There’s a set of unspoken rules underneath the surface veneer of media coverage.

One of those rules is that an election victory by the populist right proves that they have an intuitive understanding of the instincts of the electorate which liberals must humbly try to adapt themselves to. An election victory by progressives, on the other hand, is a freak aberration which will inevitably be reversed, probably due to the hubris and naivety of those who just proved triumphant. Victories on the left are contingent and transitory while victories on the right are abiding and profound.

This was the tone after the election of Zohran Mamdani in New York this week, along with other Democratic successes in Virginia and New Jersey. It was also the tone after Holland’s liberal candidate Rob Jetten upset expectations and beat back Geert Wilders’ far-right Party for Freedom.

In fact, the triumph of the far-right is not inevitable. They can be beaten and they regularly are. Each progressive triumph at the ballot box provides a learning opportunity.

The media will largely ignore this information in favour of a set narrative. Many progressives will ignore it too, out of a tribal hatred of either centrism on the one hand or socialism on the other. Establishment Democrats tried to undermine Mamdani and have almost certainly learned nothing. The British online left, however, is obsessed with him, treating him as a direct continuation of Jeremy Corbyn, even though he reveals much more about Corbyn’s weaknesses than his strengths.

Let’s take a better look at these campaigns, without preconceptions. I’m going to put the policy to one side for a moment and just focus on communication. It throws up three vital lessons.

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Happiness

The first and most important attribute we saw this week was joy. Mamdani seems to have smiled for so long, for his entire life, that there are these permanent dimples on his cheeks. He has the face of a man who is going to age well, someone who is content within his soul. Similarly, I have never seen Jetten frown. I’m not sure he’s even capable of it. He seems to live with a permanent smile - a little more professional than Mamdani perhaps, but authentic, unforced, natural.

There is a jolliness test in politics. Does the candidate want to scold the voters? Or do they want them to have a good time? This is one of the reasons why Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter. It is one of the reasons why Boris Johnson beat Jeremy Corbyn.

It’s actually quite telling to see so many old Corbyn supporters insist on the similarities between him and Mamdani. It’s true that there’s some rhetorical overlap - both talk about billionaires and the one per cent, both self-describe as socialist. But in terms of emotional appeal, they occupy different universes.

Corbyn despised the press. He treated it like a conspiracy out to undermine him. He sneered and snarled, his every comment an appeal backwards towards his supporters, not forwards towards those he needed to convince. He looked angry, vigilant, desperate for the camera to be off him. This is a problem because when voters encounter the candidate they do so through the camera, and the hostility therefore looks like it’s directed at them.

Mamdani wants the camera to come in. He is pleased to see it. He wants to reach through it to those on the other side. I mean, my God. Look at him talking to Sky News - a delight - and tell me Corbyn would have been able to do that.

Corbyn supporters say this is because the press was out to get him and it kinda was. But that was the same for Mamdani. The press will go for figures on the left. It’s up to you how you choose to handle that. Responding with irritation allows their attack to be more successful than it might otherwise have been.

One of the things progressives most struggle with about Donald Trump is that he is ultimately on the party-guy end of the jollity spectrum. His manner is comedic. If you’re on the same level as him - in other words, if looking at him doesn’t make you want to vomit up your fucking soul - then there is something amusing about the fact that no-one, himself included, has any idea what’s about to come out of his mouth. At his most effective, Nigel Farage is also a party guy. The fags, the pint, the easy laugh. It is all tremendously mannered, of course, but well cultivated and effective.

Now however, it’s getting harder to remember the joke. Trump rules by paramilitary thugs taking people hostage in the street. Farage is having to straighten himself out to look prime ministerial. The background noise is increasingly bleak: stubborn inflation, economic instability, a generalised sense of national decline across the West.

Those easy genuine smiles from progressive candidates, that sense of warmth and optimism - it’s probably the most compelling emotional appeal you can make right now. It’s a promise. It says: We can make things OK. Things don’t have to stay this way. We can make it less miserable, less fraught, less poor, less hateful. More joyous. In the words of Jetten’s campaign slogan: “It can be done.”

