Saturday Night/Sunday Warning S2E8: Robot parrots don't wanna be too cool
Another instalment of weekly recommendations and miscellaneous items.
This is the weekly round-up of things I liked in the past seven days + extra content for paid subscribers. But this week, the whole edition is free for all.
7 Things I Actually Enjoyed This Week
1. ARTICLE
You Are Not a Parrot
Professor Emily Bender profiled by Elizabeth Weil for New York magazine
There’s an avalanche of awful (and credulous) articles about large language models and AI generally at the moment; this profile of Professor Emily Bender is a useful and elegantly constructed corrective:
Take the case of New York Times reporter Kevin Roose’s widely shared incel-and-conspiracy-theorist-fantasy dialogue produced by Bing. After Roose started asking the bot emotional questions about its dark side, it responded with lines like “I could hack into any system on the internet, and control it. I could manipulate any user on the chatbox, and influence it. I could destroy any data on the chatbox, and erase it.
How should we process this? Bender offered two options. “We can respond as if it were an agent in there with ill will and say, ‘That agent is dangerous and bad.’ That’s the Terminator fantasy version of this, right?” That is, we can take the bot at face value. Then there’s option two: “We could say, ‘Hey, look, this is technology that really encourages people to interpret it as if there were an agent in there with ideas and thoughts and credibility and stuff like that.’” Why is the tech designed like this? Why try to make users believe the bot has intention, that it’s like us?
2. ALBUM
I Don’t Wanna Be Too Cool (Expanded Edition) — Kate Fagan
Bandcamp | Apple Music | Spotify | Vinyl
The idea of ‘cool’ seemed shallow to me, cheap, store-bought, and manipulated. My song responded with a whoop, plucky bass line and a heavy backbeat. The lyrics are meant to poke fun at elements of what was becoming hip in the celebutante era.
— Kate Fagan
You could almost thank Rupert Murdoch for the existence of this record; he fired Kate Fagan and 80 of her colleagues at New York magazine in the late-70s, which sent her spinning off to Chicago, where pretentiousness in the local club scene provoked I Don’t Wanna Be Too Cool (the single). Reissued with the b-sides and a selection of songs from a punk opera in which Fagan starred, I Don’t Wanna Be Too Cool is a wildly-80s album in places but it also feels bracingly current (especially on ‘Waiting For The Crisis’). Don’t just get hung up on the catchy insouciance of the title track.
3. ARTICLE
How the Biggest Fraud in German History Unravelled
by Ben Taub for The New Yorker
If you’re a Trashfuture listener, you’ll already be familiar with the Wirecard fraud; if you aren’t try this episode then read this blockbuster New Yorker feature:
That night, Marsalek met a friend, Martin Weiss, for pizza in Munich. Until recently, Weiss had served as the head of operations for Austria’s intelligence agency; now he trafficked in information at the intersection of politics, finance, and crime. Weiss called a far-right former Austrian parliamentarian and asked him to arrange a private jet for Marsalek, leaving from a small airfield near Vienna. The next day, another former Austrian intelligence officer allegedly drove Marsalek some two hundred and fifty miles east. Marsalek arrived at the Bad Vöslau airfield just before 8 p.m. He carried only hand luggage, paid the pilots nearly eight thousand euros in cash, and declined to take a receipt.
Philippine immigration records show that Jan Marsalek entered the country four days later, on June 23rd. But, like almost everything about Wirecard, the records had been faked. Although Austrians generally aren’t allowed dual citizenship, Marsalek held at least eight passports, including diplomatic cover from the tiny Caribbean nation of Grenada. His departure from Bad Vöslau is the last instance in which he is known to have used his real name…
4. ARTICLE
The Familiar Beryl Cook
by Frank Kibble for
The second in Vittles’ The Story of Post-War Food Told Through Art series is about an artist whose work was once ubiquitous. Frank Kibble explains:
As a child, I always wondered about the pictures that hung in my grandma’s house. They were all by the same artist, who had a distinctive style, painting slightly rounded people in everyday scenarios: down the pub; running errands in town; tucking into fish and chips. They were endearing and humorous and, in my child’s mind, they didn’t fit. They didn’t fit the mould of the art I was shown at school, which seemed stuffy and earnest. The faces featured in these paintings, which were always smiling or laughing, didn’t fit my conception of ‘good art’, which had been informed by the despairing faces from Renaissance masterpieces. When I asked my grandma why she liked them, she said it was because they showed happy people: ‘Nice to have around the house.’
