Weeknote, Sunday 5th November
Time passes. The highlight of this week was at the Royal Festival Hall on Monday, when we drove into London (more on that in a moment) to see Brian Eno and the Baltic Sea Philharmonic perform Eno’s album The Ship along with a handful of other songs.
It was of course brilliant, and incredibly moving. One of the additional songs that they performed was Bone Bomb from 2005’s Another Day on Earth, which is song rooted in the testimonies of two people; a teenage girl Palestinian suicide bomber; and an Israeli doctor who talked about how he had learned to pull fragments of the bones of suicide bombers from the bodies of their victims. It was incredibly affecting: I cried.
Eno is one of the artistic anchor points of my life. I first ran into his work in the early 80’s, when in my teens I bought a second hand copy of Another Green World and instantly knew that I wanted to be able to make art like that. I never quite succeeded in that aim – whatever my writing is, it’s not like Eno’s!. But he’s always been an inspiration in the way that he has had the fearlessness to do what he wanted to do without worrying too much about either immediate ability or the artificial boundaries which people set between the different creative domains.
Once a year, I reread his A Year with Swollen Appendices, which I think should be on the required reading list for any course in any creative field. No matter what you do creatively, you will get something out of it. You might not like Eno more at the end of it, but I think that’s actually to Eno’s credit.
As I mentioned, we drove rather than getting the train. Environmentally of course that is a poor decision. But it’s also literally half the price of travelling when there are two people, even including the parking and ULEZ charge. We drive to Woolwich and get the Elizabeth line from there; the fuel costs about £10, compared to about £80 for two people to get the train. I remember reading that the line to Canterbury is, per mile, the most expensive passenger railway in the world, and I can believe it.
However, this journey turned into a rather more expensive one, because on the way back we blew a tyre on the M2 and had to call recovery to pick us and the car up. Unfortunately our coverage had also run out, which meant that the total cost of recovery was just north of £200. Plus, of course, the tyre needed replacing (another £80). The God of Nature got their revenge.
A couple of weeks I started a Substack. I wanted to create a series of posts which look at how technology is impacting on publishing, and I have started with a focus on how the main sources of traffic for publishers – Google, Facebook – are going to fade in importance over the next few years as they begin to keep more people on their own pages and produce more immediate answers to queries using large language models (LLMs, which I am trying to not call AI – because while they are definitely artificial, they are not intelligent).
I think the audience development community of which I was (am?) a part is, at least publicly, in a bit of denial about this. The reaction to the article on The Verge about SEO’s impact on the web was a good demonstration of this: a lot of SEO people were very defensive about it, which is never a good look (if you’re confident about your work, you don’t get prickly when someone doesn’t understand what you do). I think I’m going to write something about that this week.
Some people have asked about Substack and why I’m using it. The answer is mostly that it’s much easier to get an audience there than it is to create a standalone newsletter. Substack does part of the work of promoting it for you, and it does work. That said, I also understand that some people have an ethical (and practical) objection to using a platform like Substack, so I’m going to create an alternative way of signing up this week somewhere else (probably Buttondown). It means more work for me of course, but that’s fine: and it also gives me a backup for when Substack inevitably starts to enshittify (which will be the moment you’re no longer able to export your subscriber list to move to another service).
Three things that caught my attention this week
- I feel like I end up recommending whatever Cory has written every week, but this week’s article on big tech’s “attention rents” really did knock it out of the park.
- The Guardian’s interview with Naomi Alderman was also brilliant. But that’s because Naomi is brilliant. We have only met once, but I have absolutely admired her ever since. Amongst the many clever and warm-hearted people I know, she’s pretty much top of the list.
- It’s been interesting to see how little reaction there has been to Sam Bankman-Fried’s inevitable guilty verdict from the Silicon Valley rich dude posse, but it makes sense: they want to portray him as simply a fraudster who got caught. The trouble is, he’s one of their creations who got caught.
Importing Apple Notes into Obsidian is now easy
Apple Notes doesn’t have an export option. Instead, as Obsidian’s blog post on the Importer plugin update explains, it stores your notes in a local SQLite database. The format isn’t documented, but the developers of the plugin were able to reverse-engineer it to allow users to move notes and their attachments out of Notes and into two folders: one with Markdown versions of your notes and the other with the files attached to your notes. The folder with your notes includes subfolders that match any folders you set up in Notes, too.
This is just outstanding work from the Obsidian team. There are a couple of limitations, mostly that it can’t import password protected notes (obviously), but I’ve tested it and it worked well.
Related: undocumented SQLite databases should not be the way that a multi-gazillion dollar corporation is storing valuable data.
Who would have thought Amazon would behave like this?
Amazon deliberately deleted messages to hide dodgy business practices:
The FTC also alleges that Amazon tried to impede its investigation into the company’s business practices. “Amazon executives systematically and intentionally deleted internal communications using the ‘disappearing message’ feature of the Signal messaging app. Amazon prejudicially destroyed more than two years’ worth of such communications—from June 2019 to at least early 2022—despite Plaintiffs’ instructing Amazon not to do so.”
And the answer to the headline is, of course, “anyone that’s been paying attention.
AI content: Publishers' next burning platform moment
LLMs remove a key competitive advantage of publishers. You need to find a new one.