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Tailored electorates

The Democratic party has tied itself in knots arguing about the relative advantages and dangers of Mamdani but the reality is perfectly obvious and perfectly comprehensible on the basis of this week’s results alone. In Holland, Jetten hardened his party’s asylum policy. In New York, Mamdani proudly projected a sense of diversity. Governor’s races in New Jersey and Virginia were won by establishment-backed Democratic party moderates. The mayoral race in New York could appeal to a different electorate.

We live in a terribly stupid world, so these results are met by people saying that their model - compromise or principle, moderate or radical - is the only one which works anywhere, as a blanket approach. In fact, the lesson is that you pick the right candidate, with the right message, for the right area. And you create local political organisations with the freedom to do that.

Would you pick a self-proclaimed socialist to run in a swing state in the US? Probably not. Should you be relaxed about a radical figure in a liberal city? Probably yes.

Progressives benefit by having lots of different variants put in front of the electorate. Jetten’s asylum policy aims at a middle of the road compromise involving out-of-country applications under the auspices of UNHCR as well as day one language classes. He says Dutch people “just want to decently host people fleeing war and violence, but also be strict with the rotten apples who ruin the system”. It’s not language that I like and nor do I approve of out-of-country applications, but you can see the effort to find a defensible middle position on the issue. It is superior to the moral and strategic muddle we see from Labour. Similarly, many of Mamdani’s policies would not be helpful in London, others may be.

The basic problem comes when progressives view their differences as weaknesses, not strengths. Mamadami runs by being proudly multicultural. I love that about him. I love that his family looks recognisably like mine and the world he inhabits looks recognisably like my own, at a time when those values and lifestyles are being attacked. I love that London Mayor Sadiq Khan emphasises the diversity and patchwork elegance of my city. But I am not under the illusion that this would be a sensible campaign approach in the North-East of England.

The national campaign, in any country, will naturally be a compromise of sorts. Local campaigns can have different flavours and textures. There is no need for moderates and radicals to insist that their preference operates best across the political landscape. It doesn’t. They don’t. Embrace the diversity of the progressive alliance, rather than sabotage it.

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Modernity

Both Mamdani and Jetten are something new. It’s not that they are politicians of the social media era - we’ve had that since at least 2016. It’s that they are politicians of the online video era. They’re Instagram and TikTok politicians. Jetten first changed from a routine cut-and-paste professional politician to a sensation after TikTok montages of a fictional romance in the Dutch parliament. His Instagram game is strong: professional, carefree, upbeat.

Mamdani is a social media triumph of simply unprecedented quality. He is a delight to watch and listen to, possessing that vanishingly rare quality of being a politician people actively want to hear more from. He was always going to struggle to get a hearing from the press or even TV, but he could sidestep that problem and go online, appearing on accounts that are the modern equivalent of Saturday night prime time for his demographic.

Whenever he did it, he emphasised the most valued quality in the modern information ecosystem: authenticity. Who else would say that Spanish is “kicking my butt” in a pitch to Latin voters, or show outtakes of him mangling the language? No-one. And that’s why he is brilliant, the perfect example of how to communicate politically at this precise moment in time. He makes everyone else look ancient.

We cannot train politicians into being as charismatic as he is or as comfortable in their skin or as nice to look at. But we can have communication strategies that are based on the 2020s rather than the 1990s.

Consider how far away any politician in the UK is from occupying this space. Farage performs best on Tiktok, but he is successful only in being better at it than everyone else, which is not hard. Green party leader Zack Polanski does OK, but like Farage, he gets his clicks by repeating a set of firm, slightly conspiratorial, political slogans. He still communicates in what is ultimately a fairly old fashioned way, as if he is doing a party political broadcast.

Labour’s communications policy is based on securing op-eds in newspapers which hate them, for a readership which does not exist. Everything operates according to a schedule which is so dated it is covered in cobwebs: a Sunday morning interview with Laura Kuenssberg, a place on Question Time, and a slot after 8am on the Today programme.

There is no fresh thinking about how to reach a new set of voters, there is no attempt to find the people who can operate in that space. There are millions of eyeballs online and yet the vast majority of British political attention is spent on the dwindling audience on TV and in print. It’s mad, on a basic mathematical level. It’ll be even more mad when the voting age is lowered to 16.

