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How to hack religion

Easter Sunday is one of the two days a year when I engage in Pascal’s wager. This is because attending Christian service twice a year (the other date is Christmas) is, in some denominations, the minimal requirement for being considered a Christian.

This got me thinking whether it was possible to hack religion more broadly. What, in other words, are the minimal requirements to be considered a legitimate member of other world religions?

Firstly, in order to address the immediate objections of the devout, of course such an approach is not really ‘in good faith’ as it were. Furthermore, obviously certain contradictions immediately arise for anyone claiming to be an adherent of more than one faith-based belief system. After all they don’t agree with one another!

But one may equally argue that Pascal’s wager itself is not proposed in good faith either. And in any case, if we assume, as most religious people do, the existence of one or more deities, then one must also presume that the pertinent god or gods are entirely aware of the inherent dishonesty of such an approach (though this is not necessarily a disqualifying factor in some faiths.)

One bon mot often offered by atheists and occasionally agnostics to the religious is the sarcastic agreement that they concur with the devotee that all bar one god does not exist. Therefore their disagreement relates solely to that one final deity and the related belief system. It’s witty because it highlights the revelatory nature of religious knowledge and belief, the illogical component that this rather than that or indeed any other faith is solely correct.

But what if we were to jettison such narrow and unecumenical thinking? In other words, if we were to attempt to maximise our Pascal’s wager, how might we go about it? As mentioned above, two attendances at Church per year suffices to be Christian in some quarters. This is not an onerous requirement really. But what about other religions?

Islam is an interesting case. Generally, in practice, multiple daily prayers and weekly attendance at the mosque is expected. However, doctrinally, simply submitting to Allah is sufficient to be considered Muslim. Even better, that submission need not even be made in good faith, so long as the behaviour expected of good Muslims is also observed. Hence, it is possible to simply profess the shahada, the statement of belief in Allah, in order to become Muslim.

Buddhism likewise can be adhered to without major commitment of time or other resources. There are, as might be expected in a religion with such a wide range of variants, an equally wide range of expectations of Buddhists. To some, simply being alive makes one a Buddhist already. To others, seeking refuge in the ‘three jewels’, the triratna, that is the Buddha, the dharma (doctrine, or teaching), and the sangha (the monastic order, or community), is all that is needed. In practice, this involves turning to the Buddha, Buddhist teachings, and Buddhist community for guidance. This is a little more commitment than the monotheisms require, but again, arguably not overly onerous.

Hinduism, as a variegated collection of interlinked polytheist beliefs, is also a little difficult to pin down in terms of minimal requirements. However, in many cases, the eternal duty, or Sanata Dharma, is all that need be adhered to. This is the requirement to avoid malevolence to all living creatures, and treat them instead with compassion, charity and generosity. Quite a high bar, behaviour-wise, but doctrinally quite easy to accept.

Judaism is a much trickier affair. Generally, one must be born Jewish to be considered Jewish (and the nature of proving that descent is not always straightforward – matrilineal descent from a Jewish mother is generally required.) For others, a process of conversion is necessary, and this process – known as giyur – is far from easy. Judaism as a belief takes a range of forms, from Orthodoxy to Reform, and not all accept conversion. Furthermore, conversion even where possible is a protracted process generally undergone under rabbinical guidance, and even when successful then requires that the convert, among other requirements, adheres to all 613 mitzvot (commandments) of the Torah.

I’ve yet to explore properly the requirements of other religions, such as Sikhism, Baha’i, Jainism, Shinto or any of the traditional African or Chinese faiths and animisms. I fully expect that again, they would require a process of commitment to behaving well towards others, the requirement to engage with the religious community, and perhaps a conversion process also.

But it does seem to me possible in principle at least to hack religion in a manner than expands Pascal’s Wager outward, and in the spirit of the original wager if not of the religions themselves.

I’m not sure if this means that the world’s religious faiths are a little more accommodating than generally understood, or if both Pascal and I are much more cynical than the world needs people to be. Perhaps both. In any case, a happy Easter, Ramadan, Passover or simply Sunday to people of all religions, one religion, or none.

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Who loves thy neighbour, and which neighbours do they love the most?

One reason to study religious futurisms is because the world is becoming MORE religious, not less. In that context, it’s worth considering what various religious and non-religious groups think about one another. Here’s a nice table, derived from a new Pew Research set of polls, looking at this in the American context.