It still surprises me that I’m old enough to have been part of the transition from print publishing to digital, but what surprises me more is that publishers are again making some of the same mistakes they made in that early internet era. But this time, it’s about the use of large language models to generate content, and it’s even being made by digital natives.
A little bit of history is probably useful here. Back in the mid to late 1990s, many publishers saw online content in terms of its ability to reduce their costs. Paper, printing and distribution of physical magazines were expensive. Publishing content online, though, was basically free. This, the theory went, would allow publishers to cut costs those costs and make more money.
What most publishers didn’t understand was that the high costs of production associated with print were their main advantage because they acted as a barrier to entry for new competitors. Starting a magazine was hard: you had to not only have enough capital to allow you to print and distribute the thing, you needed access to news-stand distribution, which in the UK meant working with big distributors who had to be persuaded to stock you. You needed a sales team to sell enough advertising to support it, and they needed contact books that were thick enough to get their feet in the doors. Magazine publishing was expensive, and only large publishers were able to get it done at scale.
By the mid-1990s, though, anyone could publish online. All those competitive advantages disappeared within a couple of years. You could publish easily using platforms like Blogger, WordPress, or even Myspace. You could get ad revenue from systems like Google Ads, without a sales team of any sort. Not only that, but you could get your content seen via Google search and social platforms.
It took publishers a long time to realise that the old barriers to entry no longer protected them. Some publishers still act like they think they do, and so appear consistently dazzled when a new platform comes along and makes individuals who take advantage of it into millionaires. TikTok is the latest, but it’s by no means the first. Online was a burning platform moment for publishers, and some of them took far too long to see it.
The next burning platform
The ability of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT to create content is, of course, being seized on by publishers who see it as a method of creating editorial content without having to pay anyone to do it – or, at least, by paying fewer people to do it (and probably cheaper ones too – that was another outcome of the move from print to digital). If you’re a publisher reading that and shaking your head, thinking “well that’s not what we’re doing” I am going to give you a small monkey side eye because we all know that if you’re not thinking that way, your CFO probably is:
There’s nothing wrong with using new technology to reduce costs, as long as you retain your competitive advantage. And here’s where things are difficult for publishers because what LLMs do is similar to what happened with web publishing in the 1990s: it removes the competitive advantage of publishers in the creation of content, just as the web removed their advantage in publishing and distributing it. It is the next step in the democratisation of publishing.
In the early internet publishing era, anyone could create any content and put it online, but to be successful they needed to have the expertise to write the content in the first place. That’s why niches like technology publishing were impacted early and heavily: there was plenty of expertise out there, and suddenly, they could create content directly without an intermediary.
Now, thanks to LLMs, anyone in the proverbial bedroom can create swathes of “good enough” content on any topic they want. They can churn out hundreds of average pieces about anything, just by taking a list of the most popular search queries in that topic as their starting point. They’re not flawless, but they’re good enough, particularly to answer the kinds of search queries which publishers have used to generate traffic at scale.
This is why, for publishers, AI content creation is another burning platform moment. Combine it with the move towards providing more answers directly on search pages, and you have a one-two punch to publisher traffic which Mike Tyson would be proud of.
Of course, publishers can use LLMs too. But, as with early internet publishing, their size means they can neither move fast nor with low enough fixed costs to make it work. If a proverbial 16-year-old can create an article with ChatGPT on “10 things you didn’t know about Mila Kunis” at the same speed as a celebrity magazine, at the same quality, the magazine loses even if it has used technology to eliminate roles and cut its costs. Because, unlike our 16-year-old, it has big fixed costs: offices, equipment, pensions, you name it. And it has margins to protect because the stock market expects to see revenue growth every year.
Regaining competitive advantage
So what can publishers do to retain their competitive advantage? There really is no point in trying to pretend that the AI genii doesn’t exist, in the same way that publishers couldn’t pretend in the 90s that people would just carry on buying huge volumes of print.
Nor will legal claims aimed at the likes of OpenAI, Google and Microsoft succeed. Yes, your content has been scraped to create the language models in the first place. But given the result in the Author’s Guild vs Google Books case, I expect courts to hold that this kind of use is transformative, and therefore fair use. Either way, it will be tied up in the legal system for far too long to make a difference.
Some have suggested that the way forward will be private large language models built solely using the corpus of text publishers hold. There are a few issues with this, but the biggest one is simply that the horse has bolted. OpenAI, Google and others have already trained their models on everything you have published online to date. They probably even have access to content which you no longer have. How many redirects of old, outdated content do you have in place where the original no longer exists? How many of your articles now only exist in the Wayback Machine?
Instead, the only option for publishers is to focus on creating content of a higher quality than any current LLM. You cannot gain competitive advantage at the cheap, low-cost end of the market. Trying to do so will not only make you vulnerable to anyone else with the same tools (at $20 a month) but also devalue your brand over the long term.
Creating higher quality content means employing people, which is why that urge to use LLMs to replace your editorial teams will actually undermine the ability of publishers to survive. Putting that cost saving towards your bottom line today is a guarantee that you will be out-competed and lose revenue in the future.
So what can you do with LLMs? The most important thing is that LLMs can be used as a tool to amplify the creativity and ability of editorial teams. They are most useful as what Steve Jobs used to call “a bicycle for the mind”, capable of amplifying human creativity. An LLM can give you a starting point, suggest an outline on any topic, rewrite a headline 100 times using the word “crow” and it never gets tired doing so.
