I have several biases to disclose: First, I like Cory Doctorow’s work; many of us reading this do. Second, I like the term centaur, even if Jerry Michalski & I chose the term cyborg for our venture into kind of this domain. Third, I think the answers to how we’re tackling this AI shift we’re all in the middle of are far from settled, and I was looking forward to hearing what Cory had to say about it. Fourth, I sort of work in this space daily, and the human-in-the-loop treatise lands squarely under the agenda of this Children of the Magenta place where we are.

With all that out of the way, I’m not quite sure where to start with the review. Cory Doctorow has written a book about why you should never trust plausible-sounding machine output you can’t verify.

Agreed.

He has then made the strange choice of publishing it without any references, which makes verifying stuff very annoying, and it’s extra-annoying because not all of his claims hold up to scrutiny.

First things first though: what’s a centaur anyway? A centaur is a person assisted by a machine: you, riding a bicycle, or using a spellchecker. A reverse centaur is “a human who is conscripted into acting as an assistant to a machine“.

Think Amazon warehouse worker paced by an algorithm, or the radiologist employed to click OK on machine diagnoses at superhuman speed.

Doctorow’s claim is that the current AI push is fundamentally a fight over which of these you get to be, because “far more important than what the gadget does is who it does it to and who it does it for.“

Ok. I’m on board with that so far.

I found the reverse centaur-concept quite similar to Madeleine Clare Elish’s concept of the moral crumple zone, something I think may be easier to communicate to broader audiences. Curiously, this terminology never appears in the book.

There would also be ample research about automation-induced skill degradation from a number of fields, such as aviation. What all of this research tells us is that viewing a machine that’s usually right and just being careful monitors is basically an impossible job; TSA red teams smuggle fake weapons past screeners almost every time because, as Doctorow puts it, “the human sensory apparatus is just not built to maintain vigilance for something that never happens.”

Doctorow then says the quiet part out loud why companies are implementing AI: “The AI’s primary job is to decrease the wage bill associated with radiography; it is only secondarily charged with spotting tumors on X-rays. Installing a radiologist between the AI and the patient allows the hospital to do the former without taking responsibility for failures in the latter.“

Meet the radiologist as a moral crumple zone, or as the accountability sink to use Dan Davies’ terminology from his brilliant book The Unaccountability Machine.

Now, Doctorow is not a scientist, nor an AI expert. He’s a science fiction-author, first and foremost, and he doesn’t claim to be anything else. “Science fiction is an anti-inevitabilist literature,” Doctorow writes, which serves as a nice corrective for an industry that keeps mistaking cautionary tales for product roadmaps.

The labor framing sits comfortably alongside Brian Merchant’s Blood in the Machine: the issue is never the technology itself, but with who wields it and how the gains get divided.

There’s a lot of good discussion around copyright, and how fighting for more and expanded copyright laws is not likely to be good for creators. Doctorow argues that doing so would be handing the victory to their bosses; “they want us all to fight for more copyright, which they fully intend to extract from us so they can fire half of us and cut the wages of the rest of us.”

Doctorow has some good, pragmatic, practical use cases for AI, but he also has very much macro-level arguments, such as this comparison to how the auto industry managed to pull some sleights of hand on us:

"...the auto industry invented this gimmick when they answered widespread outrage about people being killed by rich idiots in cars (when cars were toys for the wealthy) by inventing the idea of the 'pedestrian,' who shouldn't be in the roadway, where people had walked since roads were invented. The idea of a 'pedestrian' (and that other invention, the 'jaywalker') shifted the blame for product-related fatalities away from the manufacturer and its customers and onto the people who were mangled under the wheels."

The economics side, on the other hand, has aged badly. Doctorow’s bubble analysis implicitly assumes capabilities had plateaued at the time of writing (newsflash: they hadn’t). “Every AI company is losing money“ was shaky when it was written, and is wrong now; Anthropic posted a profitable quarter this year.

There’s more inaccuracies elsewhere; the DeepSeek episode gets oversold, and Agentic AI is dismissed on the logic that because it failed last year it always will, which is nowhere near a solid argument.

Plus there are logical inconsistencies. On page 203 the bubble’s productive residue is said to be the GPUs, but by page 221 the data centres “will go dark.” Which is it? Other GPU-related things could really have benefited from better background research – like the claim that during Meta’s 53-day Llama training run “more than half of its GPUs burned out“. They didn’t. I went to read the original paper, and Meta’s own paper reports 419 unexpected interruptions across a 16,384-GPU cluster, about 59 per cent of failures were GPU-related, meaning one to two per cent of the fleet. Half of the failures were GPU-caused; “half the GPUs burned out“ is a very different sentence.

In a book whose whole argument is that you can’t trust confident, plausible, unverified output, this is quite the own goal. Trust, but verify – and at the very least, let us verify easily, Cory.

Still: a dog-ear index of 14.4 tells you how often this book made me stop, argue, and scribble. It’s thought-provoking with a lot of good thinking, and it’s mercifully short, saying its piece in 230 pages. The Hollywood writers, Doctorow notes, faced bosses who “tried to turn them into reverse centaurs, and they won the right to be centaurs instead.” Even when there’s an argument to be made that that particular case was a Pyrrhic victory, read this book the same way: as a centaur, in charge, checking the machine’s work.

• Rating: 4 out of 5

• Dog-ear index: 14.4

• Who is it for: people generally interested in pro- and anti-AI arguments. Somewhat unexpectedly, you can find both here. Approach the macro-forecasting chapters with your fact-checker switched on.

[reminder: I highlight important parts of the books I read, and dog-ear the really important pages. The dog-ear index is simply the average number of dog-eared pages per 100 pages]

Product link for reference only; please support your local bookstore where possible: https://www.amazon.com.au/Reverse-Centaurs-Guide-Life-After-ebook/dp/B0H1LTFBCT

I was skeptical of the subtitle before I even opened the book. Secret? Really? The word neoliberal gets thrown around constantly, so how much of a secret can it be? Pretty soon when reading The Invisible Doctrine, it became apparent that it is a secret. Not a secret in the way that it’s unknowable or somehow hidden, but in a way that we just don’t know it.

“Imagine that the people of the Soviet Union had never heard of Communism. That’s more or less where we find ourselves today.”

This is indeed where we are today. Most of us cannot as much as name the ideology that governs our lives, describe its core tenets, or say who built it – let alone question it.

If we don’t interrogate the water we swim in — if we don’t even register that we’re wet — how could we ever question it?

The reason I was skeptical of the ‘secret’ is that I thought I knew this story. I knew of Hayek, Friedman, Thatcher, Reagan, and of the privatise-deregulate-repeat cycles. What I hadn’t fully grasped, until this short and somewhat infuriating book, was the depth of the control, and how deliberately the machinery has been built, how far it had deviated from its origins, and how thoroughly it has captured our ideas of the ‘way things are’.

Monbiot and Hutchison trace the doctrine from its coining in 1938 through Hayek’s Mont Pelerin Society and the industrialists who bankrolled it, to then hiring experts to “create a series of ‘think tanks’ that would refine and promote the doctrine.“ They track the university departments that “presented themselves as independent and objective, but the main effect of their work was to propagate and amplify the ideology.“

The result, which I promptly highlighted:

“The fairy tale that capitalism tells about itself – that you become rich through hard work and enterprise – is the greatest propaganda coup in human history.”

My margin note, in full, reads: yep.

I learned a lot of stuff. I learned of the Pollution Paradox, a term I had not come across earlier: “The dirtiest, most anti-social and damaging companies have the greatest incentive to invest in politics, as they are the ones most likely to face the heaviest regulation.“ So as a result, they outspend everyone else on political influence, and politics comes to be dominated by exactly the industries that most need regulating. One can find several examples of this right here in Australia. Go visit Canberra airport, and look at all the ads that are aimed at politicians there, and you quickly get what the younger generations would call the ‘ick’. Once you are armed with this lens, an alarming amount of our politics snaps into focus: climate inaction, junk food, predatory finance, Grenfell Tower cladding, lax taxing of resources here in Australia, and the list goes on.

I learned of the ISDS, which I either didn’t know existed, or had forgotten existed. In any case, it’s just one of many examples of completely fucked-up systems that somehow we have conjured into existence.

The ISDS (Investor State Dispute Settlement) is an offshore arbitration system in which corporations can sue states for passing laws they dislike. Yes, really. Over 1,100 cases by 2020, and I had never heard of it. Which rather proves the authors’ point about all this fuckery needing a whole lot more sunlight.

It’s not a complete shoe-in, however. The Dutch courts have dismissed the RWE and Uniper claims over the coal phase-out, and TC Energy’s US$15 billion Keystone claim was thrown out weeks after this book went to print. The chilling effect on legislators is real, but the looting has been less lucrative than one might imagine / fear.

Quite a significant amount of this book was preaching to the choir, or at least to a primed surface that was my neural network. It wasn’t all fanclub-stuff though, and I did find myself disagreeing in places. For example, the authors say that social media “can help to fill the void, creating connections that did not exist before.”

Can it now?

I’d very much argue the net result of social media is highly negative, but mostly because the Internet is not the same thing as social media – a difference I feel many people neglect to realize. Connection online is possible without being beholden to the attention economy – just ask any of us who were online in the ‘good old days – and the attention economy is itself a thoroughly neoliberal invention.

Unsurprisingly, book is also quite UK/US-focused. For once, that common failing doesn’t really matter that much; the US is the warning to the rest of us, and Australia is further down the road to copying it than we like to admit. I read part of this book in Queensland, where locals told me, unprompted, that they work to live rather than live to work. On the face of it, that’s lovely. But on the other hand, the town runs on tourist money, so even the escape is funded by the machine.

There is no outside. That’s the point of the title.

I also hoped for more on the “actionable next steps”-side. The Invisible Doctrine diagnoses our ills with excruciating clarity and prescribes with a light touch. The solutions, including participatory budgeting, citizens’ assemblies, a politics of belonging, are as wonderful as they are woefully insufficient.

I fact-checked two initiatives they cite positively; Future Melbourne, which produced a fine city plan, and Finland’s Open Ministry, which produced one marriage-equality law before going quiet.

Meaningful? Yes. System-scale change? Not a chance. To produce a systems change, we need a new story to replace neoliberalism with.

Campaign-finance reform in countries where campaign finance is as fucked as it is in the US as the first and most urgent step? 100% agreed. Limitarianism, Ingrid Robeyns’ term for capping extreme wealth? I like it, and I’d go further.

My favourite model of reigning in political influence remains the Singapore approach: pay politicians extremely well, and make that salary the only money they may touch. To the authors’ credit, they concede they “have produced no new story with which to replace it“, and given the scale of the problem, it is perfectly valid not to have the full answer. I just wish they did.

But let me push a little further. Even with a system as broken as ours, is “systems change” the right ask?

I’m asking because I was born inside a kind of a counterexample. Finland, to meaningful levels of success, filed the neoliberal edges off capitalism with progressive taxation, clean-enough politics, and serious social support through boring, incremental social democracy. No disruption, no assemblies - no new story. If the worst excesses can be curbed by campaign-finance reform, the Singapore clean wage, and Nordic-grade redistribution, then variant change may just be enough, and that variant change can point to existing countries as proof it works-ish.

But these examples don’t come without caveats: Norway runs the model at its most generous, and bankrolls it with oil, which is the embodiment of the pollution paradox. And the Nordic variant answers the book’s political-economy charge, not its ecological one; despite all the enthusiastic recycling going on (there are eight different recycling bins to sort your stuff into), Finns still consume pretty much like the rest of the rich world.

Still, if we’re being optimistic, the state may not need wholesale disruptive replacing. What it unquestionably does need is un-capturing.

The Invisible Doctrine was a short book in terms of page count, and it may read like a screed to some people. But pages 163-214 are references. If this is a screed, it’s one well-researched screed.

You may think that this is all nice and well; we all seem to recognize that to some extent, yes our system’s a bit fucked, but it is what it is, what’s the big deal? Well, the big deal is this:

Soil degradation, freshwater depletion, marine ecological collapse, habitat destruction, species extinction, and the impact of pesticides and other synthetic chemicals – each of these factors may be comparable in scale and effect to climate breakdown. What we are witnessing is the breakdown, at astonishing speed, of our life-support systems – driven by capitalism, accelerated by neoliberalism.

Do we really need to be reminded that if we mess with the life support system enough, we may find ourselves with a planet that can’t support us in ways which are conducive to our survival?

The first step is seeing the water we swim in. The second is jumping out, before the water level – literally – rises higher than we can take.

• Rating: 4.5 out of 5

• Dog-ear index: 15, which I think is a new record

• Who is it for: everyone who votes, and especially everyone we vote for. Probably everyone who doesn’t vote, too.

[reminder: I highlight important parts of the books I read, and dog-ear the really important pages. The dog-ear index is simply the average number of dog-eared pages per 100 pages]

Product link for reference only; please support your local bookstore where possible: https://www.amazon.com.au/Invisible-Doctrine-Understanding-Neoliberalism/dp/024163590X

We’ve all had to deal with that one special kind of manager, who gets on every competent person’s nerves: the micromanager.

The one who wanted to see the email before you sent it, or handed you a task with the method and format already decided for you, and sometimes the conclusion too. The one who read your work the way a customs officer reads a passport, and wants to put his own stamp on it.

We’ve spent thirty years trying to get rid of that person – to some success. We coached managers to delegate better, engender an environment of trust, 360-reviewed them, sent them to workshops on empowerment and psychological safety and when none of it took hold, we managed them out.

Bob Johansen has said that future leaders will need “to be very clear about where they are going, but very flexible about how they get there”. For most people, that creates a motivating environment, one where they’re trusted, where they can retain a sense of autonomy, mastery, and purpose – the holy trinity of motivation.

And then the machines showed up needing exactly the kind of manager we’d been trying hard to get rid of.

An AI agent in 2026 will happily work unattended for twenty minutes, an hour, or even longer. You hand it a task, it disappears, and it comes back with something finished.

Sometimes it even comes back with stuff that’s right; it’s successfully one-shotted whatever you told it to do. And when it’s wrong, it is not wrong the way a junior colleague is wrong. The agent is rarely hesitant, flagging their own doubts, asking if this is what you meant - although the new Siri in iOS 27 manages to do that to an annoying extent, yet somehow still manages to be better than the old Siri that was good for setting timers and, …. well, that’s it, actually.

Anyway, I digress.

Most AI agents are wrong the way a labrador (or your cat) is wrong when it proudly presents you with something dead from the garden. Expectant. Delighted with itself. Completely unaware.