There are some fascinating anomalies here, more anomalies than patterns really, but we will need to explore these societally if we hope to have a peaceable future society. Additionally, the headline is a little disingenuous since mainstream Christian sects don’t tend to view Mormonism as Christian.

And there are many significant gaps in the polling which renders it incomplete. For example, what do Muslims think of the other sects? What about Buddhists, one of America’s fastest growing religions? Or Hindus? Or Orthodox Christians? What about New Age/Pagan/Wicca-based beliefs? Or Indigenous beliefs? And so on.

Nevertheless, this research, as a snapshot in time, is a reasonable starting point for ecumenical outreach for those who are religious, for religious futurist research for those like me who have an academic interest, and for those (sociologists, theologians, politicians, policy-makers) exploring similar inter-relationships in other territories.

For me, a number of these anomalies are particularly intriguing. Only Mormons like everybody. Only Jews are liked by everybody. Opinions on Muslims are almost entirely negative. Historical gulfs between Protestants and Catholics appear to be elided.

The biggest agreed antipathy instead is actually between Evangelical Protestants and Atheists. And the biggest imbalance in regard is between Jews and Evangelical Protestants (a 79 point divide). There is, in short, lots to digest, even if the research is limited in terms of range (America only) and scope (the various creeds for some reason not included.)

I suspect such a table would look different in different locations, needless to say. But we won’t know for sure until someone does the relevant polling in other nations. I look forward to such data emerging in time.

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Zen and the Art of Science Fiction Ancientness

Due to the production lag of academic work appearing in public (peer review, people working for no remuneration, etc), some of the early work I’ve done on Science Fiction and Buddhism is only now emerging in print/pixels.

The first chapter of the slowly emerging book, which looked at Buddhist Reception in Pulp SF, appeared about 18 months ago, as I noted at the time.

Now two more chapters have emerged, long awaited and then arriving in tandem, like buses of legend. The first of these examines the crypto-Buddhism of Arthur C. Clarke, and can be found in a very excellent essay collection entitled Rendezvous with Arthur C. Clarke: Centenary Essays, published unsurprisingly to commemorate 100 years since ACC’s birth.

Contact the publisher Gylphi if it’s of interest, or else pick up a copy on Amazon or via your favourite brainy bookshop. Like all Gylphi books, it costs only a fraction of most academic texts.

Clarke on Clarke contained therein.

The second publication likewise focuses on a single author, this time Frank Herbert of Dune fame, and therefore it will come as no surprise that it’s entitled “The Dharma of Dune: Frank Herbert and Zen Buddhism”.

It can be found in volume one (of two) of Fantastic Religions and Where to Find Them, or, to name it in its original language, Religioni fantastiche e dove trovarle: Divinità, miti e riti nella fantascienza e nel fantasy. If you follow that link, it will take you to the page of publisher Edizione Quasar where you will find both volumes, which contain an eclectic range of clever and considered takes on religion in a vast array of SFF texts, literary, televisual, cinematic and cultural.

Where can you find fantastic religion? In here!

Many thanks are due to the editors of both volumes, Paul March-Russell and Andrew Butler in the first instance, and Igor Baglioni, Ilaria Biano and Chiara Crosignani in the second.

You might reasonably wonder why all three of these chapters feature rather old SF. That’s partly because I’ve been working on this book chronologically, though I’d expect that the next chapter to emerge blinking into the light might jump a few decades to consider Cyberpunk. Don’t ask me when that will be though. The gestation period of academic texts is an arcane mystery. When it happens, I’ll be sure to let you know though.

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The Cosy Sectarianism of the Great Irish Writers

How cosy and quaint do the petty sectarian bigotries of 20th century Irish writing seem today.

I’m not referring to the civil war in the North of Ireland, usually euphemistically referred to in a diminished manner as the ‘Troubles’. I lived through most of that, and it was extremely unpleasant indeed.

Rather I mean the slightly earlier period of the early and mid-twentieth century, when Irish writing bestrode the world in the forms of giants like Joyce, Beckett, Yeats and Behan.

What’s interesting, considering just these four (though we could add many other lesser names), is the varying personal reactions to the sectarian divide in Ireland. For the Protestant-raised, middle-class and cosmopolitan Beckett and Yeats, minor distinctions in flavours of Christianity was an irrelevance at best.

