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The Cat Crusades in the Culture Wars

I’m not an especial fan of cats. Cats will be chewing your fingers and clawing at your eyeballs within minutes of your death. Cats are apex predators who devastate local wildlife. Cats are highly self-serving and have learned how to hack human attachment to them, in part with the assistance of toxoplasmosis, with which they infect us.

In short, I’m more of a dog guy.

But cats are also useful in many ways, providing company and comfort of a sort to the solitary, isolated or lonely. They keep vermin down. And their long history as domestic human companions can often be used to cast light on some social trends historically.

Take for example the ‘cat lady’ meme, which in its current popular mode may be said to have originated on The Simpsons, where the character of Eleanor Abernathy is depicted as being a demented old woman who shouts gibberish, hoards rubbish and clings to dozens of cats. Eleanor’s back story is that, as a highly intelligent young woman, she became overeducated, studying both Law at Yale and Medicine at Harvard, thereby foregoing romantic relationships and family and burning herself out intellectually, resulting in her fate as a ‘crazy cat lady’.

One does not have to ponder for long to see why this narrative appeals to the incels of the alt-right in their ongoing demonisation of feminism, female autonomy and what they perceive as the anti-family ramifications of educating women.

So the prevalence of cats as part of, or at least adjacent to, human domestic culture also means that they serve as bellwethers for cultural development. I am reminded of the 19th century viral practical joke, whereby people would place advertisements in newspapers, usually purporting to be from merchant sea captains, seeking to pay for cats which they wished to have on their ship to prevent rat infestations.

As a result, hundreds of people would flock to the docks of their city on the allotted day, only to find that no such captain or ship existed, and release the various strays and kittens they had gathered, thereby causing chaos (and one presumes amusement for the joker who placed the advertisement.) This joke ran for decades in various primarily British and American port cities, as my friend and former colleague Chris Smith has detailed in an essay on the matter.

As Smith points out, the originating event, an alleged cat hoax at Chester, never happened. But the fact that it was reported inspired copycat (sorry) events which definitely did. And the reason for this virality of what was originally an urban legend, the reason why people persisted in committing this hoax, was as Smith states to laugh at the poor, the uneducated and in particular the Irish.

So who do we use cats to laugh at today? Obviously women, in particular educated single women as I have already mentioned. But there are other targets too. Most recently a meme about the medieval papacy has gained a lot of traction on social media which features cats. It’s easiest to reproduce it here than describe it:

Now, the logic gap here may be obvious to anyone no matter how little they may know about Pope Gregory. If the papacy demanded the death only of black cats, surely all the cats of other colourings still existed and could have dealt with the rats whose fleas were the primary vector of bubonic plague into Europe? Someone with only the tiniest familiarity with medieval chronology might further protest that the outbreak of plague in Europe in the 1340s came at least a century AFTER it is suggested that Gregory launched his anti-cat campaign.

Vox in Rama does indeed exist. It is a Papal Bull which primarily discusses the alleged existence of a satanic worship ring in Germany and proposes its suppression. Killing cats is not proposed within it. Furthermore, it was directed only to a small number of German clerics, not to the clergy or Christian population of Europe as a whole. Now, this is not to say that Gregory is entirely innocent in all things. He was quite fond of instigating pogroms against heretics, of which Vox in Rama formed a part. But did his blindness to consequence and thirst to persecute inadvertently lead to the deaths of millions of people from the bubonic plague? Absolutely not.

So what are we really reading here? If the resurgence of the Simpsons Cat Lady is about male insecurity and condemnation of female outperformance in higher education and the workplace, and the 19th century cat hoax is about the lower middles of Britain sneering at the poor and the Irish simultaneously, then who is the target of the Papal cat genocide meme, and why?

Obviously the primary target is the Catholic Church. The meme trades on institutional Catholicism’s instigatory involvement in medieval persecution of heresy, from the Crusades to the Inquisition. But within that is a further layer of attack on male power and its concomitant stupidity, a failure to connect action to reaction, cause to consequence.

