is more common in America than Britain and is typified by Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope, with its fusion of the political and the personal. Keir Starmer was planning to write one of these but dropped the idea earlier this year, much to everyone’s relief (rumoured title: The Comfort of Low Expectations).

You might expect Wes Streeting’s new book to fit the who-I-am genre, since Streeting is ambitious and on the way up. In fact, it fits neither model. One Boy, Two Bills and a Fry Up is a memoir by a politician that is barely a political memoir at all, which makes it human, endearing and a little unsatisfying.

The fry-up begot the boy. In May 1982, Streeting’s mother Corinna was newly 18, poor and pregnant by her 17-year-old boyfriend, by accident. At the insistence of her mother, Libby, she made an appointment for a termination. The hospital warned her not to eat anything before coming in. But Corinna, who lived with her mum and two siblings in a three-bedroom council flat in Stepney Green, woke up that morning determined to have her baby. So she cooked herself breakfast. By the time Libby got to the kitchen, the plate was empty, and Corinna could tell her furious mother, and herself, that there was no going back. Hence the book’s title—and its author.

Nanny Libby, a chain-smoking cyclone of a woman, loomed large in Streeting’s early life. She was loyal, loving and ferocious. When she found out that Corinna had been abused by a boyfriend, she tracked him down and beat him with a bicycle chain. A tireless activist, she was heavily involved in campaigns against the Thatcherite regeneration of London’s docklands. When Rupert Murdoch relocated News International to Wapping, she joined the picket lines. A Labour party stalwart, Libby was invited to stand for the local council more than once, but always refused, partly because she was ashamed of her criminal record.

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Catch-up service:
Thinking By Hand
How To Save Centrism
What the Fuck Are We Talking About When We Talk about Love?
Arteta vs Guardiola
Moon Joy
How Evil Is Mark Zuckerberg?
Giving Advice Is a Treacherous Business

An under-reported trend in British society is the extraordinary rise of long distance running. This week, the organisers of the London Marathon announced that there have been 1.3 million global applications to run in next year’s race, more than double the amount in 2024. Just over a million of those applications were from the UK. That’s 1.8% of the entire adult population.

Personally I hate running, but I’m cheered by this. In a country that doesn’t have many positive social trends to celebrate at the moment, it is a bright spot. Running is healthy and, for many people, therapeutic. The largest number of applications from a single demographic group came from women aged 20-29, the group with the worst mental health in the country. Yes, I’d rather they were socialising more too but it’s still good that so many have found a reason to get out of their homes and their heads.

It’s tempting to think of running as some kind of antidote to technology but it is actually a product of it. Modern running is inextricably tied to the smartphone. Apps like Couch To 5K, MapMyRun, and Strava give novice runners the advice, social connection and incentive structures they need to get going and keep going. Nobody needs a phone, or a smartwatch, to run, but many people wouldn’t be running without one. An absurdly complex technology has enabled millions of people to discover one of the simplest and most fundamental of human activities.

At this year’s marathon, 60,000 people finished the race, watched by about 750,000 spectators. At the front of the race, and the top end of the sport, Sabastian Sawe smashed the two-hour barrier, once thought insurmountable. (He did it with the help of technology too, albeit of a different kind).

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But wait, maybe the whole thing is futile, since the robots can do it better now. Last month, there was a half-marathon race in Beijing, in which robots competed with humans. The robots crushed it. All three podium spots were taken by non-humans. The winning machine, made by a subsidiary of Huawei, beat the human world record by seven minutes. This has been reported as a momentous event. “The robots’ speed far exceeds that of humans,” a spectator observed sombrely, “This may signal the arrival of a new era.”

Or it may not. It’s true that the race displayed Chinese progress in robotics: all of the bots were considerably faster than those entered a year ago. Indeed, that is probably why it was staged. But the premise of a competition with humans is inherently ridiculous.

We already have machines that can beat humans in half-marathons. They’re called cars (and these days they don’t even need drivers). Building a machine that can get around a course at speed is not cutting-edge. Doing so while making it look like a human is harder, but that’s an artificial, technologically pointless constraint. It might force useful innovation of some kind, but it’s mostly about the pictures.

The fact that this robotics showcase was presented and reported on as a sporting contest at all is significant. Whoever was behind it knew it would get more attention that way, because we’re fascinated by sport. But why are we fascinated by sport? It’s not because we want to know how fast a human-sized object can propel itself around a track. It’s because we’re fascinated by humans; helplessly compelled by intra-species comparisons.

That’s why 60,000 people took part in the London Marathon: to discover how they’d fare against fellow runners, and against their past selves. It’s also why so many turned out to watch. The spectators might have been supporting someone they knew or seeking a glimpse of the world’s top runners, but mainly they liked watching strangers do something hard, so hard that there is nowhere to hide. You can’t pretend to be someone you’re not when you’re on the edge of exhaustion.

Regardless of whether they’re wearing a comedy outfit or not, each runner declares themselves a unique individual. They’re all doing the same thing, slightly differently. Subconsciously or otherwise, the runners are comparing themselves against each other and themselves; the spectators are comparing themselves against the runners and each other. Both runners and spectators enjoy being around other runners and spectators.

If you think of the London Marathon as a place where a task gets done - covering a distance in the minimum time possible - you’d be completely missing the point. It is a festival of human comparison and human connection. It is growing in popularity at a time when technology threatens to curtail the scope of human endeavour, and it’s doing so with the help of technology. Perhaps this tells us something about how AI will change the world of work.

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How To Save Centrism
What the Fuck Are We Talking About When We Talk about Love?
Arteta vs Guardiola
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How Evil Is Mark Zuckerberg?
Giving Advice Is a Treacherous Busin…

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Catch-up service:
What the Fuck Are We Talking About When We Talk about Love?
Arteta vs Guardiola
Moon Joy
How Evil Is Mark Zuckerberg?
Giving Advice Is a Treacherous Business
Against Introspection
Is the Current Gulf War Taking Place?

Scarlett Maguire, a pollster and one of Britain’s smartest political analysts, has issued a wake-up call to centrists. The centre is not where they think it is. Centrists are used to thinking of themselves as the inhabitants of a lush and large tract of land called “The Centre Ground”, with everyone else scrabbling around the edges. In fact, the centrists are isolated on a scrubby little verge in the middle of a motorway.

According to her data, the politicians who think of themselves as centrists are pitching to a group of voters - she calls them “liberal institutionalists” - who make up only 5% of voters. What is a liberal institutionalist? Think pro-Remain Tories, ageing Blairites. More specifically: voters who believe in a smaller state; who trust institutions and the mainstream media; who trust government; who are pro-business, pro-immigration (with controls), and loosely pro-globalisation.

This describes me, more or less. Me and about seven other voters, apparently. It is actually quite exciting to find out I’m in a tiny minority. Perhaps my very boring and vanilla brand of politics has finally become interesting and radical. Am I an extremist now?

I don’t know if I can claim that quite yet. I do accept, however, that whoever the median voter is, it’s not The Ruffian. Who is it then? According to this data, the median voter distrusts politicians; wants change; backs deportations; wants large reduction in legal migration; favours a wealth tax and wage ratios, is anti big-business. But also dislikes inflammatory rhetoric; worries about an unstable world; wants to see solutions over political point-scoring.

Let me get this straight: the median voter distrusts conventional politicians and most non-conventional politicians. They want lower taxes on their household and higher taxes on the rich. They want to cut public spending but only on migrants and scroungers. They want higher living standards, tougher regulation on big business, and much lower immigration. Oh and they’re also a big fan of pragmatic solutions. Sure.

In short, the median voter is all over the place. He or she holds what centrists would consider “extreme” views, and these views come in strange combinations. This is hard to swallow for centrists on both right and left.

Those on the right haven’t yet come to terms with how far left the electorate has shifted on economics. Many voters are under the impression that if we squeeze the rich and hit big business, we can pay for everything. Having lived through the financial crisis and austerity, they still believe that public spending is cut to the bone, and that we live in an era of rising inequality, when if anything the opposite is true. They’re not aware that Britain has the most progressive tax system in the developed world.

Similarly, politicians on the left have found it hard to accept how far they are from the median voter when it comes to immigration. The public isn’t satisfied with higher immigration, as long as it’s controlled and managed - the boilerplate position of even right-wing Labour MPs. Voters are furious about the relatively small numbers of illegal immigrants and want (or at least say they want) to cut legal immigration too. Left-wing politicians and commentators paint Shabana Mahmood as some kind of neo-fascist when in fact her position on this issue is well to the left of the median voter.

