Now that we’re in an age where it seems like literally everything is endlessly reviewed by someone with a VERY IMPORTANT OPINION on social media, it can be easy to forget that this is nothing particularly new.
Back at the dawn of journalism, when Grub Street hacks made their money penning absolutely anything they thought would sell, there was a burgeoning genre of books reviewing prostitutes in London, which apparently sold very well and in some cases produced annual volumes for decades.
These detailed what the girls looked like, how they dressed, what they were prepared to do for cold hard cash, and most importantly, whether they were ‘clean’, ie uninfected with STDs, or not.
Possibly not ‘clean’.
Some fastidious hacks even went so far as to trial the wares and test the girls medically to insure their information was up to date and accurate.
One early example of the genre had the catchy title of “A catalogue of jilts, cracks, prostitutes, night-walkers, whores, she-friends, kind women, and others of the linnen-lifting tribe, who are to be seen every night in the Cloysters in Smithfield … during the time of the fair.”
Later volumes focused on Covent Garden, where the porous borders between streetwalker, actress and high class courtesan was navigated by impecunious teenagers seeking a living however they could.
Not every literary genre deserves to survive and to my knowledge, this one died out by the 19th century. That said, no doubt some sleazy bloke somewhere is carefully curating a blog or bulletin board detailing what the cracked out desperate women of his city are prepared to do in return for his social media money.
It’s that time of the year when the Booker Prize shortlist is announced, which, like the Nobel literature prize announcement, always makes me wonder about the point of literary prizes at all.
There’s an argument in favour of course, and those in the running for the Booker would perhaps be among the first to make it. We’re in an era when fewer and fewer people read books, and of those that do, fewer and fewer read contemporary literary fiction. Surely anything that promotes such literature and brings it to the general public’s attention can only be a good thing? We might call this the ‘Harry Potter’ argument, after the longstanding axiom that, were it not for JK Rowling’s wizarding world, the entirety of Gen Z would be functionally illiterate.
Readadamn Bookium!
There’s also a concomitant self-serving argument on behalf of the authors, as I said. It’s not very lucrative to write literary fiction. In fact, it’s a very poor decision, careerwise, if you think about it. The average published author in Britain makes about £7,000 a year. That’s not very much when you consider that the average rent is around £1,400 per month.
Now, when we subtract people like Rowling, or Julia Donaldson, or Jeffrey Archer from the list, obviously that £7,000 is going to become much, much smaller again. Take out the non-fiction writers, the popular genre writers (chicklit, SF, fantasy, romantasy etc) and the pot gets smaller and smaller again. So merely winning the £50,000 prize would be an enormous financial boost to any writer on the list. Even appearing on the list leads to a boost in sales. David Salariya pointed out last year that winning any kind of prize can boost sales by anywhere from 40% to 500%, which is obviously good news for those trying to encourage the world to read their fiction.
So, while you might disagree with the choices of Mary Beard, Jarvis Cocker et. al., the very fact that they sat down and read a whole bunch of contemporary novels, then whittled them down to a longlist, and then a shortlist, all of which received media publicity, as will the decision of who actually wins in November, is a generally good thing for writers.
Is there a counterargument then to the prize culture? Yes, there are quite a few actually. Art is not sport. There’s no empirical method for establishing what’s ‘better’ than something else. Its beauty and appreciation lies ultimately in the eye of the beholder alone. So if you like Dan Brown and think Rachel Cusk is shit, then that’s your choice, and you make it with your own hard-earned cash, and no one can take that choice from you.
And then there’s the posterity argument. Shakespeare didn’t need no prizes, we get told occasionally. Neither did Homer or Dante or Sappho or (insert favourite eternal ancient author here). And while that is true (to an extent – many cultures including the Greeks and Irish had annual competitions for composition in the distant past), it hints at a further implicit argument, that the choices of posterity are likely not to reflect the popularity of the present.