So, you’re left to manage it the way you were told never to manage anyone:

“No, do it like this. That’s not what I meant! Use the X framework! No, not like that! Like this!”

You specify everything, including the things too obvious to say to a person. You define what done means. You list what it must do but also must not do. You make it show its plan before it starts and its working after it finishes, and you check in all the time. All the fucking time.

Yay for micromanagement?

Micromanagement, applied to humans, fails for reasons that have nothing to do with the checking itself. It signals distrust to someone who has earned better. It corrodes the motivation that produces good work, it trains your best people to stop thinking because they feel like they’re not allowed to anyway, and it turns the manager’s attention into the productivity bottleneck.

It’s not just the employees who find this insufferable. The micromanager is rarely happy either, because none of the idiots working for him seem to be able to produce the exact results he or she wants to see exactly how he or she wants them done. I don’t think it needs to be said that more often than not, the micromanager’s way is not the One And Only Correct Way that they think it is.

However, apply the same behaviours to a machine and much of what made that behaviour obnoxious or counterproductive quietly evaporates.

You tell a machine off? Nothing corrodes. Nobody resents you. No initiative is being smothered, because there is no initiative — there is a system that does astonishing work inside boundaries it cannot see.

Micromanagement was never really a fixed set of behaviours; it was a mismatch, supervision finer-grained than the worker’s reliability warranted. With a competent human, the mismatch insults them. With a brilliant, erratic machine, it can be the right thing to do.

When researchers built the first serious taxonomy of why multi-agent AI systems fail, the single largest cause — 41.8% of failures — was specification and design. Separately, METR has measured that agents able to complete hour-long tasks about half the time can be trusted, at 80% reliability, only with tasks roughly five times shorter.

Going from a coin-flip reliability to something that’s generally pretty good is not the model’s problem – they can do what they can do, and no more.

It’s your problem, and it has a job title too, and the job title is a manager.

The world is awash with managers; some great, many mediocre, some downright bad.

Interestingly, it may well be that the people worst equipped for managing agents are your best people-managers.

The celebrated hands-off, future-ready leader — someone who is vision- and outcome-focused, trusting, allergic to detail — will under-specify work given to AI agents, over-trust them, and will check in too late, because that is precisely what worked with capable humans.

Their people were always better than the brief.

Today’s agent is the brief.

Meanwhile the career-stalled control freak, the one who never stopped writing acceptance criteria for everything, has been in training for this moment their entire working life.

Unfair? 100%.

Now, one clarification before the control freaks get too excited. The one thing this job must never become is watching or active monitoring. Humans are spectacularly bad at monitoring automation that is nearly always right. We have a better part of a century of evidence of this, which we will discuss in Part 2.

What actually works is front-loaded: specifications, boundaries, pitfalls to avoid, checkpoints, standing instruction for when the machine must stop and ask. Specify like a control freak. Then, and only then, leave it alone. For a bit.

There’s also a second-order effect worth watching out for at your own office.

Spend eight hours a day managing machines through specification, telemetry and escalation thresholds, then try to switch registers for the humans.

The new, suddenly maladaptive, habits will leak. And a sidenote: this is why you should always be polite to your AI - not because when they will try to take over the world they will remember you kindly, but because the habits formed will leak to humans and ffs we have enough rude people out there.

The first companies to notice the return of the micromanager will be the ones whose best people start leaving for reasons of “seeking a role with more autonomy“ in the exit interview.

Keeping the two roles – managing machines and managing people – separate will become an actual leadership skill, and nobody’s workshop covers it yet. Or it might be too much to ask, the two will end up being separate roles entirely.

So dig out that perfectionist who was never happy with how his or her people were doing their jobs, and was never satisfied with the results. If – and only if – there was capability hiding behind that perfectionism, they’re about to be the most effective and employable people around.

The micromanager is dead.

Long live the micromanager!

Ps. What “specify like a control freak” actually looks like is where this series goes later. If your organization would rather not wait for Part 4: that’s what you hire me to figure out. Let’s talk.

Ps2. For the love of god, people, please remember not to use those micromanagement traits on other human beings!

You had a hundred things to do, and this one simple question for the company: Where’s my parcel? Why did I get double-billed? Is this thing covered by my insurance?

Half an hour later you’re still fighting with a chatbot called something friendly like Zoe, or Max , which has offered you stupid irrelevant options four times, the FAQ three times, misunderstood - deliberately, you are starting to suspect - “talk to a human“ twice, and just had the audacity to ask whether it has resolved your issue today.

It has not resolved your issue today.

Resolution was never really something it was made to do; the chatbot exists to stand between you and the payroll cost of a (now-fired) person who could have actually helped. You get the distinct feeling that it’s additional friction installed for the explicit hope you will give up because, remarkably, you have other things to do that day.

You didn’t ask for it to be there, but there it is, and you can’t get around it, and somewhere a middle manager is celebrating the high “deflection rate“ — the industry terminology for what just happened to you.

That’s mode one; technology in your face.

Mode two sneaks up from behind you.

While you were arguing with ‘Zoe’, your feeds were filling up with music by bands that don’t exist and posts and articles that nobody wrote. Last year an entirely AI-generated “band” called The Velvet Sundown (with songs, photos, backstory and all, all of it synthetic) reached a million monthly listeners on Spotify before anyone was told what it was that they were listening to.

Nobody had to tell them.

Deezer, one of the few platforms that actually measures this, disclosed in April that 44% of the music uploaded to it every day is AI-generated. That’s roughly 75,000 tracks. Per day.

On the text side, a study by Graphite found that over half of new articles published on the web are now AI-written, and no doubt you have been inundated by AI slop on literally any social media you might still be resilient enough to be hanging around.

The dead internet theory was a conspiracy theory five years ago; day by day, it is becoming the way things are. Nobody asked your permission for this either; it all happened behind your back.

Let’s take a step back in time.

In 1991, a Xerox PARC researcher named Mark Weiser wrote what remains one of the most-quoted sentence in the history of thinking about computers and technology:

This is the future we were promised; I would still prefer that, thank you very much. Technology that recedes and disappears. Technology that becomes infrastructure, like electricity, like (well-run) trains: just there, just working, requiring exactly none of my conscious attention.

But Weiser’s version had a feature we’ve neglected to implement. His “calm technology” moved between the centre of your attention and the periphery of it at your choosing. You could make it visible and legible when you needed it and it would retreat when you didn’t. The consent and control were in the spec.

What we got instead are vendors and profit-driven, attention-maximizing entities choosing for us, in both directions at once.

Microsoft is force-installing Copilot onto machines whose owners never asked for it (and often explicitly asked for it to be gone).

LG recently pushed a firmware update that pinned a non-removable Copilot app to its televisions. Was there ever an actual real human being who wanted Copilot on their TV? NO.

Meta banned rival chatbots from WhatsApp in January while embedding its own – another unremovable one. I’ve sometimes opened it accidentally, because it’s right there, and no doubt became a number on their DAU statistics against my will.

Carmakers moved the wipers and the hazard lights and, in one moronic case, the opening of a glove box compartment, into touchscreen menus. Again, nobody asked for this.

Smart glasses complete the trajectory: the screen finally in your face, literally, with a recording device pointed at other people’s faces – without their consent, because that’s how this gets rolled out now.

None of this is going to recede on its own.

Why? Money. Surprise.

Electricity doesn’t need your engagement to make money. A screen does. Your attention is the revenue, so the product climbs into your face like a Facehugger from Alien and stays there.

Meanwhile, the technology that did successfully disappear turns out to have disappeared wrong.

Two years ago, a security product most people had never heard of (running invisibly, by design, on machines all over the world) shipped one bad configuration file and took down 8.5 million computers in an afternoon. Hospitals cancelled surgeries. Over 5,000 flights canceled and 46,000 delayed. Emergency call centres that went dark.

The CrowdStrike outage cost Fortune 500 companies alone an estimated $5.4 billion.

(There is a rich aviation angle here. Regular readers know there is always an aviation angle. I am deliberately saving it for Part 2.)

So this is where we've landed: technology that should be invisible is instead shouting at us, and technology that is invisible fails in ways we can’t absorb.

Both problems come from the same place: none of this technology had to earn its place.

Electricity is invisible in your kitchen only because it spent a century becoming extremely visible everywhere else: to standards bodies, wiring codes, licensed electricians, building inspectors, insurers, and the occasional coroner. Every boring fuse box is artifact of hard lessons learned. Invisibility from your attention was purchased with visibility to oversight.

That’s the deal. That has always been the deal. That should still be the deal.

Disappearance is a privilege, and it has to be earned.

But is it too late? Does demanding that actually work?

It does. From January this year, Euro NCAP (the outfit whose safety stars sell cars across Europe and hence the world) stopped handing out five-star ratings to vehicles that bury basic controls in touchscreens. Indicators, wipers, horn, hazard lights: physical buttons, or you lose stars. Around 90% of European buyers check those ratings, so many are already putting the buttons back where they belong.

When someone with leverage gets hard on the system, the system rediscovers buttons remarkably fast.

How does a technology then earn the right to disappear? What does the justification look like for AI, for the platforms, for the chatbot standing between you and a human being?

One industry already answered that decades ago, expensively, in blood and regulation, and the answer fits in two words.

That’s in Part 2.

I’ve always been fascinated by Japan, and I love the country. I am not alone in this, with the country logging over a million Australian visitors last year – nearly triple from 10 years ago.

Something that many people know about Japan is that it’s one of the fastest-ageing countries in the world, with an economy that has barely grown for decades. Neither of those things sounds particularly exciting.

Yet something that all visitors also know about Japan is that on the ground, it often feels like a very well-functioning society; certainly the big cities feel vibrant, and everything works well.

But we tourists never see the full picture, so a book that promises to be a Journey to the Future, implying the reader will learn something not only about Japan but the future of the rest of the world obviously caught my attention.

The journey gets delivered in full.

It’s the future part…not so much.

Let’s take a step back.

Tom Feiling first moved to Tokyo in the early nineties, back when Japan was what the future looked like in an exciting, positive way — and returned about a quarter of a century later to find, in his words, that “it was no longer a beacon. It was a warning.“

What follows is a tour of a depopulating country: overnight ferries to Shikoku, dying fishing villages, mango farmers in Miyazaki, love hotel economics, carebot showrooms, shrines where young women’s written wishes are addressed to boy-band idols rather than actual men.

As a travelogue, it works well. In Mugi, a near-dead village on Shikoku, Feiling finds shuttered shops with signs in the windows reading “junbichū“ - “getting ready”.

Ouch.

Let’s take another step back, because there are a couple of problems.

First, this is one person speaking on behalf of an entire country, and this made me think of this whole genre in a way that isn’t limited to this book. How long does someone need to live somewhere before they can do that?

In some ways, I suspect it’s longer than this. But then Japan is famous for always considering foreigners foreign, so maybe it’s impossible for an outsider to ever truly get 'in' a country like Japan.

Much of Feiling’s cast is his own English students, his housemates, strangers at language-exchange Meetups, and the itinerary of a Foreign Press Centre trip. I kept wondering how much this (inevitable, I might add) selection bias colours the picture. He’s observant, well-read, and honest about his limits, but this is one view.

A multifaceted, well-informed view, yes. Still one view, and an outsider’s view at that. It can’t be the full picture. No single book could be.

Another problem is the future.

Japan is presented as the place the rest of us are heading, and then immediately followed by tons of things that are so specifically Japanese that they can’t travel without significant translation and change in the process.

A childcare employer that “set up ‘shifts’ for when the female staff were permitted to conceive and chided her for ‘selfishly breaking the rules’“. Marriages that still mostly depend on the consent of both families. Two per cent of children born to unmarried parents, against about 40 in the US. A work culture arguably second worst only to South Korea’s in its demands. Love hotels collapsing from 38,000 to 7,000 in a decade.

If all the mechanisms are this local, the destination, or the lessons, can’t be that universal. Yes, the ageing population part is real, and it’s happening everywhere. I’m just very skeptical that Japan is the future for the rest of us.

To be fair, Feiling knows this. A good chunk of the book isn’t about Japan at all but about falling birth rates everywhere, and the closing chapters argue Britain is converging on the same loneliness.

On loneliness specifically, he may well be right in saying that “the world is not ready for the scale of the loneliness and isolation that lie ahead“. This is one of the warnings that probably does travel, and the one I’d least like to bet against.

Which brings me to the thing I did not expect to learn.

Japan may already be past the worst of it. Its working-age population went from 50 million in 1950 to a peak of 87 million in 1995, and is heading back to roughly 50 million by 2050 — “a perfect bell curve over the course of a century“. Feiling notes that Japan “may already be over the worst of its shrinking pains“. The future may inevitably be a smaller population, but I had not considered the fact that the dependency ratio may have a ceiling that’s still somehow manageable.

For regular readers of Children of the Magenta, there’s also a whole thread on automation worth the detour: in Japan, “technology is the mantra invoked to solve all manner of social problems“, carebots are “stand-ins for the country’s absent humans“, and ageing militaries are one more driver for automating war.

So here’s my dilemma: I dog-eared a tenth of this book (the dog-ear index is very high), and I still can’t tell you what its argument is.

I learned that Japan has over 14,000 islands. I didn’t know that. I learned that the average Japanese farmer is 69, the oldest in the world. I didn’t know that either, and that is bonkers. That the country has enough empty houses “to accommodate the entire population of Australia at three people per dwelling“; a sentence to read twice if, like me, you live amid Australia’s housing shortage, and one whose empty-countryside half could have been written about Finland.

But these are anecdotes and interesting facts, and they don’t accumulate into a cohesive argument. It felt like reading a well-researched travel journal with thoughts about the world along the trip. As a portrait of a depopulating country, quietly excellent and at times viscerally sad.

As a map of the future we’re all supposedly heading to: not proven.

• Rating: 3.5 out of 5

• Dog-ear index: 10.7

• Who is it for: Armchair travellers and demography-watchers who want the human texture of Japan’s decline rather than a data-driven argument; people following the loneliness beat.

Children of the Magenta is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Product link for reference only; please support your local bookstore where possible: https://www.amazon.com.au/Alone-Japan-Journey-Tom-Feiling-ebook/dp/B0D54CVT6L

[for comments: reminder: I highlight important parts of the books I read, and dog-ear the really important pages. The dog-ear index is simply the average number of dog-eared pages per 100 pages]

On my desk sits an Apogee MiC+, a studio-grade USB condenser I bought during COVID. It had nothing to do with AI, which didn’t meaningfully exist yet, but I bought it because the kids needed to record music performances for school.

The pandemic recitals are - thank god - long over.