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There’s been an awful lot of nonsense spoken about election results this week - a sense of inevitable defeat cultivated in the overall media narrative, an intemperate battle of tribal animosity between progressives. But there are extremely useful practical takeaways from what we’ve seen. Joy and hope are powerful, even radical, in an era of doom. Moderates and radicals should be relaxed about which approach is best suited to a given area and try to learn from each other, regardless of their differences. Effective political communication is possible online, with powerful results, if we dare to think outside of the traditional communication structures.

We can learn all these things if progressives are prepared to learn from one another, rather than try to batter each other to death over minor differences. Is that likely? No. Why change the habit of a lifetime? But we can at least hold out some hope. It’s a good week for it.

Odds and sods

This week’s i newspaper column was on Rachel Reeves’ newfound honesty about tax and the urgent need for widescale reform of the system.

This week’s episode of Origin Story was part one of our epic history of the Labour party, from Keir Hardie to Keir Starmer. An endless tragicomic cycle in which right and left try to murder each other, succeed, fall apart, are murdered in turn, and then begin anew. 125 years of history made as breezy and effortless as possible, complete with pitch-dark humour and an abiding sense of the pointlessness of it all. What else could you ask for?

I’ll be doing two events next week. The first is at the Festival of Higher Education, where I’ll be discussing universities as a cauldron of liberalism. This is why the populist right despises higher education. It’s why even Labour doesn’t dare to defend it anymore. Because these institutions equip people to assess information critically, think for themselves, and question authority. No wonder they’re so hated.

The festival is extremely diverse, addressing every aspect of higher education, from policy to funding, values to practicalities, domestic to international. Skills minister Jacqui Smith will be there as will the chair of the Office for Students. If you’re involved in higher education in any way at all, it’s basically the place to be. Tickets are available here.

The other is Origin Story Live, where we dig into the weird, weird world of left and right. In part one of the show we’ll ask why conservatives are losing their minds by exploring some of the weird right-wing thinkers who have influenced the likes of Kemi Badenoch and JD Vance. And in part two,we’ll continue season eight’s story of socialism by looking at rising stars like Mamdani and Polanski. We’ll also rip into some of the misunderstood buzzphrases that are making our political discourse stupider by the day.

Culture pick this week is the new series of The New Gods by writer Ram V and artist Evan Cagle. I am a bit obsessed with Jack Kirby’s Fourth World saga. It’s my happy place. A lot of this is simply down to the names. How the fuck do you argue with names like the Anti-Life Equation, Big Barda or Granny Goodness? You can’t. How do you argue with their design? You may not.

The New Gods is essentially an anti-fascist parable in the form of a cosmic epic. Kirby was a veteran of the Second World War, but he was writing during the 60s, in defence of hippies and young radicals. He wasn’t one of them, but he knew who his allies were.

This latest iteration of the story has all the poetry and grandeur you could ask for, with masterful storytelling from V and scenes of impossible beauty from Cagle. The only flaw is that the ending is very, very abrupt. But then: what a small price to pay. One of my favourite bits of the comics universe is back and on form. I’m feeling properly lucky about it.

Right, that’s you’re lot - fuck off. Have a lovely weekend.

Geoff Mulgan has written a great piece on the shortcomings of a centrism which wants “to be thought of as practical competent problem-solvers, sensible, grown-up and realistic.” I agree that Mulgan is right to call this a dead-end. I want to argue, though, that it is a dead-end in its own terms: a genuinely realistic competence would see that a government cannot survive merely by aspiring to competence.

Charlie Munger once said something very wise and important:

One skill is knowing the edge of your own competency. It’s not a competency if you don’t know the edge of it.

And even the best politicians’ circle of competence is inherently small simply because human affairs are complex and unpredictable and our knowledge limited. They are confronted with what Thomas Homer-Dixon called an ingenuity gap: “a shortfall between their rapidly rising need for ingenuity and their inadequate supply.”