Yeats in later life veered into mysticism, theosophy, magick and the occult. Beckett by contrast tended to dismiss Christianity if not all religion entirely, referring to it as “all balls”, though conceding that it amounted to more than merely “convenient mythology”. Raised in the era they were, both Yeats and Beckett imbibed plenty of Christian dogma in school and wider culture however, and both demonstrate in their writing an easy and deep familiarity with Christian writings and the Bible.

Beckett, probably not considering conversion to Catholicism

By contrast, the Catholic, lower middle-class/working class Joyce and Behan seemed unable entirely to shake off the tribal Catholicism of their backgrounds and education. I was reminded of this recently when I re-encountered Behan’s hilarious take on Anglicanism:

Don’t speak of the alien minister,

Nor of his church without meaning or faith,

For the foundation stone of his temple

Was the bollocks of Henry VIII.

Behan wearing a rosette proclaiming what is undoubtedly the greatest sporting chant ever.

Behan was a self-described “daylight atheist”. This is often presented online in the form of a quote: “I’m a communist by day and a Catholic by night”. However, I’ve not found a reliable source for this variant. Anyhow, Behan clearly had not managed to transcend the petty sectarian rivalries which beset Ireland, and in this he echoes Joyce, who in the highly autobiographical A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man describes his alter-ego protagonist Stephen Dedalus refusing to consider conversion to Protestantism:

– Then, said Cranly, you do not intend to become a Protestant?

– I said that I had lost the faith, Stephen answered, but not that I had lost self-respect. What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?

We might consider this passage as a depiction in mature adulthood of his prissy adolescence were it not that it is echoed elsewhere in his work, such as the short story ‘Grace’ in Dubliners.

Joyce in his lengthy European exile.

It’s worth remembering too that Joyce and Behan both escaped the confines of petty Ireland if anything more completely than Yeats ever did, the latter becoming a senator in the newly independent Ireland whereas Joyce relocated permanently to Europe, while Behan spent much of his time in London and America. (Beckett like his mentor Joyce went to Europe and never looked back.)

So then, what fuels this seemingly pointless animus? The grounds of objection from both Joyce and Behan relate to an apparent illogicality inherent to Protestantism. Notably in both instances, there is no defence of Catholicism offered, merely a snide (and in Behan’s case, very funny) dismissal of Ireland’s second-largest faith.

And unlike Yeats, neither sought to construct a religious faith of their own, though in Joyce’s case at least there was an astonishing attempt to replace the religious impetus with an aesthetic one, succinctly underpinned as Joyce said, by “silence, exile and cunning.”

I think Behan’s piece (a translation as it happens from 16th century Irish) gives the game away here. In many locations, the first line of his translation is misquoted as referring to “your Protestant minister”. But Behan like his source material makes clear that while Anglicanism is being referred to, the issue is less the protest against Catholicism underpinning it than its alienness, that is, the fact that it was the faith of the foreign (ie English) overlords who governed Ireland from the time of bebollocked Henry to their present day.

In other words, it was an atavistic political tribalism rather than a theological objection. We still have those tribalisms in Ireland today, primarily in the North where those overlords remain in position, likely against their will and desire, due to the complexities of establishing a permanent and lasting peace. In the 26 counties of the Irish Republic however, these passages stand out as glaring anachronisms now.

And even in the North, the late great “famous” Seamus Heaney (like Yeats and Beckett a Nobel laureate) is best described as sociologically post-Catholic rather than a devotee of the creed of his birth. This runs counter to the opinions offered by some of his most astute critics, Conor Cruise O’Brien and Edna Longley in particular of course, but is it unfair to point out that both critics came from Protestant backgrounds and hence saw the cultural references to Catholicism in Heaney’s work as more significant than it was simply because those references were alien to them in the same way that Protestantism was to Behan?

So, will you be converting to Protestantism, Seamus?

In other words, the sensitivities may be reversed here. Perhaps it is as readers that we detect these curious emphases. Perhaps we misconstrue the petty cultural rivalries of sectarianism in mid-20th century Ireland because religion played such a larger role in cultural life in those days, in ways that anyone under 50 is unlikely to recognise in Ireland today.

The great Irish writers never stop teaching us, and one of their lessons is that we must challenge ourselves as readers with regard to what we find striking in their writing. What we notice and what we do not says perhaps as much about us as it does about them. They hold a mirror to our souls, even if, like Behan, we are daylight atheists.