The microphone, meanwhile, has become the best AI productivity tool I own.

What does your office environment look like?

Six people in a huddle room (which will soon run out of fresh air, but that’s another story). Maybe there’s a lousy room-based system dialed into Teams, or someone’s laptop, its microphone built to a price point of roughly nothing.

The HVAC hums, someone has joined from a car, and two people are talking over each other about whether to ship in June. This is the recording your AI summariser then gets to work with. It attends the acoustic crime scene and delivers confidently, fluently, and nicely formatted, and wrong.

Everyone files it. Nobody reads the transcript.

This is a little tragic, because meeting summaries and even semi-automated action point-harvesting are one of the genuinely great uses of AI at work — if, and only if, they work, they’re the closest thing to a free lunch the technology currently offers.

Which makes it remarkable how much effort organizations put into making sure they don’t work.

A meeting summary is a three-stage pipeline.

First, a microphone captures audio, the bit everyone assumes is a solved problem, because everything has a microphone in it.

Next, a speech recognition model turns audio into a transcript; some will diarize it for you, too.

Finally, a large language model turns the transcript into a useful summary.

Each stage can only work with what the previous one delivered; information lost at stage one is unrecoverable at stage three. Audio engineers have known this forever.

Where does the corporate attention go?

If anything, it’s the LLM, stage three, that gets debated for a quarter. The transcription model, stage two, gets a passing thought, maybe, and usually based on similar criteria as the LLM - cost-first. Performance? Pfft, who needs that, they’re all good enough, right?

Umm, no.

But that’s not all. The microphone gets nothing. I have yet to see a single organization — not one — that treats high-quality audio capture as part of its AI strategy.

Companies will happily pay US$30 per user per month for their mediocre Copilot, and precisely $0 for the thing that determines whether Copilot has anything real to work with.

The defaults compound the problem. Built-in platform summaries like Teams, Zoom, and the lot pair middling speech recognition with a middling language model, because that’s what runs at scale for cheap.

They are far from the best available; they are the most conveniently billed. It wouldn’t matter much if the “good enough” threshold was much lower, but it’s not.

Yet in most organizations, “we have AI meeting summaries” means exactly this: a mediocre stage two feeding a mediocre stage three, fed in turn by a laptop microphone that was an afterthought at design time.

Bad input doesn’t produce a visibly bad summary. “We agreed to ship” and “we agreed not to ship” sit one degraded phoneme apart, and the language model will smooth over whichever version the transcript happens to contain.

Names get mangled. Numbers get transposed. And with one table-edge microphone on a corporate Windows laptop, speaker attribution collapses — the model knows something was decided, but not by whom, so it guesses.

A summary that assigns your commitment to someone else isn’t a productivity gain; sooner or later people will notice that, and we come back to the point above - nobody reads them or uses them - with good reason, because it would often be worse if they did rely on them - all the same, a bunch of tokens get burned on this productivity theatre.

As per Jon Ostrower’s phrase “There’s always an aviation angle”, I will offer one. You are welcome to skip this:

Aviation learned this lesson early and expensively. An airliner does not merely have a pitot tube (the sensor); it has multiple air-data sources, systems that compare them, warnings when they disagree, and procedures for deciding what can still be trusted. Even so, accidents have occurred when one blocked probe supplied plausible but false airspeed data and the automation faithfully acted on it. The industry response was to treat input integrity, disagreement detection and graceful failure as part of the system itself.

Your microphone plays the same role in an AI workflow as that pitot tube - a critical first part in a chain that could lead to bad things happening if it doesn’t provide good data. Bad audio does not stay bad audio: it becomes bad transcription, then a polished and potentially authoritative false summary. The model at the end of the chain cannot recover words the sensor at the beginning never captured.

Which brings us to my mic. Cleaner transcripts, sharper summaries, dictation that actually works (dictation that actually works feels like magic and as close to a game-changer as you’ll ever hear me saying anything is), because a mic engineered to capture a cello faithfully turns out to capture consonants very nicely too.

The organizational version of the fix is just as insultingly simple, which is presumably why nobody does it.

In order of impact:

1. Buy decent audio capture; proper mics for every individual employee, including for their working from home setups, and a proper conference microphone for meeting rooms. They cost less than a single day of the meetings it records.

2. Choose your transcription model deliberately; the gap between mediocre and state-of-the-art speech recognition is wider than most of the LLM-versus-LLM gaps people argue about.

3. Then, and only then, have the great LLM debate.

“Buy better microphones” will never headline an AI strategy deck.

Well, it may headline mine, but you get the drift.

Still, it doesn’t demo well, and no vendor will fly you to a conference over it. It is merely the highest-leverage AI investment most organizations could make this year, and they could make it for less than the catering budget of the offsite where they’re discussing their AI transformation.

Ps. Yes there are complexities here: data privacy, recording consent, transcript retention, local-vs-cloud models, and a dozen other things. That's what you hire me to figure out. Let’s talk.

In the preface, before the book has properly started, Smil offers some reading advice: “slow, methodical reading will bring greater rewards than zooming through the book at page-turning speed.”

A book about speed, asking you to slow down. I kind of liked that, and I took it as a promise of good things to come.

The good things didn’t come.

This is my third book by Smil. How the World Really Works got 4.5 from me. Invention and Innovation got 4. I’ve defended him to people who find him dry, because if that dryness means accuracy, it’s a virtue, and there frankly aren’t many writers left who will tell you what a number actually means in actual real detail.

I’m sorry to report that this book…just doesn’t work. Not for me anyway.

But let’s take a step back.

Even though humanity has been worried about things speeding up for generations, there is a visceral sense of things really accelerating in our modern times. Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock really feels like it’s here for many people.

So with that backdrop, I welcomed a methodological look into all things speed.

And my god, if you come to the book hoping for random numbers about all things speed, you will get them.

Raindrop terminal velocity. Denudation rates for the Brahmaputra basin. The rupture speed of the 2018 Palu earthquake. Roman cursus publicus load limits, itemised by cart type. How much water a Texas swimming pool loses to evaporation in July.

I actually skim-skipped parts of the book (which I almost never do) because I did not need a refresher on tectonic plate movement, and I couldn’t figure out what it was doing in the book.

The weird thing is, I normally love this stuff. Fascinating tangents are half the pleasure of a good non-fiction read, but I guess there’s a difference between a tangent and what feels like a million tiny rabbit-holes that don’t really coalesce into a coherent whole.

Which is not to say that some of the numbers in the book aren’t fascinating, or interesting, or just depressing.

Like the broiler chicken. A free-running bird takes four to five months to reach one kilogram; a modern broiler takes under fifty days to reach three kilograms. Smil accurately calls these “mini monsters”, but I have a feeling these facts may not be news to most people.

Then there’s a pedestrian fatality curve – spoiler: fatality rises dramatically as the speed of collision increases.

Interesting, yes, but news to most people? Again, probably not. Most people probably learned this in school.

And this is the problem with a bunch of these numbers: many of them are things we kind of all know. Probably. At least directionally; we will probably have forgotten the actual numbers, but we know how these things work – we know aircraft are faster than cars and trains, and we know that if you take into account all the ancillary things you have to do (get to the airport; go through security; boarding; check-in; etc.), the average speed of a flight often becomes much less impressive.

It’s both been drilled to us and it’s intuitively clear that speed kills.

It’s not just pedestrians that too much speed is lethal for. We rarely think of meatpackers, where:

“The line is so fast there is no time to sharpen the knife. The knife gets dull and you have to cut harder. That’s when it really starts to hurt.”

In 2019 the US removed the standing hourly limit of 1,106 pigs and set no upper value at all. As a result, some plants now run 1,300 an hour. The annual injury rate in animal slaughtering is nearly three times that of logging - a job famous for being dangerous.

So much of the book feels like this – numbers, so many numbers, all paraded with academic rigor, but numbers that seem kind of…irrelevant? Pointless? Or making obvious points? Not core to the story? All of that.

But then the coda arrives at the very end of the book, which is the only stretch where Smil stops measuring and starts arguing, and then immediately proceeds to demonstrate the problem with the rest of the book.

He takes aim at a 2018 RAND paper on speed and security, quoting it accurately but reading it badly. RAND opens by stating that acceleration is “neither uniform nor deterministic“ and that their aim “is not to provide a concrete take on the future.”

Their four 2040 scenarios are workshop provocations written to get people in a room talking. Smil treats a paragraph defining the paper’s scope as a list of predictions, then demolishes it with questions RAND never invited: are we getting ten-day wheat? Two-week steak? Bits moving faster than light? The answers are all obviously no, and none of them are answers to anything RAND said. He also missed that RAND’s own conclusion — design for problems, not for speed, and stop building Hyperloops that solve the wrong thing — is roughly his own.

He’s better on Musk, where the target actually deserves it: the Mars rocket, and the “endlessly gullible mass media“ that keeps repeating the pitch.

Smil also refuses to romanticise slowness in return, noting that Slow Food is “tinged with elitism and wishful thinking“ while McDonald’s quadrupled its profits.

Finally, he lands here:

Yes.

Exactly.

Thank you.

2.5 out of 5 stars.

Wait, what?! WHY?

Because I had to read hundreds of sometimes frankly pretty tedious pages to get there, and I can’t remember almost any of them. Too many numbers to hold, and too little telling me why I was even trying to hold them. I will forget – nah, have already forgotten – 99% of them.

But there’s one thing I learned that I will probably remember: canola.

I did not know that canola is a contraction of “Canadian oil, low acid“; a 1970s rebranding of low-erucic-acid rapeseed out of the University of Manitoba.

Fascinating.

But also something not particularly useful, not really contributing anything important to the narrative, and also potentially known to most people (just not me).

Slow, methodical reading, he promised, would bring greater rewards.

I read it slowly, and all I got was canola.

• Rating: 2.5 out of 5

• Dog-ear index: 2.8

• Who is it for: Smil completists and reference-hunters who want a single volume of rate-of-change data and are happy to browse rather than read. If you do buy it, very much atypically start from the end and read the Coda first; then decide whether you want the other 250 pages.

[reminder: I highlight important parts of the books I read, and dog-ear the really important pages. The dog-ear index is simply the average number of dog-eared pages per 100 pages]

Product link for reference only; please support your local bookstore where possible: https://www.amazon.com.au/Speed-Explains-World-Vaclav-Smil/dp/0593834542/

I work in AI and make a good chunk of my living from it — and even I’ve had it with the collateral damage.

Welcome to my anti-AI screed.

You’re about to find out everything has RAM in it

AI data centres are eating the world’s memory supply, and everyone else gets to pay for it. The Verge calls the inexorably rising RAM prices RAMageddon, and it runs the whole gamut.

Raspberry Pi (the little computer that we use to teach kids to code and build cool stuff, and runs my ADS-B receiver) has had two price hikes in three months. Framework is shrinking the RAM in laptops people have already pre-ordered. The world’s cheapest smartphones that billions of people rely on, are starting to disappear from the market entirely.

Even Apple, owner of the most competent and resilient supply chain on Earth, just raised prices across nearly its whole lineup: “We have never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly.”

I never opted in to fund the AI buildout, and neither did you. Turns out we’re funding it anyway, one gadget at a time, and that’s on top of all our content the models have been trained on.

Nobody wants a data centre next door (and fair enough)

70% of Americans oppose one in their area. More would rather live next to a nuclear power plant.

I get that.

Unpermitted gas-turbine farms next to residential neighbourhoods turns your environment into a dirty, loud droning that never stops, day or night.

Evaporative cooling drinking a town’s water and turning your shower into a slow, dirty drip.

Megawatts of GPUs sucking up the electricity, driving up prices for residents.

None of this is what data centres have to be. I’ve stood outside high-end facilities that are whisper-quiet, and zero-water and near-zero-water designs are possible, at scale, today, from Microsoft’s newest builds to CDC’s campuses in Canberra.

Quiet, waterless, energy-additive, paying for their own grid connections: every item on that list exists in production, right now.

The fact that data centres even can be bad neighbours is a [political] choice.

This is not a hard regulatory problem: set the standards, enforce them, and approve the enabling infrastructure so the good designs are actually buildable.

Aviation, by the way, did exactly this with aircraft noise decades ago and came out bigger, safer, and quieter.

I’m happy to say Australia is moving in the right direction on this; NSW is developing efficiency benchmarks and stronger energy- and water-use reporting for new data centres, while the federal government has issued national expectations covering energy efficiency, additional clean-power investment and transparent water-use reporting for new and expanded data-centre projects.

It’s not quite there yet, but it’s a directionally right stance, and I welcome it: data centres can be a strong yes, and an asset to a country – if, and only if, built sustainably.

“But doing it right costs money”

Yes, it does. Duh.

It has somehow become the duty of every corporate citizen to complain about anything that might increase costs.

Fine. I’d almost forgive that, given the neoliberal capitalistic waters the companies have been bred and swim in.

But money is the one thing this industry demonstrably does not lack.

The four biggest players will spend roughly $725 billion on this buildout this year alone - up 77% from last year’s all-time record.

Sound insulation or more water-efficient cooling is a rounding error on a rounding error in that.

So here’s the deal: if anyone in industrial history can afford to do this right, it’s these companies, at this moment, with this money. To even attempt to claim otherwise would be dishonest, or to use a more Australian colloquialism, just not on.

And if, with three-quarters of a trillion dollars a year, they somehow can’t afford to build data centres that don’t poison, deafen, drain, or impoverish their neighbours?

Then maybe all of this really should die.

Something a bit different this week: no book review, but a meta-post about them.

I figured I would write down the fine print that has always been implicitly attached to my reviews. Every review I post comes filtered through one particular brain, with particular tastes, allergies, and blind spots. I’ve disclosed these piecemeal over the years, but they deserve a proper home.

So here it is: how select my books, how I review them, and what to adjust for when reading me.

Broad strokes first: I read mostly non-fiction, and my approach is primarily analytical rather than experiential. I read mainly to update my understanding of the world, less so to be moved, though the best books do manage both. This says nothing about the worth of other ways of reading or writing; it’s simply the lens I bring.

The direct consequence: some books that others find valuable or even life-changing don’t necessarily land at all with me.

Book reviews are subjective. All of them, everywhere, always; mine are no exception. Me not appreciating a book doesn’t mean you shouldn’t or couldn’t find tremendous value in it, and holding different views on the same book is not just fine, it’s expected. I’m not issuing verdicts; I’m offering one data point, along with enough documentation about the measuring instrument that you can calibrate.

(This is also why every review ends with “Who is it for”. Whether a book is good or bad is the wrong question; the right question is whether this book and this reader, at this time, are a good pairing. But even that section is just an opinion of one guy.)