This is one of Reeves’ problems. Her fiscal rules oblige her to ensure that “the current budget must be in surplus in 2029-30” and that government debt be falling as a share of GDP then. This means that fiscal policy must be set on the basis of the OBR’s medium-term forecasts. But forecasts are usually wrong simply because the future is unknowable*. What’s more, a good forecast will change randomly. This is because it will embody all available information and so will change only because of unpredictable surprises which are by definition random - which in turn means that fiscal policy will change randomly. Any Chancellor therefore risks having to make policy reversals and appear to be not in control of events, as Reeves is now doing. Unless they are lucky, their claim to competence will thus be undermined by events. Which is an especial problem if competence is all you are offering.

You might think the way out of this dilemma is to abandon fiscal rules and instead set fiscal policy to control inflation. This, however, merely replaces reliance upon a forecast for the public finances with a reliance upon one for inflation. This is an improvement because inflation is less unpredictable than government borrowing, but it doesn’t solve the problem.

The fact that governments cannot predict and control extends far beyond economics, however. Adam Smith famously said there was a “great deal of ruin in a nation”. There will always be some hospital that fails, or some outbreak of criminality, or some mistakes somewhere in the public sector. A government that claims competence will get the blame for these.

Especially, of course, if it is not a right-wing one. For example, there were 377 prisoners wrongly released in 2023-24 and 2024-24 and an average of one a week in the years before then. Such incompetence under a Tory government got little publicity. But the release of two prisoners recently means, says the BBC, that the “buck stops with Lammy” in a way that it did not stop with Chalk or Raab or Lewis or Buckland or Gauke or....

I fear a similar thing will be true of immigration. This has fallen sharply recently, and is expected to drop much further. It is unlikely, however, that the right will give Labour credit for competently “controlling our borders” More likely, any crime committed by a migrant (and such crimes are statistically inevitable) will trigger a moral panic.

People mocked David Cameron for warning of “chaos under Ed Miliband”. But he was right. A paperclip going missing at the Department for Rural Affairs would have been “chaos” under a Miliband government. The Tories wrecking the economy and public services, on the other hand, was “drama”, which is what lobby correspondents want.

There’s something else. The competence that a government needs has changed, and is more demanding now.

In the decades before the mid-00s, the job of macroeconomic policy was mainly to avoid egregious errors** and so free-ride upon an economy that was growing by 2-3% a year and generating rising tax revenues.

But that world has gone. In a stagnant economy, competent government requires that policy-makers find measures to raise trend supply-side growth or to raise taxes whilst doing as little economic harm as possible. These are much more demanding tasks, perhaps even impossible ones. The bar for what is “competent” is much higher now.

In theory, the government could acknowledge all this: that there’s a great deal of ruin in a nation; that human affairs are unpredictable; and that capitalism isn’t working as it used to. It could, for example, abandon the utterly silly reliance upon point forecasts and instead base policy upon upon the range of possible outcomes; things like the Bank of England’s fan charts should be more politically salient than they are.

I’m not sure, however, that any government could actually do this. Part of politicians’ professional deformation is to be overconfident about their abilities, and to not know the edge of their own competency. Nor, of course, would such a recognition of reality be acceptable to our debased and moronic political discourse. And of course, talking about the failures of capitalism is well off the agenda.

What centrists offer, therefore, is not so much competence as competenciness - a claim to be in control founded not upon realism but instead upon centrist utopianism, a belief in a world that is perfectible if only the right people were making the right policies. This is of course a profoundly ideological position, and a mistaken one. A truly realistic and competent politician would see it as such.

* The purpose of a forecast isn’t to tell us what events will occur. It is to tell us how surprised we should be when they do occur.

** Something the Tories failed to do, triggering recessions in 1980 and 1990.

Everybody knows there are good ways in which the government might raise economic growth, such as rejoining the single market; increasing competition; not hitting one of our most successful industries with a tax on its customers; shifting tax from incomes to property; and so on.

Everybody also knows, however, that these methods are mostly incompatible with its ideology and so they are Not Serious. What we need therefore are measures which are compatible. Here, then, are a few.

First, we must build upon a model of proven success in creating create good, skilled jobs around the country: Bet365. It has created 6000 mostly well-paid jobs in previously run-down Stoke, which now has a larger tech sector than Cambridge. This suggests we should encourage the gambling industry, perhaps with tax breaks.