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Anthony Burgess versus Stanley Kubrick

I had the pleasure last week of speaking at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, as part of a panel discussion to launch a new book entitled Burgess, Kubrick and A Clockwork Orange.

The book is co-edited by Dr Matt Melia from Kingston University, and Georgina Orgill, the archivist of Stanley Kubrick. For those with an interest in the great brainwashing fable, in either literary or cinematic form, it’s a great read, from Matt and Georgina’s introduction, to the final essay.

The Ponying the Slovos team were honoured to be able to contribute to the volume, and eagerly grasped the opportunity to compare Burgess’s Nadsat to that which features in Stanley Kubrick’s script (and thereafter, the movie itself.)

Alas, as is so often the case with academic research these days, the purchase price is not so cheap. My suggestion is to ask a friendly academic librarian to consider purchasing it on your behalf. However, I can offer you a flavour of what we discovered, and subsequently wrote about in the volume.

M’learned colleague Benet Vincent has written up a fascinating article over at the Ponying the Slovos blog, explaining the differences between Burgess’s Nadsat and Kubrick’s.

I hope you will read it, and perhaps also get the chance to look at the book, not to mention its gorgeous cover.

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Sapienship Lab now live!

Last January, I flew out of Cappadocia and left academia, which was a strange thing for me to do really, since I’d aspired to be an academic for decades before I finally achieved it.

So what lured me away? The opportunity to work with Professor Yuval Noah Harari and his NGO Sapienship, a social impact company that aims to focus global attention on issues of global importance, including the climate crisis, technological disruption and the prevalence of war.

So what have I been doing with them for the past year? Largely, I’ve been working with my colleagues developing the Sapienship Lab which launches today. There’s a lot of content in there already and much more to come over the coming weeks and months. It even includes some audio dramas I wrote which I guess count as my first published science fiction in a while.

Most of the content is factual, educational, and intended to act as a guide through the labyrinth that is our fast-moving now. A lot is aimed at middle schoolkids through to undergrads, but we hope that everyone can learn something from it.

I miss teaching but I feel that in my new role I can still educate, albeit remotely, and contributing to the Lab is how I’m doing that now. I hope you’ll take a look at some of what we’ve prepared. It’s taken a lot of people a long time to put all this together.

And perhaps you might share it too with anyone who might be interested, which hopefully will transpire to be everyone, because we strongly believe that we’re all in this together and only by talking and listening to everyone will we manage to improve our world.

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‘Beyond Nadsat’ now in print and available for free via Open Access

Over at Ponying the Slovos, our ongoing project on invented languages in art and literature, I wrote a series of posts on Anthony Burgess’s other invented languages a couple of years back, of which there are more than a few.

These collected thoughts have now been expanded, revised and published in the peer-reviewed Hungarian journal of English literature, The Anachronist, and (almost all) the journal is free to read or download in the spirit of open access thanks to the publishers at ELTE, Hungary’s foremost university.

View Vol. 20 (2022): Burgess and Droogs: A Post-Centennial Collection of Essays

In this paper, Burgess is used to demonstrate that the role of invented languages in literature goes far beyond the existing well-explored territories of Science Fiction (SF) or High Fantasy, though they predominate therein, and can also be found in historical novels, and even realist fiction, as Burgess’s variegated novels reveal.

This is Ponying the Slovos’s second publication for 2023, and it’s not even two weeks in. We might need a little lie-down!

Anyhow, feel free to read the article here, and the whole journal, all of which will be of interest to Burgess scholars, may be accessed from this page.

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The German Writer Who Foresaw His Own Death

This holiday period is an especially difficult one for many people, who will look up into the cold sky not in expectation of Santa Claus, but in despair. From wartorn Ukraine to the cost of living crisis in Europe, many people are suffering in ways that seemed unthinkable only a year ago.

This night, the seventh night of Hanukkah and the night before Christmas, pay a thought for those who are living insecurely and losing hope. There are many of them. All we have is each other, ultimately. Alas, some of us do not even have that. Here is the story of one such man, Maximilian Bern.

Maximilian Bern, (born Bernstein), was a Jewish German writer who died during the hyperinflation which brought the Weimar Republic to an end almost a century ago, in 1923.

He had been born in 1849 in Ukraine, in Kherson, where his father was a doctor. But then as now, people were leaving Ukraine, and Maximilian relocated with his mother to Vienna after his father died. Though the family fortune was lost, Maximilian’s first novel Auf Schwankem Grunde (“On Shaky Ground”), made his name, and he became a freelance poet, writer and novelist thereafter.