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In fact, all politicians with ambitions to govern are in a tough spot, since the median voter is not only charmingly inconsistent but also under some serious misapprehensions.

According to Scarlett Maguire and other pollsters over the last few years, voters are surprised to be told that we spend more on welfare than we take in income tax, or that we still have a huge Covid bill to pay off. They think we can spend more on the NHS and Defence if we just cut the salaries of MPs (or something). They think serious crime is rising, not falling. They have been allowed to forget that if you want higher living standards and better services, then the economy has to grow, which means big business has to thrive.

I don’t think this makes the country “ungovernable” but it certainly raises the difficulty level. You can see why even mainstream politicians are giving up on the median voter and targeting their base, or at least their ‘bloc’. The smaller the target group, the more internal consistency there is, the easier it is to shape a coherent set of messages. The trouble is that to win power - or enough power to get things done - you still have to win over voters and stakeholders from beyond your bloc, and you still have to adopt policies with a chance of working.

You might be able to impose a wealth tax on the very rich, for instance, but you’d soon find it would raise very little while slowing growth. You might slash immigration, but the NHS would collapse and GDP growth would be stymied. You might promise to spend more on lots of things but you will soon face a fiscal crisis. Pick your own examples of fantasy smashing into reality, but the most obvious one is playing out as we speak. A party that came into power on the impossible promise that it wouldn’t raise taxes but would deliver improvements in public services is now widely despised for its dishonesty. Was it worth it?

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I want to try and rescue centrism, but first I’ll say what I mean by it, starting with what I don’t mean.

Interpreted literally, “centrism” means aiming for the middle point of the political spectrum. Scarlett’s analysis suggests that it isn’t a viable approach anymore. I’m not sure it ever was. When the canonical centrists, like Blair or Cameron, talked about aiming for the centre ground, it meant compensating for the bias of their own party by pulling in the opposite direction, in order to reach voters who weren’t naturally aligned with them.

So Blair emphasised wealth creation and crime, Cameron social liberalism, and so on. Yes, they sought to stay close to the median voter, but it was a little more subtle than finding the middle point in a distribution and putting a flag on it. A strategy that merely tries to win back voters lost to more extreme competitors is a failure of ambition; the main parties should still be reaching to the other side as well as shoring up their flanks.

People who use the label “centrist” derisively (which is most people) use it to mean “starting with what the median voter wants and working back to political positioning”, or less kindly, “hollow opportunism”. Again, this isn’t true of Blair or Cameron, who were both true believers in their political missions, in some ways to a fault. There was actual content to their platforms: they had a philosophy, they had ideas, they had policies they wanted to see through. (Conversely, I don’t think of Robert Jenrick or J.D. Vance as centrists, even though they are plainly opportunists.)

A more charitable interpretation of the term is that it means “ambitious about winning power by winning over voters from beyond my base and then governing effectively, in a way that consolidates and expands my coalition”. (OK, not a great bumper sticker). Governing effectively will and should mean different things to different leaders, but centrism doesn’t set the direction. It’s a political method, not a philosophy. You need both.

Looked at this way, centrism isn’t dead, it just needs updating. It needs a lot of updating.

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“Centrism” is nothing without seriousness about governing, and on that count the centrists have, as Stalin said when the Germans invaded, “fucked it up”. Oh boy, have they fucked it up. Supposedly centrist leaders have presided over political chaos and national stagnation, which they have not only failed to alleviate but actively made worse. If the notion of a reassuringly competent Prime Minister, supported or at least accepted by the whole country, still resonated in 2024, it means less than nothing now.

The incumbent is like a custom-designed bot created to expose centrism as a lie. Starmer really is a hollow opportunist with no principles and no ideas. He really did rise to power in a mechanical way, sending two different messages to two different electorates without believing in either. All this might not have mattered if he then proved an effective PM. As it is, he is a shopping trolley in the guise of a technocrat; Boris Johnson without the bonhomie: weaving from side to side, pushed by whoever last took the handle, smashing into whoever happens to be nearby.

Still, painfully inadequate as both the Labour Party and the Tory Party have been, they remain the least bad options available. Despite some half-hearted efforts to get serious, Reform is still teeming with cranks, like the doctor who believes that vaccines cause cancer, and Suella Braverman. The Green Party wants to pull out of NATO, unilaterally disarm, kill GDP growth and legalise all drugs. Ed Davey - no.

That means centrism has to be revived. After all, it is the raison d’être of the main parties: their appeal to voters rests on a claim to be less extreme and more competent than the populists. To restore authority to that claim they will have to update their calcified assumptions about who the median voter really is, and to mercilessly interrogate their own thinking about what the country needs. They should be as critical of established wisdom, which means their wisdom, as the populists are. They have to understand and share the anger that voters feel about certain problems without letting it make them stupid.

Centrists, whichever party they’re from, will have to settle on a policy platform that tells and is framed by a coherent story about where Britain is now and where it needs to go. They will need to believe in it from the depths of their being, having sweated over it. Ideally they will have arrived at it through argument, so that they are fully aware of the case against, and have their enemies and potential converts in plain sight.1

To win elections, they will need to tell voters they’re right, for the most part, but centrists can’t substitute dishonesty for persuasion, where persuasion is necessary. Voters must be brought to understand that the only way to permanently reduce the cost of living is to increase growth, and that we can’t go on spending what we aren’t making.

Centrists will need to project urgency about the direness of our national predicament, something they tend to be poor at, since they came of age in more serene times and fancy themselves as calm hands on the tiller. They must not just project urgency, but feel it. The first error of the Starmer government was failing to cut short the 2024 summer recess. Some ministers have been rather too attached to their holidays, constituency work, family time. If the country is not in a crisis already, our leaders need to act as if it is.

The initial challenge is to demonstrate that the state can still do things. This is another sense in which centrists desperately need to update their mental model of politics. They need to recognise that one of Britain’s biggest problems is government itself, and that the proper response to this is not to complain about levers that don’t work or recalcitrant civil servants, but to have a bloody plan for power. A plan for the first week, the first month, the first year. Reality has a plan of its own, after all, and it is coming for you.

The populists have a vision but no plan. Starmer had neither. Whoever succeeds him, in the short or longer term, better have both.

Which brings me, seamlessly, to Michelangelo. (And after that, a Rattle Bag of excellent things - come on in…).

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Arteta vs Guardiola
Moon Joy
How Evil Is Mark Zuckerberg?
Giving Advice Is a Treacherous Business
Against Introspection
Is the Current Gulf War Taking Place?
How To Build Your Own Tower

The couple in the picture went viral after a TV camera caught them apparently having a bad tempered row at a basketball game in Indianapolis. The man is gesticulating vigorously, the woman is looking off to the side with a face like thunder. She then turns fire on him, at one point quite clearly saying, “What the fuck are you talking about?”.

Sports Illustrated (among many other media outlets) got in touch with the couple. It turns out this was an exquisitely middle class row. They were arguing about the value of a liberal arts education, having been prompted by a discussion of the topic on a recent New York Times podcast. And while the exchange was robust, it wasn’t hostile.

I absolutely love the woman’s account of the argument, which is funny, fine-grained, and rather romantic. I have to quote it in full:

“Even saying that out loud, I can hear you yawning through the phone,” Grace told SI. ” … The thing is, Michael and I have been together for four years—wonderful, happy years. But that’s just what we do. We both just talk. He’s frighteningly smart. So what everyone witnessed was me listening to his well-articulated thoughts and responding with what you saw, which was ‘What the f--- are you talking about?’ I think that was probably to kill time while I thought of a rebuttal. Because that’s sometimes what you have to do. Sometimes you ad hominem, sometimes you just raise your voice, and other times you actually already have something to say. I think that I did a mix of the two while I sorted out my thoughts. That’s just how we always talk, and it’s fun, and we’re always just doing that. That’s it. It’s so boring.”

Every group which spends time together has a culture, and a couple is just a small group. The woman is effectively telling us, “This is our culture. This is how we do things here.” Watch the clip without cultural context and you get a misleading view of what’s going on. I love that sentence near the end, in particular: (“That’s just how we always talk, and it’s fun, and we’re always just doing that.”). It’s such a beautiful description of a healthy practice of disagreement.