Whence does this actually stem? Most likely the inspiration is the success of a truthful meme, that of Mao’s war on sparrows as part of his ‘Four Pests’ campaign, which did indeed lead to the deaths of millions of Chinese people in the 1950s. The resurgence of this particular event as a meme on social media functions primarily as a cautionary tale against Communism, as well as a kind of Sinophobic warning against gullible and indoctrinated Chinese people. It would not be unfair to surmise that this meme has been primarily propagated by anti-Communist ethnonationalists in the West.

So what is the semiotic or cultural meaning of the Pope Gregory meme about cats? It is an attempt to respond to the popularity of the Mao meme by inverting and displacing it. Pleasant as sparrows are, human attachment to cats is much more significant culturally, and there is a general repugnance to the killing of cats in Western and other cultures. So Pope Gregory’s patriarchal, ignorant and cruel cat crusade (as depicted erroneously in the meme) is actually a response to what anti-Communist ethnonationalists find dear, that is, the Christian church via its primary institution.

We can expect the culture wars to continue apace, and it is likely that cats will increasingly be weaponised in this fashion as a mode of marshaling emotional responses on one side or the other. Smith’s illuminating and entertaining study shows how this is nothing new and is attested in history (and in media) long before the internet existed.

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Surviving the Civil War of the Vampires

Mark O’ Connell, one of the better chroniclers of our lightning-paced transitions through tech-disrupted realities, had an intriguing mini-essay published in yesterday’s New York Times. His topic is the vampiric desire for immortality as expressed by the elites of this world, from the political despots of Russia and China to the posthumanist dreamers of Silicon Valley.

As O’Connell notes, the desire for immortality is nothing new. It is a by-product of human wrestling with our mortal condition and thus is itself immortal, switching up only its face, clothing and name as the centuries pass.

In this sense, the techbro quest for infinite longevity becomes, as O’Connell states, a contemporary analogue for medieval alchemy, and the kind of arsenic and mercury-based witches’ brews which seduced a series of Chinese emperors into a truncated rather than extended lifespan.

But O’Connell’s vampire metaphor, if it is best thought of as mere metaphor, put me in mind of another recent use of the term by one of his essay’s protagonists, Vladimir Putin.

O’Connell relates Putin’s overheard conversation with President Xi in Beijing, a forbidden topic in the Forbidden City, about how as septuagenarians they are still mere children. This amiable discourse between dictators should of course fill us all with an eldritch chill. Their shared desire to continue in power forever, like the dessicated cybernetic Emperor in the popular Warhammer 40k mythos, reminds us of just how impervious to traditional threat and opposition they believe themselves to be.

Yet of course, they are fully aware of the threat which they face. It is not you or I, or the hundreds of millions of ordinary citizens they preside over, of course. We – they – are mere meatsacks who exist in order to be ruled, to be leveraged in pursuit of endless political power. Mere mortal plebs are the threat they can marshall against others, be it Ukraine or Taiwan, or be it dissidents in England or Tibetan separatists.

The threat that they face is the civil war of the vampires, and they are fully aware of this. In March 2024, Vladimir Putin was engaging in one of his habitual polemics against the Western Powers in an interview with the journalist Dmitri Kisilev, when he made a revealing statement which O’Connell’s essay brought back to my mind.

Here is what he said in Russian, to avoid any accusations of misrepresentation: «В западных элитах очень сильно желание заморозить существующее положение, несправедливое положение вещей в международных делах. Они привыкли столетиями набивать брюхо человеческой плотью, а карманы — деньгами. Но они должны понять, что бал вампиров заканчивается.»

How might we translate this? Forgive me for falling back on the machines, as the posthumanists would have us do, but my Russian is too rusty to suffice here. Instead, let Microsoft’s translation software attempt to convey it: “In the Western elites, there is a very strong desire to freeze the existing situation, the unfair state of affairs in international matters. They have been accustomed for centuries to stuffing their bellies with human flesh and their pockets with money. But they must understand that the vampire ball is coming to an end.”