Bern is alas not much read today.

He lived for a couple of years in Paris, and for a time he was married to the renowned actress Olga Wohlbrück, who is now regarded as Germany’s first female movie director. She later left him for a playwright. However, until soon before his death in 1923, he lived an affluent life of artistic renown in Berlin.

In 1904, he published a collection of poems called Die zehnte Muse (“The Tenth Muse”), in which we may read two of his poems which now seem disturbingly prophetic. These are On a Dead Track, and Vagabond Song, which I have lovingly mistranslated below.

What do they appear to prophecy? His own death, which appears almost as a footnote or an aside in Frederick Taylor’s 2013 history The Downfall of Money: Germany’s Hyperinflation and the Destruction of the Middle Class. Taylor had borrowed the anecdote about Bern’s death from a book by Otto Friedrich entitled Before the Deluge: A Portrait of Berlin in the Twenties, wherein on page 126 we hear briefly about Bern’s fate.

Hyperinflation had destroyed Maximilian’s savings as it had so many others, and aged in his seventies, he was in no position to restore the family fortune a second time. He withdrew them all – over 100,000 marks – and spent the entirety of his wealth on a subway ticket, all he could now purchase. After riding one last time around the city, Bern withdrew to his apartment and starved to death.

On a Dead Track

There are people who fall through

old ways and norms, either due

to someone else’s fault or all their own,

to land on a dead track, alone.

Though thousands pass on,

hunting in the world for happiness,

you are chained, unmoving, gone

cheated by the turns of fate, helpless.

You are separated, restricted, forever

from all paths where burns

driving ambition, or wherever

a proudly purposeful force stirs.

Tormented by consuming longing

to storm into the open, into the wide,

even those who miss their lives must

die unnoticed, lonely, set aside.

Vagabond Song

Now I don’t care about anything at all.

What goes up must come down again.

And if I go nowhere, by the road I’ll fall

and stretch out to die, who knows when.

Then the morning finds me dead

like many a bird on a pile of shit,

like many a deer, killed in the night

alone and helpless, in the forest unlit.

When the first fingers of dawn’s light

touch my cold and pallid cheek,

they’ll gleam to show that I was glad

to be freed at last from torment so bleak.

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Return of the Dread AI

Or, you are DEFINITELY the data they’re looking for.

Do you remember when AI was nothing to worry about? It was just an oddity, a subject of humour. But yet people with lots of money and power kept taking it extremely seriously. They kept training up AIs, even when they turned out to be hilarious, or racist, or just downright incompetent.

And then all of a sudden AI got good at things. It began to be able to draw pictures, or write basic journalistic-like factual articles. Then more recently, it began to write plausible student essays. I say plausible, even if it did seem to be doing so with artificial tongue placed firmly in virtual cheek, penning histories of bears in space.

Nevertheless, this was an example of the sole virtue which Silicon Valley values – disruption. And so everyone took notice, especially those who had just gotten disrupted good and hard. Best of luck to academic institutions, particularly those responsible for grading student work, as they scramble to find a way to ensure the integrity of assessment in a world where Turnitin and similar plagiarism software systems are about to become defunct.

And yet there are still some people who would tell you that AI is just a toy, a gimmick, nothing to worry about. And yes, as AI begins to get good at some things, mostly we are enjoying it as a new toy, something to play with. Isn’t it, for example, joyous to recast Star Wars as if it had been made by Akira Kurosawa or Bollywood?

(Answer: yes, it very much is, and that’s why I’m sharing these AI-generated images of alternative cinematic histories below):

Bollywood, long long ago, in a galaxy far far away…
Akira Kurosawa’s version of Star Wars, as envisioned using Midjourney V4 by Alex Grekov

So where, if anywhere, is the dark side of this new force? Isn’t it fun to use the power of algorithms to invent these dreamscapes? Isn’t it fascinating to see what happens when you give AI an idea, like Kurosawa and Star Wars, or better again, a human-written script, and marvel at what it might produce?

(Answer: Yes, it is fascinating. Take for example this script written by Sapienship, inspired by Yuval Noah Harari, and illustrated by algorithm. Full disclosure: I wrote a very little bit of this.)