As I got older, I flattered myself with a critical eye and, for a time, dismissed the paintings – I probably saw them as knick-knacks in an old lady’s house. But now, as I write this, one of the paintings hangs a metre away from me. In recent years, with what might be a kinder way of seeing, I have grown to agree with my grandma: they are nice to have around the house.
The creator of these paintings was Beryl Cook, who, throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, was one of the most visible artists in Britain. Her work could be found reproduced on postcards, on tea towels, and in framed prints like those owned by my grandma; thanks to these reproductions, it felt as though anyone could own a Cook painting. And her work was accessible not just in terms of availability, but also content. Observing the daily goings-on of life in Plymouth, the city where she lived, Cook typically painted working-class subjects in places that would feel familiar: the pub, the market, the picnic in the park. Crucially, she often depicted those subjects enjoying classic English meals – fish and chips, fry-ups, pasties – celebrating vernacular English cuisine at a time when it was being maligned.
5. PODCAST
E190: Weiss Pride (feat. Mic Wright)
by Podcasting Is Praxis
This is a somewhat self-serving recommendation here but I think I’m the least good bit of this excellent episode from my friends at Podcasting Is Praxis. After running through several hors d’oeuvres of awfulness, the main course here is the dire, no good, downright awful New Statesman Bari Weiss profile, which was the topic of last weekend’s mini-essay.
6. INTERVIEW
Professor Mariana Mazzucato interviewed by Oli Dugmore on the dangerous power and influence of big consultancy firms.
I’m looking forward to reading Mazzaucato’s new book The Big Con.
7. BOOK
Rule Nostalgia by Hannah Rose Woods
The illusion of the ‘good old days’ is tested to destruction in a book that as the blurb promises “separates the history from the fantasy”. Penguin sent me the book for free but I’m recommending it for free too. It’s good.
Usually, there’s a paywall here. This week, the whole weekend edition is free. Consider subscribing if you like it.
THE MICRO ESSAY
Power speaking (partial) truths to power
The Telegraph’s ‘scoop’ — Isabel Oakeshott delivering a wheelbarrow of Matt Hancock’s WhatsApp messages on its doorstep — continues to dominate the headlines and such paragons of journalistic ethics as Fraser Nelson and Julia Hartley-Brewer are swinging for anyone who questions the whole affair.
On Britain’s most reliably terrible televised politics show Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, Nelson — the oddly-accented editor of The Spectator — bloviated:
The job of the journalist is to shine a light on things ministers prefer to keep in darkness.
Mary Wakefield’s account of her time in lockdown with her husband Dominic Cummings is still on The Spectator website uncorrected, despite being shown up as a work of fiction. The Spectator’s ‘honesty’ is as selective as the Telegraph’s approach to the 100,000+ WhatsApps; they share an owner.
Oakeshott is not engaged in journalism. She and the Telegraph are political operatives working to push a particularly partial story for the benefit of their allies and they are exploiting the vulnerable and the bereaved as they do it. Today, Oakeshott used a teenager’s suicide as a rhetorical tool.
There’s no level to which the Telegraph will not stoop.
THIS WEEK’S STATS
There are currently 8,143 subscribers to this newsletter in total (up 75 from last week). There are 637 paid subscribers (up 16 since last week).
This week’s most-read edition was The scorpion’s scoop
THREE NEWSLETTERS I NEARLY WROTE THIS WEEK
1. 'Media literacy is dead': Yes and the media was one of the killers.
Self-explanatory, I’d say.
2. A letter from a 'legitimate' businessman
On the ludicrous claim that British tabloids don’t use blackmail.
3. Bullied by a chatbot
Looking at AI stories and journalists getting shitted up by super-autocorrect.
PLAYLIST
Sunday Warning #7: A mixture of old and new stuff I listened to this week that I thought you might like too. It’s on Spotify but here’s the tracklist too:
YOUTUBE FIND OF THE WEEK
1982: Bob Hoskins talks about London being “sterilised by greed”:
Thanks for reading and sharing. Special thank you to those of you who’ve made the jump to become a paid subscriber.
Previously:
Slop will eat itself
The clash between Isabel Oakeshott and Cathy Newman was a real scrap in the British media's professional wrestling antics, but truth was still the loser.