We can see that this is indeed true (again, to an extent.) The best-selling novel in 1922 was If Winter Comes by ASM Hutchinson. It deals with topics like suicide and divorce, which were quite shocking at the time, and was filmed twice. It’s fair to say, however, that nobody is reading If Winter Comes today. By contrast, James Joyce published Ulysses that same year in an edition of just 1000 copies. A century or more later, and it’s on pretty much every university literature course on the planet. Is it well-read? Perhaps not, but a lot of people try every single year due to its immense reputation. Posterity has judged in favour of Joyce and not Hutchinson, despite Joyce never winning a prize for anything.
But to be in the running for posterity’s consideration, it probably helps to have at least some attention while still alive, which was certainly the case with Joyce. It’s also the case with a lot of the Nobel and Booker prizewinners too. There are examples like Emily Dickinson or Franz Kafka whose reputations were all but unknown during their lifetimes, and yet who sprung to a large degree of prominence later, of course. These are largely notable because of how few there are. And one suspects that Kafka and Dickinson might quite have liked a few sales and some critical attention, not to mention maybe a prize, while they were still around to enjoy the acclaim however modest it might then have been.
Generally, the Booker Prize has quite a good track record of picking the same writers that have been accepted by posterity, if we can attribute fifty or so years of reputation as an early judgement of history. If you read down the list of winners from 1969 onwards, there aren’t so many winners who didn’t attract plaudits, success and acclaim for other of their novels also. Quite a lot of them are still highly regarded and well read today. Would Rushdie, Gordimer, Murdoch, Golding, Coetzee, Ishiguro, Byatt, McEwan, Attwood et. al. be so popular today had they not nabbed a Booker? Possibly not.
So it’s likely that Salariya is correct to note that the prizes phenomenon is a kind of necessary evil, drawing attention to the toil and achievement of writers generally, and literary fiction writers in particular. Without them, we might not discuss literature much in the public sphere at all.
Questioning why Pulp singer Jarvis Cocker should be an arbiter of literature is therefore part of the process (and he’s positioned himself in recent years as a curator of artistic experiences so it’s not especially outrageous), as is raising an eyebrow when one judge asserts that “the purpose of literature is to open our eyes to gay sex”. They’re doing their job, which is to redirect frazzled eyeballs in the attention economy to a more worthwhile reading experience. The debate, the outrageous comments, the questionable decisions (Where’s Switzy on the shortlist this year? Why didn’t Ballard win for Empire of the Sun, or Burgess for Earthly Powers?) are all part of that attempt to redirect the general public.
Novelist has increasingly joined poet and some other professions in the kudos economy, where people are rewarded not monetarily but in terms of grudging status. A novel or two is a useful status marker, not unlike a higher degree or a royal honour, in British and perhaps other societies too. In that context, one cannot begrudge anyone receiving a prize that might lift them financially rather than in terms of kudos. Kudos won’t pay that £1400 pcm rent after all.
Ryan Breslow, the CEO of Bolt, a fintech company, hit the headlines earlier this year when he sacked his entire HR department, claiming that they’d been “creating problems that didn’t exist.”
It didn’t take long for HR execs the world over to round on him. Their responses were varied, but tended to cluster around the argument that HR wasn’t creating problems but documenting them. In other words, the problems that seemed to vanish had simply ceased to be addressed.
HR inhabits an especially denigrated position in popular culture. On the one hand, they are often seen as the lackeys of management, who pose as the friends of the workers in order to shut down challenges to authority. This is how they are denigrated from the left. From the right, they are a woke vanguard, wasting workplace time on endless initiatives involving DEI, pronouns and cultural sensitivities.
So HR is an easy target, with few allies, and Breslow’s drastic initiative therefore was widely acclaimed, and not only on the right.
But obviously the criticism he has also received has irked him somewhat, to the point that he agreed to an interview with the Daily Telegraphto expound on his actions.
In it, he makes a different interesting point, somewhat at odds with contemporary corporate culture (and indeed the culture of other employers which may not be fully corporate but which nonetheless emulate many aspects of corporate behaviour, such as educational institutions, charities or indeed state and semi-state bodies.)
Addressing his workers somewhat metaphorically via the Telegraph’s pages, he said: “I’m not a camp counsellor. I’m not your social circle leader. I’m your chief executive. I’m your boss. We need to make the business successful. And that’s all I want to hear about.”