There are a few things to note here. Firstly, Putin does not attempt to replicate the demonisation of entire peoples such as have been levied against the people of Russia by the media and institutions – banking, sporting, cultural, legal – of the West. His target is much narrower, the Western Elites. Secondly, what exactly is his accusation? That global geopolitics is a rigged game, designed to direct wealth and power to those Western Elites at the expense of everyone else. And what is his warning? That this era, which he alleges has lasted for centuries, is about to end.

So even if the last dance is being played out at the vampire’s ball, what evidence is there that a vampiric civil war is set to follow? It’s worth noting that generally such series of events overlap rather than follow serially. The dancing and music continued on the Titanic long after the iceberg was first struck. Wars tend to build to a crescendo and recede rather than switch on or off in a binary fashion. Therefore, we must acknowledge that the vampiric civil war is already under way.

And what form does it take in these early stages? We can see the open gorging on human blood and flesh in a range of locations already, not merely the weeping wounds of conflicts like those in Ukraine, Syria, Sudan or Lebanon, but also in the uptick in various forms of terrorist violence all across the globe, often of an Islamofascist nature but also taking many other forms too of which the most likely to catch fire uncontrollably is the ethnonationalist one. But perhaps all of these can better seen as the jockeying of the minor vampires for a seat at the next feast.

O’Connell correctly links Putin’s overheard comments to Xi about tech-enabled longevity to the kind of warped vision quests of the Cali techbros, and in particular to Marc Andressen’s astonishing credo in his 2023 “Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” that “We believe artificial intelligence is our alchemy, our Philosophers’ Stone — we are literally making sand think.”

One wonders what the sand does think, and to what extent it will be happy to be yoked to the posthumanist longevity quests of the various vampiric cliques. We can be sure of one thing, however. Whatever genies or demons the vampires summon in order to pursue their immortality will not be shared with the meat masses. The posthumanist dream dangled before us is conversion to vampirism. Only the elites will be bitten. The rest of us will be consumed instead.

If mortality grants poignancy and meaning to human life, then what is immortality? Is it really infinite meaning and endless feeling, or instead a senile decline into static autocracy such as we see in Warhammer or Dune? Anne Rice encouraged us to have sympathy with the vampire, and we are still in her era of revisionism, of loving the cold dead predator as if it were merely cool and detached.

It is instead time for us to resurrect our historic loathing of the vampire, because the real victims of the vampiric civil war will inevitably be us mere mortals. Only by sharpening our stakes against the posthuman desires of the vampires can we hope to survive their civil war.

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Chapter Two is Not the Final Word

If you look up Jakob Ehrlich you’ll probably be directed by Wikipedia and other sources either to the biography of the nominatively anglicised Jack Earle, who was a carnival sideshow performer in the early 20th century known for his extreme height, or else the Viennese Zionist Jakob Ehrlich, who died in 1938, having been beaten to death in the Dachau concentration camp.

But in January 2025, another Jakob Ehrlich died, a man in his Nineties who had lived the latter part of his life in Florida. He left behind a life fully lived, which is detailed in his slender autobiography, which I had reason to examine earlier this week.

Ehrlich, unlike his Viennese namesake, survived the Nazis. Born in Sarajevo, he was a child when they came to power and with a degree of foresight his parents fled with their children to live for some years in refugee camps in Yugoslavia and Italy. Eventually, Ehrlich moved to South America and ultimately to the United States.

In his all-too-brief account of his life, the period of the holocaust takes up chapter two of ten chapters in the text. One imagines that to a young boy, displaced repeatedly during a terrifying war, it didn’t feel much like chapter two to him at the time. And yet there were still eight chapters of his life ahead of him.

Looking at the index of Ehrlich’s text thus becomes a numerical lesson in humility, resilience, and optimism in the face of darkness. I suspect many people who find themselves in similar dark periods of their lives, darkened either by personal or geopolitical or even global circumstances, often feel apocalyptic in the moment, and struggle to imagine a brighter future.

But a lot of life revolves around refusing to accept the Chapter Twos as endings or conclusions, and also refusing to allow them to prevent future chapters from being written.