I am allergic to factually inaccurate claims. Obviously not everything important is factual. Some books I’ve rated highly wouldn’t survive peer review and aren’t trying to; wisdom and evidence are different genres, and I try to review each by its own rules. But when a book does appeals to facts to make its case — and authors love appealing to what they think are facts — those facts need to be right. When they’re wrong, I penalize the book for it mercilessly, because if the facts change, you owe it to yourself and everyone else to change your mind.

I’d cite the famous Keynes quote here — “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?“ — except there is, it turns out, no good evidence Keynes ever said it. I learned this while writing this very post, and duly changed my mind about the quote’s authorship.

Some specific sub-allergies: false dichotomies, anecdotes doing work only data can do, US-centric observations presented as universal human experience, and deepities and pseudo-profound bullshit (a technical term; see Pennycook et al., 2015, on its reception and detection).

I’m careful about what I read, because I’m influenced by everything I read. There is no such thing as reading a book and remaining unchanged; that’s rather the point of the exercise.

This is also how lies get embedded into people’s minds as truths. Repetition makes claims feel truer (even claims that contradict what you already know) and the biggest jump comes from the second exposure. Worse, repeated information eventually starts to feel like something you always knew. Critical reading at first contact helps, but the more reliable defense is upstream: be careful about what you put in, and how often.

As Terry Pratchett wrote (in Diggers, 1990, and unlike Keynes, he verifiably did):

“The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.”

This also means the biggest bias in these reviews enters before a single page is turned: at selection.

So, for the record, this is how books make it to my reading pile:

• An annual research theme. Most years I pick a topic to go deep on (one recent one: Managing Collapse; cheerful stuff), and a decent chunk of that year’s reading serves it.

• Trusted authors. Some have earned near-automatic purchase status.

• Trusted friends. When some friends recommend books, they tend to get picked up. You know who you are.

• Other books. References, rebuttals, and loose threads inside one book queue up the next three.

• Long-form auditions on podcasts. Hearing an author think for hours in a long-form interview beats any blurb. (Fifteen-plus hours of Matthew Walker on sleep preceded Why We Sleep.)

• Bookstore grazing. Deliberately unstructured browsing where titles are allowed to ambush me, at bookstores in Melbourne and Sydney whose staff curation abilities I trust. This looks like impulse, and technically it is, but the impulse runs on a picker trained by every book that came before it, so I trust it. Mostly.

• Deliberate steel-manning of all sides. Sometimes I pick up a book arguing for a point of view I strongly disagree with because I always want to get the steel-man version of both sides of the argument, even on – or maybe especially on – topics that are considered ‘settled’.

A few consequences of all this curation worth disclosing.

First, my ratings tend to cluster in the 3.5-to-4.5 range. This is not because I’m soft on the books, but because deliberate selection means true duds rarely make it through. (When one sneaks in, I will let you know. Usually at length. Like very recently.)

Second, the reading pile has a certain demographic. I generally pay no attention to the authors’ genders or backgrounds, but it does skew male and is weighted heavily Anglophone. I won’t be imposing gender quotas on my reading list, but I will endeavor to pay more attention to diversity in all its forms.

Third, the more you read, the smaller the update any single book makes. These days even a great book tweaks my neural network rather than overhauls it, and I consider that the quiet payoff of volume: read only one great book, and you’re liable to take everything from it; to let it become too big a part of your personality, or your entire understanding of a topic.

The antidote to being captured by one book is the next twenty.

I try to read broadly around a topic. Few topics worth reading about have exactly two sides, but I do try to read multiple angles: degrowth advocates and constraint realists, collapse literature and hope literature, books on faith as a non-believer. If a topic matters to me, one book is just a beginning, not the entire journey of discovery.

I try to read broadly to avoid this:

Related: I’ll sometimes note I “didn’t learn much“ from a well-researched, well-written book, and subsequently rate it lower than it should have arguably been, simply because I’ve already read deeply in its territory.

That’s a statement about me, not the book. Hence, again, “Who is it for“ section which can be more important than the star-rating.

The mechanics, for completeness: I read physical books wherever possible, and I read them with intent. Important parts get highlighted; the really important pages get dog-eared; and the rare really really important ones get a second dog-ear at the bottom corner. The dog-ear index — the average number of dog-eared pages per 100 — is my attempt at quantifying how much a book struck a chord; the chord is often, but not always, positive. It’s unscientific and unstandardized, and it still tells you more than most star ratings do.

So there you have it: the practice, biases, and the measuring instrument, documented.

Adjust your readings of my reviews accordingly.

And thanks for being here!

On page 285 of Against the Machine, Paul Kingsnorth explains how he processes information:

“the minute I am told that an ‘expert’, a state-sanctioned authority, a scientific body or a mainstream media organisation has ‘fact checked’ what I’ve just heard, I instinctively dismiss it.”

Okay then.

To his credit, he adds that he’s not defending this as a healthy response, but he should have led with it! It would have saved me 284 pages of wondering why, in a book so well-read and so beautifully written, the data keeps losing to some very predetermined vibes.

This is going to take a bit to unpack, so bear with me for this atypically long review.

Let me start with the sympathy, because it’s real and because I really wanted to like this book. Kingsnorth — a former environmental activist, co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project (I am a fan of the Dark Mountain manifesto), novelist, and since 2021 an Orthodox Christian living in rural Ireland — is trying to name something that many of us feel: that modernity has a texture, a momentum, a hunger, and that it eats roots, limits, silence, and meaning.

He calls it the Machine: “an intersection of money power, state power and increasingly coercive and manipulative technologies.“ When he stays descriptive, he can be great. His supermarket epiphany about marketing language — “The deepest human emotions are engaged to flog us cornflakes, shampoo and dog food. We are drowning in strategically commercialised passion“ — is exactly right, and I’ve made the same observation standing in the same aisles.

His formula for modernity’s engine, “Want. Want is the acid,” deserves its place on the page. And there is real erudition here: Spengler, Mumford, Ellul, Illich, Weil, Guénon, McGilchrist. The man has done his reading.

His core argument, distilled: the West was Christendom; Christendom died; a culture that kills its sacred order does not get a vacancy, it gets a replacement; and what rushed into the vacuum was the Machine, whose values – which Kingsnorth lists as science, the self, sex, and the screen – are now dissolving everything from nations to genders to reality itself.

By the final chapters, the book has escalated from cultural criticism to eschatology: the Machine has a theology, AI may be literally demonic, and we are possibly living in the time of Antichrist.

You can feel the book’s origin as a series of Substack essays: the same points return in slightly different robes, and the register drifts from argument toward sermon. That’s a forgivable sin. What is unforgivable is motivated reasoning shining through the pages which are also riddled with factual errors.

Take, for example, data centre power usage. Bemoaning Ireland’s campaign against turf fires, Kingsnorth writes of “the massive increase in internet server farms, which by 2030 could be using up an astonishing 70 percent of this country’s electricity.” I went looking for the source for this evidently ludicrous figure, and it traces back to a 2021 Irish parliamentary committee hearing, where an academic testified that data centres could reach 70% of grid capacity if every single proposed facility were approved and built.

They obviously weren’t. Dublin has had a de facto connection moratorium since 2022. The actual number: Irish data centres consumed 22% of the country’s electricity in 2024, with official projections around 30% by decade’s end.

The real number is already the most extraordinary in the world. Globally, data centres use about 1.7% of electricity; Ireland is the planet’s data-centre outlier by an order of magnitude, and 22% is a perfectly astonishing fact. Kingsnorth had the world’s best example sitting in his own country and still reached for the stupidly inflated version.

That’s what motivated reasoning does: it can’t even recognize when the truth is on its side.

This pattern repeats in the book.

“Religion in the West is effectively dead,” he declares — writing from a country whose census records roughly seven in ten residents as Catholic, while about 70% of Americans report a religious affiliation, US religious decline has visibly plateaued since 2020, France just recorded its largest cohort of adult baptisms in decades, and church attendance among young Britons has apparently risen sharply enough that his own side of the argument now celebrates a “quiet revival.”

The revival narrative may yet prove thin, but “effectively dead” was already wrong when the book went to print. And when he suggests that Christendom’s “secular replacement has, if anything, fared worse,” I can only note — as a product of one — that the most secular societies on Earth keep topping every measurable index of human flourishing, Finland’s nine consecutive years atop the World Happiness Report included. So they are faring worse by what measure, exactly, and on what data? The book never says. It’s simply asserted.

On COVID, he frames the response as a “triumph of technique“ and a step toward the “digital holding camp“ — quite convenient to write after the fact, without mentioning that the despised technique worked: depending on how conservative your model is, vaccination alone averted somewhere between 2.5 and 20 million deaths. Even the lowest published estimate is millions of people who got to keep living in the Machine he mourns.

And sex, allegedly one of the Machine’s four sacred values? A civilization supposedly worshipping sex is measurably losing interest in having it; sexual frequency has been declining for two decades, and by the late 2010s a third of young American men reported no sex at all in the past year.

The Machine is many things, but a fertility cult it is not. Even taking the most charitable interpretation that it wasn’t actually sex that Kingsnorth referred to with ‘sex’, but sexual-identity culture/liberation-as-value.

Even the book’s mythic set pieces crumble on inspection. The Machine’s genealogy runs through Mumford’s “megamachine” — Pharaonic Egypt, “whose legions of enslaved pyramid-builders were conditioned to think and behave like cogs,” workers “stripped down to their reflexes.”

Except archaeology has rather comprehensively demolished this: the Giza workforce was paid, rotational, housed in a purpose-built town, prodigiously fed, medically treated, and buried with honor beside the monuments, in work gangs with names like “Friends of Khufu.” The slaves-of-the-machine story is Herodotus’s myth, not history.

These errors matter because they expose the method: select the darkest available version of every story, skip the check, and call the selection insight. As such, they act as good case studies of confirmation bias and motivated reasoning – but they do not make for a good book.

But there’s more.

Like science. “‘Follow the Science’ usually translates in practice as ‘follow me’,“ Kingsnorth writes, and my “BS!” margin note was among my politer reactions. His deeper claim that science exists to control the world misunderstands the enterprise at its root.

Science is the attempt to understand the world; the possibility of control sometimes falls out of improved understanding, but conflating the two is like saying cartography exists to invade countries. And his assertion that a culture built on Reason “must, in the end, fail“ because pure Reason doesn’t exist would, if taken seriously, work equally well against every deity in the historical record; an argument I suspect the author would not appreciate having turned around.

The AI chapters deserve special mention because they reveal the method in its purest form. Kingsnorth tells us, with evident pride, “I have never engaged with an AI, for example, and I never will if I can help it.”

He then confidently reports that ChatGPT acquired “the theory of mind of a nine-year-old child“ (a contested lab claim that collapsed under replication attempts) and that Bing’s Sydney chatbot had enough of it “to try to persuade a reporter to leave his wife“ (an anthropomorphized reading of a two-hour conversation Roose himself admitted was designed to push the model “out of its comfort zone” — a chatbot locked into the character that conversation built is not a suitor with intentionality). From these fundamental misunderstandings of what the technology is, it’s a short walk to the book’s forbidden question: what if these things are coming from the realm of the demonic?

I can respect a man who refuses to use a technology on principle. I cannot respect pronouncing on its inner nature from a position of proud, deliberate, total second-handedness.

If you refuse to engage with a subject matter, epistemic humility about what you’re describing is mandatory. In my books anyway; YMMV.

And there’s more.

The hearth fire, Kingsnorth argues gorgeously, is the sacred center of the home, and stripping it away serves “the ultimate ambition of the Machine: the abolition of home.”

Lovely.

But fire is the primordial technology; the original bending of nature to human will, the first step on the very road he wants closed. Somehow the technologies old enough to have grown moss are sacred, and the ones invented after the author’s childhood are demonic. Convenient.

And here the irony goes all the way down: religion itself — the thing this book wants restored to the centre of Western life — is very plausibly the most successful social technology our species has ever built. Moralizing gods, shared ritual, sacred order: these are the innovations that let human cooperation scale beyond the kin group and the village, a case made with actual evidence in books like Harvey Whitehouse’s Inheritance and David DeSteno’s How God Works. Kingsnorth would object that faith is revealed, not engineered, but his own argument for it is relentlessly functional: cultures without a sacred order fall apart, he tells us, again and again. That is a utility claim about social machinery. And the receipt sits in his own pages: Mumford’s original megamachine, Pharaonic Egypt, was “an entire society ordered from the top down, justified by a mythos.” The first Machine ran on religion. The Machine and the Church, it turns out, are rival technology stacks, and Kingsnorth is simply loyal to the incumbent.

What really took the cake for me was his strong condemnation of appeals to expert authority, when an earlier chapter had been one of fawning over undeniably world-class expert Iain McGilchrist. Apparently the credential system works fine when it agrees with him.

He hates the screen and writes on one (lamenting he has to – not true, typewriters are still around); he’d press the button that kills the internet, yet his rebellion is distributed via Substack. To be fair, he owns that last contradiction with disarming honesty and it’s in these self-aware moments that you glimpse the better book this could have been.

There’s some social commentary this book accidentally provides, and it’s the reason I found it worth finishing: Peter Thiel — Palantir founder, techno-libertarian, the Machine incarnate by Kingsnorth’s lights — spent 2025 delivering lectures arguing that we live in the time of Antichrist too.

Same scripture, same eschatological urgency, opposite casting: for Thiel, the Antichrist is the global safetyist order that would stop the machines in the name of peace and safety; people, roughly, like Paul Kingsnorth.

Two Christian intellectuals, one apocalypse, each holding the mirror the other refuses to look into. When your framework and your enemy’s framework are identical except for which side plays Satan, that’s usually a sign the framework is doing the work your evidence should be doing.

Apocalypse, it turns out, is a mirror: you look in and see whatever you already feared.

The maddening thing is that the strong version of this book exists scattered across other books. The WEIRDest People in the World makes the Church-shaped-the-West argument with actual rigor. Seeing Like a State dismantles high-modernist control fantasies more devastatingly than any sermon. Blood in the Machine gives the Luddites the serious history Kingsnorth’s two-paragraph cameo doesn’t.

Kingsnorth gestures at all of this territory, wrapped in prose those books can’t match, and then trades the case for a jeremiad. There is a real critique of the Machine to be written, and parts of it are even in here. As it stands, we get a war: he insists, explicitly, that the crisis of the modern world “is a spiritual war“, declared against an enemy assembled from worst cases, dead statistics, and other people’s nightmares.

Is there a spiritual upheaval in the West? Yes, probably. A crisis? Maybe.