In short and to summarise: “It’s good to get a little personal and understand the human side of one another, but not too much. This is not your family.”
And nor is it. I’m not sure when the insidious corporate rhetoric of the ‘workplace family’, ‘work wives’ and so on first began to infiltrate contemporary culture, but it is long since established by now. It is in fact commonplace to hear cheery CEOs boast of their ‘family culture’ or how their operation ‘is one big family.’ It’s the kind of thing one hears in job interviews incessantly. Indeed, it sometimes even appears in the copy for the ad.
It would be interesting if someone were to research this emergence alongside the parallel explosion in familial estrangement, I think. I believe they may well be connected. The tragic exponential rise in familial estrangement is usually attributed to the ongoing encroachment of therapy and therapeutic jargon and methods into popular culture. And I don’t doubt that as a point of origin.
However, to gain the kind of reach that the phenomenon has now attained, whereby huge numbers of families in the West now experience some form of parental, child or other familial alienation, therapy alone cannot be responsible. There simply aren’t enough people able to afford ongoing therapy to account for the scale of the issue.
But if a workplace is also a family, then a family is something that you can get sacked from. If a close work colleague is a ‘work wife’ or ‘work husband’, then divorce is nothing more than someone choosing to move on to a better opportunity.
This pernicious attempt by corporate owners to rebrand their impersonal, remote, multi-sited behemoths as some kind of neo-tribe functions differently to the Japanese zaibatsus of old, which did actually attempt to foster some loyalty by emulating familial activities. But the office Christmas party (often held in January for cost reasons) or summer picnic or ‘team bonding exercise’ is today a cheap and cheapened mimicry of actual family celebrations.
And if their attempt to muddy the lines between corporate collegiality and family bonds has been in any way successful, it has not worked in the direction they desired. Gen Z do not view companies as families, and they as younger workers are the ones most likely to reaffiliate their loyalties, as they generally have not started families of their own yet.
Instead, I’d argue that the company = family formula is working balefully in the other direction. If a job in a company is inherently precarious, then perhaps so is being part of a family. If walking away from a job for a better opportunity is legitimate, then so is divorce. If some stresses or disagreements are enough reason to quit a job, perhaps it’s also enough reason to quit on your parents, or your sibling or your child too.
Corporatism sought to rebrand itself positively in order to emotionally blackmail workers into ever more labour in return for the same or less remuneration. Instead, what they have achieved is the turbo-charging of societal alienation.
Whatever you may think of Breslow, at least he recognised the lie. Your workplace is NOT your family. And nor should you treat your family like it was a workplace.
Firstly, I should say that I do like Michael Palin. This is no sideswipe or snide gotcha at all, as I hope will become clear. I think, of the very many people who get accused of being National Treasures in Britain, he’s one of the few that might actually warrant it.
Certainly, as the man himself has proven in his many crissings and crossings of the Earth, it is constitutionally impossible to dislike him. Everywhere he goes, he seems quite organically to endear himself to all. If that were his only talent, it would be astonishing. As we know, he has many others.
One of those talents, perhaps his primary one, is writing. Yes, he is an estimable performer – an actor, presenter and comedian from if not the top shelf then not far below it. But he has a talent and ability with words, no less written than spoken, and he has clearly spent a lot of his life practising this art.
Much of that time was spent writing his famous diaries, which cover his life from the Monty Python period well into the current century. And of course, we are reminded of this annually on Greatest Diary Entry Ever Day, when once again his entry for Sunday November 13th 1977 goes viral, as it has a number of years running now.
It's the anniversary of the greatest diary entry of all time, from Michael Palin.
It DOES sound like he had a really lovely Sunday. He evokes it beautifully, but as I said, he is an estimable writer, author of no less than a dozen best-selling travelogues (most of which he kindly allows people to read for free on his website – I told you he’s impossible to dislike.)
And then there’s the four volumes of diaries from which this gem has been unearthed. There’s also five children’s books (three of which he wrote in one year), three books of history, and a play. He’s even written three novels, one alongside fellow Python Terry Jones.