In the same spirit, we need a more complicated tax system. This would further increase demand for accountants and tax lawyers which are very good jobs indeed: partners at Deloitte are paid over £1m a year.

There are more options. To see them, remember what a skilled job is. Only a fool would think it is one requiring diligence and ability. No. A skilled job is simply a high-paid one. Fund managers who destroy clients’ wealth by underperforming tracker funds are skilled whilst care workers and support workers for people with special needs are not*. This tells us that we need to create more fund manager jobs, by giving tax incentives for stocks and shares’ Isas or stakeholder pensions - conditional on these not being used to expand the use of index-tracker funds.

If skillifying is one way to raise growth, another is commodifying - stopping people getting free stuff. Repair cafes, time banks, Lets and even Parkrun are all the enemy of economic growth and must be discouraged, perhaps by requiring their organizers to get expensive permits. Allotments too are the enemy of growth: people who grow their own food aren’t buying it from supermarkets. We must concrete them over.

Another form of commodification is to recognise that data is a product. And the government has a lot of it. The DVLA already sells drivers’ details. The NHS could do the same.

We can do more. Paul Samuelson famously said that when a man marries his maid he reduces GDP. So let’s do the reverse. We should discourage people from doing unpaid babysitting for friends or grandchildren, perhaps by requiring enhanced DBS checks. Economic growth requires that childminding be a paid job, not an exchange of favours.

Of course, a country cannot get rich by taking in each others’ washing. But in the GDP figures, it can appear to get rich. And that’ll be good enough for any minister appearing on the Laura Kuenssberg show.

There’s a third way to raise growth. Ordinary buying and selling gives customers something that doesn’t appear in the GDP data: consumer surplus. Everytime we pay £10 for something that we’d have happily paid £15 for, we get £5 of consumer surplus. This doesn’t show up in the GDP data but if companies could capture more of it for themselves, it would show up - voila! economic growth.

The textbook way of monetizing consumer surplus is price discrimination - charging some customers more than others, as when publishers sell a high-priced hardback to an authors’ keenest customers and a cheaper paperback to others. Another way is the use of digital rights management to stop people lending e-books they have bought, or even (as John Deere does) preventing them from repairing things they’ve bought.

Ther’s another way. If Lenin defined communism as “Soviet power plus electrification” we might define today’s capitalism as market power plus enshittification. As Cory Doctorow has shown, tech companies have enshittified their offering by, for example, selling customer data, plastering sites with adverts, or by taking payments from companies to push their product up search engines’ lists. The government can encourage this process; this, I suspect, is why it is still on Twitter but not Bluesky.

Another thing the government could do in this context is to strengthen intellectual property laws. William Nordhaus famously showed that “most of the benefits of technological change are passed on to consumers rather than captured by producers.” Flat screen TVs, for example, used to be expensive until lots of companies worked out how to make them, causing prices to fall - which meant more consumer surplus but lower profits. If the government could strengthen copyright and patents, it would prevent such knowledge spillovers and so allow producers to capture more consumer surplus - in effect converting something that isn’t in the GDP data into something that is. That creates economic growth.

By now you might be screaming: opportunity cost. If we’re paying more than necessary for stuff or paying bad fund managers or accountants to navigate a complex tax system, then we’re not spending that money elsewhere. To celebrate this would be like celebrating broken windows because they create work for glaziers.

Part of this government’s mindset, though, is to ignore opportunity cost. It claims that spending on pet projects such as Sizewell C or the military will raise growth because it ignores that such spending could go to other, more growth-enhancing projects.

And perhaps it is right to neglect opportunity cost.

One reason for this is that it’s much easier to expand existing businesses than it is to create new ones. We already have lots of fund managers, tax accountants and workers in the betting industry, so why not build on these strengths?

There’s also the politics. The thing about opportunity cost is that, as Frederic Bastiat said, we don’t see it. The counterfactual to a policy of commodify, enshittify and skillify might be a more dynamic economy that serves people well. But we’ll never see this, and so the government can deny its plausibility, just as Brexiters deny the alternative world in which Brexit never happened and the economy is doing better.