I don’t know what personal conflicts this couple will face in years to come, but I’m pretty confident they will be well-equipped to handle them. In my book on disagreement there’s a section on romantic relationships. I look at the evidence that couples who are more willing to have arguments with each other are more likely to stay together, and to overcome problems when they arise.

One reason for that is that habitual practice in low-stakes arguments makes it easier to deal with high-stakes conflict. The participants feel equipped to talk out their problems rather than avoid them, and to express frustrations rather than bottle them up. Another reason is that argument is a great way to keep yourself abreast of what your partner is feeling and thinking. Conflict is information. A third reason would be the one the woman outlines above: it’s stimulating.

Of course, some couples who argue a lot are making each other unhappy. Argument is destructive and corrosive if it involves unresolved resentment and bitterness. But if a couple likes and trusts each other, then an argument, even a heated one involving swear words, isn’t some some deeply unsettling event in the relationship, but just an everyday part of their culture. It’s boring. It’s fun.

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This week I’ve done a bunch of bite-sized posts - it’s one big Rattle Bag. Next up, I look at:

• Why AI hasn’t improved customer service (and what this tells us about how fast it will change the economy).

• What the latest Starmer scandal tells us about him (and about politics generally)

• How to buy happiness (a new study)

• Plus, an actual miracle of medical science; one of the best front pages ever; how to deal with conspiracy theorists; how to value Open AI; an intriguing theory of why The Beatles put Her Majesty at the end of Abbey Road, and more…
  

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Why Aren’t We Getting the Customer Service We Were Promised?

After LLMs suddenly emerged as the next big thing in 2023 it was frequently claimed they would soon transform customer service. That made sense to me. The CS systems of big companies are notoriously poor. The human agents inside them were following scripts and rules. The existing bots were extremely limited. If any industry was ripe for an AI upgrade, it was this one.

It would also be a positive story for AI, since in theory, everyone would gain. Companies would gain efficiencies by replacing staff with software. Fewer people would have to work in call centres (I’ve done it, it’s not fun). Consumers would get quicker, better service. That would all be something to lay on the positive side of the ledger, versus mass unemployment, cyberwars, and human extinction.

But it hasn’t happened, has it? Every time I struggle to navigate the website or app of my bank or an airline I think how nice it would be to have a Claude-style interface (in fact, I often resort to Claude, just as I learned that Google was a better way to search a particular website than the website’s internal search function). As it is, we’re pretty much stuck with the old system of call centres and dumb bots.

Why is that? I posed this question on Twitter/X this week and got some great answers from people who know what they’re talking about. I think these answers tell us something about the rate of change we can expect across the economy more broadly.

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Catch-up service:
Moon Joy
How Evil Is Mark Zuckerberg?
Giving Advice Is a Treacherous Business
Against Introspection
Is the Current Gulf War Taking Place?
How To Build Your Own Tower
33 Things I Heard At Foo Camp

Football, like team sports more generally, is a rich source of case studies in organisational psychology. This one tells us a lot about the nature of stress and the importance of leaders.

Here’s all you need to know. Manchester City have been the most successful team in English football for the last ten years. They are managed by the man generally regarded as the game’s greatest manager, Pep Guardiola, a mad genius, wildly innovative tactician, and ridiculously intense coach.

Mikel Arteta is a former Arsenal player, now their manager. When Arteta retired from playing, Guardiola hired him as his assistant at Manchester City, the apprentice to his sorcerer. After three years, Arteta took the Arsenal job and began to apply what he’d learnt from the master.

Arteta is intense too, and almost as tactically sophisticated, although he does everything in a more rigid, methodical way than his former boss. Within a few years, he transformed a club that was in danger of dropping out of the Premier League’s top tier, into the second strongest team in the country. In the race for the league title, Arsenal came second to City twice. Last season, for a change, they came second to Liverpool.

This year it seemed as if the stars had finally aligned. Arsenal have been top of the league and favourite to win the title since September. Manchester City have been, by their standards, inconsistent and sputtering. Liverpool are nowhere. Finally, Arsenal were about to win their first title since 2004, and the pupil was about to best his master.

But over the last few weeks, this prospect has been thrown into severe doubt. Manchester City are now breathing hotly down Arsenal’s neck. If they win their next two games, including their game against Arsenal, they will go top of the league with only a few games to go.

If this turnaround is completed, multiple reasons will be proposed for it, including differences in squad depth and the allocation of luck. But I think the real difference will be in team psychology, as derived from the team’s respective managers.

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Catch-up service:
How Evil Is Mark Zuckerberg?
Giving Advice Is a Treacherous Business
Against Introspection
Is the Current Gulf War Taking Place?
How To Build Your Own Tower
33 Things I Heard At Foo Camp
A Deep Dive Into ‘I Feel Fine’

This piece is free to read. It’s followed, for paid subscribers, by a gloriously bulging Rattle Bag (making up for the one skipped last week).

I am grateful to NASA and the astronauts of Artemis II for providing a shaft of light in the darkness. The two biggest news stories this week have been a joyful voyage around the moon and a senseless war in the Gulf. It’s like a rather heavy-handed parable of humans at their best and worst. My feed was simultaneously full of the ravings of an actual lunatic who is somehow the most powerful person on earth, and a chorus of delight at the stunning pictures beamed in from space. Sometimes, the juxtaposition verged on comic:

The Artemis II story defied the timeline in a deeper sense. It feels as if it was dropped into the news from a bygone era; a benign ghost sent to remind us of how we used to feel about the future. It is a story about technology that empowers humans rather than threatening us with obsoletion; a story about what we have in common rather than what drives us apart; a story of American heroism. It couldn’t be more retro. You could call it a Generation X moment. All four members of the crew are aged between 47 and 50, which means that, like me, they grew up with a sense that that the world is getting better, people are basically good, technology is on our side, and progress is inevitable.

It helps that these individuals are so attractive and likeable (like all members of Gen X). They are not grifters using this as a stepping stone to wealth and influence, but true believers; the name of their craft, Integrity, does not seem like a bitter joke. Each of them travelled a long way to get to the launchpad, with setbacks and tragedies along the way. That they include a woman and a black man does not seem tokenistic but merely apt. I know there are conspiracy theorists who believe the whole thing is fake, and I’m sure there are culture warriors who hate it, but for most people, Artemis II is a chance to take a breather from all that and remind ourselves of what humans can do when they’re not at each other’s throats.

Above all, it is the pictures which amaze us; which provide us with a visceral insight into how vast and strange the universe is, how much there is to explore, and how dependent we are on the Earth’s atmosphere to protect us from the engulfing emptiness. The people with the most intense experience of this insight are, of course, the astronauts themselves. We are seeing our world through their eyes. Their training included photography, they are very aware of their role as narrators as well as pilots.

They are very good at it. Integrity crew member Victor Glover delivered a beautiful impromptu Easter message:

“In all of this emptiness—this is a whole bunch of nothing, this thing we call the universe—you have this oasis, this beautiful place that we get to exist together. I think as we go into Easter Sunday, thinking about all the cultures all around the world, whether you celebrate it or not, whether you believe in God or not, this is an opportunity for us to remember where we are, who we are, and that we are the same thing, and that we’ve gotta get through this together.”

Although Glover’s speech was heartfelt and moving, the content of his speech was familiar. Astronauts who have seen the face of the earth often respond in the same way. Here is Marc Garneau, the first Canadian in space, speaking from aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1984:

“Looking down at Earth. It’s very, very beautiful. There are wars going on, there’s pollution down there, but these are not visible from up above. It just looks like a very beautiful planet, particularly when you see it interface along the edge with space. There you suddenly get the feeling that, ‘Hey, this is just one small planet which is lost in the middle of space.’”

Here’s Albert Sacco, recalling his experience aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia, in 1995:

”Once you get into space, I tell them about something I call ‘The Astronaut’s Secret.’ It’s a realization all of the astronauts have, which is that we are a member of the whole human family. It goes beyond being a citizen of the Earth—you are really a citizen of the universe. When you are in orbit, you ask yourself, ‘Why do people have the differences that they have down on Earth?’ You see that Earth is just a small part of a large universe, and you have a feeling about it that is hard to describe.”

These themes recur over and again in astronaut testimonies: a sense of the smallness, beauty and vulnerability of our planet, combined with a conviction that humans must transcend their petty differences and recognise the essential unity of our species.

