The columnist blue screens

The problem of the generalist columnist? Experts immediately see through their farts and bluster.

Previously: The origami castle
Some 'clever' columns can't survive a rainstorm, let alone a hurricane of piss...

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I was in a room with Steve Jobs once.

I mean, I didn’t get to talk to him — though I tried — and it was so busy that I had to peek at his through the gaps in the crowd. But that would be enough to spin out a column about “my encounter with Apple’s dead genius” if I were a national newspaper columnist. In fact, it would be more than most of them work with when swinging their junior Sauron eyes toward a topic.

The weekly columnist is a locust — forever hungry for new content to devour — but also a pigeon — swooping in and shitting all over everything without much regard for what was happening before they arrived.

Last month, I introduced the idea of the origami castle in this newsletter:

It describes a column or any other piece of writing which, at first glance, appears to be elaborate and impressive but which, on closer inspection, cannot stand up to scrutiny… 

… Subject [an origami castle] to a cold rainstorm of analysis or a lukewarm jet of pissy derision and you are left with the same result: A soggy mess.

As it happens, the architect of today’s origami castle is one of the columnists who inspired its original coinage: James Marriott.

The Times’ most reliably unreliable proponent of aww-shucks arrogance has written about Apple, its new Vision Pro AR headset, and technology in general. Beneath the headline, Silicon Valley should take a reality check, he begins:

The phrase “virtual reality” has always seemed to me to overstate matters. “Strapping a video game console to your head” more accurately conveys the cumbersome and still underwhelming nature of the technology. Not having $3,500 to spare, I have not donned Apple’s new headset but I do periodically drop into my local virtual reality arcade to check whether the future has arrived (what’s the point of living in east London if you can’t occasionally commit an obnoxious sentence like that to the page?). This week I kayaked apathetically down a gorgeous river in Costa Rica in Mirage, which is lauded as “VR’s most realistic looking game”. It was cool. But no more than that.

I remain a VR sceptic. Too bulky. Too isolating. Too pointless. The cinema, more than 100 years old, remains the more “immersive” technology. Some expert reviewers are excited by Apple’s Vision Pro but I have read little to persuade me that, with its clumsy headset and awkward battery pack, it will ever become a feature of everyday life.

This is bothersome from the first sentiment; Marriott elides AR — augmented reality which places information and experiences on top of a feed of your actual surroundings — with VR — virtual reality which constructs an entire world that you enter into and experience via the headset. Apple has clearly made the decision that AR is preferable to VR and that’s worthy of analysis and critique, but Marriott in his (deliberate?!) misunderstanding cannot do that.

A crappy “virtual reality arcade” and an Apple product that neither Marriott nor I have actually used are not comparable. As it goes, I agree with him that VR is a tedious technology and that people, in general, whether consuming cinema — an experience improved by the social element — or porn — a generally solo endeavour that benefits from distance from the material — aren’t craving it.

Where he swerves off the track though is to ganch about the price of the Apple headset — the company makes luxury products and the first iteration of any of its devices tends to arrive at an eyewatering price point before subsequent versions become more affordable as the company seeks market share — and to make the bold (and arrogant) prediction that it will “[never] become a feature of everyday life”. I’ve been writing about Apple on and off since I joined Stuff around the launch of the iPhone and every product the company has launched since then — including the iPhone — has been dismissed as likely to fail.

In two paragraphs later in the column, Marriott reveals how little he has actually thought about the problems of the technology that he has set out to analyse:

Neither smartphones nor social media have had the compelling effects on productivity or economic growth that optimists anticipated. Twitter and Facebook have been destructive not only of human contentment but human efficiency... 

When modern technology companies have improved our lives, the effects have often been temporary. For a while huge quantities of investor cash made Uber a quick and cheap alternative to the taxi. Nowadays, when I order an Uber, the process entails waiting on the kerb for 15 minutes before giving up and hailing a black cab. Similarly, excitable investors stumped up the money for new streaming platforms, bringing us a golden age of prestige television dramas. But now that Netflix’s share price is falling, the money is flowing away and studios are cancelling shows. Many in the industry believe the business model of TV is broken.

These are the cheap and nasty generalisations of a guy with a deadline. One of the reasons that productivity gains and economic growth have not stemmed from things like smartphones and social media is that companies and states have used improved technology as an excuse to turn up the ‘exploitation dial’. Capital simply demands more and uses technology to shackle people to their jobs regardless of their location or the time of day.

I am married because of Twitter. I met my wife there. This is not an isolated story. And while Facebook is odious in so many ways, my experience — as one of the first cohorts at university to end up on the site (it launched in the UK during our finals) — is of a place that allows me to remain in contact with people who I have often not seen in person for ten or fifteen years.

Uber’s service has got worse because it was always a lie. The company heavily subsidised ride prices and gave big incentives to drivers in order to dominate the market but now that it needs to make money, it screws those very same drivers which reduces availability of cars and pushes up fares for customers. Uber was never a technology company; it was a shakedown with an app.

And as for Netflix and the TV industry… unlike Marriott, I don’t think I can do the complexities of the things happening there (a strike by writers to fight future generative AI deployments and present unfair wages among them) in a single paragraph but will return to the topic later.

The last paragraph I do want to look at though is Marriott’s stab at summing up the issues with AI in less than 100 words:

AI is the final symbol of the folly of a culture that worships innovation for its own sake. Couldn’t we do without a technology that, as The Times reported this week, “could kill many humans within two years”? Even the best-case scenario is disappointing. 

Someone I know who works closely with large language models such as ChatGPT complains that “it’s taken over our lives at work and it’s a useless time-sink . . . one of the biggest dead ends in tech history”. If this really is true (let us pray it is) then it is of a piece with the pointless, productivity-sapping innovations that have defined the past two decades.

The point of this column is to provoke with broad and punchy declarations but there must be something behind those statements. Marriott must know that the “could kill many humans within two years” line is a distortion of points made by Matt Clifford, the UK Prime Minister’s advisor on AI, but he doesn’t care to be accurate because it suits his argument.

AI is not just large language models but the columnist needs a pithy point to bring his argument to an end so we get a quote from ‘a friend’ and a repeat of his flimsy case around productivity. In Bullshit Jobs, the late, great, Professor David Graeber explained how the “Keynesian bargain” of linking productivity gains to employee compensation was broken in the 80s and has never been fixed. That is why — in part — technology is not a panacea; workers know that their bullshit jobs are bullshit and that working harder is not linked to better pay.

The benefit for James Marriott is that his productivity is capped and bullshit is a metric for which he is handsomely rewarded.

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