There is, though, something else. What I’ve described are trends that are already in place, and I’m merely advocating that the government accelerate them. The intelligent person might therefore ask: if British capitalism is stagnating even with the aid of these developments, what does that tell us about the underlying health of the system, and its ability to reconcile profitability and a healthy society? Luckily, though, people in politics don’t ask intelligent questions.

* Fund managers are mostly white men and care workers disproprtionately women and people of colour. Isn’t that a coincidence?

When you look in at industries and fields from the outside, most of them seem filled with odd rituals, needlessly stringent rules, and overly moralistic “purity” rules.

If your background is in tech or finance, the immediate impulse is to “optimise” and build from “first principles”. You start from scratch, do only what you think is necessary – a decision you make without actually looking into the history or background of the field you are entering – and for a while this works quite well. You’re outperforming the dinosaurs of the old guard, doing more with less money, never realising that practices that develop over years or decades in a collaborative field might not impact an individual or small organisation until well after they’ve built something that can be destroyed.

Ironically, some of the best examples of this are when non-tech people buy into a “magic” solution for making software, whether it’s Rapid Application Development (RAD) or the Large Language Models of today. They think the code is the hard part of software development when it’s only a small part of a much larger system of collaborative work, design, testing, research, and rewriting.

It’s easy to fall into this misunderstanding because much of our talk of practices or methodology does not frame them as practices but as self-evident truths.

Or, more specifically, the metaphors we use to explain and transmit the practices to new practitioners become petrified: they become fixed symbols that simultaneously obscure and represent the underlying practices.

(Apologies for the Nietzsche reference. I’m not that guy, honest.)

Test-driven development, agile, waterfall process, for example, no longer directly signify the underlying practices they used to – practices that were evolved and developed through solving actual problems in actual projects. They have become petrified metaphors that happen to have guidelines embedded within them, like partially-digested invertebrate caught in a trilobite gut and fossilised with the rest of it.

This creates a double trap:

1. Outsiders don’t understand the utility of the practices – these tools of the trade – because they now look like rituals and purity politics.
2. Insiders apply the tools blindly as rituals not understanding their context or background well enough to adapt them to their situation.

The worst case scenario would be that the problems the original practice solved begin to recur because everybody applies the tool first and foremost as a ritual. Nobody knows it well enough to adjust the practice to new or changing problems.

They invent a new practice, give it a fancy name, and the process begins again.

Most of these practices evolve as adaptations. They are rarely designed from scratch but tend to develop first as a result of collaborative work at one institution and, when it’s discovered to work, starts to spread to other organisations doing similar work and tackling the same problems.

Newsrooms and newspapers are a good example of this.

Journalistic practice isn’t a purity signal #

There are a number of practices in journalism, documentary work, and reportage that crop up again and again. You see them emerge independently in different countries, under varying kinds of governments, and under diverse economic systems.

They get abandoned, then reappear, sometimes more than once.

Some are obvious, such as the sourcing and protecting your sources. Given the nature of the work, much of it will involve developing contacts that give you information. Knowing how to find contacts, source information, and protect your sources if need be isn’t a purity signal or an ethical code. It’s a practice that lets you do the job. If you don’t do it, at some point you’ll stop being able to get the information and do the work (so you get promoted into management, natch).

Others are less obvious. The journalistic writing style, for example, results in a textual structure that’s purpose-designed to be adaptable. The first paragraph summarises the story and front-loads the most important information of the entire piece. Each successive paragraph is less and less important to the whole. Each paragraph tends to front-load the most important points of that particular paragraph.

This results in a piece of text that is more easily editable on a deadline, more easily scanned by the reader, and can often outright be cut in half to fit on a page.

This focus on adaptability, which provides ease of editing and scanning, means the writing style also lends itself to the web, even though the length restrictions there are more a matter of reader patience than available space.

(This is also why using a Large Language Model to summarise news items tends to be so incredibly inaccurate. The first paragraph is often already the summary, so the model is just taking an already serviceable summary and then watering it down with less relevant facts from further down the text, removing them from their context, which tends to change their meaning.)

One of the more important practices of a journalist or reporter is less about efficiency or productivity and more about self-preservation: impartiality. It’s not, specifically, an ethical stance, although it is addressing a number of ethical issues by the by, but it’s overall a practice that makes the journalistic work more defensible and less vulnerable to attack.