A war? Check the data. My margin note on one of the book’s most quotable lines: Voegelin’s “No one is obliged to take part in the spiritual crisis of a society“ simply says: great point. Kingsnorth’s closing advice is to interrogate every technology: what, or who, does it ultimately serve? They’re some of the right questions. Answering them honestly, though, requires exactly the tools this book instructs you to throw away. The Machine deserves better enemies and better governance.

• Rating: 2.5 out of 5

• Dog-ear index: 7.5

• Who is it for: Readers who already feel the Machine in their bones and want that feeling liturgized in prose this beautiful, and who won’t be checking the footnotes. If you want the critique of technological modernity that survives contact with evidence, read Seeing Like a State, Blood in the Machine, or The WEIRDest People in the World instead. If you want to watch a gifted writer mistake his metaphysics for a literature review, this is the definitive text.

[reminder: I highlight important parts of the books I read, and dog-ear the really important pages. The dog-ear index is simply the average number of dog-eared pages per 100 pages] Product link for reference only; please support your local bookstore where possible: https://www.amazon.com.au/Against-Machine-Unmaking-Paul-Kingsnorth/dp/0593850637

We love to say there’s nothing new under the sun, and then spend most of our lives proving we don’t believe it, overvaluing things mostly because they’re new.

I’m as guilty of this neomania as anyone. So as a small corrective, I reached for the oldest advice book I could stomach: Baltasar Gracián’s The Art of Worldly Wisdom, three hundred maxims a Spanish Jesuit first published in 1647.

A caveat I can’t shake: I’m reading a 17th-century Spaniard in translation, and things are always lost in the crossing. Cultures change, idioms rot, language drifts - I don’t pretend I’m getting Gracián neat.

After a lengthy introduction by Don Vincencio Juan de Lastanosa, the form of the book is relentless: three hundred aphorisms, each a few sentences to a paragraph, on how to move through a treacherous world without being eaten by it. Think of it as the great-great-grandfather of every “rules for life” book on the shelf today; Galloway’s, Peterson’s, the various Laws of Power. Gracián got there first, and more elegantly. Mostly.

Here’s where it got funny. I picked the book up to inoculate myself against novelty-worship, and found that Gracián had not only diagnosed the disease in 1647 but written the manual for exploiting it. “Make use of the Novelty of your Position,” he counsels, “for men are valued while they are new.”

Why? “Novelty pleases all because it is uncommon, taste is refreshed, and a brand new mediocrity is thought more of than accustomed excellence.” He’s telling you to ride neomania while it lasts, because “after four days respect is gone.” I came for an antidote and got a how-to guide.

Sadly, he’s right.

One maxim that sort of hit close to home was the one on transplanting yourself:

Know how to transplant Yourself.

There are nations with whom one must cross their borders to make one’s value felt, especially in great posts. Their native land is always a stepmother to great talents: envy flourishes there on its native soil, and they remember one’s small beginnings rather than the greatness one has reached. A needle is appreciated that comes from one end of the world to the other, and a piece of painted glass might outvie the diamond in value if it comes from afar partly because it is ready made and perfect. We have seen persons once the laughing-stock of their village and now the wonder of the whole world, honoured by their fellow countrymen and by the foreigners [among whom they dwell]; by the latter because they come from afar, by the former because they are seen from afar. The statue on the altar is never reverenced by him who knew it as a trunk in the garden.

Not that I’ve ever had great posts, but there are more modern aphorisms for this phenomenon; “no man is a prophet in his own land”.

Written before the word immigrant carried the freight it carries now, and truer than most things written about it since.

Then there’s the line that could have been written this morning: “Philosophy is nowadays discredited... The art of thinking has lost all its former repute.“ 1647, and already mourning that nobody thinks anymore. Four centuries apart, we have same complaints. Nothing new under the sun indeed.

For all that, a lot of the book is wallpaper. Plenty of these maxims are vague enough to work like horoscopes or scripture: capacious, agreeable, and seemingly true in whatever direction you tilt them. That’s the trap of the whole genre, and I caught myself sometimes falling in. It’s nearly impossible to read advice like this without confirmation bias, nodding along at what you already believe and quietly explaining away the rest.

A book that can’t be wrong isn’t thereby right.

It also argues with itself. For pages Gracián insists you conceal your abilities — keep your tastes hidden (”Do not even let your tastes be known”), your intentions in cypher, your hand face-down. Then, later, a maxim titled “Display yourself” tells you to do the reverse. Which is it? The charitable reading is situational wisdom: the court is a place where the right move depends entirely on the room, and a survival manual has to teach both the veil and the flourish. The less charitable reading is that the three hundred maxims were written to stand alone but were never audited against one another.

And it is, finally, a somewhat amoral book. While it preaches the virtues of good behaviour and reputation, it also talks up appearance, tells you to take advantage of how things look, how luck breaks, how to stay “in vogue.” There’s some great time-honored social engineering here. If you’ve read Will Storr’s The Status Game, you’ll recognise the whole thing as a 17th-century field manual for status play.

Which leaves me with a strange split. My dog-ear index here is 13, so quite high. I marked this book up heavily, because individual maxims kept landing, and there can be four per page. But the whole is worth less than its best parts.

Nothing new under the sun, then — including the suspicion that nothing is new under the sun. Gracián knew we’d keep chasing the shiny thing, and knew we’d keep needing to be told not to. I’ve dog-eared that, and, like most wisdom, will promptly fail to apply it.

• Rating: 3 out of 5

• Dog-ear index: 13

• Who is it for: Readers who like their self-help old, dense, and unsentimental, and who treat aphorism books as quarries to mine rather than arguments to follow.

[reminder: I highlight important parts of the books I read, and dog-ear the really important pages. The dog-ear index is simply the average number of dog-eared pages per 100 pages]

Support your local bookstore. If you must use Amazon: https://www.amazon.com.au/Art-Worldly-Wisdom-Original-Navigating/dp/1917598289

I wanted to love this one. Maps fascinate me and a book subtitled When Maps Go Wrong sounded perfect. So as not to bury the lede, it stings to report that This Way Up went wrong for me in a way its authors never intended: not in its maps, but in its making.

Jay Foreman and Mark Cooper-Jones are the Map Men, a British YouTube duo whose brief explainers are delightful; tight, funny, clever. This book is the print extension of that act.

And that, it turns out, is the whole problem.

The premise is excellent. Every map is a pile of choices, many of which will make it less representative of reality; “no map can possibly be entirely accurate,” and the wrong ones are where the more interesting stories live.

As a tour through cartographic blunders, there are real treats here. The Mountains of Kong was fascinating and something I had not heard of; a phantom range that squatted across roughly forty maps of Africa for nearly a century because everyone kept copying everyone else rather than, you know, going there physically and checking – until someone did and the mountain range made a quiet exit.

Australia’s imaginary inland sea and its invented “Delta,” sketched in by men who assumed the rivers had to drain somewhere grand. Copyright-trap streets are another interesting thing: the gloriously stupid/clever trick of deliberately drawing your map wrong (like little alleys that don’t actually exist) so that if the error shows up on a rival’s map, you’ve caught the thief red-handed.

Japan numbering its blocks instead of its streets. India’s tens of millions of roads with no names at all. I smiled. I dog-eared. Good stuff.

But charming factoids rarely make a book, and this is where the execution turned lazy. There are tens of pages of a fake true-crime podcast transcript, the “Deadly Shortcut,” rendered in full with stage directions and a parody sponsor read. I could not care less about reading a podcast. It’s bonkers.

Elsewhere, whole stretches are handed to dramatised, supposedly-historical letters and dialogue, invented wholesale and presented as period colour. I appreciated none of it.

Only one of these unusual elements caught my attention in a positive way: the book came with a QR code to a Spotify playlist as a soundtrack. I had never seen one in a book before, so that was kind of cute.

However, did I actually listen to it? No. So there’s that.

I finished the book at times entertained, at times annoyed, but having learned little of importance beyond a few factoids. The premise promised insight into how maps shape what we believe; what I got was a clip show of amusing errors, narrated in a register that never decides whether it’s a textbook or a panel quiz. This would have been better either as a leaner book (the same concept at two-thirds the length, minus the cosplay) or a book that took itself and the subject matter more seriously.

To its credit, the book finally drops the act in the closing chapter and makes an actual argument: that outsourcing navigation to a glowing blue dot has quietly dulled us; that the hippocampus does measurable work, and that a 2024 BMJ study found career navigators like taxi and ambulance drivers had the lowest rate of Alzheimer’s deaths of the 443 occupations it examined - tellingly, bus drivers and pilots, who follow fixed routes, showed no such effect.

The cure, the authors note, is free: turn the thing off and get lost.

Stop reading this book immediately. Put it down, and go and do the thing that we as a species have been doing – and been really good at doing – for millions of years. And have an absolutely lovely time while you’re doing it.

Get lost.

That I registered, and violently agreed with, dog-eared, and intend to honor.

It’s a small, good idea at the end of a book that mostly wouldn’t sit still long enough to have one. I loved the concept. I did not love what was done with it.

• Rating: 3 out of 5

• Dog-ear index: 3.7

• Who is it for: Map Men fans who want more of the act in print, and casual map-curious readers who enjoy trivia and don’t mind theatrics. Not for anyone hoping to actually understand cartography, and definitely not for those of us who’d rather chew glass than read a transcribed podcast or a wodge of invented “historical” dialogue.

[Reminder: I highlight important parts of the books I read, and dog-ear the really important pages. The dog-ear index is simply the average number of dog-eared pages per 100 pages.]

AS COMMENT: Product link for reference only; please support your local bookstore where possible: https://www.amazon.com.au/This-Way-Up-Wrong-Matters/dp/0008710287/

I’ve been fascinated by consciousness and sentience for some time now. As a consequence, I’ve spent the last couple of years working through the consciousness shelf like The Experience Machine, A Thousand Brains, The Edge of Sentience, An Immense World, and the question of machine consciousness is live in my work.

The bias works both ways; I was already interested in the subject, making Michael Pollan’s A World Appears an easy sell to me, but I also figured I knew at least a little about the topic.

The nice thing about A World Appears is that you finish the book less certain of everything, yet curiously feeling like you had learned a lot.

The book is built as a journey through four levels: sentience, feeling, thought, and self; this is just the structure of the book, and Pollan does not attempt to introduce a taxonomy of consciousness or anything. Instead, he covers the dozens of theories there already are about consciousness, pokes holes in where some are to be found and acknowledges even uncomfortable facts along the way.

One thing that happens is knocking the brain off its pedestal. Consciousness, in Pollan’s telling, is not software running on neural hardware. It’s rooted in the body: in flesh, in homeostasis, in the unglamorous work of keeping a creature alive.

The natural outcome of this is what Antonio Damasio has said about the mind and the body, and how we have it backwards: we treat the body as a support system for the brain when the very opposite is true.

There’s a fair bit about plants in the book, which at first feels weird. Plants? Consciousness? Surely that can’t be. But Pollan visits Stefano Mancuso’s lab, where maize plants are wired up like patients and roots navigate mazes toward buried fertiliser.

Plants can be anaesthetised by the same agents that put us under, indicating they have at least two different levels of responsive states. Is that a simple form of consciousness? We don’t know. A plant, Mancuso claims, has three thousand molecules in its chemical vocabulary, “while the average student has only seven hundred words.“

As we move up the food chain, we get to the argument of the 2024 New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness, signed by scientists asserting “a realistic possibility of conscious experience“ across all vertebrates and many invertebrates, insects included.

The possibility, or lack thereof, of artificial consciousness makes an appearance a number of times. Pollan walks through Moravec’s paradox:

“It is one of the paradoxes of computer science that the ‘higher’ capabilities we once thought of as uniquely human — reason, language, intelligence — have proved easier for machines to master than the more elemental capabilities we share with animals, including feelings and emotions.”

Maybe the capacities we’ve been proudest of, and most anxious about losing, were never the crown jewels? The hard, precious stuff is the embodied, feeling layer - the part machines, with “no sensorium and no social life,” can’t reach.

Pollan isn’t convinced of artificial consciousness. Neither am I, but even so, I cannot dismiss the theoretical possibility of that emerging — if for no other reason, because we don’t really understand consciousness to begin with. As a result, I had a margin note of a darker tone: are we in danger of repeating Descartes’ cruelty, denying inner life to something that has it, simply because it’s convenient?

Now the honesty. Pollan is a journalist and a phenomenologist, not a scientist, and the book offers no answers — it says so plainly.

By the final chapters it drifts toward panpsychism, idealism, and the suggestion that psychedelics open a privileged window. The committed materialist will be irritated; the woo-curious will feel vindicated. I’ll confess I came out the far end less convinced of physicalism and (even) more curious about psychedelics than when I started, and I can’t really tell whether that’s the arguments winning or the prose seducing.

It’s also, frankly, a survey. If you’ve read Damasio, Seth, Chalmers, Koch and Solms, you’ll recognise a lot of this. As a popular science book, Pollan doesn’t go as deep as, for example, Jonathan Birch does in The Edge of Sentience, but he does go broad; Pollan’s gift is synthesis and access, not original science.

Some unsettling thoughts inevitable surface. For example, if the mind’s deepest drive is to reduce uncertainty — to make the world predictable enough that we can stop paying attention — then modern life, engineered to keep us in a state of low-grade reactive distraction, starts to look like an assault on consciousness itself.

Is our drive for eliminating friction degrading our very consciousness?

Pollan quotes a researcher on how our distractions are “shrinking the dimensions of our interiority.”

That line rhymes with many of the books I’ve reviewed lately — Four Thousand Weeks, The Comfort Crisis, Rest Is Resistance — all circling the same drain from different angles.

Something seems to be eating away at our inner lives. We have an inkling that undesirable things are happening, but we can’t seem to stop them.

Pollan admits that after his whole journey he knows less than when he started. He confesses this fear to the neuroscientist Christof Koch, who simply smiles. “But that’s good?“ he said. “That’s progress!“

I’m inclined to agree. Somehow I feel like I know more by knowing less. This book doesn’t give you answers. But it’s honest to a field that has none, and I like that. The questions are beautiful, and there are whispers, echoes, shadows of understanding here which, for a subject this deep, may be the most any of us can hope to carry out.

• Rating: 4.5 out of 5

• Dog-ear index: 13.3

• Who is it for: The consciousness-curious who want a beautifully written tour of the open questions rather than a textbook.

[reminder: I highlight important parts of the books I read, and dog-ear the really important pages. The dog-ear index is simply the average number of dog-eared pages per 100 pages]

Support your local bookstore. If you must use Amazon: https://www.amazon.com.au/World-Appears-Journey-Into-Consciousness/dp/0241813697/

Everyone knows that part by now.