In fact this response is so common that it has been given a sciencey-sounding name: “the overview effect”. The term was coined by American writer Frank White in his 1987 book, The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution. White interviewed 22 people who had been to space, identified these recurring themes, and concluded that seeing the Earth from space triggers a shift in awareness which fundamentally changes people for the better.

He crafted a grand narrative out of his materials. For White, the overview effect represents an evolutionary step change, latent in humans since the birth of the species. Space flight, he said, is aligned with the “general purpose” of mankind. It represented hope for the future; a chance to leave behind nation states and petty territorial disputes forever. He proposed that his readers become “terranauts”: evangelists for space science and technology, who will usher in the next stage of humanity’s evolution.

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Despite being full of junk history and dubious science, White’s book and his big idea proved remarkably popular, especially among elites. The overview effect was enthusiastically endorsed by environmentalists, peace activists, space industry advocates, and politicians. In 1997, President Bill Clinton cited it in a speech at a White House conference on climate change. It has been studied by psychologists and integrated into the research and development of space technology, including spacecraft design. In 2008, White founded The Overview Institute in Washington, DC.

Not everyone is aboard this ship, however. In 2014, a historian of science called Jordan Bimm published a waspish critique of the overview effect. He argued that rather than being a neurological phenomenon it is an artefact of America’s Cold War ideology. Bimm’s approach reminds me a little of Roland Barthes in Mythologies. Barthes examined a series of cultural stories and images which presented themselves as natural and universal, like the unifying goodness of wine in France. Using semiotics - the study of cultural codes - Barthes showed how these myths served particular political interests at particular moments. Scratch “nature” and you get history.

Bimm traces the overview effect’s provenance to those iconic photographs of the Earth which emerged from the moon missions - in particular, “The Blue Marble”, taken from Apollo 17 in 1972, which became perhaps the most reproduced image in history.1 In the 1970s and 1980s, it suited America to present its bid for global hegemony as a story of universal peace and harmony. Space exploration was a convenient means to embody and burnish this story - it was “manifest destiny” on a cosmological scale. The Russians or Chinese or Indians may not have been quite so moved by the astronauts’ rhetoric of universal human love.

It’s not that the astronauts were being consciously propagandistic, it’s that they knew the right thing to say. Bimm points out that it is not inevitable that humans respond positively to seeing the Earth from space, as White suggests. Test pilots and astronauts take part in an intense competition to be selected for missions, aware that every aspect of their performance and personality is being scrutinised. Consequently, they feel under pressure to exhibit pristine mental health, which translates as endless positivity. As a former NASA psychologist put it, “The expression of emotions such as sadness or fear is considered a weakness. The pilot/astronaut culture is overtly hostile to the expression of such problems—in themselves and others.”

You have to go back to the early days of high-altitude flight, before such norms were fully established, to find more negative self-reports. In 1956, aviation experts identified the “break-off effect” among pilots, defined as “a feeling of physical separation from the Earth when piloting an aircraft at high altitude.” Pilots spoke about feelings of isolation and loneliness, and of losing their connection with the world - something like the opposite of the overview effect. Bimm’s point is not that all astronauts secretly feel this; it’s that astronauts probably respond to space flight in a variety of different ways.2 But in order to claim that his sample of twenty or so individuals revealed a universal human truth, White had to exclude any negative experiences.

Frank White was influenced by James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, that the Earth is one giant superorganism. That idea, which dates to 1974, originated in work Lovelock did for NASA on developing a method for detecting life on Mars. Bimm treats Gaia as a cultural artefact too, another response to a historical moment in which the promise of technological progress mingled with fears about communism, over-population, and pollution.

Although Bimm doesn’t discuss this, the cultural meme most obviously intertwined with the overview effect is the one we might loosely term “liberal globalism”: the idea that the world is moving gradually towards a consensus based on markets, democracy, international law, and social tolerance. That narrative reached its apogee in the 1990s and early 2000s and is closely associated with Bill Clinton, the early years of the internet, and America’s economic and military dominance. Fukuyama’s “end of history” (at least in its popular form) is a sibling of White’s idea. For White’s terranauts, read Ivy League liberals who saw themselves as the stewards of this inevitable progress.

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If this makes me sound cynical about this mission or these astronauts or any of those who have slipped the surly bonds, then it’s not meant to, because I’m not. I appreciate Bimm’s clear-eyed interrogation of White’s myth, but as myths go, I rather like this one. I’ll take it. A story about universality and co-dependence is preferable to the brutal zero-sum rhetoric that dominates political discourse today. That the overview effect isn’t scientific or ‘natural’ doesn’t make it meaningless. It might be a fiction but fictions can harbour important truths.

The rationale for Artemis II is also a kind of fiction. NASA’s story is that this is a step towards building a lunar base, which might help us get to Mars one day. We all know it’s not really about that. They’re lassoing the moon because they can, and the rest of us are thankful for the sublime spectacle of them doing so. Take a moment to enjoy Reid Wiseman’s pure, childlike, unfakeable excitement at seeing the moon up close, punctuated by the chuckling delight of his counterpart at mission control (“Copy, moon joy”). It’s enough to make a terranaut out of anyone.

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This is free to read so please share and ‘like’ it, if you liked. After the jump: a very juicy Rattle Bag, full of important stories and fascinating insights you may have missed…

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Catch-up service:
Giving Advice Is a Treacherous Business
Against Introspection
Is the Current Gulf War Taking Place?
How To Build Your Own Tower
33 Things I Heard At Foo Camp
A Deep Dive Into ‘I Feel Fine’
Pitfalls of AI Journalism

Last week Meta and Google were found liable by a jury in Los Angeles for harming a young woman’s mental health. The woman, known as Kaley, is 20. She testified that she started using Instagram and YouTube aged 9. “I stopped engaging with family because I was spending all my time on social media,” she said.

At one point she spent 16 hours straight on Instagram. She said she started feeling anxious and depressed from age 10 onwards and has been diagnosed with body dysmorphia. Her lawyers argued that the tech companies bore responsibility for her troubles, since they designed their platforms to be addictive.

It’s not often a British Prime Minister feels compelled to comment on the outcome of an American state-level court case, but Keir Starmer did so. He said the verdict showed the status quo on social media was “not good enough”, using it to highlight his government’s intention to restrict or ban social media for under-16s. The case for tougher regulation of social media is building a head of steam just at the point that it seems to be on the verge of being transformed, for better or for worse, by AI.

I’ll come back to this court case, but first I want to talk about another blow dealt to Meta’s reputation, this one in the court of public opinion. Sarah Wyn-Williams’s book Careless People was published last year and has been a massive bestseller. It’s the story of an idealistic lawyer and diplomat from New Zealand who joined Facebook early on and rose to a position of influence but became bitterly disillusioned with the company’s ethics.

Wyn-Williams - we’ll call her SWW, her internal tag at Facebook (which later became Meta) - thought she would be helping Facebook change the world for better, as it connected citizens in every country to each other. She came to believe that the opposite was true, mainly because Zuckerberg and his pals were feckless, selfish, and immoral. Her charges against them are multiple, including a blithe tolerance for misogyny and brutal management practices. Her most serious complaint is that they knowingly allowed the platform to become a propaganda vehicle for malign political actors, including Donald Trump, and Myanmar’s military junta.

I suspect Careless People would have sold pretty well in any event but its popularity has been greatly enhanced by Meta’s decision to sue the author. The day before its British release date, a US arbitrator granted Meta an injunction which banned SWW from promoting her book and from saying anything negative about Meta. The ruling doesn’t concern the truth of the book’s claims - it’s not about defamation - but is based on an interpretation of her 2017 severance agreement with Meta.

You might think, hurrah, lucky author, rolling in $$$ thanks to Meta’s stupidity - and without having to do any promotion! (Though book promotion is actually fun, for the most part). That’s what I would have said until I met SWW briefly at a private event (we were both shortlisted for a prize which neither of us won). She was very nice - friendly, unpretentious, funny. She didn’t talk about Meta but she did say how weird it is to have a book out and yet not be able to speak about it in public.

Worse than that, though, her time and mental energy are being almost totally consumed by the legal dispute, which remains unresolved. She has got to know her lawyers very well since she has to spend so much time with them, an she has to pay their fees herself. I didn’t quite grasp the parlous position she is in until reading this piece by her publisher. SWW faces fines of $50,000 for every statement she makes that might be seen as “negative or detrimental” to Meta. These include statements made anywhere, even in the privacy of her own home in Britain. Yes, even speaking to her own family.