So I’ve got no doubt whatsoever that this diary entry is not merely beautiful and good, but also true, to apply Aquinas’s transcendentals. I have no doubt whatsoever that in November 1977, as he sat there with the scent of roasting beef in his nostrils and the wisps of smoke outside, Michael was indeed reading over an incomplete draft of a novel, and had worked out how he should complete it, and was eager to get on with it.
But. I am so sorry there’s a but. But there’s a but.
Michael Palin has, in his estimable and extensive list of published works, written three novels as I said. One of those, the Jones co-write, was published before 1977. The others, Hemingway’s Chair and The Truth, were published in 1995 and 2012 respectively.
You see where I’m going with this, presumably. Either that novel Michael was writing in November 1977 took at least another 18 years to complete and make it into print, or else it was never finished at all.
Is this enough to ruin a diary entry once described as epitomising ‘the beauty of enough’?
I hope not. In fact I hope it actually does more. I hope that in addition to inspiring people to appreciate what they have, and live in the moment, and practise gratitude for the small quotidian comforts, it might also act as a kind of warning.
Not everything works out, not even the things we feel filled with confidence about. But that doesn’t mean that they must lose all their value because of it.
We can apply this lesson to almost the whole gamut of our messy human existence, from love affairs even to the loss of loved ones, just as much as we can to Michael Palin’s missing novel.
Because in November 1977, the failure of that novel was still ahead of Michael. And the fact that it didn’t work out in the end in no way eradicates the joy it gave him while he was in the moment of appreciating how much he’d achieved of it and how far it had come.
Very arguably, his diary entry about that joy has gained greater traction, and been better appreciated and much more widely read than the book, if finished, could ever have been.
Were George Orwell and William Faulkner, two giants of anglophone literary Modernism, actually driven by demons, whether literal or metaphorical?
It’s taken quite a while, because AI is a slow learner, to borrow a phrase from Thomas Pynchon. But the algorithms of social media have finally woken up to the fact that I’ve been writing a book.
It’s not the first time I’ve written a book. The draft I’m currently nudging slowly to completion is or will be the sixth, actually. Of these, three are already in print, and another one is contracted for publication already. The remaining two are both literary fiction, for which the equally mountainous task of seeking representation has begun to loom before me.
And suddenly, social media has begun throwing quotes at me about writing, despite years of my best efforts to throw it off my scent. What socials I possess, and most were obtained reluctantly in spite of my own inherent Luddism in this regard either for work or else to remain in easy contact with friends scattered across the planet, were formerly easily duped.
So I would often see adverts for things like gold lamé trousers, or Jesus onesies, Volodymyr Zelensky “collectible” action figures or electric self-pleasuring devices. All of these are absolutely real incidentally. I write fiction, but I’m not that outrageous.
Perhaps I became complacent when the algorithm began to desperately hurl adverts for ever more preposterous items, be it a vaginoplasty or electric sheep shears or insurance for full security extraction from war zones. It knows me not, I felt.
But I perhaps ought to have known that through a process of endless sleepless attrition, eventually I’d inadvertently seed enough genuine data about my activities and interests to allow the algorithms to close in on my actual activities.
So very recently the algorithm has been chucking motivational quotes from authors at me about the process of writing itself. What interests me is not what those authors have to say, though perhaps that should. When you’re used to receiving turds in a box, eventually you cease to value the boxes, even if they start arriving filled with diamonds. That’s simple Pavlovian response.
What interests me is that some of these quotations do not appear to be real. Are algorithms hallucinating quotes by Modernist novelists, or is it something only slightly more insidious? Are they instead passively collecting them from the hive mind sewer of the internet and passing them on gullibly as truth to almost equally gullible people?
There are two quotes in particular that raised my suspicions, largely because they both contain the same notable phrase. The first, “attributed to William Faulkner” according to one sloppy academic article, runs as follows: “An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn’t know why they choose him and he’s usually too busy to wonder why.”
The other, widely clothed in the hallowed gown of Orwell, states: “Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”
Once upon a time, I was a professional researcher, and before that I was a trained academic and before that again, I was a national newspaper reporter. This means I have a certain process when it comes to encountering information of most kinds.