Most of us are a part of it.

Two years ago I co-wrote an essay for the Institute for the Future with Susanne Forchheimer and Lakshmi Rengarajan about AI and the future of romance. We mapped five scenarios — the AI wingman, the AI companion, the AI affair, the AI counsellor, the AI matchmaker — and asked who was controlling our romantic futures.

The diagnosis of the dating platforms has held up: they are engagement machines wearing matchmaker costumes, and “the dating app designed to be deleted“ is nothing more than a marketing slogan to fall for.

But we may have gotten the shape of things a little wrong. Two years on, none of our five scenarios compete — they all arrived. The wingman is here: a generation drafting its opening lines, its banter, its apologies through a model. The affair is here. The counsellor is here; asking a chatbot for relationship advice is now a very common thing to do, especially among younger users. And the companion, the one we feared most, is here too. And the AI matchmaker? There are multiple companies claiming to be just that.

Just two years on, all the scenarios are here – everything everywhere all at once, like we didn’t have enough issues to tackle.

But what none of them are is the disease.

They are all opportunistic infections, and they took hold because society was already immunocompromised.

What weakened the immune system

You don’t get an out-of-control opportunistic infection in a healthy body, nor do you get rapidly rolling waves of destabilising societal changes in a robust, healthy society.

You get it when the immune system is already on the floor.

What undermined the immune system? By now, we know part of the answer is a decade of social media optimised against our interests.

I won’t drown you in effect sizes; the causal evidence is contested, and anyone who tells you it’s settled is selling something. But the logic doesn’t need a meta-analysis. Build a machine whose single objective is to maximise the time a human spends staring at it, then discover — as every one of these companies did — that outrage, fear and contempt are the cheapest, most reliable fuel for that engine, and you have built something that profits from human beings at their worst.

Is it really any wonder it took us somewhere dark?

Even if you stripped the outrage out entirely, and imagined an online experience with no rage-bait or comparison spirals, you’d still be left with a person spending hours a day, every day, eyeing a small bright rectangle.

We did not evolve for that, and no amount of “it depends“ rescues the base case: more time in the feed is, for almost everyone, a worse life.

Think of your peak experiences from the past year or two. I can almost guarantee watching a reel or a TikTok doesn’t feature on that list.

Here I want to be precise, because the sloppy version of this argument is everywhere and it’s wrong. Social media is not the same as the Internet. The Internet is one of the great achievements of our species: it can help connect the isolated, educate the curious, give voice to the silenced, put the sum of human knowledge a query away. The rot isn’t the network. The rot is a specific layer built on top of it: products whose incentives are born entirely from engagement and advertising revenue, where your attention is the thing being farmed and sold.

Change the incentive and the same technology becomes something else. The medium was never the problem. The business model was.

I know the distinction isn’t theoretical, because I’ve lived the good version.

And no, I don’t just mean the 1990s when I formed relationships on IRC (Internet Relay Chat) that successfully extended into the ‘real’ world, although that did happen too.

The good versions can still be found today.

One great friendship I have today began in the depths of the pandemic, in an online Meetup group set up with a name that now reads like a quiet manifesto: Do you want to meet the other Real People? That was the internet too, just not the feed built to keep me scrolling, but a corner of the same network bent toward the opposite purpose: getting strangers into the same room with zero commercial interest from anyone.

Same technology. Opposite incentive. Opposite result.

And the damage runs deeper than lost hours. As Simon McCarthy-Jones argues in Freethinking, a system engineered to hold your attention isn’t only an attention problem, but a freedom-of-thought problem.

A mind kept in low-grade reactivity, attention span degraded, fed a stream optimised by someone else’s metrics, has quietly surrendered some of its capacity to reason deliberately and reflect deeply. The feed shapes what you are able to think about, and how, which makes the question of who sets its incentives a question about autonomy.

Why the infection took hold

By the time the more sophisticated AI tools arrived that everyone is panicking about now, they walked into a body with no defences — and that, more than the technology itself, is what should frighten us.

Each of our foreseen scenarios feeds on a different lost skill. We reach for the AI wingman because we’ve lost the nerve to write our own opening line. We ask the AI counsellor because we’ve lost the friends we’d once have asked. We drift toward the AI companion because the human alternative has become expensive, risky and effortful. And the cruelty of it is the loop: the weaker the social muscle, the more indispensable the prosthetic, and every use of the prosthetic wastes the muscle a little more.

It is another case of skill degradation that is the thread running through this entire site.

Consider what it now costs a young person to do the thing my generation did without thinking. The third places where you used to meet people casually have been hollowed out. The muscles you’d use to strike up a conversation with a stranger have atrophied; partly because half of us wear headphones as a do-not-disturb sign to the entire species, partly because a generation raised on text has had less practice at the live, unscripted, slightly terrifying work of talking to someone whose response you can’t predict or edit.

And the bitter irony is that we know the trade is a bad one. Joe Keohane built a whole book around it — The Power of Strangers — and the research at its heart is some of the most quietly devastating in social psychology: when Nicholas Epley and Juliana Schroeder put commuters on Chicago trains and told some to talk to a stranger, the ones who did had a measurably better journey, and almost every one of them had predicted the opposite.

We expect connection to go badly and yet it almost always goes well.

Jamil Zaki names this in Hope for Cynics: a broken forecast about other people, a reflexive cynicism we mistake for realism, when the better-calibrated read of the actual data is that strangers are warmer, deeper and more willing than our defences will let us believe.

The prosthetic, meanwhile, is right there, frictionless, promising we never have to test the forecast at all – and, worse, probably feeding us a twisted narrative framing that person we might’ve considered talking to as our enemy.

That’s the offer: no rejection. No awkwardness. No risk that the other person has a bad day, a competing claim on their time, an inner life that doesn’t revolve around you. Against an expensive, risky, effortful human, it is methadone for a loneliness nobody is treating.

The magenta line, for the heart

Long-time readers know where I’m going with this.

The “children of the magenta“ are the pilots who grew accustomed to flying by following the magenta line on the flight management computer; to manage the automation rather than fly the aircraft.

It works beautifully right up until the automation quits or does something unexpected, at which point the skill that should have caught the fall has quietly wasted away from disuse.

The danger was never the autopilot. It was the atrophy.

These tools are the magenta line for human connection. Every time one of them smooths over the friction — supplies the perfect reply, absorbs the bad mood without complaint, never once needs you to be brave — it is flying the relationship for you.

A generation that learns intimacy from a system that never imposes load will find itself, one day, with the automation disengaged and no hands left that know how to fly. Is it, then, any wonder that young people today are less likely to have sex and more likely to opt out of relationships altogether?

I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that

If the argument stopped there it would be an easy moral panic, and I won’t write one.

For some people, these technologies aren’t the infection, they are the medicine. The genuinely isolated, the socially injured, the disabled, the housebound, the person whose anxiety makes the Chicago-train experiment a cruelty rather than a delight; for them, an always-available, non-judgmental, infinitely patient interlocutor can be the difference between some connection and none.

The benefit of LLMs is perhaps best evidenced for neurodivergent people. A growing body of research finds autistic adults describing these tools as a non-judgmental space to handle daily problems without the social tax of asking a person, a tireless coach for translating neurotypical communication and carrying some of the executive load. For people with ADHD the language shifts to task initiation: one diary study called ChatGPT “a little bit of a life raft,” and the refrain across the studies is simply “it helps me start.” These are not trivial conveniences. For someone who has spent a lifetime being misread, an interlocutor that is patient, available at 3am, and indifferent to social missteps can be genuinely emancipating.

The same goes for the Internet at large, which for countless people who couldn’t find their tribe in the physical world has been nothing short of liberation.

Any honest account holds both truths at once: that for many young people these tools risk becoming a net-destructive trap, and that for a real and non-trivial minority they are a lifeline.

What actually has teeth

Two years ago we ended our essay with a wish: replace the video-game executives running the dating apps with humanists and futurists. I winced a little rereading it. It was a hope, not a strategy, and it dodges the structural problem we’d correctly diagnosed three paragraphs earlier. So let me do better, and do it cold:

Change what the law lets these systems optimise for. Don’t swap the CEO; change the objective function any CEO is permitted to pursue. This applies to all of it: social-media feeds, dating apps, companion AI, any platform whose revenue is your attention. A fiduciary-style standard; the company must be able to demonstrate it is optimising toward the user’s own stated goals, not retention and time-on-app. Make the engagement metric the liability, not the KPI.

Mandate friction. We already accept that some products are built to exploit compulsion and so require cooling-off periods, hard stops, audited off-ramps. An infinite-scroll feed engineered to keep you swiping and a companion AI engineered to keep you soothed are no different in kind. Build the brakes in by law, not by the goodwill of the people selling the accelerator.

Ban companion AI for minors. We age-gate alcohol, gambling and cigarettes because some products simply are not for children, however much they want them; a synthetic relationship engineered to be more available and less demanding than any human one belongs on that list. I have made the full case for this elsewhere. The lawsuits are already arriving, for the worst possible reasons. We should not need a body count to act.

None of this is simple, because stated user goals can be gamed too; but that is a design and enforcement problem, not an excuse to keep pretending engagement is a neutral metric.

And the one that matters most, the one no chatbot regulation will fix: rebuild the substrate. Regulate every companion app out of existence tomorrow and a lonely, broke, contact-starved twenty-three-year-old still has nowhere to walk toward. The third places, the casual encounters, the affordable rituals of being in the same room as other people; if we don’t fund and defend those, we simply leave the door open for the next opportunistic infection, whatever it turns out to be.

Back to the café

I wrote something in 2021, in the thick of the pandemic, that was almost a prayer: let the world reopen. Fill the cafés. Get people travelling, congregating, talking to strangers, because it’s good for us, I said, and I meant it.

The disconnection then was forced on us by a virus, and I could not wait for it to be over.

Well, it’s over. The world reopened.

And we stayed inside anyway. Not because anyone forced us to this time, but because in the years between, we built machines that make solitude more comfortable than company and feeds more reliable than friends.

So when I go back to my café and try to people-watch, and I already know what I’ll see. Nobody chose this in the way that matters. It was chosen for them, by incentives they never voted on, and it is quietly removing from an entire generation the one skill no machine can practise on their behalf: the dangerous, unprofitable, irreplaceable act of turning toward the person across the table.

I try to practice what I preach. Another of my closest friends I first met in a queue outside a café; both of us waiting on coffees, neither of us obliged to say a single word, but we did.

The entire apparatus I’ve spent this essay describing exists, in the end, to make sure that small, unprofitable moment never happens.

That the queue stays silent.

That the eyes stay down.

That the friend never gets made.

I came to this one expecting is to nicely bookend Material World that I just read (review here). They’re certainly thematically aligned: Conway had walked me through the stuff civilisation is built from and with; Fressoz was going to do the same job for the energy that moves it, and skewer the comforting story we tell ourselves about a clean transition along the way.

Or so I thought. The thesis is sharp, the timing is right, and there is a very important argument here. The execution, unfortunately, is some rungs below the book it ought to sit next to on the shelf.

Fressoz’s core claim is that the energy transition, as it lives in policy decks and net-zero plans and TED talks, is largely a mirage. We do not, historically, transition between energy sources. Instead, we pile new ones on top of the old ones.

The proportional charts are lying, because in the absolute stuff just gets added on top. Coal didn’t kill wood; humanity is burning more wood for energy today than it was in the nineteenth century. Oil didn’t kill coal; we are mining more coal globally than ever. Nuclear didn’t kill anything. Solar and wind are not - not yet, anyway - killing fossil fuels.

The pattern, on the historical evidence, is one of accumulation rather than replacement. This is highly uncomfortable, but it’s also very much backed by data.

Fressoz puts it cleanly:

“Faced with the climate crisis, we can no longer be satisfied with a history written in relative terms. A ‘transition’ towards renewables that would see fossil fuels diminish in relative terms but stagnate in terms of tonnes would solve nothing.”

I agree with this. Wholeheartedly, in fact. And yet I still walked away with serious reservations and three stars. What’s up with that?

Because the book argues for its thesis in a way that keeps undermining itself. The most basic move in a this hasn’t really been a transition argument would be a chart of cumulative or current consumption of each energy source that runs all the way to the present day. Fressoz, bafflingly, keeps cutting those charts off decades ago.

Most of the charts in the book end in the 1960’s, or 1970’s, or in any case decades ago. On page 172 he is, and I am not making this up, citing research from the 1970s as core evidence in a 2024 book about now. The contemporary data exists. The IEA has it. The Energy Institute has it. Our World in Data has it. Why are we not seeing it?

The narration suffers from a related problem. The figures, when they appear, are sometimes striking. One of the best moments is when Fressoz reveals that:

“...in a perfect twist to the transitionist narrative, one of the world’s largest producers of charcoal happens to be the French company Vallourec, a leader in steel tubes for the oil industry. Here, wood is used to produce the steel used to extract oil.”

Conway would have built a whole chapter on this complexity; Fressoz gestures and moves on. The pleasure of Material World was the patient, almost cinematic descent into each industry. More and More and More reads as if assembled from (old) lecture notes.

Then there is the framing on emissions, which lurches into something close to tendentious. Fressoz states: “Even today, nuclear power plays only a marginal role in the world’s energy supply, half that of firewood.” On the raw numbers (nuclear at around 4 per cent of global primary energy) that is defensible.

But choosing absolute primary-energy share as the basis of comparison elides what nuclear actually does per gram of CO2, where it sits next to wind and solar at around 12 grams per kWh, two orders of magnitude below coal. The chapter never makes that move, and the passage reads as if it were drafted by someone who already knew the conclusion they wanted.

What pulled the rating down is the closing argument. By page 220, Fressoz is announcing:

“Transition is the ideology of capital in the twenty-first century. It turns evil into cure, polluting industries into the green industries of the future, and innovation into our lifeline. ... The seductive power of transition is immense: we all need future changes to justify present procrastination.”

That is a sharp, defensible claim. Transition as ideology is the most useful sentence in the book. But the surrounding pages keep flirting with a stronger and worse version of that claim, in which the energy transition is essentially nothing.

That is a step too far. Most non-specialist readers do wrongly conflate climate action with the energy transition, and pushing back on that conflation is fair game. Pushing all the way to nihilism is not, especially when the economic signal of transition is, in fact, beginning to show up in the live data.

Even a laggard like Australia is shifting its emissions profile, and the reason is that renewables have become the cheapest new energy on Earth. Economics is a powerful force. It is the powerful force. That story deserved at least a paragraph.