If you’re a publisher, you probably still have decades worth of experience, context, contacts and knowledge of audiences in your editorial teams. Train them on how to use LLMs to amplify their creativity (and if you want some help with that, email me!)
You’re going to have to change your content strategy to adapt to the new world of falling Google traffic anyway. LLMs should be seen as a chance to exit the market for low-quality, high-volume content.
Weeknote, Sunday 29th October 2023
An abbreviated weeknote this time, as I've not long got back from Orford Ness.
Orford Ness is a strange and interesting place. Used by the air force as a bombing run and a research centre, it has been partly rewilded, but with the unmistakable detritus of military and industrial use. In some ways, it reminded me of parts of the industrial edges of Derby combined with the brutal flat farm land of southern Derbyshire. But with shingle. Lots and lots of shingle. It's stark and beautiful, and I recommend a visit.
I started scribbling down a story based in part there last night, which I want to outline further. I'm going to crack into writing a short novel in November and see where I get with it: I would like to get a draft completed, although as I don't yet have a plot outline I'm a bit behind already. That will be this week's work.
Also on the agenda for this week is the second weekly post on my Substack, which focuses on the intersection between technology and the publishing business. Last week I posted about the impact of AI-driven changes in search on the ability of publishers to get traffic, the short version of which is “oh bugger”. There's no doubt in my mind that Google and Facebook really are intent on answering more queries without sending traffic to anyone else. That raises some huge problems, but there are ways out.
This week is all about using AI to create content, and the threat that poses to publishers. “Threat,” you're saying, “isn't it an opportunity?” Well, no – and tomorrow I'll explain why.
The three things which most caught my attention
- How tiny Qatar hosts the leaders of Hamas. In among the entirely correct condemnation of Hamas, what's being ignored is the role of “friendly” countries in “hosting” the Hamas leadership. Qatar, a country which has a track record of human rights abuses as long as your arm, gets rewarded with hosting World Cups and much more while it materially supports terrorism. Why does the West ignore this? In Britain's case, perhaps because of the [£40bn or so “investment” the country makes] – which mostly means buying and inflating property prices, benefiting our Tory masters.
- Many people jumped on the story that Spotify made higher-than-expected profits, citing the top-line number of around 1bn euro earnings. What they didn't cite was the actual profit: just 32m euro. Bearing in mind that it was after a quarter of crackdowns on password sharing, large increases in subscribers, and increases in prices, it's hard to see how Spotify will ever be a seriously profitable business.
- All the Whole Earth Catalog is now available online. Nostalgia in a bucket load.
DOJ probing Tesla’s EV range cheating
DOJ probing Tesla’s EV range after reports of exaggerated numbers - The Verge:
The US Department of Justice (DOJ) is investigating the range of Tesla’s electric vehicles after reports surfaced that the company was relying on exaggerated numbers.
In documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Tesla said that it had “received requests for information, including subpoenas from the DOJ, regarding certain matters associated with personal benefits, related parties, vehicle range and personnel decisions.”
This follows on from a Reuters' report earlier this year, which found Tesla was getting so many complaints about range it was cancelling appointments with its service centres for customers with the problem:
According to Reuters, there was nothing actually wrong with the vehicle’s battery. Rather, Tesla had allegedly created software to rig its driving range estimates to show a rosier picture. This led to thousands of customers seeking service appointments to figure out what was wrong with their vehicles. But because the vehicle was working as intended, Tesla’s diversion team simply canceled all the appointments.
So Tesla created software which gave a false reading of battery range, then when people spotted it, they just canceled any service to them.
It’s worth noting that when VW was caught cheating on its emissions tests by using a device to check when it was being tested and artificially improving results, it ended up being fined tens of billions of dollars.
This isn’t on quite that scale, but regulators tend to take a very dim view of cheating customers. It’s quite possible this will cost Tesla billions.
Anyone willing to bet that it will turn out this was done at Elon Musk’s insistence? And will that be the final nail in the coffin of his reputation?
SEO will be over for publishers. You need to adapt.
Position one for a query is no longer close to enough
I don't know of a single person in publishing who doesn't believe that large language models (LLMs) aren't going to have a profound impact on the industry. But most of the attention has been on using them to create content, something which many publishers see as a way of increasing efficiency (by which they usually mean reducing expensive headcount).
Whether that is actually possible or desirable is a topic for another time, but what I want to focus on is the other side of AI: what its adoption by Google is going to do to the traffic to publisher sites, and how we should be changing our content strategies to respond.
Google's large language models
It's worth starting by being clear about how Google is using LLMs. The company has two products which use large language models to deliver results for users. The first, and probably the best well-known, is Bard, which is similar to ChatGPT in that it uses a conversational interface where users ask questions or give prompts in natural language, and the programme responds.
The second – and the one which, I think, should be most concerning to publishers – is Search Generative Experience (SGE). SGE is currently in the experimental stage, but will ultimately deliver answers directly into the top of Google, generated by its large language model.
As you can see from the example, SGE takes up a lot of real estate in the query result, and delivers a complete answer based on what Google “knows”. Although it gives citations, there is no need to click on them if all you want is the answer to a query.
How this affects publishers
Obviously, anything which sits at the top of search results is going to impact on the amount of traffic which clicks through to publisher sites underneath. And this is potentially worse than anything we have seen before: if the answer to the query is given on Google's page, why would anyone bother to scroll down and click through?