And journalism gets attacked all the time.

News media and the press are the fourth power. They serve as a check on the government’s three powers: legislative, executive, and judicial. It isn’t a coincidence that whenever oligarchs, demagogues, and authoritarians attempt to assert their control over the three main powers of government, they begin by attacking news and the press. We’ve seen this repeatedly in history, most notably when a society begins to shift authoritarian, such as in Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, Putin’s Russia, Orban’s Hungary, or the US today.

You don’t need full-on fascism for these attacks to happen. They happen every time and everywhere power gets consolidated, for example during economic bubbles or monopolies.

Impartiality, proper sourcing, and a neutral style of language is journalistic self-defence, not a purity signal.

If you make a living digging up and highlight information on powerful people who don’t want that information highlighted, they will attempt to undermine you.

If you have a financial conflict of interest, then their message is easy. “You can’t trust what they say because they’re manipulating you for their own benefit.”

It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not, whether it affected the story or not, the existence of the conflict re-frames the story in the public eye, rendering all of what it delivers suspect.

The same work, same writing, same format, same structure, same style, and the same delivery will have a different effect on the public if there is a perception of a conflict of interest. If there’s an actual conflict then even those who support the work will begin to have questions.

Avoiding conflicts of interest in the stories a journalist writes, proper sourcing, and a neutral style of writing is an act of self-preservation. If they don’t do it, they run the risk of being unprotected when something happens, when somebody with even a modicum of authority takes a dislike to their work, and their career will be over.

If you want to continue to do journalistic work, you need to pick up at least some of the practices of journalism simply out of self-defence.

Claiming that impartiality, sourcing, and neutral language is purity signalling or a vestige of an older era is like saying that wearing a helmet while riding a motorcycle is a useless purity signal that amounts to nothing more that a performative adherence to outdated rituals.

It’s there to protect you when something goes wrong, it’s not for those watching you from the sidelines.

(Mockery is its own kind of shield. Well-sourced mockery such as Last Week Tonight or Pivot To AI comes from a long tradition of parodying power. Western culture, at least, gives comedy a lot of leeway that has a similar function to the journalistic neutral style of writing.)

Over the past three decades, journalistic practices have steadily been devalued. That many, if not most, of you consider them to be useless purity signalling only serves authoritarians and oligarchs. It serves those who don’t like their power to be scrutinised or criticised.

The ethical dimension to impartiality isn’t inherent in the practice itself but in that the alternatives are less ethical: the other option is to serve and defend power. As long as you serve one master well and are useful to them, they are likely to stand by you even as you criticise others with power.

Tech journalists, for example, by and large opt to protect their work and career by simply working for the subjects instead of acting as a check on their power. They only cover critical stories when they’ve already broken out and even then they tend to co-opt the language of neutrality to downplay the impact in the name of “balance”. This is why neutrality and impartiality aren’t inherently ethical in and of themselves. The tactics and trappings of impartiality can be directly co-opted to serve unethical work. Serving power is obviously simpler and safer than attempting to do anything meaningful with your life but, thankfully, it’s not an option everybody can stomach.

Some people actually want to do important work.

If you do aspire to having a career scrutinising and criticising power, then for God’s sake, show at least a hint of a survival instinct! You can’t copy the practices of shills like Kevin Roose or Casey Newton while targeting the very powers they serve and protect. You need to shore up your defences! Review your potential conflicts of interest! Think about how and what you write in terms of defensibility and sourcing. You have two readers: the archetype that represents your likely audience and a tech oligarch’s opposition research team.

If you want to fight the fight of a journalist, you need to take up their weapons. If you don’t, you will get ploughed.

Case in point, Ed Zitron’s recent fall from grace as the “AI” Bubble’s most notable critic.

The unguarded flank #

If you don’t know who Ed Zitron is, he’s a notable blogger (sorry, “newsletter writer”) and podcaster who has made a bit of a career digging up information, analysing, and reporting on tech and the “AI” Bubble specifically.

He has written reports on industry finances, how specific products such as Google’s search were degraded, shady deals, and more.

He has a writing style that’s quite verbose and partisan, neither of which I’m really in a position to criticise.