It’s perfectly possible, as Jakob Ehrlich demonstrated, to allow such moments to permanently colour your life – indeed, how could they not? – without also allowing them to be the final word.

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AI Art Aspires to the Condition of Muzak

Most food you can get is mass-produced in factories, or constructed on assembly lines. But people will still pay more to cook from scratch with good ingredients, or pay someone to do so for them.

Most furniture these days is factory-made or flat-pack. But if you pay enough, you can get something of lasting quality, made by a craftsman either now or centuries past.

Most clothes are fast fashion, made in Asian sweatshops, and fall apart or fade after a few washes. But for enough money, you can get tailored clothes which will last decades.

And if it doesn’t murder us all or melt the planet, this is possibly where AI is taking us. To a future where most words, most images, most music, most entertainment will be algorithm-generated.

But if you’re prepared to pay, humans will still be around to make you a quality product.

Walter Pater famously said that all art aspires to the condition of music. In his Jerry Cornelius series of novels, Michael Moorcock subverted this to the mass media age, suggesting that all art aspires instead to the condition of muzak.

We now know of course that it is not ALL art which thus aspires. But certainly all algorithmically-generated content does, by definition.

Capitalism is using algorithms to enforce industrialisation upon creativity, that having been resisted by humanity until now, despite the concerns of generations before us, from the Luddites to William Morris.

But at the fringes, where the poor and the hyperrich almost meet in a kind of horseshoe of behavioural patterns, human-created art, without any AI involvement, will be the art of choice for those who cannot afford the mass-produced option, as well as those who can afford to pay extra for its status symbolism, quality and the longevity.

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Does the Protagonist wear Prada?

Writers have their little tricks. Nearly all of them use a thesaurus to avoid overusing their favourite words, for example. And some like to dip into a phone book (or its modern equivalent the internet) to generate names for characters.

I’ve been writing fiction on and off for nearly four decades (no jokes about my journalism career please!), ever since Heinemann published me alongside Salman Rushdie, Nadine Gordimer, William Trevor and others in their Best Short Stories of the Year anthology when I was still in short trousers, so to speak.

But one thing I’ve never managed to do successfully is dress characters.

Anthony Burgess was a famously terrible dresser, partly because he was colourblind. If you watch him on old chatshow clips, he’s wearing brown shirts with green ties and so on.

But he knew his characters deserved better, so he would get his glamorous Italian wife to tell him what each of his characters ought to be wearing.

That’s what I could definitely use – someone to dress my characters for me. (Not the glamorous Italian wife – I’d need to be on Anthony Burgess level royalties to afford one.)

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The Lost Philosophies of Loss

You might think that there would be a very large body of philosophical thinking on loss, but if there is I haven’t found it. Perhaps somewhere along the line, we lost it? If you know of any, I’d like to know more.

There is of course a lot of writing about grief, which is a subset of loss related to the process of dealing with our collective mortality, and the particular mortality of a loved one. Related to this is a certain amount of thinking that pertains to mortality itself, why and how it grants meaning to existence, the necessity of embracing rather than fearing it. And beyond that again, a lot of philosophies – one thinks in particular of Stoicism and Buddhism – address the importance of accepting change in general, not just the kind of change which results in the death of someone near and dear.

Outside the realm of philosophy (or perhaps within it, depending on how you view the relationships between things like psychology and philosophy, or various religious tenets and philosophy) again there is a large body of thought that considers the purpose of mortality, and how best one should encounter it. Some of this, like Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s highly popular five stages of grief model, is focused on practical rather than conceptual ways to address grief, and obviously for people experiencing the kind of seismic shock that a bereavement entails, this kind of approach can be enormously helpful in a difficult time for many.

But there seems to be a shortfall of writing about loss in general. It’s not only lives which are lost after all. There are many other kinds of losses, and while some of these might in part emulate the patterns of grief and bereavement, others do not. The loss of a friendship for example, or a love affair, the alienation of a close family member, or the emigration of anyone we are close to can come very close to the grief pattern and response, though since the critical component of mortality is missing, there are inevitable differences.