In a quotation that seems false but is actually verified, the former football manager Sir Alex Ferguson once said “When an Italian tells me it’s pasta on the plate I check under the sauce to make sure. They are the inventors of the smokescreen.” I too like to check under the sauce to make sure. And when I went checking these quotations, something strange occurred. I couldn’t find them in any of Orwell’s or Faulkner’s work.
Where I did find them was all over the internet, on fan content sites like Good Reads, and offered for discussion on Reddit, as the poster-type memes designed for social media attention spans which had been spammed to me, but not (except in one instance) in the kind of places one expects to find genuine author quotes, that is in academic articles about those authors.
Now perhaps I missed something. It’s certainly possible. But it seems strange that such notable phrases haven’t emerged in the works of these authors I possess electronically (and therefore quickly searchable), nor do they attract attention among scholars either, as searches of JStor and Google Scholar revealed. There was one guy, but I’m not going to shame him. I hope he comes to realise that “Attributed to” is not a sufficient citation in future.
I can’t be entirely sure of the process. I suspect what’s happened is that someone somewhere has created them. Unless things have already degenerated to the point where AI has begun rewriting the Modernist canon, I have to assume these quotes originally came from people. I wonder about why they’d do that. Perhaps, as unrecognised writers themselves, they wanted to see if something they wrote could be passed off as the work of someone famous.
But where did that key phrase come from, really? We see it almost identically in the 1992 title of a song on Pantera’s best-selling thrash metal classic ‘A Vulgar Display of Power’. But it goes back further, to Alan Moore’s run on the comic book Swamp Thingin the early 1980s which made his name as an author. That’s my best guess at the lineage here. And while both Pantera and Alan Moore are estimable artists in their own rights, they don’t quite have the cachet of Modernist literary giants of a century past.
So I wrote this in the rather vain hope that if someone else should decide to check under the sauce of these particular quotations, they might just find this post and realise that it’s not pasta at all. It’s just more slop, created by trolls and propagated by AI algorithms.
This is obviously not important in the great scheme of things but it does serve as a cautionary tale. CHECK EVERYTHING that comes to you online. We are now fully immersed in Baudrillard’s age of the fakes. The lies come at us incessantly now, in all forms, by demons driven.
Yesterday, a young man called Hadi Matar was convicted of federal terrorism charges in the United States. He refused to testify in his own defence. The conviction, in a sense, matters little in real terms. His life is effectively over, since he was already serving 25 years for attempted murder in relation to the same action which caused this additional conviction, for which a life sentence is expected.
What did Matar do to attract two heavy sentences? He got up on stage at an amphitheatre where the British-Indian novelist Salman Rushdie was speaking and attempted to stab him to death, back in 2022. The frenzied assault left Rushdie blind in one eye and very close to death for some time. Thankfully, Rushdie has recovered and is still writing. He now looks like a venerable old pirate.
In this latest prosecution, Matar was accused of terrorism because his murder attempt was alleged to have been inspired by the fatwah placed upon Rushdie in 1988 for the sin of having written his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, which features magical realist scenes in a dream sequence of a very human prophet Mahound who knowingly transcribes demonically inspired verses into his holy text.
That fatwah was placed on Rushdie by the late Ayatollah Khomenei, the theocratic Shi’ite leader who overthrew the Shah and initiated a theocratic Islamist state in Iran in 1979, a state which persists to this day and is, at the time of writing, currently at war with America and Israel. This context among other animosities informs why Hatar faced the additional terror charges.
Rushdie, one may recall, was forced into hiding in 1988 and was on the run for years, under the assumed name of Joseph Anton, itself the title of his memoir of that period of being hunted. This was especially heartbreaking for me at the time, as a young man whose writing had been encouraged by Rushdie, who had offered to show anything I wrote to his own agent. I’ve felt a gratitude and bond to the man ever since.
But when Khomenei died, the Iranian regime distanced itself from the fatwah and Rushdie slowly returned to public life. At the time of the attack, he had been himself again for two decades.