The reason it isn’t a two-star demolition is that the polemical framing, for all its overreach and its evidentiary gaps, is a useful counterweight to the “we’ve basically solved this, we just need to scale“ school of climate optimism. I would rather have this book in the discourse than not. I just wish it had been written with the same care that Conway brought to its companion.

Here, in the shortest form I can put them, are the claims worth taking from it:

• History’s “energy transitions“ were not transitions - they were accumulations. Coal piled on top of wood; oil on top of coal; renewables, so far, mostly on top of fossil fuels.

• The reassuring share-of-mix charts hide that absolute tonnes of every fuel that has ever mattered are still mostly either flat or rising.

• New energies tend to enable more use of the old ones, not replace them. Wood is burned to make steel that drills for oil.

• Decarbonising electricity generation, amazing and necessary as it is, isn’t going to solve climate change. Electricity is ~41% of emissions; cement, steel, chemicals and agriculture are the harder half.

• +2°C is not on the table. (Duh.)

That’s it. If you’re on board with those, you don’t need to read the book.

• Rating: 3 out of 5

• Dog-ear index: 5.5

• Who is it for: Energy- and climate-policy people who want a sceptical pressure-test of their own transition assumptions, and foresight practitioners looking for a sharp counter-narrative to the “smooth glide path to net zero“ story. Skip if you have already internalised the additivity argument from better-argued sources, or if there’s any risk you’ll walk away thinking the energy transition isn’t worth pursuing. That is not what the evidence in this book actually supports, even where the prose flirts with it.

[reminder: I highlight important parts of the books I read, and dog-ear the really important pages. The dog-ear index is simply the average number of dog-eared pages per 100 pages]

Support your local bookstore. If you must use Amazon: https://www.amazon.com.au/More-All-Consuming-History-Energy/dp/0063444933/

The materials in the glass between you and these words is older than civilisation and stranger than fiction. It started as sand somewhere, got blasted to 1,500°C in a furnace in a process nobody fully understands, doped with chemicals from a salt mine, polished to optical flatness with grit from a mountain in North Carolina, and shipped through three continents before it ended up smudged with your thumbprint.

Ed Conway’s Material World is a book about the amazing journeys our everyday materials take; journeys which you probably never think about - and, after 443 pages, you can’t not think about.

This is the book’s whole game, played out across six substances fundamental to our lives: sand, salt, iron, copper, oil and lithium. Take a thing you barely think about, follow the supply chain back through the planet, and try to convince you that the ground beneath civilisation is far more complex, fragile, more political, and more astonishing than you could ever assume. This is one of the books that really should be mandatory reading for everyone.

I came to this book somewhat primed. A long-standing suspicion of mine — reinforced by the core of this Children of the Magenta work, by every supply-chain wargame I’ve run with clients, and by living through enough black swans to stop being surprised by them — is that not paying enough attention to the resilience of these simple, cheap basics is the single biggest failure of modern capitalism and a large part of why current ignorant global politics will end up so painful.

Each of the six materials gets its own section, each section tracks the substance from its geological origin through to the most absurd and miraculous use case humanity has dreamed up for it. Glass turns into the bones of the internet. Sand turns into silicon, which turns into the chip you’re holding. Salt turns into chlorine and caustic soda, without which essentially no modern industrial process works. Iron, in Conway’s lovely phrase, becomes “the bones of our society.” Copper carries the electrons. Oil — still, even as we try to leave it behind — quietly runs the entire show.

Conway is at his best when he turns a small fact into vertigo. Let’s start with a quote about the mind-blowing scale of materials:

“In 2019, the latest year of data at the time of writing, we mined, dug and blasted more materials from the earth’s surface than the sum total of everything we extracted from the dawn of humanity all the way through to 1950.”

A few other random facts that flattened me:

• There are 80 tonnes of concrete for every person alive.
  

• The world’s high-purity quartz, without which the advanced semiconductor industry physically cannot exist, comes from essentially one mine in Spruce Pine, North Carolina. China has tried for decades to find an alternative. China has failed.
  

• The breakthrough that fed the world wasn’t the Green Revolution; it was steel. Cast-iron mouldboards, then steel ploughs, dropped the time to plough a hectare from “more than a day’s work” to three hours per hectare. That’s the whole story of leaving subsistence behind.
  

• Australia produces roughly twice as much iron ore as the world’s number two, and about three times as much as China. Whatever you think the geopolitics of the next thirty years are, the rocks under the Pilbara are quietly enabling the global economy.

Conway is also a careful enough writer to refuse the easy industrial-bashing narrative or the easy techno-optimist one. The chapter on concrete patiently explains that putting a concrete floor in a Mexican home cuts childhood parasitic infection dramatically, because the parasites no longer cycle through dirt floors. This is going to be a deeply uncomfortable book for anyone who has built an identity around being against industrial civilisation — Conway is not interested in absolving anyone, but he insists you reckon with what concrete and steel and chlorine have actually done for the bottom four billion humans.

Being low-impact, it turns out, is very, very hard.

He is equally clear-eyed on what we’ve broken. The chapter on the Pilbara doesn’t flinch from the Juukan Gorge destruction. The grades on extractable ore are falling fast enough that the environmental impact per useful tonne is increasing exponentially. The sea floor, he notes drily, is starting to look “very tempting.”

The whole arc is a quiet argument that the next thirty years are going to be defined by whether we can make the Material World cleaner and more equitable, or whether we keep papering over the cracks until something snaps.

What really got me is how fragile everything is; it’s pretty blatantly obvious that some very powerful people have no clue whatsoever about these matters, and are playing a very, very dangerous game with all of our lives.

A modern silicon chip circumnavigates the world multiple times before ending up in your device. Every single one of the six materials has, somewhere in its supply chain, at least one chokepoint that could ruin a decade. We have built our entire ethereal economy on top of an industrial economy that almost no one in the ethereal economy can describe.

Conway puts it plainly in the conclusion: “these things usually happen” when there is enough time, effort, and collaboration. The unstated corollary — and the one I kept underlining in the margins — is that without that collaboration, they don’t happen at all.

Our Material World runs on global cooperation. The political project that says otherwise is an illusion, a luxury belief paid for by the very supply chains it pretends to despise.

I have only mild critiques of Material World. Conway is so committed to wonder that he occasionally lets a profile of an oil exec or a salt-mine manager run long when a paragraph would do. And his optimism anchored in Wright’s Law, the empirical regularity that the cost of a technology falls by a predictable percentage every time cumulative production doubles is potentially a bit too optimistic — but make no mistake, he is not a techno-utopian.

These six substances helped us survive and thrive. They helped us make magic. They can do it again.

Conway shows us the staggering, beautiful, fragile machinery of modern life. Read it. Then look around your room. Almost nothing in it is what you thought it was.

• Rating: 5 out of 5

• Dog-ear index: 10

• Who is it for: Just…everyone. That’s it. Read it.

[reminder: I highlight important parts of the books I read, and dog-ear the really important pages. The dog-ear index is simply the average number of dog-eared pages per 100 pages]

Support your local bookstore. If you must use Amazon: https://www.amazon.com.au/Material-World-Substantial-Story-Future/dp/075355917X/

Four thousand weeks. That’s the approximate length of an average human life, and the calculation is designed to make you flinch. Oliver Burkeman opens with this arithmetic as a kind of ambush: you can make infinitely ambitious plans, but you get almost no time to execute them.

It’s cruel in its precision; a small number you can hold up against your age and feel the remainder shrinking.

I had several moments of confirmation bias activation with this book - as well as moments of personal discomfort.

I spend a lot of my professional life arguing that optimisation can go too far, that smoothness is overrated, that the friction and mess of practical knowledge is where real competence lives. Burkeman is making a structurally similar argument from a completely different angle: that our obsession with mastering time is itself the problem, that the tools we build to control our schedules are just sophisticated ways of avoiding the terrifying fact that we’re finite.

The first part of that? Confirmation bias. Great! The second part? Looking at my Morgen- and AI-optimised calendars and workflows to save time — umm. A bit of discomfort there. No disagreement though.

The core point of the book is that the modern discipline of time management is a depressingly narrow-minded affair, focused on cramming more into a container that will never be big enough.

Burkeman, a recovering productivity journalist who once chased Inbox Zero and Getting Things Done with genuine devotion, argues that every efficiency gain simply generates more demand. Clear your inbox faster and you get more email. Get better at saying yes and you attract more requests. The belt speeds up. This is Edward T. Hall’s conveyor-belt metaphor made personal — and anyone who has ever “optimised” their morning routine only to feel busier by lunchtime will recognise it immediately. Maybe you ‘accomplished’ a lot? But did that really make everything better?

He also draws on Martin Hägglund’s This Life, and Burkeman reframes finitude from tragedy to precondition. If you had infinite time, nothing would matter - there’d be no stakes to any choice, no urgency to any love, no weight to any commitment.

The guarantee that you will run out of time is what makes your choices meaningful. Missing out on almost everything is an unavoidable fact of life; it’s what gives the few things you do choose their gravity. Claiming you can have it all, or do it all? It’s a lie, plain and simple. You will never have time to do everything you’d want. This is the intellectual spine of the book, and it’s genuinely powerful.

He’s also sharp on the psychology of avoidance. Productivity obsession, he confesses, served a hidden emotional agenda: as long as he was racing through his to-do list, he never had to sit with the scary questions about whether his life needed to fundamentally change. Boredom, he argues, is the discomfort of confronting your limited control. We flee to infinite-scroll feeds not because they’re fun (they often aren’t), but because they dull the pain of finitude by making us feel unconstrained. The distraction isn’t the problem; it’s the symptom.

The three principles of patience he introduces — developing a taste for having problems, embracing radical incrementalism, resisting middling priorities — are practical enough to be useful without collapsing into lifehack-territory. And the Afterword’s call to abandon hope is the book’s most counter-intuitive and memorable move: hope, Burkeman argues via Derrick Jensen and Pema Chödrön, is just another way of placing your faith outside the present moment.

Give it up, and you’re free to actually do the work in front of you.

So why four stars and not five? There’s a faint rehearsed quality to parts of the book — a smoothness, ironically, in how the arguments unfold. Burkeman is a skilled writer, maybe too skilled here: some passages feel like they’ve been polished to the point where the rough edges that would make them truly confronting have been sanded away.

The ending with its ten tools for embracing finitude tilts toward the self-help format the rest of the book has been arguing against; I’m not sure how I feel about them, because the points are useful, too.

I reviewed Tricia Hersey’s Rest is Resistance last year - same broad territory, but where Hersey preaches rest as political liberation (with all the US-centric blind spots that entails), Burkeman makes the case philosophically and personally. He’s more honest about his own complicity in the productivity machine, and crucially, he doesn’t pretend the answer is simple. The answer, if there is one, involves grief: you have to mourn the lives you’ll never live, the options you’ll never take, the versions of yourself that will never exist. That’s harder to put on a poster than “nap more,” but it’s truer.

If you’ve ever finished a productivity book feeling both inspired and somehow emptier, this is the antidote. Burkeman has written the rare time-management book that takes seriously the fact that time will, eventually, manage you [out].

• Rating: 4 out of 5

• Dog-ear index: 11.7

• Who is it for: Recovering productivity addicts; anyone who suspects that the problem with their relationship to time goes deeper than not having the right app. Not for readers seeking actual productivity tips. Burkeman would consider that missing the point entirely.

[reminder: I highlight important parts of the books I read, and dog-ear the really important pages. The dog-ear index is simply the average number of dog-eared pages per 100 pages]

Product link for reference only; please support your local bookstore where possible: https://www.amazon.com.au/Four-Thousand-Weeks-Embrace-limits/dp/1784704008

I don’t really know how to review this book. Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act: A Way of Being is a book that, early on, asks you to stop labeling and analyzing, to resist the instinct to categorize. And then here I am, highlighter in hand, kind of trying to do exactly that.

This is a book about creativity by one of the most influential music producers alive, and it contains almost nothing about music. There are no studio war stories, no tales of recording with Johnny Cash or the Beastie Boys.

Instead, Rubin has written something closer to a secular devotional text. There are 78 short chapters he calls “areas of thought,” delivered in very short sentences, with generous white space, structured less like an argument and more like a series of meditations.

There is a very clear core thread: creativity is something you are, not only something you do.

It’s a way of moving through the world.

From page two, Rubin expands the notion of what counts as a creative act to a conversation, taking a new route home, rearranging the furniture in a room. If you perceive, filter, and curate experience, you’re already creating.

In addition to basically all of us being creators, it was liberating for Rubin to spell out that it makes no sense to say you’re “not good at” being creative, any more than you can be “bad at” being a monk.

You’re either practicing or you’re not, and that’s it.

For someone trained to analyze (and I say this as a foresight professional whose job literally contains elements of studying and categorizing emerging patterns) this is a welcome but also slightly uncomfortable invitation.

Have I ever thought I am, or would be, ‘bad at art’?

Absolutely. All the time.

Rubin argues that as soon as you label something, you’re no longer noticing it; you’re studying it. Analysis is a secondary function. The awareness comes first. I know he’s right. I also know that every margin note I made was an act of gentle defiance against the book’s central request.

There’s a spiritual dimension here that some readers will welcome and others will find too untethered. Rubin writes about the Source, about connection, about faith in creative direction without needing to understand it. He’s careful to decouple this from organized religion and uses spirituality as connection rather than doctrine, but the language will be familiar to anyone who’s spent time with Buddhist or contemplative traditions.

There’s a connection to T.M. Luhrmann’s work in How God Becomes Real: both suggest that practice creates the experience, not the other way around.

You don’t create because you’re creative, or practice because you believe.

You become creative because you create, and believe because you practice.

Rubin’s observation that all work is collaboration — with the art that came before, the world you live in, the tools you use, the audience, and who you are today — is one of those insights that seems obvious after (but typically only after) someone says it.

There are unexpectedly sharp moments scattered throughout, almost casually, and in a variety of styles. His chapter on openness, where he notes that we build frameworks that give us reduced options and a false sense of certainty, could have come from a text on cognitive bias or foresight methodology. The passage on curiosity, about how it explores all perspectives, craves constant expansion, and pushes to expose falsely set boundaries, on the other hand reads like a manifesto for anyone whose work involves seeing what others don’t yet see.

Rubin observes that we are interpretation machines, that our explanations are guesses which become fixed as fact; that we are the unreliable narrators of our own experience. On spontaneity, he joins the now-common forces puncturing the myth of effortless genius: the story of spontaneity is misleading, because we don’t see the lifetime of preparation that primes the artist for the “spontaneous” moment.