If Meta wins the case, those fines may apply to many, many statements in the book and could easily amount to millions of dollars. So not only is SWW engaged in a draining and expensive legal battle every day, she is living under the looming threat of complete financial ruin, pursued by a mega-corporation with bottomless pockets and an apparently remorseless will to destroy her. Her position is not to be envied. When people talk about the bravery of whistleblowers, this is what they mean.

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I have a lot of admiration for her as a person and, now that I’ve read the book, as a writer too. Careless People is very entertaining. I recommend you buy it, not just to spite Meta, but because it is enjoyable and fascinating. I do, however, have some criticisms of it, which I make below in my review. In short, I think it greatly exaggerates the case against Zuckerberg and Meta, blaming them for things for which they shouldn’t be held responsible. I suspect this is true of the Los Angeles court case too.

I don’t say any of this of out of sympathy for Meta or Zuckerberg - the way it and he are treating SWW is itself evidence of a company that lacks humanity and wisdom. But the widespread habit of blaming big tech for our social ills, from the deterioration of democracy to the mental health of teenage girls, is crowding out more realistic and honest analyses of our problems. You can think that scapegoating is bad even when you don’t care for the scapegoat.

Careless People is very much a book of two halves. Roughly speaking, the first half covers the author’s background as a UN diplomat for New Zealand; her fascination with the rise of this new media platform; her determination to land a job at a company she foresees will one day be a powerful player in global politics; her initial failure and then her eventual success at getting one, despite nobody at Facebook being quite sure what she will do, since at that point (2011) they were still not thinking of themselves as a company which needed relationships with governments outside America.

It also includes her progress to the centre of power at Facebook, as global corporate diplomacy becomes more and more important to its growth plans. SWW becomes responsible for arranging meetings between Zuckerberg and various heads of state, and getting governments to support the platform’s growth in their country, or at least not to ban or restrict it.

This first half is essentially a savage social comedy. SWW’s account of Facebook’s chaotic and unstoppable growth is brilliantly done, and she has a talent for closely observed satire. We get vividly drawn portraits of senior managers: those at the very top like Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, but also her immediate bosses, and a whole gallery of supremely ambitious, supremely weird people.

The company is run by a clique of Zuckerberg’s friends from Harvard, who all resemble him in personality. Since it was SWW’s job to arrange meetings with politicians and officials, many of whom are also clever but cold and socially awkward, the potential for excruciating comedy is enormous, and SWW milks it with flair.

Here, to give just one small example, is part of her account of Facebook’s first meeting with representatives of the German government. SWW and her boss, Marne Levine, welcome them to Facebook’s office in Washington DC. The Germans are distrustful of Facebook, associating it with the kind of surveillance they left behind in 1989, so just getting this meeting was a coup for SWW. But it doesn’t go well:

As soon as the German delegation is seated in the meeting room, we start formal introductions. Marne explains her background…at the end of listing her Harvard and government credentials, she concludes with, “And I’m Jewish.”
The room is silent.
”I mean, I don’t bring that up because of the Holocaust.”
Absolute silence. As if every living thing in the meeting room has been frozen. I’m trapped in some terrible parody of diplomacy.
”It’s just I figured you already knew,” she continues. “We can discuss it if you wish?”

They do not wish, and SWW cuts in to move the discussion along.

Careless People is enjoyably bitchy about nearly everyone SWW worked with at Facebook, though in some cases scorn is mixed with praise. Despite hanging her former boss out to dry here she says she liked Marne. Sandberg comes off worse: she is portrayed as tin-eared, self-obsessed, and hypocritical, singing the virtues of female solidarity while making workhorses out of her female staff. In a now well-known scene on a private jet, Sandberg invites SWW to to share a bed with her and gets upset when she declines.1

SWW’s portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg - the most important person at Facebook, and therefore, in theory, the villain of the whole story - is more balanced. She shows him as cold-eyed, irritable, stingy with thanks, and surrounded by aides who let him win at board games, but allows him some redeeming features too.

At first, he is flippant about the diplomatic or political aspect of his job, which doesn’t interest him. But as Facebook’s growth comes to depend on adding users outside America he comes to see how important it is, and leans on SWW to help him navigate this world, a very different realm to Silicon Valley. He becomes interested in his own soft power, as almost a virtual head of state. On a visit to Indonesia, he asks SWW to arrange a ‘riot’ so that he can be ‘gently mobbed’. She obliges. He even instructs staff to help him explore a run for US president (a bizarre episode that I for one had memory-holed).

SWW paints Zuckerberg as both cynical and naive. She shows an ingenuous, childlike side to him, as with the delight he takes in learning Mandarin. There is kindness too. In 2015 she manages to get Zuckerberg a speaking slot at something called the “Global Citizen Festival” in Central Park, attended by sixty thousand people and broadcast live on TV. The bill features Beyoncé, Coldplay, and Big Bird. (SWW makes great play of a scheduling clash with the latter; this whole chapter is the last burst of pure comedy in the book.)

When Zuckerberg goes on stage to address the crowd, there’s a malfunction: a video of him speaking starts to play on a giant screen behind him (his staff had prepared the video in case he didn’t want to speak in person; his assistant submitted it in error). Paralysed by this, all he can do is stare out at his baffled audience, before edging back down the stairs at the side of the stage, still facing the crowd, and sweating profusely (a motif of the book is his over-active sweat glands).

It’s a complete humiliation and you expect him to turn around and blast SWW and his assistant. Instead, once he is backstage, he tells them, “This is my fault”. When SWW tries to take responsibility, he says, “Look Sarah, if I was good at speaking or even improvising, this wouldn’t be a big deal…I need to work on this stuff. It’s me, not you. Really.” He tells her she’s doing an amazing job, a message he reinforces in writing later on.

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As the narrative of Careless People enters 2016, the book’s sense of humour more or less disappears, and so does the nuance. Careless People becomes moralistic, prosecutorial and one-note, hammering repeatedly on how appalled SWW is at Facebook’s leadership. She arraigns them for platforming extremists, overriding democratic process, enabling human rights abuses, all in the ruthless pursuit of growth.

If that was what she felt at the time, the reader might wonder why she stayed on in her job, and why she helped Facebook’s leaders court dubious regimes, like the Chinese Communist Party. It’s not that I can’t imagine how a good person might find herself caught up in facilitating something they don’t approve of, but SWW doesn’t give a satisfying account of her thinking other than that she was pregnant with her second child and had share options. Partly because of this, the switch into polemic mode feels contrived.

Much is made out of what seem quite minor incidents. For instance, there’s a story about a Facebook VP in Brazil who gets arrested after WhatsApp (owned by FB) refuses to hand over messages in a drug trafficking case. Zuckerberg wants to publish a note celebrating the bravery of his employee and the company’s refusal to betray the privacy of “our community”. That wouldn’t be wise, since the messages in questions were sent by an alleged drug trafficker. He would also have been jeopardising his employee’s safety by effectively confirming that FB and WhatsApp are the same company.

SWW goes very hard on Zuckerberg’s apparent lapse of judgement. She is “disgusted” with him for even considering such a note. She “truly sees him differently” after this. In fact, she says this is what makes her decide to leave Facebook (at some point).

But Zuckerberg, at least as far as I can tell - the author isn’t explicit on this point - didn’t post the note. He backed down after being warned off it by advisers. (The employee was released after 24 hours in jail). I’m sure it was unwise, maybe even reckless, to even consider it but to me this story just doesn’t justify such a big change in her view of him and the company. In the same chapter she suggests that if Zuckerberg was a good, caring boss, he’d have called Brazil’s president to lobby for his employee’s release - exactly the kind of abuse of democratic process she criticises him for elsewhere.

The slightly unconvincing moralising persists through the rest of the book. Zuckerberg is invited to a summit of world leaders that will take place in Peru shortly after a Zika outbreak there. He is unsure about making the trip because he is trying to conceive a second child with his wife, and Zika can harm unborn children. The official health guidance is to stay away. In the end he agrees to go but on condition Facebook can build a “controlled structure” on the site of the conference, where they can mitigate any risk of infection.

An extreme measure, perhaps, and not unreasonable given his personal circumstances - but SWW is appalled. She likens it to imperial exploitation: “before I know it I’m negotiating with Peruvians for some land near the conference to be dedicated to Facebook”. She says that Facebook had been accused of “digital colonialism” in the past and this was therefore “not a good look”. I would have thought a sensible adviser would say that such accusations could be safely ignored, given the importance of protecting the CEO and his wife from a dangerous illness.