This means the much-fought over positions one to three will be much less effective than every before, and there will be a big decline in publisher traffic.
The impact on different kinds of content
It is likely that some kinds of content will be impacted more than others. Answers to questions are an obvious one, and in 2017 they accounted for 8% of searches. That is likely to have grown already and grow still further as users get used to being able to ask machines questions and get good quality tailored answers.
But in its article on SGE, Google highlights a second area where publishers are likely to see a major impact: shopping. Many publishers have put significant effort into creating content focused on affiliate revenue, with some seeing affiliate overtaking advertising as a source of revenue. Affiliate content is almost always designed to capture traffic via search, for the simple reason that buying products usually starts with a Google search. An SGE-driven shopping search experience will ultimately bypass publishers and drive traffic direct to the retailer, with the AI making individually tailored recommendations on what to buy.
This threatens to be disastrous for publishers. Effectively, SGE delivers a one-two punch of reduced traffic as more search queries are answered on the results page, plus reduced traffic to and revenue from affiliate pages.
What publishers should do
SGE is currently in the experimental stage, which means publishers shouldn't see any significant impact for now. But there is a clear direction here: more answers to search queries will be delivered without any click-through to publishers. And product shopping queries are going to become something which Google channels to retailers (who, by complete coincidence, are also advertisers) rather than publishers (who, by and large, are not).
I estimate that publishers have a window of between three and five years to change content strategies to adapt to this new world, depending on the speed of user adoption. It could be faster: much will depend on how quickly Google's LLM work starts to move from an experiment to delivering real results.
The long-term answer for publishers is to reduce exposure to Google as a source of traffic. That's going to be tough: almost every site I have worked on relied on Google for between 60-90% of its traffic. And the more the site was focused on affiliate revenue and e-commerce, the higher that percentage was.
The answer is to focus on increasing your level of direct traffic, making your site a destination for content rather than something users hit once and bounce away from. Learn lessons from marketing: treat every piece of content you create as an opportunity to deepen your relationship with your audience.
There are five things I would recommend publishers start doing today:
Refocus your KPIs and OKRs to be about deepening relationships, not just traffic. Focus on repeat visits and sign-ups. Look to increase the number of qualified email addresses you have (and whatever you do, don't succumb to the temptation to capture more data. If you deliver value, you will capture more over time -- but all you need now is a person's email address).
Reevaluate your search strategy and focus on topics with complexity. The more complex the content, the higher its quality, the less likely it is that an LLM can deliver a good quality version of it. Expertise and depth will be essential, and complex topic areas might be the “last person standing” when it comes to Google searches which work for publishers.
If you have three to five year revenue forecasts, ramp affiliate revenue down over time rather than predicting growth. The era of affiliate revenue as a major contributor will be over. Use the revenue you are getting from it to bootstrap other areas.
Heavily invest in newsletters. And whatever you do, don't consider them to be a place for advertising. Nothing creeps users out more than thinking they are signing up for interesting content only to find it chock-full of ads or sponsored content.
Don't think that AI-generated content is going to “save” you. Many publishers are looking at content created by LLMs as a way of lowering costs. It will. But it will also put you out of business. Remember that any content you can create with an LLM can be done better by Google at the top of its results pages. What publishers have in their favour is human talent, creativity and expertise. The more you lose that by trying to use LLMs to cut costs, the smaller your competitive advantage.
Next week I will return to that last topic, and look at the mirage of LLM content and why it's a death-trap for publishers.
China launches investigation into iPhone maker Foxconn, says state media
China launches investigation into iPhone maker Foxconn, says state media:
China has launched an investigation into Apple iPhone maker Foxconn over tax and land use, Chinese state media reported on Sunday. The Global Times, citing anonymous sources, said tax authorities inspected Foxconn’s sites in the provinces of Guangdong and Jiangsu and natural resources officials had inspected sites in Henan and Hubei… The Global Times article quoted an expert saying “Taiwan-funded enterprises, including Foxconn . . . should also assume corresponding social responsibilities and play a positive role in promoting the peaceful development of cross-strait relations”.
This is a very big deal and should be keeping Tim Cook awake at night. Effectively, it’s a small shot across the bows for Foxconn, a reminder that without the good graces of the Chinese government, it can’t exist.
Weeknote, Sunday 22 October 2023
It's been a while...
It’s been a while. I have missed the last couple of weeks not because I was too busy to write, but almost the opposite: I have felt like nothing much has happened.
Of course, that isn’t true. It’s never really true that nothing is happening in your life, but when you’re not working, what tends to happen is that the days elide into each other. The rhythm of most people’s life is work, or child-rearing, or the climbing frame of domesticity which they have erected around their time.
I haven’t really yet cultivated that. I have had no work to do other than to make myself get up and write something every day. We have no children to depend on our timekeeping. And keeping house has never been a routine for either of us.
The commemoration this weekend has been that of three months since I last had to get up in the morning, do eight hours of work, and sign off from Teams. I can’t say I haven’t enjoyed it. Having nothing to do, no one relying on your input to get on with their lives, is something I can recommend to anyone who wants to avoid waking up one day and asking “what the hell happened to me?” It provides that thing we most lack as we dance busily through life: perspective.