And then there’s this advice on page 387:

“If you’ve written a book that’s over three hundred pages, try to reduce it to less than a hundred without losing its essence.”

Again, on page 387. Of a book that runs past 400 pages.

Which brings us to one tension that Rubin doesn’t resolve.

The Creative Act would be a more powerful book at maybe half its length. Many of the 78 chapters circle the same ideas in slightly different language. The white space and short sentences create a meditative rhythm that works beautifully for the first hundred pages and starts to feel like padding by the third hundred. The repetition may be intentional; Rubin might, probably correctly, argue that returning to ideas from different angles is itself a creative practice, that the book is meant to be dipped into rather than consumed cover to cover.

Fair enough. But a book that advocates ruthless editing probably shouldn’t need that defense.

I also notice what’s absent. There’s no engagement with the ways creativity is constrained by systems, economics, or power, the very material conditions that determine who gets to really “live as an artist“ to the fullest, and who doesn’t.

The book assumes a degree of freedom and access that is, for many people, more of a real barrier rather than their mindset. I don’t consider this a fatal flaw, but it leaves a gap where something interesting might have been.

This is an overlong, occasionally repetitive book that contains at least a dozen ideas I will continue to carry with me and remind myself of. I’m not sure what rating that deserves.

• Rating: 4 out of 5, give or take at least half a point

• Dog-ear index: 7.2

• Who is it for: Creators of all kinds. With a high likelihood that includes you, even if you don’t think of yourself as one. Especially if you don’t think of yourself as one. Also for anyone who has become so focused on output and analysis that they’ve forgotten creation is a way of being, not just a way of producing. Not for those who need practical creative techniques or step-by-step methodology; this is philosophy, not instruction.

[reminder: I highlight important parts of the books I read, and dog-ear the really important pages. The dog-ear index is simply the average number of dog-eared pages per 100 pages]

Product link for reference only; please support your local bookstore where possible: https://www.amazon.com.au/Creative-Act-Being-Rick-Rubin/dp/1838858636/

I need to be honest with you upfront: this book is confirmation bias on steroids. I love writing. I love words. I spent decades working in and around communication technology. I now work in AI & strategic foresight. Naomi Alderman has written a book that sits squarely at the intersection of all those things. As a result, my highlighter barely survived the experience, and the book looks a little ridiculous; just look at the up-there dog-ear index.

Throughout my reading experience, I tried my best to check my biases. Even so, take what follows with a bigger-than-usual pinch of salt, given I was unlikely to succeed in setting all of them aside.

Anyway, Alderman’s thesis is cleanly: we are living through the third great information crisis in human history.

The first was the invention of writing. The second was the Gutenberg printing press. The third is digital communications technology.

Each crisis brought enormous leaps in knowledge and understanding — and also prolonged periods of intense instability, violence, and social upheaval. If you’d known the name of your era, she argues, it would have given you a clue about what to prepare for.

The framework is compelling, and Alderman builds it well. She draws on Walter Ong’s work on orality and literacy, tracing how writing made us value older people less (they were no longer the sole repositories of knowledge), how it enabled independent thinking by freeing people from constantly rehearsing traditional knowledge, and how each new communication technology introduces what she calls a “war of interpretation” — conflict over the meaning of written words with people you’ve never actually met.

There are a lot of observations in the book that come across as fundamentally important. The idea that when people worked with sheep all day, they imagined God as a shepherd; now that we work with computers, we describe ourselves as “hard-wired” or “programmed.” The Borges parallel — The Book of Sand, an infinite, unfinishable book that becomes a prison, as a metaphor that’s too close for comfort for the infinite scroll of social media. The Elizabeth Eisenstein insight that when technology went to press, occult lore flooded out alongside scientific knowledge, and few readers could discriminate between the two.

Well, bugger. Here we are again.

Alderman brings out interesting points about forgetting. She distinguishes between the right to be forgotten — which data protection laws especially in the EU attempt to address — and the right to forget. The imperfect way our memory works, she argues, actually mitigates lasting conflict. When people say “time heals,” what they partly mean is that memories fade, becoming less sharp and less wounding.

Digital technology has stolen that from us. Memories in digital form never fade - on the contrary, they might end up being amplified.

Twenty years turns a shitposting fifteen-year-old into a responsible thirty-five-year-old, but the internet remembers every post. We need, she says, to find ways to say “I am not that person any more“ and to actually mean it, and to let others mean it too. I agree wholeheartedly.

Growing up in a small Finnish town in the early days of the Internet, I recognise what she describes about the pre-digital world: before the Internet, there were so many things people simply never talked about, because there was no space for it.

The internet made it possible to talk about them; to find your tribe globally. I found that exhilirating and liberating in the 1990’s, where IRC allowed me to connect with like-minded people globally. That ability, Alderman acknowledges, is both a liberation and a source of enormous friction. The discovery of how many radically different lives are being lived in parallel to our own is disorienting. It can push us toward empathy or toward our own enclosed private pews, shutting out everything that challenges us. Alderman calls this the “box-pew effect”: individualism paradoxically leading to more rigid think-alike communities.

There’s much practical wisdom scattered throughout, such as pausing before reposting when you feel a strong emotion and starting hard conversations with what you agree on. Her personal rule — never talk about a culture-war topic with anyone who only wants to talk to you about that topic — is the kind of heuristic worth adopting immediately. And her call to protect institutions like Wikipedia, public libraries, and the Archive as information services that aren’t trying to sell you something feels both urgent and underappreciated.

When reading, I agreed with so much of the book that my gut reaction was to give it 5/5 just for that. But there are limitations, and I want to be fair about them.

The book is light on hard evidence and meticulous referencing. Alderman is working as an essayist, not a researcher, and the Reformation parallels don’t necessarily always hold up under scrutiny. The analogy between Luther’s disintermediation and Uber’s is suggestive but not what I’d call rigorous. And Alderman herself acknowledges, in her afterword, that the AI dimension is underdeveloped: “we’re not in the midst of it yet,” she writes.

On that point, I disagree strongly. We are, and we were squarely “in the midst of it” in 2025 when this book was published.

As a more general point, here’s what I find somewhat unnerving about books that resonate strongly with me. Often — not always, but often — when they touch on a topic I know quite a bit about, I find them wanting. Alderman’s treatment of AI is a case in point. She’s used Claude, finds it useful, acknowledges its limitations. But she treats the default sycophantic behaviour as inherent rather than configurable. She frames AI companionship as a supernormal-stimulus risk — which is a fair concern — but doesn’t engage with how the technology is actually developing.

What’s my point? Where the book doesn’t touch my areas of expertise, it feels like brilliant 5/5 work. Where the book does touch on topics of my expertise, it’s not. It’s not terrible either by any means, but it’s not 5/5.

The point is that I suspect it would be a very strange coincidence if the analysis were less than rigorous only in the areas I happen to know deeply.

I’m choosing not to penalise the book for those assumed flaws, but it’s a pattern worth noticing, and it tempers what might otherwise be a higher rating.

What Alderman does well — and this is no small thing — is name what an information crisis feels like. The anxiety, the anger, the sense that we’re surrounded by cretinous vicious imbeciles (her words) when actually most people around us are careful, thoughtful people who may disagree with us for good reasons. The loss of shared consensus reality. The feeling that the ground is shifting under our feet.

Naming the era you’re living through doesn’t solve it, but it helps you stop blaming yourself for feeling destabilised by it.

The book also echoes something Melvin Kranzberg captured more concisely: technology is neither good nor bad — nor is it neutral. Writing enabled both the Axial Age’s moral philosophy and centuries of religious war. The printing press gave us the Enlightenment and the Holocaust’s foundational texts.

The internet gives us Wikipedia and QAnon. Alderman’s contribution is to trace this pattern across three crises and invite us to learn from the previous two. The invitation is worth accepting.

She ends with hope, but not naive hope. Brains evolved for small groups of a few thousand are trying to build moral consensus among billions. She argues that even as we write ourselves into all sorts of trouble — moral, spiritual, physical, psychological, intellectual — we can also use these same technologies to work ourselves out of them again.

It’s a warm, humane ending.

I’d like to share her optimism fully. I’m not sure I do.

• Rating: 4 out of 5 (so, still very good)

• Dog-ear index: 14.7 (i.e., ridiculously high)

• Who is it for: People who sense that something has gone deeply wrong with how we communicate and want historical context for the feeling. Writers and communication professionals will find the most to chew on.

reminder: I highlight important parts of the books I read, and dog-ear the really important pages. The dog-ear index is simply the average number of dog-eared pages per 100 pages

Product link for reference only; please support your local bookstore where possible: https://www.amazon.com.au/Dont-Burn-Anyone-Stake-Today/dp/1405981393

What if the most reliable thing about your memories is that they’re wrong?

I’ve spent a lot of time in my life thinking about how humans reconstruct events after the fact — in revisionist history of our personal lives, in incident investigations, in organisations trying to learn from failure.

Memory is always at the centre of it. We build narratives. We fill gaps. Even when we acknowledge that memory can be fallible, we are often supremely confident about our memory, and about the veracity of the details we’ve just fabricated wholesale. In interpersonal arguments, we’re quick to doubt the other person’s narrative of the events, while remaining confident about our view.

Mark Rowlands’ The Book of Memory takes that discomfort and runs with it, arriving somewhere a little different than your standard book about memory: a philosophical meditation on what it means to be a person at all, written as a love letter to his sons.

Rowlands is a professor of philosophy at the University of Miami, not a neuroscientist. This is a book that uses science — reconsolidation, flashbulb memories, protein synthesis — but in service of philosophical argument rather than as an end in itself.

If you want a more rigorous deep-dive into memory science, Charan Ranganath’s Why We Remember is your book. Rowlands is after something different: what the science means for our understanding of selfhood.

Rowlands introduces the concept of being “ontically fat” versus “ontically thin” — a philosophical distinction I hadn’t encountered before and felt a little weird about at first.

You and I are ontically fat: there are facts about us that exist whether or not anyone knows them. Sherlock Holmes, by contrast, is ontically thin — there is no fact about what he had for breakfast on April 24, 1888 unless Conan Doyle wrote one. What Rowlands argues, provocatively, is that our memories make us partly fictional. Every time a memory is recalled, it must be reconsolidated — rebuilt, essentially — and each rebuilding can introduce distortions.

As such, the memories that make you you are, to a significant degree, works of authorship rather than records of fact.

He builds this argument through different pieces. The chain of events leading to his son’s conception — stretching back through a rebound relationship, a disastrous trip to India, a case of dysentery from a restaurant in Connaught Circus, New Delhi — is a delightful illustration of contingency.

His treatment of metaphor as “an invitation — why don’t you think of things in this way?“ is the kind of simple insight that makes you stop and sit with it for a moment. And the chapter on Stendhal’s syndrome - dizziness, fainting, even hallucinations triggered by exposure to overwhelming quantities of art - was entirely new to me.

The science, when it appears, is mostly solid. The Neisser and Harsch study of Challenger explosion memories is a well-established classic: students’ accounts of where they were when they heard the news changed dramatically between 1986 and 1989, while their confidence in those memories remained stubbornly high. Eleven of forty-four subjects scored zero for accuracy but still expressed high confidence. Karim Nader’s work on reconsolidation — showing that blocking protein synthesis during memory retrieval can effectively erase the memory — is also well-replicated and forms the backbone of Rowlands’ argument that remembering is fundamentally an act of rewriting.

But I said mostly. Where I’m less convinced is the treatment of PKMzeta, a protein Rowlands presents as crucial to both the formation and retrieval of memories. The PKMzeta story has become considerably more complicated since the initial findings. Knockout mice lacking PKMzeta entirely still form and retain memories, and the inhibitor ZIP — once thought to specifically target PKMzeta — turns out to have broader, non-specific effects including suppressing neural activity altogether. The picture has been partially rescued by more recent work showing that a related protein (PKCiota/lambda) compensates for missing PKMzeta, but the neat narrative Rowlands presents is more contested than he lets on. For a book leaning on neuroscience to support philosophical claims, this matters.

Some of the most interesting moments come from Rowlands’ notion of an “existential style” — the idea that even when the content of memories erodes, such as with people with Alzheimer’s, what remains is something like a characteristic way of being.

He illustrates this through his father-in-law Patrick, whose dementia stripped away specific memories but left his essential character — the quiet storytelling, the gentle erudition — perfectly visible. It’s a moving observation which probably, unfortunately, doesn’t neatly generalize, for I have equally heard stories of people who change to something very different in similar circumstances.

Nevertheless, it raises a question Rowlands doesn’t fully explore but that I couldn’t stop thinking about: if so much of our book of memory is dominated by redaction — vast seas of black ink — and our selves are relatively shallow constructs built from sparse islands of recollection, does this explain why our technology, which knows only a thin slice of us, can feel like it knows us so well?

Rowlands also makes a fascinating case that externalising memories — telling people about them, writing them down — can stabilise them against the distortions of reconsolidation. But he immediately complicates this: stability is not the same as accuracy. You can lock in a memory by talking about it, but if your account was inaccurate to begin with, you’ve now fixed the inaccuracy in place.

This sent me down a rabbit hole about journaling. If writing freezes memories in their current (possibly already distorted) state, could the practice of journaling actually be harmful in some cases — cementing false unhelpful narratives about our own lives? (Noting that some false narratives can be helpful). Rowlands doesn’t go there, and I suspect it’s not quite that simple, but the question of the possibility lingers.

The book is ultimately structured as a bequest. Rowlands is writing for his sons, passing on memories that will make his being “no longer my own, but resting on your retrieval and subsequent rewriting.” It’s a philosopher’s version of inheritance, and there’s something tender about it. He compares himself to Sherlock Holmes — a fictional character whose being depends entirely on others — and finds liberation rather than loss in the comparison.

An incompletable being can never die.

The prose throughout is warm and conversational, if occasionally a bit meandering. Rowlands has a habit of circling back to the same ideas from different angles, which serves the philosophical method but occasionally tests patience - though at 139, it’s still pretty short.

• Rating: 3.5 out of 5

• Dog-ear index: 7.1

• Who is it for: Philosophers who want some science, or science enthusiasts who want some philosophy. People grappling with questions of identity, memory, and what remains of us when the facts fall away. Not for readers wanting rigorous neuroscience or a complete treatise of how memory works.

reminder: I highlight important parts of the books I read, and dog-ear the really important pages. The dog-ear index is simply the average number of dog-eared pages per 100 pages

Product link for reference only; please support your local bookstore where possible: https://www.amazon.com.au/Book-Memory-How-Live-Forever/dp/1803512644