There is a quasi-dramatic scene on the private jet later on in which SWW, by now too tired and disillusioned to worry about upsetting her boss, challenges Zuckerberg directly about his failings as a leader. Rather than getting angry or defensive, he asks her to name a specific example, and she cites his decision not to consider re-naming “internet.org” (an accessibility initiative for developing countries that FB co-sponsored, which was not neutral, as its name suggested, but, at least in part, a way of selling FB services).

Is that it? SWW was probably right that he should have agreed to call internet.org something else. But for our big confrontation moment - the moment our hero speaks truth to power - this seems anti-climactic to the point of bathos, as does Zuckerberg’s response: “That’s fair”. (By the way, this is to SWW’s credit: a less honest narrator might have distorted the encounter to glorify the narrator and condemn Zuckerberg, or indeed not included it at all).

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A crucial part of the book’s case against FB is that the company made Donald Trump president in 2016. SWW says Facebook “basically handed the election to Donald Trump”, and, even more nefariously, it “threw the election” to Trump. The problem with this is that it isn’t true, and Careless People doesn’t even try very hard to prove it is. I don’t expect a memoir or a polemic to have the same standards of evidence as work of political science, but I’d like a little more meat on the bones of such a punchy claim.

SWW tells the reader that FB “embedded staff in Trump’s campaign team”. Sounds bad! What the book doesn’t say is that FB also had a team assigned to Hillary Clinton - it offered identical support to both candidates. Like Google and other digital platforms, they were selling their services to high-spending advertisers. This seems like important context.

It’s true that Trump’s campaign made better use of Facebook than Clinton’s campaign, engaged with the FB team more deeply and and spent more on the platform. But those were choices made by the campaigns, not FB. SWW seems mad that Trump was allowed to use FB’s data-based microtargeting to tweak its messaging and raise funds. But that’s what FB does. That’s the business! She omits to mention that Obama made highly effective use of Facebook in 2008 and 2012. Do we say that Facebook “threw” those elections to Obama, or that he won “because of” Facebook?

A narrower version of the book’s claim might be that Trump used the platform in a uniquely dishonest way, and that Facebook allowed him to. But even this is undermined by the lack of a single example of “misinformation” in the book. Nor does Careless People make the case that the Trump campaign was more dishonest than Clinton’s or any other campaigns. Perhaps there is a case to be made there, but even so it would be secondary to the central claim on which this whole section rests.

In full polemic mode, SWW says she can’t imagine how she’d would feel if she created the company that enabled Trump to win the presidency: “I honestly think I’d have a nervous breakdown…It’s so ugly. What a thing to be responsible for.” Let’s remember, we are talking about a democratic election here, not some atrocity. But anyway, the central claim is false. Trump didn’t win the election because of Facebook.

Advertising campaigns, for all the vast amounts of money that candidates spend on them, generally make little difference to electoral outcomes. We should be suspicious of any claims that they are decisive, even though it’s in the interests of campaign operatives and media owners to say they are. There’s no evidence that 2016 was any different. As far as researchers can tell, Trump-supporting misinformation did not change minds.

The definitive account of the 2016 election, by three political scientists, gives short-to-no shrift to the Facebook dunnit view. Unorthodox as he was Trump won (the electoral college) for normal reasons: voters like to switch parties after two terms; his opponent was very unpopular; voters were angry about illegal immigration. He also dominated the media, but the most crucial channel in that regard was TV.

Careless People is on firmer ground when it comes to the final crisis of the book: the genocide in Myanmar. In late 2016 the country’s military junta incited mass violence against the minority Rohingya Muslims, resulting in tens of thousands of deaths. Anti-Rohingya propaganda and hate speech spread online, through Facebook. Almost the whole of the internet-connected population used it, because the company was ‘first in’ when the government liberalised internet access, thanks in part to SWW’s efforts.

The regime exploited the FB algorithm to seed and spread lies about the Rohingya. Meanwhile, FB devoted almost no staff to moderating content in the country, despite repeated warnings from SWW and others that it should. That was a genuine dereliction of duty. It doesn’t mean that FB caused the genocide, or that the genocide wouldn’t have happened without it - the historical roots of the violence go deep, and it’s hard to imagine that better content moderation would have averted it.

But the platform does seem to have contributed to the conditions for the violence and even intensified it, albeit inadvertently. You can see that Zuckerberg’s attention would have been elsewhere - the company made very little money in the country. He and his senior team would have had plenty of higher priorities to focus on than the rumblings of a country of which they knew very little. The underlying issue is that Zuckerberg has always been unwilling to accept responsibility for how FB is used, rather than just for the services it offers.

This at the core of the recent US court case too. Was Facebook/Meta responsible for Kaley’s sixteen hour stint on Instagram, or for her social media-induced isolation from her family? I don’t know enough about the case to have a firm opinion on it, but my general instinct is that however clever, sophisticated and appealing these apps are, they are not overpoweringly magical amulets which users cannot resist. Calling it addictive, rather than habit-forming, seems highly dubious to me.

In its response to the verdict, Meta said: “Teen mental health is profoundly complex and cannot be linked to a single app.” I agree with this. Bad teen mental health can’t even be linked to a particular form of media. Analogies with tobacco are facile and misleading; the evidence that cigarettes do harm is much, much stronger than the case against social media (and even the latter’s strongest critics don’t claim it gives you cancer). These apps are just one aspect of the user’s environment and even when they contribute to bad mental health, they’re less important than other causes, like genetics, chronic stress, or abusive relationships.

None of this is to say that social media use shouldn’t be constrained or regulated by parents, schools or governments. Personally I think it should. But this tendency to blame society’s ills, from Trump to depression to genocide, on, not just one form of media, but one bad company, even one bad man, should be resisted. Mark Zuckerberg is lacking in empathy, imagination and taste, and, like many CEOs, it’s hard to see what he cares about other than winning. But he’s not evil and I don’t think the last ten years would have gone better if Facebook had been under different management. He was under-prepared for the social and political consequences of connecting everyone in the world to everyone else. But weren’t we all?

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Sorry this is so long; I didn’t have time to make it shorter. The Rattle Bag will return next week!

Catch-up service:
Against Introspection
Is the Current Gulf War Taking Place?
How To Build Your Own Tower
33 Things I Heard At Foo Camp
A Deep Dive Into ‘I Feel Fine’
Pitfalls of AI Journalism

I have been appointed ‘cultural adviser’ to a fast-growing startup, which is rather exciting and slightly daunting. I might say more about that at some point but for now I’m using it as an excuse to write about a subject I’ve been interested in for a while: the many ways in which well-meaning advice can backfire - particularly personal advice, between family members, partners or friends. There’s a rich seam of psychology research devoted to this very question.

Imagine that someone you’re close to is very stressed about something. Maybe your girlfriend is worried that she’s about to get fired from her job, maybe your daughter feels she is being ostracised from her friendship group, maybe your friend has had worrying medical news. Let’s say you want to help this person feel less stressed, by changing the way they think about the situation. What’s the best way to do that?

A new paper from a group of psychologists led by Yitong Zhao, at the University of Toronto, identifies two commonly used approaches, which they call decommitment and commitment.

Read more

Catch-up service:
Is the Current Gulf War Taking Place?
How To Build Your Own Tower
33 Things I Heard At Foo Camp
A Deep Dive Into ‘I Feel Fine’
Pitfalls of AI Journalism
Centrism’s Anger Problem

In a recent podcast interview, the Silicon Valley investor and entrepreneur Marc Andreessen claimed to have “zero” level of introspection, or at least, “as little as possible”. He also proposed a grand historical theory of introspection as a kind of life-sapping disease imported from Austria in the early twentieth century. For this he was savagely pilloried on Twitter/X, where he is something of a Main Character, with over two million followers.

That is fair enough, given that much of what he said was plain silly. It’s fun to put a billionaire in the stocks, especially one who came out for Trump in 2024 and has apparently infinite regard for his own sagacity. But actually, I think Andreessen made an interesting point here, one which got buried under the discourse avalanche. This post is an attempt to rescue it.