So, what new perspective on my life have I found? First, that I have a kind of pastoral radicalism, a communism-not-Marxism which believes in the collective good. That sounds abstract, but I think it’s important. It’s a deep and abiding value, and we live in an age when values are used as a debased common currency, but in actuality are as ephemeral and short-lived as muons, decaying quickly into more stable and entrenched positions.
The second thing I have come to understand is how deeply rooted impostor syndrome is in my life. I have always spent time denying my role in what I have achieved (at one point, one of my managers made “blowing my trumpet” a goal for the year because of my habit of deflecting praise). Because of this, I am not kind to myself in any meaningful way. Being forced to just stop has allowed me to start the process of letting some of this go.
The act of writing can be both an antidote to and a trigger for impostor syndrome. Writers crave the validation of an audience because it’s the one moment when the feelings of fraudulence are pushed into the shadows. But the fear of not living up to expectations, of having no originality, of creating nothing of value, is also right there, all the time.
I have thought a lot about this over the past couple of days. We were away, first in Hastings (Kim was teaching a life drawing class there) and then Eastbourne, seeing the Turner Prize show. If you get, go: Rory Pilgrim’s Rafts made me cry, as did Barbara Walker’s work. It reminded me that art is emotion, and it means that I really do have to tap into my emotions to make mine work. More of that, I suspect, over the coming months.
Meanwhile, at some point I will have to actually get some kind of income or other. I have a few more months when I don’t **need** to work, but at some point money will once again become a thing of concern, rather than an abstraction which I can deal with later. One learning about money: I need much less of it than I would have thought a few months ago. Debt, it turns out, robs you of your freedom quite effectively because you have to earn more than you need to pay back someone for the time when you couldn’t earn all that you required. I’m free of debt now, and that feels like an unshackling.
Things I have been reading this week
I finished Gary Gibson’s Europa Deep in two gluttonous sittings. It’s a neat, tidy and highly enjoyable hard SF story, and it reminded me how much of the SF genre is currently playing with the tropes of thrillers and crime drama. I need to think a bit more about this because somewhere in the race to make SF adhere to the structures, tropes and pacing of the thriller, something – quite a lot – is lost.
Reading Hilary Mantel’s A memoir of my former self feels like a delightful indulgence. It’s a collection of Mantel’s extensive back-catalogue of non-fiction, created because she developed the habit early in her career of writing for newspapers, periodicals, and magazines as well as books. It wasn’t really for fun: it was a survival mechanism because writing fiction (then as now) was not really enough to live on, at least until you become the kind of celebrated and storied writer Mantel grew to be.
I’m glad she had to do it because she applied her mind to it and the results are spectacular. In the first piece, “On the one hand”, she writes about the difference between fiction and journalism:
Fiction isn't made by scraping the bones of topicality for the last shreds and sinews, to be processed into mechanically recovered prose. Like journalism, it deals in ideas as well as facts, but also in metaphors, symbols and myths. It multiplies ambiguity. It's about the particular, which suggests the general: about inner meaning, seen with the inner eye, always glimpsed, always vanishing, always more or less baffling, and scuffled on to the page hesitantly, furtively, transgressively, by night and with the wrong hand.
It’s great. You should read it.
Weeknote, Sunday 22nd October
It’s been a while. I have missed the last couple of weeks not because I was too busy to write, but almost the opposite: I have felt like nothing much has happened.
Of course, that isn’t true. It’s never really true that nothing is happening in your life, but when you’re not working, what tends to happen is that the days elide into each other. The rhythm of most people’s life is work, or child-rearing, or the climbing frame of domesticity which they have erected around their time.
I haven’t really yet cultivated that. I have had no work to do other than to make myself get up and write something every day. We have no children to depend on our timekeeping. And keeping house has never been a routine for either of us.
The commemoration this weekend has been that of three months since I last had to get up in the morning, do eight hours of work, and sign off from Teams. I can’t say I haven’t enjoyed it. Having nothing to do, no one relying on your input to get on with their lives, is something I can recommend to anyone who wants to avoid waking up one day and asking “what the hell happened to me?” It provides that thing we most lack as we dance busily through life: perspective.
So, what new perspective on my life have I found? First, that I have a kind of pastoral radicalism, a communism-not-Marxism which believes in the collective good. That sounds abstract, but I think it’s important. It’s a deep and abiding value, and we live in an age when values are used as a debased common currency, but in actuality are as ephemeral and short-lived as muons, decaying quickly into more stable and entrenched positions.
The second thing I have come to understand is how deeply rooted impostor syndrome is in my life. I have always spent time denying my role in what I have achieved (at one point, one of my managers made “blowing my trumpet” a goal for the year because of my habit of deflecting praise). Because of this, I am not kind to myself in any meaningful way. Being forced to just stop has allowed me to start the process of letting some of this go.
The act of writing can be both an antidote to and a trigger for impostor syndrome. Writers crave the validation of an audience because it’s the one moment when the feelings of fraudulence are pushed into the shadows. But the fear of not living up to expectations, of having no originality, of creating nothing of value, is also right there, all the time.
I have thought a lot about this over the past couple of days. We were away, first in Hastings (Kim was teaching a life drawing class there) and then Eastbourne, seeing the Turner Prize show. If you get, go: Rory Pilgrim’s Rafts made me cry, as did Barbara Walker’s work. It reminded me that art is emotion, and it means that I really do have to tap into my emotions to make mine work. More of that, I suspect, over the coming months.