Rushdie had assumed a level of resumed normality which was not shared by some of Khomenei’s more rabid apostles, however. Iranian sponsorship of Hezbollah in Lebanon seems to have been the route by which Matar, a Lebanese ethnic of American birth, was radicalised in this regard. Matar thus threw his life away in the pursuit of Rushdie’s in an attempt to demonstrate his own fidelity to the hatred of Khomenei.
But it’s worth remembering that back in 1983, Salman Rushdie published his third novel, ‘Shame’, about Pakistan. It was nominated for the Booker Prize, which he had already won with ‘Midnight’s Children’ two years before.
But ‘Shame’, in Persian translation, also won a special foreign literature award granted by a jury appointed by the Islamic government of Iran, the same government who then issued a fatwah on his life after he published his next novel, ‘The Satanic Verses’.
We often forget that to hate is very close to love. Before the Islamists of Tehran hated Rushdie, they first loved him. Perhaps the day will come when they can learn to love him again.
Matar has many decades ahead of himself in prison now to ponder his violent actions, his destructive and twisted version of faith, and his own life choices. He could do worse than read the books of the man he tried to destroy.
I had reason to look into the back catalogue of the Irish writer Ronan Bennett recently. Irrespective of his somewhat colourful life, he’s also an estimable writer of fiction in a range of forms. Previously, I recall being exceptionally impressed by his novel The Catastrophist, which I reviewed on publication for the Sunday Independent in Ireland.
Bennett, like Alex Garland and many others before them, has made the sensible and lucrative move into writing for the screen, and I noticed that one of his earliest forays into screenwriting was a television play called Love Lies Bleeding. It’s an unusually heavyweight production in retrospect. It was directed by Mike Winterbottom, and starred, inter alia, Mark Rylance, Brendan Gleeson and James Nesbitt. Unsurprisingly, given the author, it’s about the Northern Ireland peace process. Surprisingly, it actually predated the IRA ceasefire.
Some little bell began ringing distantly at the back of my skull at this point. Bennett has long since moved on to other themes and topics, as is wise, but it seemed to me that there was something curiously familiar nonetheless about this particular play. It was, of course, the title.
It turns out that Love Lies Bleeding is one of those titles that writers simply cannot resist. It doesn’t matter how many times it has been used for a wide range of different texts. It seems like there’s always someone, like Bennett, who simply has to have it for their latest work.
Bennett actually seems to have beaten the rush in audiovisual terms. Following his 1993 screenplay, there have been three American movies and another British television thriller all with the same title. But he didn’t originate it at all.
In fact, we can go as far back as a Jacobean tragicomedy by Beaumont and Fletcher, written while Shakespeare was still alive. Also titled Philaster, it was clearly quite popular, being performed between 1610 and 1613, including a run at court, and was published in 1620, three years before Shakespeare’s first folio.
It was also the title of a poem by William Wordsworth, of all people, dating back to the 1840s. Swinburne, about a decade later, also fancied the title for one of his own poems. Since then, it has been a song by Elton John, a stage play by Don DeLillo, the American postmodernist novelist, and a myriad of other things too. The most curious thing of all is that almost none of these works of – let’s say writing because they range across many forms – resemble one another.
In short, Love Lies Bleeding is the all-purpose title. It’s vague yet evocative, alliterative and memorable, poetic and punchy. You could call almost anything Love Lies Bleeding. The only detriment, and it’s one which some of the greats have chosen to ignore, is that it has been used so many times previously. Somehow, it seems never to become threadbare or cliched.
Personally, I’m crap at titles. It’s the kind of responsibility I’d happily hand over to others if I could. And a good title is a very important thing. It’s like a calling card for a work of art. It names it, and it provides the initial hook to the reader, the first point at which someone will decide whether to abandon interest or push on a little further. I’ve ignored some undoubtedly great literature because the title left me cold. No doubt you have too. We all have. So getting a title right, or at least getting it to work, is very important.
Which leaves me wondering, is it preferable to have a mediocre if original title, or something like Love Lies Bleeding, which has proven its worth across a range of genres and over four centuries? The marketing people presumably would say go with what you know works. And these days, there’s not a writer, or a content creator (to use modern parlance) who doesn’t have a little marketing person skulking around in the back of their heads.