You can watch the relevant clip here, This is a summary: his interviewer, David Senra, asks him to elaborate on his dislike of introspection. Andreessen says: “I find people who dwell on the past get stuck in the past. It’s a problem at work and it’s a problem at home.” Senra agrees, noting that one of his observations from reading biographies of successful entrepreneurs is how little they introspected: “Sam Walton didn’t wake up thinking about his internal self. He just woke up and was like, I’m going to keep building WalMart…”

Andreessen then embarks on his drunk history riff:

“All of the modern ideas around introspection and therapy were manufactured in the 1910s and 1920s…Great men of history didn’t sit around doing that stuff at any prior point. It’s all a new construct. First, Western civilisation had to invent the concept of the individual, several hundred years ago. Then for a long time it was, the individual runs and builds things - empires, companies, technologies - and then this guilt-based whammy showed up from Europe, from Vienna, Freud and that movement - the individual needs to self-criticise, feel guilt, look backwards, dwell on the past. It never resonated with me.”

This is the section that really, uh, resonated with people. Scornful counterpoints came thick and fast. If we’re talking about great men of history, they don’t get much greater than Napoleon, who loved to dwell on his stormy emotional life, after Goethe. Benjamin Franklin was methodical about improving his own character and habits. Abraham Lincoln was beset by self-doubts and anxieties, and wrote eloquently about them. Introspection was hardly invented by Freud. Shakespeare created the most famously introspective character in literature. Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, St Augustine and Aquinas all wrote about their inner states.

And yet I think the critics overplayed their hand. Many presumed a wider definition of “great man” than the one implicit in Andreessen’s statement; he was talking about doers rather than (just) thinkers, and mostly entrepreneurs. Their definition of introspection was also too wide. Napoleon’s emotional flamboyance is not evidence of self-analysis, or self-questioning. Self-improvement, whether practiced by Franklin or Aurelius, is not the same as self-discovery. Aquinas was interested in himself only insofar as he was one instance of God’s creation, the human. None of these figures believed themselves to have an inner life that was unique and fascinating in its own right.

Second, the critics seemed to imply that prolonged, self-lacerating introspection is a permanent feature of the human condition. But it’s not. This is a big subject but in short Andreessen was right to suggest that it is a cultural invention that originated in Europe, even if he was a few hundred years and a couple of hundred miles out. Its true progenitor was Martin Luther in Wittenberg, not Freud in Vienna. It was the Protestants who popularised the idea that to be enlightened requires a relentless scouring of the inner self.

That’s not good news for Andreessen’s overall thesis, of course, since the rise of capitalist entrepreneurship went hand-in-hand with the rise of Protestantism. Introspection and the work ethic are historical twins. But I still think he and Senra were on to something. I’m often struck by how many high achievers are unencumbered by self-reflection. To take an example close to home, I’ve read or watched countless interviews with Paul McCartney, and he is at his least interesting on the topic of Paul McCartney. It isn’t that he doesn’t have a rich inner life. It’s that he puts it into his work - into the songs. His therapist is his guitar.

Top sportspeople are interested in their mental life only insofar as it affects their performance. Few of them go deeper than that (Andre Agassi being a notable exception). Introspection is positively harmful when your aim is to reach a state of flow. The same goes for successful politicians. When asked in a recent interview about how certain personal tragedies had affected his formative years, Tony Blair shrugged and said, “I don’t spend a lot of time psychoanalysing myself.”

Introspection and self-doubt are in tension with the speed at which entrepreneurs have to move. If you sat next to Bill Gates or Rupert Murdoch or Mark Zuckerberg and asked them about the wellsprings of their motivation, do you think that, even if they were being completely candid, they would have anything interesting to say? They’d much rather talk about the next project, or the next deal.

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Market economies reward acting over thinking at the margin, and America has the most dynamic economy in history. In fact, Andreessen was describing a distinctively American attitude to life - a Frontier mindset. Alexis De Tocqueville observed that Americans “seldom indulge in meditation” and “entertain very little esteem for it.” He was struck by the fleetness with which they experimented and innovated, unburdened by contemplation, convention, or rules. Sarah Wyn Williams, the New Zealand-born author of Careless People (my current read) characterises the spirit of American capitalism as “forward motion without introspection”.

I often think about Tyler Cowen’s playful remark: “People in the EU are super wise. You have a meal with some sort of French person who works in Brussels—it’s very impressive. They’re cultured, they have wonderful taste, they understand all these different countries, they know something about Chinese porcelain. And if you lived in a world ruled by them, the growth rate would be negative 1%.”

More broadly, I’m also sympathetic to Andreessen’s view that introspection is a hindrance to happiness…

After the jump: the therapist who says that introspection isn’t good for us and why I’m shallow and boring. Plus a glorious Rattle Bag.

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Catch-up service:
How To Build Your Own Tower
33 Things I Heard At Foo Camp
A Deep Dive Into ‘I Feel Fine’
Pitfalls of AI Journalism
Centrism’s Anger Problem
All Hail the Putter-Togetherers

In 1995, Jean Baudrillard, French philosopher and apostle of post-modernism, published a book called The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. It consisted of three essays he wrote for the French newspaper Libération in 1991, while the Gulf war was, in fact, taking place.

A brief recap: what we now call the first Gulf War was provoked by Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. The first President Bush assembled a coalition of allies (including the Soviet Union) to put economic and diplomatic pressure on Saddam. When that didn’t work, he sent in troops and missiles. America drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait. Bush chose not to force Hussein out. The rest is people saying “the rest is history”.

I remember the day the war started. Here in London there was a sense of foreboding, of terrible forces being unleashed, even if the action seemed legitimate and necessary. I don’t feel that there was quite the same moment here when Trump announced the beginning of “major combat operations” in Iran. Perhaps that’s because it isn’t a land war with troops and tanks rolling into battle. But it’s also to do with the suddenness of the event, the confusion over why it’s happening, and the way that the current US president imposes his own sense of dizzy unreality on all of us.

As a leader, Bush Sr. was more or less the opposite of Trump - slow, cautious, painstaking. When he said that America would draw a line in the sand, the world could be fairly sure that he would follow through.1 With Trump, you never know what’s going to happen next, or indeed what just happened. At the start of the year he launched a strike on Venezuela with even less warning. So the attack on Iran seemed less like a discrete and momentous event and more like the latest video in a never-ending doom-scroll.

This is why people have been raising the name of Baudrillard, who died in 2007. When his book on the Gulf war was published in English it met with howls of derision and moral outrage. If Twitter had been around, he would have been cancelled. The influence of post-modernists in the academy seemed to be at its height (in retrospect, it was just the beginning) and his book was a flashpoint in the battle between doughty Anglo defenders of reality and feckless French philosophers who denied there was any such thing.

To some extent, the moralising was justified. Real people were being killed by real bombs in the Middle East, as Baudrillard wrote his think-pieces from the safety of Paris. But if the title of his book was hyperbolic, his actual argument was a bit more nuanced. Baudrillard wasn’t claiming that no military action had taken place in the Middle East, but that the war’s true raison d’etre was spectacle. Its violence and casualties were fodder for what today we’d call a reality television show, created and produced by the American government. It was content.

In his view, the television narrative of reality was now shaping reality itself. America wanted a new show and it got one. Not because cynical politicians were manipulating a duped public, but because everyone, politicians and generals included, was lost inside the simulation. The spectacle had swallowed the real.

I should say, I don’t believe he was right about that war. His explanation for it seems superfluous. There were obvious reasons, economic and geopolitical, for America not to allow Saddam Hussein to colonise Kuwait. Bush, whatever his flaws, was a serious statesman, with a formidable foreign policy team. This was not an administration which went to war for the pictures.2

But perhaps Baudrillard was simply ahead of his time. His argument applies with more force to the current Gulf war, and the current moment.

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Catch-up service:
33 Things I Heard At Foo Camp
A Deep Dive Into ‘I Feel Fine’
Pitfalls of AI Journalism
Bodies Behaving Badly
Centrism’s Anger Problem
All Hail the Putter-Togetherers

John &Paul is at number one on the Sunday Times bestseller list for a THIRD week running. Hurrah.

Ingmar Bergman, the great Swedish filmmaker, wrote in a workbook for three hours every morning, a rigorous version of the practice that is now called “morning pages”. He started at 9am, and finished when his clock struck for midday, even if he was midsentence.

His workbook was a freeform diary in which he wrote down every thought, feeling or experience, no matter how trivial or dark or socially embarrassing. The point was to be utterly free. Since some of his workbooks have been published, we can see that ideas for films, or scenes from films, often germinated in these sessions.