Meanwhile, at some point I will have to actually get some kind of income or other. I have a few more months when I don’t need to work, but at some point money will once again become a thing of concern, rather than an abstraction which I can deal with later. One learning about money: I need much less of it than I would have thought a few months ago. Debt, it turns out, robs you of your freedom quite effectively because you have to earn more than you need to pay back someone for the time when you couldn’t earn all that you required. I’m free of debt now, and that feels like an unshackling.
Things I have been reading this week
I finished Gary Gibson’s Europa Deep in two gluttonous sittings. It’s a neat, tidy and highly enjoyable hard SF story, and it reminded me how much of the SF genre is currently playing with the tropes of thrillers and crime drama. I need to think a bit more about this because somewhere in the race to make SF adhere to the structures, tropes and pacing of the thriller, something – quite a lot – is lost.
Reading Hilary Mantel’s A memoir of my former self feels like a delightful indulgence. It’s a collection of Mantel’s extensive back-catalogue of non-fiction, created because she developed the habit early in her career of writing for newspapers, periodicals, and magazines as well as books. It wasn’t really for fun: it was a survival mechanism because writing fiction (then as now) was not really enough to live on, at least until you become the kind of celebrated and storied writer Mantel grew to be.
I’m glad she had to do it because she applied her mind to it and the results are spectacular. In the first piece, “On the one hand”, she writes about the difference between fiction and journalism:
Fiction isn't made by scraping the bones of topicality for the last shreds and sinews, to be processed into mechanically recovered prose. Like journalism, it deals in ideas as well as facts, but also in metaphors, symbols and myths. It multiplies ambiguity. It's about the particular, which suggests the general: about inner meaning, seen with the inner eye, always glimpsed, always vanishing, always more or less baffling, and scuffled on to the page hesitantly, furtively, transgressively, by night and with the wrong hand.
It’s great. You should read it.
The new Apple Pencil
Apple has released a new Pencil for iPad and it’s weird. It looks like the Second Generation Pencil (the one which charges by sticking to the side of the iPad Pro or current Air). And it will attach there. But it won’t charge if you do – it charges through a hidden USB-C port via a cable.
Oh and it’s not pressure sensitive, which makes it worse for drawing than the old Pencil which charged via Lightning.
It is, though, £79 rather than the ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY NINE POUNDS the second generation Pencil will cost. So that’s one thing.
Marc Andreessen's manifesto
It would take a far, far longer post than I’m prepared to spend my time writing to go through Marc Andreessen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” paragraph by awful paragraph, but a few points probably won’t go amiss. - If you’re going to approvingly paraphrase “a manifesto of a different time and place”, you might want to check that said manifesto’s author wasn’t an early member of Mussolini’s fascist party.
- Writing “we believe technology is universalist. Technology doesn’t care about your ethnicity, race, religion, national origin, gender, sexuality, political views,” and then, two paragraphs later “We believe America and her allies should be strong and not weak” either shows you have no idea how to write, are being entirely disingenuous, or simply too stupid to think except in blocks of 240 characters. Either way, get an editor to help.
- If you are going to talk about the Greek notion of arete then having an understanding of its relationship to class in Greek society might be a good idea, too. Aristocrats were assumed, by definition, to be exemplars of arete. It wasn’t something that thetes like me would have.
- Believing that techno-optimism “is a material philosophy, not a political philosophy” while giving many repeated examples of what even a first year philosophy undergraduate which know was a political philosophy does not make you look smart.
I could go on – the whole thing is riddled with howlers – but really is there much point?
Thirty years ago, in a different life, I was a philosophy postgraduate student and taught first year undergraduates their introduction to metaphysics and ethics. In the first time, every time, someone would turn in an essay which read like this, and you would have to patiently explain to them they were going to have to rewrite it or fail, because philosophy does not mean writing down all the random thoughts you had when smoking that bundle of weed the night before the deadline.
This is the manifesto of an emotionally insecure man having a mid-life crisis as he realises that his life’s work is meaningless and all the gold and treasure he has accumulated will never make him happy. Mid-life crises in men are often surprisingly redolent of the emotional outpouring of pseudo-intellectual silliness that accompany late teenage, that first period of life when boys start to realise they are not the centre of the world and lash out at the injustice of it all.
Perhaps, then it’s no surprise this reads like it was written by a 14 year old and put on Pastebin. That it was written by a 52 year old with billions of dollars at his disposal says more about the failure of capitalism to imbue life with meaning than Andreessen could possibly imagine.
EDIT: The first draft of this contained something about A16Z’s investment in Uber. In fact, they passed on Uber. But as if to make the point about the kind of technology which Andreessen believes will save the world as long as we never question it, let’s ask an AI...
Publishers need to wake up to the truth about Google traffic
Google explained that SGE is part of the Google Search experience; it is a search feature and thus it should work as how normal search directives work. “The context is that AI is built into Search, not bolted on, and integral to how Search functions, which is why robots.txt is the control to give web publishers the option to manage access to how their sites are crawled,” Google told us.
I’ve been using both Bard and Bing CoPilot a lot lately and the direction is clear: while AI-driven search will link to original sources as references, they are not going to send much traffic your way. The aim is to provide the answer to any query on the results page, not one more click away.