When we reach Kübler-Ross’s stage of acceptance, we incorporate into our daily existence the reality that whomever has died is not coming back. But if someone has not died, and has instead for whatever reason given or ungiven simply departed from our lives, then this stage can only be partially applied. There is always the unbidden hope, the fractional reality while all still live, of some kind of reunion or rapprochement, and this perpetually delays and impedes the possibility of acceptance in the Kübler-Ross mode.

There are other things too which can be lost which are no less damaging for being more abstract or less acute than the tangible company and love of another human, or indeed animal, companion. Many people tie up entire swathes of their identities in their work, for example, treating their job as a kind of mission or purpose, and they are often cynically encouraged by employers to do so, since they can leverage this ‘labour of love’ motivation into ever greater profit motives and margins.

We have evidence that the loss of such mission-perceived employments can have pretty devastating effects on well-being. The most acute evidence is probably the death rates of people in their initial phase of retirement, where many of those who dedicated their working lives to a particular career are as bereft as the bereaved when it is removed from their daily existence, resulting in a much-increased rate of death from stress and anxiety-aggravated conditions such as cancer or cardiac arrest.

One can lose anything that one can gain in this world of course. And ultimately that’s the point. We enter life and leave it with nothing. But in the interim, “wedged as we are in between two eternities of idleness” as Anthony Burgess once wrote, we accrue all manner of things, from possessions and relationships to feelings, skills, abilities, desires, ambitions, achievements, accreditations and awards, not to mention all manner of material items, almost all of which instigate a sense of attachment when obtained and a concomitant sense of loss if removed. This kind of loss can be especially aggravated if the item somehow becomes entangled with our sense of self, or our perceived status, or simply has grown familiar to us.

Some of these losses are generally acknowledged by society. It’s socially acceptable, for example, to grieve over the loss of a home where one has lived for a long time, plastering the walls with memories and meaning and belonging. Maybe less so, it’s still understood that people can form strong attachment to certain material things which provoke significant sense of loss if removed from that person’s life. Even a favourite mug, the Stoics warn us, is a risk. Let the mug be just a mug, they advise, lest in your growing attachment to it as a fetish or totem item it becomes a risk to your mental equilibrium, one clumsy elbow away from shattering a little bit of yourself on the hardwood floor. Buddhism too tells us that attachment (upadana) is the root of all suffering (dukka), ultimately.

What intrigues me, I suppose, is the absolute ubiquity of loss compared with the relative silence of great thinkers on the matter. Every day we’re all losing something – our keys, a phone number, another thin hair or two maybe. Some days we lose something seismic, like a home, or a job, or a relationship which has been severed or destroyed. Some terrible days we lose to mortality a loved one we realise in shock we won’t ever be able to converse with again, except in our memories, or maybe these days in the pseudo-demonic facsimiles offered by “griefbot” AI technologies.

Every day, ideally, we’re all gaining things too, even if it’s just the awareness of additional loss, the experience and resignation of accepting that the inevitability of change often comes with a negative prefix attached. But life isn’t maths on that level, and perhaps we as humans suffer from a kind of positivistic fixation, wherein we delude ourselves that the things we gain will remain while the things that we lose can, in some way, be reversed or mitigated. Kübler-Ross calls this the bargaining stage of grief, but on a less conscious level it applies to all forms of loss.

So perhaps we feel more keenly the losses without necessarily accounting the gains the same weight of importance. There’s probably a familiarity bias to that phenomenon, I feel. Losses can sometimes feel like they mount up like amputations, one limb after another being lopped off, further disabling us, whereas the things we gain on any particular day don’t necessarily assume the resonance and importance they may ultimately hold for us for some time.

Also, it seems inherently inhuman or robotic to attempt to account for the gains and losses in life as if they were merely emotional analogues for P+L bookkeeping. We don’t do double ledger accounting in our hearts or souls.

And given this ubiquity of experience of loss, and its superimportance over gain in terms of lived human experience, I remain surprised that the greater topic of loss beyond the more limited realm of grief is not more frequently debated within the Western philosophical tradition. But I can’t and don’t claim to have read everything obviously. I may have missed out on good thinkers on this very matter. And if that’s the case, do please put me right and direct me towards some reading in the comments below.