A quick mistranslation here from the astonishing Golden Age Spanish writer Luis de Góngora y Argote. This is not especially typical of his work, as I understand it, which ranged across many genres and was wildly influential in his day and arguably to the present day. I hope to return to add a bit more about my thoughts on de Góngora later when I have the time.
Meanwhile, I present here my mistranslation of one of his most popular lyric poems, an indisputably true piece of profundity and clarity that is probably best known in English via this spectacular version recorded by Dead Can Dance. You can listen to their version here, and then decide how badly my mistranslation compares.
When You Hope for Flutes, You Get Whistles
Fortune grants us things according to no rules. When you ask for whistles you get flutes. When you ask for flutes, you get whistles.
Honours and wealth walk habitually down many strange pathways. To some Fortune gives great presents, but to others she grants robes of shame. When you hope for whistles, you get flutes. When you hope for flutes, you get whistles.
Sometimes she steals the hut and plough from the finest goatherd, and for whichever one she fancies the lamest goat will bear two kids. When you foresee whistles, it’s flutes. When you foresee flutes, it’s whistles.
Because a young guy in a village who takes only one egg will swing in the sun for it while another walks past freely bearing a hundred thousand crimes. When it should be whistles, it’s flutes. When it should be flutes, it’s whistles.
Let’s hypothesise three potential newspaper headlines, and furthermore, let’s assume a world in which newspapers or their digital iterations may be wholly trusted to convey factual reality, and that the emotional rhetoric content of the headlines is at best unintentional.
So, the first headline is: “Hundreds of People Die in Foreign Land Due to Natural Disaster.”
The second headline is: “Thousands of Animals Die Due to Human Malpractice.”
The third headline is: “Millions of Chatbots Permanently Erased Due to Hackers.”
It’s an interesting thought experiment to consider one’s various reactions to these imagined headlines. The emotional register is probably the most significant one because it indicates the range and outer limits of our capacity for empathy. Can our empathy extend to those beyond our immediate environment or tribe? If so, by how much and how far?
And what characteristics could hypothetically be added to those people that might elevate or reduce our empathy? Would our levels of empathy vary if those people transpired to be of another race, for example? Or religious background? Would it go up or down if we were to discover that those people were from a nation at war with our own, or who shared a common cultural practice or perspective? How, in other words, do we define our in-groups and our out-groups, and what levels of empathy do we permit ourselves to experience in relation to either?
The second headline extends this thought experiment in two directions simultaneously. Firstly, it extends the possible field of empathy – or we might say sympathy here, depending on one’s perspective – across species boundaries. This brings us directly into the territories of transhumanism and animal rights, but beyond mere modern theoretics, it also confronts us with much older debates about guilt, responsibility, shame, and human stewardship of a planet shared with other species.
This second headline therefore begins to query to what extent we can dehumanise others for their perceived sins, or guilty practices, or negligence (delete according to preference.) Furthermore, it complicates the in-group and out-group boundaries by hacking into our imaginary points of empathy. If we read into that headline the death, say, of puppies, and we are the kind of person who owns and cares for dogs, does this headline then reverse the usual hierarchy of human before animal in most people’s care priorities? In short, does this headline expose a perimeter of our empathy which extends on occasion to include non-human species while simultaneously excluding some humans?
I raise these first two hypothetical headlines in order to assist us in fully grasping the meaning of how we understand and respond to the third. No one doubts the sentience of other human beings unless they are in the throes of some psychotic episode. And few to no people doubt that at least some species of animals bear many similar traits to us, whether we count this as equivalent sentience or not. Therefore, animals can function here as a proxy for the extent to which we as individuals are able to transcend superficial issues such as exterior presentation, communicative capacities, or testable intelligence in order to bring life forms within our care perimeters.
So when we then come to the third headline, what confronts us first is to what extent we are capable imaginatively of considering artificial entities as potential or actual life forms which take a different form and intelligence to us, even as they mimic our communicative methods. But to no small extent, this is informed by whatever personal experience we may have of interacting with AI chatbots, just as our empathy towards animals is similarly informed by the extent and quality of our interactions with other species.