This has massive implications for publisher traffic, particular for reviews and answers pages which I think are most vulnerable to AI-driven answers. I’ve been using CoPilot for purchasing research and it’s great. I can start by asking it for, say, laptops under £1000 with good battery life. I can then have a conversation to interrogate more about each product. It’s a superior experience to any web page I have ever used for that kind of product research.
Is it 100% accurate? No – but neither are a lot of reviews, particularly the kind of “best laptop for…” top tens that are written to hit the top of product searches on Google.
But it’s not just affiliate: search provides between 40-80% of publisher site traffic. And we have already seen Facebook traffic, the other biggest referrer, die off.
Publishers can no longer rely on Facebook and Google for the bulk of their traffic. The time has past when content strategies should focus on them. Instead, they need to focus on getting a loyal audience which they have direct relationships with. The SEO era is coming to an end, at least for large chunks of traffic.
GitHub Copilot costs more per user than it charges
Big Tech Struggles to Turn AI Hype Into Profits - WSJ:
Individuals pay $10 a month for the AI assistant. In the first few months of this year, the company was losing on average more than $20 a month per user, according to a person familiar with the figures, who said some users were costing the company as much as $80 a month.
The first stage of the enshittification cycle is often to charge customers less than it costs to run the service, in order to acquire and lock in as many as possible. After that, at some point, you dump on them from a great height.
The good use of ChatGPT for factual writing
I’m not a huge fan of using ChatGPT for writing, because even leaving aside issues of accuracy, its style is stilted and just the wrong side of formulaic. But there’s one area where it really works as a writing assistant: giving you an outline on a topic as a starting point.
Tell it what you want and what to include, and it will come back with an outline of everything you should cover. It won’t be your final structure, but as a place to start and especially if you’re a bit stuck and need something to bounce around to fine-tune your idea, it’s a really good assistant.
I’ve been thinking a lot about large language models as assistants for human creativity lately, in the context of Steve Jobs' old view of computers as “a bicycle for the mind” and also the Knowledge Navigator video which came later on – John Sculley’s vision of the future of computing. More to come on that…
Weeknote, Sunday 1st October 2023
How the heck is it October already? That's just not possible.
It's been a relatively quiet week. On Tuesday I was going to go to Waterstones in Canterbury to see Mark Stay talk about his latest book, but didn't feel great so I stayed at home. I suspect the reason I didn't feel great was basically that I didn't have enough caffeine: I accidentally made morning coffee with decaf, which is probably some kind of crime against humanity. Coffee-drinking humanity, at least.
On Thursday I went to the Good Bad Books event at the Barbican. We drove in, which is crazy, but even taking into account the charge for ULEZ and petrol costs it's half the price of the train. The prices of train journeys, even bought in advance, off-peak and discounted, are stupid. Once you have more than a single person, it's probably cheaper to drive if you can, even though fuel prices are again on the up. I hate it, but there it is.
The event was the culmination of a series of workshops. I went to the last one on horror writing and the story I wrote got selected to go in the book produced for the event, which was INCREDIBLY EXCITING. I have had my byline in so many magazines I've lost count, and probably had a million words published, but none of them have been fiction and that's incredibly exciting. I didn't even think it was that good a story, although I'm told otherwise -- so I'll take it.
This was also a week of computer maintenance, and I'm not even vaguely finished. The autumn new operating system bonanza -- new versions of iOS, iPadOS, macOS, Windows and even Chrome OS -- meant that a lot of machines suddenly wanted to download multi-gigabyte updates. Which would be fine if our home broadband ran at anything other than glacial speeds.
Cue me carting around various laptops to the University Library, where I can sit and update things at much faster speeds. And of course read some really good books. Having a borrower's ticket, though, is turning out not to be much of a money saver as I have a tendency to want to buy some of the books I find. Thankfully they are mostly second hand, obscure and cheap.
One other small good piece of tech this week: it turns out there is a version of iA Writer for Windows, which makes me very happy indeed. iA Writer is a great Markdown programme which includes some great editing features, such as the ability to highlight all the verbs, nouns, adverbs and so on in different colours. This makes it really easy to spot where you are being repetitive or where the adverbs are taking over the text.
And finally, Saturday saw us pop along to the Gulbenkian to see Acid Brass – acid house, played by a proper brass band. I first saw them 26 years ago, at the Barbican performance of KLF's Fuck the Millennium – a gig which lasted (if I remember) 24 minutes (there was some numerological connection to the number which Jimmy and Bill were obsessed with). There was dancing.
Things things which caught my attention this week
- This video shows a meeting between the legendary Hayao Miyazaki, who made some of the most beautiful animated films in history, and a bunch of AI dudes keen to show him their generative movement system. It does not go well. I think I agree with what Miyazaki-san says at the end: "We humans are losing faith in ourselves."
- iFixit dropped the repairability score for the iPhone because of its parts pairing scam. Sigh.
- When thinking about global warming, it's worth remembering that it really is the fault of the rich. Eat them. All of them.
Things I have been reading
I finished The Entropy Exhibition by Colin Greenland this week, which is an interesting (and out of print) look at the influence and influences of New Worlds magazine and its coterie of writers. They're a fascinating bunch: from the older ones (Brian Aldiss, J. G. Ballard) to the young punks (Michael Moorcock, M. John Harrison) there was a lot of really interesting stuff going on.