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How many times did humanity forget how to write?

Writing was invented independently on at least four different occasions according to historians – in Sumeria, ancient Egypt, China and Central America.

So it would not come as a surprise to discover that it had also been invented elsewhere beforehand and died out as a lost technology. After all, we still cannot replicate the techniques which made Samurai swords or Roman concrete. And other technologies like glass-blowing, central heating and seismography are attested to have been invented, lost and then rediscovered.

I think the Vinča symbols from ancient Serbia (which predate Sumerian cuneiform writing by millennia) are almost definitely an example of writing being invented then forgotten, for example.

This process may actually have occurred repeatedly before writing stuck, as it were, when the Mesopotamians discovered it five thousand years ago and shared the technology with their neighbours. What’s really interesting is when this process began.

Latest research suggests maybe up to 40,000 years ago. At least, there are artifacts covered in symbols dating to that period which have been discovered in caves in the Swabian Jura, in the South of Germany.

Scientists are currently reluctant to describe this as even a proto- or rudimentary form of writing, but instead are calling it symbolic external information storage. Which to me seems like a cautious way to describe writing. They’ve also insisted that they’re not trying to decipher the symbols. But you can bet your ass they are attempting exactly that.

Human history often seems like a very recent and rushed occurrence, and it is when viewed through the scale of the history of the planet (billions of years) or even that of complex life on the planet (many hundreds of millions of years.)

But it’s actually quite long and the perception that for most of it, people who were cognitively and physically similar if not identical to us spent their time sniveling in caves or chasing deer and berries is probably a serious underestimation of their abilities to conceptualise and to communicate.

Homo Sapiens as a species (never mind the other sentient hominids which preceded us) is perhaps 300,000 years old. Increasingly we’re beginning to realise that most of ‘prehistory’ (as it was formerly dismissed) actually contained thinking people who thought stuff and achieved things.

Many of those things are now lost to us of course. And some of those things may have included technologies and behaviours now considered inherent to the human experience, like music, ritual and yes, writing.

The tiny numbers and thin densities of populations predicated against some of these technologies and behaviours being sustained sometimes. That’s inevitable. As mentioned above, a number of technologies and behaviours have been repeatedly invented, as it were.

I predict quite confidently that the coming years will bring further archeological discoveries which will start to reinforce the idea that human history didn’t suddenly begin when the Mesopotamians decided to start writing down their grain quotas, but in fact stretches much further back than we might previously have considered.

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AI is a horse with three legs

A lot of people are extremely concerned about the prospect of AI superintelligence, and the possibility that it could supersede and perhaps even destroy humanity.

I spent a lot of the past four years or so researching this exact topic.

But increasingly it’s coming to look like AI is actually shit. In other words, it’s not going to take over the world and send Terminators to kill us (what I call the Skynet Complex). And nor are we going to luxuriate in Star Trek-style indolence while AI does all the heavy lifting.

AI can replace *some* human performance, but as we are learning, it’s usually inaccurate, unreliable and expensive. Most companies who’ve used AI have lost money on it.

But as Cory Doctorow notes, AI is an enormous danger. It’s going to destroy our global economy as it eats up all the investment and provides almost nothing except environmental degradation and water shortages in return.

It’s a combination of the world’s biggest nothingburger, tulipmania for the digital age, and the displacement of people in work by unreliable, fantasising, digital plagiarists.

We should stop AI now, not because it might kill us like Terminators, nor because its creators stole all their training material, nor because it’s an environmental disaster. But because we’re betting the global economy on a horse with three legs.

See what Cory says here.

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Where exactly did the Roman Empire end?

Like a lot of questions about history, this is both superficially straightforward and on closer reflection highly philosophical. I have a very straightforward answer for you, one that I have never seen referred to in print or pixel before, but let’s take the complex route first.