Here’s part of an entry from July 4, 1976, on a day when he was worrying about a film he wanted to make:

I think it’s the form that worries me the most. I can’t find the form, it’s not coming to me on its own. Or rather it is, but I find it tedious and uninteresting. And I’ve no inclination to write it down like that. I wish I could just skip all the mediation, all the practical circumstances and transitional phases.

My little grandson Lukas, whom I didn’t know, drowned yesterday. He was only four years old.

A small bird, greenish gray in colour, flew into my windowpane and broke its neck.

I sit in my tower and life goes on outside.

The shocking parenthesis in which he reports the death of his four-year-old grandson was not an aberration. Karl Ove Knausgaard, in his essay on the workbooks, describes Bergman as an introvert with “an almost pathological lack of empathy”. We’ll get back to that, but for now it’s the last line of Bergman’s entry I want to draw your attention to. I think we can all learn something from him about towers.

Anyone engaged in a creative project - and I use the term loosely enough to encompass, say, a Substack newsletter - needs to be able to be both open to the world and its stimulations, and able to isolate themselves from them. In fact this doesn’t only apply to creative work. I started writing this post when reflecting on how to cope with the alarming news which blares out of our screens every minute.

We used to live in a world where the news came on the hour or in the morning paper. Now, like everything else, it’s a firehose that never stops. You can cut yourself from news altogether (a perfectly reasonable option) or you can choose to remain open to it. But if you do the latter you still have to find a way to retreat from it now and again. Otherwise you just get stuck inside an information regimen which you don’t control, losing all distance and perspective.

That isn’t healthy. It doesn’t do any good to be worrying about things over which you have no control and only superficial knowledge. I’m fond of the philosopher Michael Oakeshott’s response to the young Andrew Sullivan, when the latter told him he wanted to be a journalist: "I consider the need to know the news every day a form of mental disorder." Oakeshott no doubt appreciated Schopenhauer’s dictum: “The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time.”

To get distance and perspective on the world you need a tower.

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Catch-up service:
A Deep Dive Into ‘I Feel Fine’
Pitfalls of AI Journalism
Bodies Behaving Badly
Centrism’s Anger Problem
All Hail the Putter-Togetherers
The Stamina Gap

John &Paul is at number one in the Sunday Times bestseller list for a second week running!

Today I report on what I heard or overheard at Social Science Foo Camp, an annual convention of techies, academics, and assorted oddballs, this year held at the Microsoft campus in Mountain View outside San Francisco. (Also in attendance: Helen Lewis, who writes about it here). These snippets are taken from my notes which are incomplete and messy and frankly unreliable. Some are from presentations, others from canteen chats. To stay on the safe side, I haven’t attributed them except for one or two.

This is intended to be impressionistic than anything rigorous - I want to give you a feeling for the kinds of conversations that were going on. There were conversations about culture and art as well as technology although inevitably the conference was dominated by AI. I haven’t used quotation marks but where these are first person you should assume someone other than me is speaking unless I use my initials.

Best to click on the title above and read this online.

1. Tech exec: I’ve been in conversations with the top people at all the major companies developing frontier models. The common theme is that none of them have a clue how this will play out.

2. We should have a strong industry norm against making AI conscious. Anthropic’s ‘constitution’ for Claude is endowing (and even enacting) an AI with consciousness, and therefore ‘rights’. This will lead nowhere good.

3. We don’t even know what it would mean for an AI to be conscious - we don’t even know what it means to say humans are conscious. There are 22 competing theories of human consciousness in the scientific literature! Six major theories and a host of niche ones. The lack of consensus is striking - few if any major areas of scientific research are like this.

4. The chimp-pig hypothesis originated by Eugene McCarthy (not present at Foo) argues, contra Darwin, that humans are the result of interbreeding between those two species. (See also this report in Pig Progress). (IL: The speaker who presented McCarthy’s theory was not arguing for it, merely suggesting that it’s interesting and provocative, as Darwin’s theory was in 1859, and that this is therefore an opportunity for us to feel what it feels like to encounter a strange idea.)

5. AI “reasoning models” (models like DeepSeek and OpenAI o3 which show extended chains of thought before answering) aren’t just reasoning for longer; they’re engaging in internal debate. This study finds that they simulate multiple different internal voices or perspectives, with distinct personalities and areas of expertise. These voices argue with each other, question each other, and eventually reconcile differences. The researchers call this a "society of thought." That is, AI seems to be spontaneously reproducing the mechanisms of human intelligence, including debate and productive disagreement.

6. Another study used machine learning to map the intellectual perspectives of millions of scientists, inventors, screenplay writers, entrepreneurs, and Wikipedia contributors against each other. They found that collaborations between diverse thinkers were more successful - but in a specific way. Background diversity — having lived different lives or trained in different fields — was actually detrimental to creative achievement. What counted was perspective diversity: the most successful collaborations happened when partners had a common language but divergent approaches. (IL: I’m going to call this the John & Paul theory of creative collaboration.

7. There has been a long running dispute between Wikipedia editors over whether an entry titled “Longcat” is actually about a long cat, or about an internet meme depicting a long cat. This actually goes quite deep.

8. When an AI performs poorly or messes up a task you give it, make a note and try the same prompt in six months’ time. This is a good way to get a feel for their progress.

9. The vibe-coding apps are not, in fact, easy to use. You need technical domain knowledge and intuitions rooted in software engineering - and a lot of LLM usage - to get the best out of them. They don’t replace expertise, they amplify it.

10. When we give scientists an AI and a scientific problem to solve they feel better about what they’ve done but haven’t always done better. When we give them a cloud of AIs with different viewpoints to work with, they feel better and they do better. They’ve understood the problem at a deeper level.

11. Analyst at major investment bank: My team’s written reports have become more complex and in-depth since LLMs. It wasn’t a conscious shift, just a response to the fact that it’s now so easy to get instant analyses of, say, the economic impacts of an American attack on Iran. So we have to offer something better.

12. One of the questions we should ask when designing or using AI systems is do we only want the ‘probably right’ answer - or do we want the user to have understood the answer and why it might be wrong?

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13. On the one hand, AIs increase individual agency because people will be able to do X (something they didn’t have the capability to do before). But they may also reduce agency because people will feel that everyone else can also do X.

14. Culture is “the unconscious patterning of human behaviour”. (Original source: Edward Sapir).

15. The whole history of America and the modern world is embodied in the banjo, an instrument that originated in Africa, entered America through blackface minstrel shows, migrated into the upper class of American and British society as a fashionable parlour instrument before shedding that identity entirely and becoming a hillbilly/bluegrass instrument. Earl Scruggs, who created the three-finger roll technique in 1945, is one of the most influential musical innovators of the last century. (IL: hat tip to the wonderful Alison Brown).

16. Time-locked LLMs - LLMs trained on data that only goes up to, say, 1492 or 1913 - are still at an early stage but will be a fascinating tool for exploring historical perspectives.

17. Will human-made things need the stamp of human craft, William Morris-style? Or will norms simply evolve, as they did in photojournalism? When digital photography emerged some in the photojournalist community believed they might have to stick to analogue film to prove veracity. In fact ethical norms have sufficed to regulate the field.

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18. We can train people to use AI for writing in a way that doesn’t harm the quality or individuality of their writing. But they’ve already had years of experience. How will we do it for people who have grown up using LLMs to write?

19. Arnold Schoenberg, notwithstanding his reputation for austere music, was a warm and affectionate father and much loved teacher. He has three living children.

20. AI safety only needs one rule: the allocation of electricity to each agent is proportional to the wealth (or well-being) of the poorest person. So they cease to exist if people are impoverished. The physicality of AI is the only way to force alignment. All abstract principles can be gamed but energy will remain the fundamental constraint and we should use it.

21. Cognitive resonance - when the AI feeds back to you what you already think. (Opposite of cognitive dissonance).

22. I had a toxic person in my life that I’d been emailing back and forth for years. I had this nagging feeling that I needed to meet them face-to-face to resolve our differences. But then I found a better way: I gave the AI all of our emails and then did a role-play with this person - after that I realised I didn’t need to meet with or talk to them ever again.
    
    After the jump, more snippets from Foo including some fascinating insights into how human memory works. Plus: my thoughts on the BAFTA brouhaha, plus the Gorton by-election, plus a Rattle Bag of juicy links and stories. If you haven’t already, seize the day and take out a paid subscription. It’s easy to do and excellent value, though I say so myself. The Ruffian is 100% human-crafted.

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