I have also started re-reading Malcolm Bradbury's The History Man, which I first watched in television form (starring Anthony Sher) when I was a teenager. It was one of the things which persuaded me that maybe I should go to polytechnic rather than sign on or work at the railway painting trains like my father. My ambitions, at that age, involved being in a band and owning a transit van to take us to gigs. My life has taken many odd turns since then.
Also reading – I'm going a lot of reading – New Worlds: An anthology edited by Moorcock from 1983. This was a library find, where I have ended up buying a second hand copy. I had this book when it first came out, and lent it to my friend Stanley. Predictably, I never got it back. Wherever you are, Stanley, give me a shout.
Things I have been writing
I've been writing some notes for a potential novel, but I'm not sure it's got legs. We shall see. I don't think of myself as a novelist, at all, but I'm willing to give it a go.
Microsoft 365 Copilot shows you ads. Or does it?
Ask Microsoft 365 Copilot in Windows if it shows you ads, and it gives you a pretty confused answer:
But ask it a question about the specs of the iPhone 15, and at the bottom of a useful answer you get… what looks suspiciously like an ad:
So which is it? does Copilot show you ads or not?
Perhaps part the answer comes from the fact that, while it’s available in the UK, it’s not shipping in the European Economic Area (EEA). No reasons are given for this, but it’s likely that it’s the same “waiting and seeing” about the impact of the provisions of the Digital Services and Digital Markets Acts in the EU as “stopped” Meta from shipping Threads there.
Which begs the question: what exactly is Microsoft doing with the data that it’s harvesting from your copy of Windows that makes it nervous about the DSA and DMA? Windows has access to every file, every message, every conversation you have on your computer. So what is Copilot doing with it?
In this week’s Weeknote, I’m doing some writing, walking around Sheppey, and being angry about repairability.
Weeknote, Sunday 24th September 2023
I spent Monday and Tuesday working on a short story submission. The workshop that I went to last week at the Barbican on horror was the last one a series run by Good Bad Books over the summer -- I hadn't known about it till the last one, otherwise I would have been to all of them -- and they were taking submissions from attendees for a chapbook of work.
However, the submission date was Wednesday which basically gave me two days to write and edit something. I could have simply pulled an idea off the shelf, or even taking a preexisting piece. But I wanted to do something based on the exercises in the workshop, so I was essentially almost working from a fragment which was never really intended to be a full story.
I got it done. Submissions had to be less than 1000 words, and mine was about 750. It had a beginning, a middle and an end. And it got accepted, so I'll get a couple of copies at the event they're holding this week (tickets still available!)
It's a horror story about a man on a train, a small child, and some plastic dinosaurs. You might enjoy it.
Yesterday we went over the the Isle of Sheppey -- which, it turns out, was named by the Romans who called it "Island of Sheep" -- for Flood III, a walking tour combined with writing workshop. It was part of a series of workshops run by the Fieldnotes group across southern England aiming to explore creative practice situated in place, and there is definitely something interesting and inspiring about moving from location to location while exploring some prompts for creative work.
We ended in the best possible fashion: a cup of tea and slice of cake at the Criterion Bluetown Heritage Centre. This is a brilliant small museum and music hall which is doing a huge amount to preserve the history of Sheppey and Bluetown in particular. Once a cramped working class district created to serve the docks, Bluetown housed thousands of people thanks to the adjacent docks, which made workers live within a mile. Now there are only about 200 people living in Bluetown. It's fascinating -- and outside of the island (and even on it) a lot of this history is invisible.
This week also saw the arrival of two new bits of technology. The first was a 2TB internal SSD, which I fitted into my ThinkPad X1 Carbon – which means it now has 32GB RAM and enough storage to last quite a while. It's mainly a Linux machine these days which means it is massively over-specced, but the performance is really good and I like using it. That keyboard!
The second arrival was a Keyboard Folio for my Remarkable 2 tablet. I recently started using this again after a long hiatus (I'll write something about this on Technovia soon), but I'm really enjoying it and the Keyboard Folio means I can use it as a little distraction-free device for getting words written in draft.
I'm considering writing a monthly old-school tech column. Not business focused (lord knows there's enough of that). But something more in line with Jerry Pournelle's Byte stuff, which was mostly just about the tech travails he had encountered that month. I've actually got enough for one this month, so might kick it off this week.
The three things which most caught my attention
- Rupert Murdoch "retired" (hint: he's not retired) and Mic Wright wrote the best thing you will read about him. Includes the line "When Murdoch is finally pronounced dead — perhaps for tax reasons…"
- Apple publicly states it's all in favour of right to repair, while undermining it through whatever technical and legal means it has to hand. This company really does not deserve your money. It sure as heck isn't getting any more of mine.
- This one came via Cory too, and it's a beaut: the B612 font, which is used in Airbus cockpits and designed for legibility, is actually open source and free to use. Mmmmm, fonts. You can download it. It's nice.
Things I have been writing
After finishing off the story for the workshop I did some more work fleshing out the world of the wolves that I mentioned last week. I think there is something in this.
Things I have been reading
My pile of books grows ever larger. Arrived this week was something new by Gary GIbson (Europa Deep), Stephen Baxter (Creation Node), and I haven't even finished Neal Asher's War Bodies, which is working really hard not to keep me reading.
All that's on top of a bunch of non-fiction: Danny Cipriani's autobiography and Tiago Forte's The PARA Method. I have much reading to do.