We’d need firstly to define what we mean by Roman Empire. The Ottomans, the Germans, the Venetians, the Bulgarians, the Russians and a whole host of other civilisations all considered themselves in one way or another to be true heirs of Rome. Should we consider them as true continuations or not?

Then we’d need to consider what we mean by where. Where is a subset of when in this instance. If we define the Roman Empire as ending with the sack of Rome by Alaric the Visigoth in 410 CE, then obviously the empire fell at Rome itself. But Alaric was dead within a few months, and there was still an emperor in Rome over 60 years later.

And what of what we now call the Byzantine Empire, but which knew itself as the Roman Empire? Founded in Anatolia in the fourth century due to a split of the Empire into Eastern and Western administrations, the empire based in Byzantium (later Constantinople, later Istanbul) continued until it was overran by the Ottomans in the fifteenth century just as its Western twin was overrun by the Ostrogoths in the fifth.

For me, as for themselves, the Byzantines were Roman. Greek-speaking, yes, but Roman all the same, with a continuity of culture all the way back to the founding of Rome as a city state in the eighth century BCE. So if we consider the Byzantines to be the last vestige of the Roman empire, then surely it fell when Constantinople was captured by Sultan Mehmed II (known understandably as ‘the conqueror’) in May 1453 CE?

Close but not quite. Some of the Byzantine empire still stood even as Constantinople was sacked and burned. One standout was the Maniot territory in the Peloponnese in Southern Greece, which at the time Constantinople fell was under the command of the wonderfully named Despotate of Morea, which in practice meant two Byzantine leaders (who promptly fled.) The Maniot people did not flee however, and the Ottomans didn’t bother invading this mountainous and difficult territory until 1770 CE. But with the departing despots so also departed any vestiges of ruling Byzantine (and hence Roman) culture. This was a Maniot defiance of Ottoman rule, not a Byzantine one.

Then there was the principality of Theodoro, which was a sliver of Crimea under Byzantine rule sandwiched between the coastal Genoese colonies and the inland Khanate of Crimea. Technically again, this was Byzantine territory. But in reality, it was populated by Goths.

What? Yes, in fact the Ostrogoths had been in Crimea for over a thousand years, since the FOURTH CENTURY CE! Byzantine rule (following the fourth crusade) was merely yet another imperial vassalage for the Goths of Crimea. At various times they had fallen under the nominal rule of a bewildering range of imperial powers, including the Huns, Khazars, Mongols and Genoese. Ultimately, they were merged into the neighbouring Khanate in 1475 CE, and became part of the Ottoman empire. So, not exactly the last stand of Rome.

Which brings me to my own answer to the question, where did the Roman Empire end? The Empire of Trebizond was a secessionist state of the Byzantine imperium. Formed during the fourth crusade as an opportunistic power grab by a local potentate, the Trebizond empire sustained only a little longer after the fall of its parent state at Constantinople. The Trebizond secessionists were if anything even more aggressed by the combined threat from Turkmen and Ottoman forces than the Byzantines were. Throughout the 1440s and 1450s, they repelled repeated attempts at invasion.

The end finally came in 1461, a mere eight years after the fall of Constantinople. There is a wonderful, almost contemporaneous painting depicting the departure of the Byzantines from Trebizond following King David’s surrender to Mehmed II:

So what happened exactly? Mehmed swooped in from the west to isolate Trebizond and place it under siege, which continued for a month. To achieve this, his forces had to go into the high hills immediately behind the coastal city and outflank it, so that they would be unable to receive either reinforcements (which David hoped would come from Christian Europe) or supplies via the harbour.

Trebizond was a high walled city located between two freshwater sources flowing into the Black Sea, so a physical attack was ill advised. For Mehmed, it was easier to maintain negotiations while besieging the city. And the inhabitants were well aware of what had happened to Constantinople for refusing to negotiate.

This map, take from Wikipedia, gives a good sense of the geography of the time:

The formal surrender would of course likely have taken place in the citadel or the palace (both currently under archeological exploration at the time of writing.) However, this followed an agreement between David and Mehmed for a negotiated surrender. With their forces primarily located to the east of the city, adjoining the freshwater river that is now only a dry river valley in the modern city, it is possible that Mehmed’s forces first entered the city via the lower gate closest to the harbour and market, but more likely that they entered through the double gate closer to the citadel.