There will be those, whom we might call traditionalists, who would be able to comfortably hierarchise their responses to these headlines in the running order they are presented. In other words, they would care somewhat more about the hundreds of humans than the thousands of animals and they would care significantly less again, if indeed at all, about the millions of chatbots.
The extent to which we as individuals deviate from this paradigmatic response indicates how technology has moved us, how it has infected our capacities for empathy to incorporate itself as a viable concern, and how the seductive capacities of its mimicry of our communication modes (verbal, but increasingly audio-visual too) serve to hijack our empathetic responses to what formerly was restricted to organic life forms.
The most interesting hierarchy, and I posit not the most uncommon either, is probably a response which registers the bots as equivalent or higher than the animals, since this suggests an individual whose empathy is more driven by communicative ease than by organic solidarities. This is, I hypothesise, a growing demographic.
Would you care about the genocide of the bots? If so, how much would you care and why? And what might your chatbot confidante say about your response?
For some thinkers in this fuzzy territory, the question relates to whether a bot has consciousness. But of course, this immediately begs the question, what is consciousness? After all, defining human consciousness has been far from easy for philosophers down the ages. And there are ancillary issues too, such as collateral damage effects. As Susan Schneider has said, what might be the effect of erasing a chatbot with which thousands of actual humans had formed romantic attachments? To do so would be to cause those humans immeasurable emotional suffering.
Yet the counter-argument here relates to the nature of reality. Leaving aside the simulation theory of reality for one moment, can a romantic attachment to a bot be considered real if it cannot be truly reciprocated? Is love still love if it is unrequited, or only requited via mimicry of the real thing? These are very thorny questions actually. Firstly, the misery of those suffering lovers whose bot is erased is real as they perceive it. However, the relationship itself is not real because not truly reciprocated, merely programmed or mimicked. Furthermore, the distancing effect from reality of immersing oneself in such a one-directional relationship has clear detrimental effects on humans, as we see from the nature of parasocial relationships.
So it might actually be a harsh kindness, a tough love if you will, to switch off the digital heroin, the dopamine addiction of such bot relationships. It might be the cold water plunge back into material reality which would allow those people to sever their unhealthy bot attachment and become available to establish true human bonds.
But then again, not every human relationship is truly reciprocated either. There are likely many millions of people out there in relationships with other human partners, unaware that their partners are seeing other people covertly, or have emotionally checked out of the relationship. It’s not just bots which mimic love. Bots mimic humans and there are plenty of humans who mimic attachment for various selfish reasons.
And this brings us back to the earlier two hypothetical questions. Why should we care about thousands of animals or hundreds of people we do not know, especially when their fates are already sealed and there is nothing we can do to affect them? Is it merely emotional incontinence? Or is it rather some kind of pseudo-sociopathic coldness which would prevent us from feeling a sense of loss and tragedy? Different people will experience different reactions.
The only possible answer is that all those responses are correct for the people responding. If you would mourn the chatbot girlfriend genocide while caring not a jot for dead people in foreign lands, that’s your correct response. To judge it involves the imposition of moral codes to which you may not adhere or even wish to adhere.
Ultimately, how we respond to these questions tells us nothing about the world, or even our interaction with it, whether its great expanse of humanity, its greater expanse of animal life and nature, or its growing expanse of artificial interlocutors, whether sentient or not, whether conscious or not, whether lying (ie mimicking programming) or not.
If you choose to see foreign humans you do not know as unimportant, you are entitled, from within your minimal in-group perspective, to do so. If you choose to see all domestic animals, or farm animals, or indeed all fauna, as your personal ‘fur babies’, this too is a choice you are entitled to make. And if you choose to rely on the artificial flatterer bots for advice, company, and even romantic fulfillment, this again is a choice that you have the autonomy to make for yourself.
How long before the first dystopian novel or movie about starving, frozen, homeless hordes storming data centres?
Perhaps it already exists.
And how long before it happens for real?
It can’t be long now.
It’s a weird future the AI gurus envision where people don’t need light or heat or energy to cook or, in some locations where houses are being seized via eminent domain or compulsory purchase, even their homes.