The one thing we all thought was that some jobs, some industries, some practices were immune to machine involvement. Sure, robots and automation might wipe out manufacturing and blue collar work. What a pity, eh? The commentariat for some time has shown little concern for the eradication of blue collar employment. Their mantra of ‘learn to code’ is now coming back to bite them on the ass as firstly jobs in the media itself got eviscerated and then so too this year did jobs in the software sector.

2022 tech sector job losses, Jan-Nov 2022.

But those old blue collar manufacturing industries had mostly left the West for outsourced climes anyhow. So who exactly would lose their jobs in a wave of automation? Bangladeshi garment factory seamstresses? Chinese phone assemblers? Vietnamese machine welders? (In fact, it turns out to be lots of people in Europe too, like warehouse workers in Poland for example.)

But the creative industries were fine, right? Education was fine. Robots and automation weren’t going to affect those. Except now they are. People learn languages from their phones rather than from teachers increasingly. (Soon they won’t have to, when automation finally and successfully devours translation too.)

Now AI can write student essays for them, putting the degree mills and Turnitin out of business, and posing a huge challenge for educational institutions in terms of assessment. These are the same institutions whose overpaid vice-chancellors have already fully grasped the monetary benefits of remote learning, recorded lectures, and cutting frontline teaching staff in record numbers.

What’s next? What happens when someone takes deepfakes out of the porn sector and merges it into the kind of imagery we see above? In other words, what happens when AI actually releases a Kurosawa Star Wars? Or writes a sequel to James Joyce’s Ulysses? Or some additional Emily Dickinson poems? Or paints whatever you like in the style of Picasso? Or sculpts, via a 3D printer, the art of the future? Or releases new songs by Elvis, Janis Joplin, Whitney Houston or Tupac?

Newsflash: we’re already there. Here’s some new tracks dropped by Amy Winehouse, Jim Morrison and some other members of the 27 Club, so named because they all died at 27.

What happens, in other words, when AI starts doing us better than we do us? When it makes human culture to a higher standard than we do? It’s coming rapidly down the track if we don’t very quickly come up with some answers about how we want to relate to AI and automation, and how we want to restrict it (and whether it’s even possible to persuade all the relevant actors globally of the wisdom of doing so.)

In the meantime, we can entertain ourselves with flattering self-portraits taken with Lensa, even as we concede the art of photography itself to the machines. Or we can initiate a much-needed global conversation about this technology, how fast it is moving, and where it is going.

But we need to do that now, because, as Yoda once said in a movie filmed in Elstree Studios, not Bollywood nor Japan, “Once you start down the dark path, forever it will dominate your destiny.” As we generate those Lensa portraits, we’re simultaneously feeding its algorithm our image, our data. We’re training it to recognise us, and via us, other humans, including those who never use their “service”, even those have not been born yet.

Let’s say that Lensa does indeed delete the images afterwards. The training their algorithm has received isn’t reversed. And less ethical entities, be they state bodies like the Chinese Communist Party or corporate like Google, might not be so quick to delete our data, even if we want them to.

Aldous Huxley, in his famous dystopia Brave New World, depicted a nightmare vision of people acquiescing to their own restraint and manipulation. This is what we are now on the brink of, dreaming our way to our own obsolescence. Dreams of our own unrealistic and prettified faces. Dreams of movies that never were filmed, essays we never wrote, novels the authors never penned, art the artists never painted.

Lots of pretty baubles, ultimately meaningless, in return for all that we are or can be. It’s not so great a deal, really, is it?

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Gaslit by Goblins – the dictionary definition

There is dissent among the lexicographers!

Whereas last year the Oxford English Dictionary (with the somewhat American-sounding diminutive ‘vax’) and Merriam-Webster (with the more formal, and somehow British sounding vaccine) concurred on word of the year, this time they have diverged.

For the M-W, this year’s word is ‘gaslighting’, a not-especially-new term used to describe a kind of cruel psychological manipulation. However, the OED put their favoured options (which included a phrase and a hashtag!) to a public vote, and came up with ‘goblin mode’.

What is ‘goblin mode’, you may ask? Some Tolkienesque monstrous tendency to murderous behaviour?

Goblin Mode?

No, apparently it is a term of online usage which is defined as “a type of behaviour which is unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly, or greedy, typically in a way that rejects social norms or expectations.”

In other words, the kind of behaviour one expects from people who consider hashtags to be words and eschew responsibility by putting their work out to a vote.

I feel like the OED has started gaslighting me. I’m team Merriam-Webster until the goblin mode ceases in Oxford.