Amazingly, this gate is still standing, entirely unremarked upon, and can be found down a narrow cobblestoned alleyway strewn with graffiti and with children’s laundry drying at head height. There is no plaque or commemorative item of any kind to inform you that this place was the geographic spot where over 2200 years of continuous Roman culture came to its final end. And yet, that’s exactly what it is:

The inner gate of Trebizond’s double gate, where 2,200 years of Roman culture came to an end.

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To be everything and more

I recently came across Jonathan Frantzen’s tribute to David Foster Wallace (written in the usual compelling Frantzen style, and interwoven with a trip to Robinson Crusoe’s island).

Buried in there is one of Frantzen’s typical hidden gems: “To be everything and more is the Internet’s ambition, too.”

As AI looms, I concur with his concern that the virtual world is rapaciously eating away at us all. Perhaps we all need to go outside more, though maybe not as far as an inhospitable island off the coast of Chile.

Many bytes have been spilt over this ongoing encroachment. Is it a bad thing? Is it an inevitable thing? Is it dystopian? Is it dystopian but will eventually become utopian?

The general public seem to harbour suspicions. Courting reduced to swiping instantly on a phone app cannot but feel like some kind of awful diminution and commodification. And yet according to research, a tenth of straight people and a quarter of gay people have met their partner online.

This is the kind of efficiency and scalability and global connectivity the internet rightly boasts about. But it doesn’t seem to make most people as happy as it makes the tech oligarchs who profit from such seismic societal change.

We could look at Wikipedia too, the extraordinarily ambitious project to get the world to collaborate in collating the sum of all knowledge. Obviously they haven’t achieved that, but such an overweening ambition drove the project to where it is today, having displaced encyclopedias like Britannica early on, and spoiled many a pub argument by providing instant answers to disputes of an esoteric nature.

Does it matter that Wiki pages about Marvel’s cinematic universe are much more detailed than pages about ancient philosophy? Yes and no. The open source model panders to the interests of the editors not some abstraction of relative importance. But perhaps their interests also reflect (broadly) those of the general public.

And with the ‘internet of things’, one by one the appliances in our own homes and environment are becoming dully sentient, speaking to one another, integrating with systems we rarely if ever see or comprehend.

This is convenient, apparently. It is convenient for our fridge to order our shopping, for the heating in our homes to decide when and how much heat to provide, for our cars to drive themselves, leaving us all feeling that strange combination of privilege as passenger, and cargo without control.

As with all societal change of this scale, or at least all that we’ve been experiencing since the industrial revolution two centuries and more ago, the technology changes the world so quickly that it unnerves many. We never asked for this. We are unsure how it will change our lives. The promises of the techbros often come with dystopian undercurrents, as we see with the online dating revolution.

No wonder then that people like Frantzen might want occasionally to step out of that and into a former world, one of no surveillance, one where dangers can be fatal, one which somehow feels more adventurous and alive. I think many of us harbour similar desires, however hazily constructed.

But as he writes, the internet wants to be everything and more. And its rapidly growing offspring AI wants that even more and may at some point even be able to achieve it.

The irony of Frantzen’s argument is that in seeking to escape the world, he found he missed it deeply. The parallel he draws between the physical island of Selkirk/Crusoe and the mental island on which his friend Wallace was trapped is not unreasonable.

As usual, binary thinking won’t help us. Let’s leave that to the technology which thrives on ones and zeroes. We will need to find a new, tech-enabled way to engage with the world and each other. I wish the tech oligarchs would ponder that possibility a bit more.

I don’t wish to be stranded on either a desert island nor a digital one. I would like to be able to connect with people. The internet both does and doesn’t permit this, because it wants to be everything and more. It interpolates itself between us. And that, I fear, will likely cause many more people to end up on that third type of island, the one which David Foster Wallace was tragically unable in the end to escape.