(There’s also a question of what is a neutral tone of writing on the web. The tone of the web is different from print. You could argue that the blogger style of emotive writing is more neutral to the likely audience than a newspaper’s historical house style. But that’s a topic for another day.)

Ed Zitron definitely behaves like an asshole on social media. He gets angry at people who agree with him, demands credit at every turn, and just generally behaves like a pain in the ass.

That also isn’t in any way disqualifying. If we dismissed every reporter or journalist who is an insufferable asshole, the newsrooms of the world would be empty voids, populated only by a traumatised intern or two.

He doesn’t like to give credit and omits most prior work on “AI” criticism in his coverage. This can get annoying, but given that his focus has been on company finances, investment, and executive decisions, it’s been hard to argue that it compromises the work he does in any meaningful way.

That work has been interesting and often onerously detailed. Up until recently, most of the criticism of his reports has been minor. Some quibbles about how he uses terms (but the numbers were accurate). A couple of questions about projections and estimates, which he generally acknowledged in the text. A lot of complaints about the writing style and behaviour, both of which are completely valid but don’t change the facts he reported on.

The newsletter has also been popular. He was fast becoming the poster child for those who are criticising how the “AI” Bubble is playing out in the real world. He did research, had developed contacts and inside sources, and seemed to check his facts. He has been doing journalistic work using journalistic practices.

Or, at least, some journalistic practices.

He’s never hidden the fact that he is a PR guy. The fields of journalism and PR are, unfortunately, closely connected and there is steady traffic in both directions between the two.

Considering just how much work he’s been putting into his journalistic work – he regularly publishes newsletter articles that are over ten thousand words long, in addition to his podcast – I had always assumed that he was a former PR guy. I didn’t have the imagination to think somebody had the time to regularly hammer out several books’ worth of material and work in PR both at the same time.

But, a profile on him from Wired (itself the poster-child of servants of power masquerading as journalists) recently highlighted the fact that he is still running a PR firm, one that not only had tech companies as clients, but “AI” tech companies, including some of the least-reputable “AI” companies around, such as DoNotPay and (formerly) Nomi.

The backlash online has been swift and intense.

Conflicts of interest re-frame your prior work #

Remember Zitron’s tendency to hog credit and not reference other critics?

Something those critics all have in common is heavy criticism of DoNotPay and character-based “AI” chatbots such as those sold by Nomi. Those two companies have each become poster-children of sorts for distinct kinds of abuses by the “AI” sector:

• DoNotPay was fined for promising cheap automated expertise that it couldn’t deliver, putting their customers at risk.
• Nomi was one of the early indications that the psychological harm from chatbots could both be widespread and literally life-threatening.

Almost every active critic of the “AI” bubble, the ones that have kept up a pace of output that’s similar to Zitron’s, has covered these two companies.

But not Zitron, it seems.

The revelations abou his clients re-framed his writing. That he focused on the more obviously unstable companies in “AI”, while at the same time downplaying the contributions of researchers who have broader and more fundamental criticisms of the technology and the industry – who have specifically criticised his clients – no longer looks like an innocent decision. The conflict of interest changes how people see the writing, how they understand it, and undermines their trust. It re-frames the audience’s understanding of him from being an independent crusader to being a shill at best.

The writing itself hasn’t changed. The work that went into them hasn’t changed. The facts they report on are still facts. But his actions have changed how readers will interpret the text and all that the companies need to do to deflect his reports and criticism is to point at the conflict. “That’s the guy you trust, huh? Really?”

I have no doubt that a PR guy as capable as Zitron will find a way to salvage something out of this and bring himself back into the centre of attention. But his writing no longer does the job it used to. It has become a different thing entirely. What exactly it becomes will depend on how he spins and and re-reframes his work. But he used to position himself as a journalistic speaker of truth to power and that is no longer a position he can hold.

Another irony in all of this is that the Wired piece is generally laudatory:

In truth, Zitron’s two jobs aren’t in as much tension as they might seem to be. The PR wheedling and the critical needling come from the same place: He loves this stuff. He’s just mad it doesn’t work better.

This isn’t surprising because your average Wired editor, historically, wouldn’t know journalistic ethics if it walked up to them and hit them in the face with a shovel. (A “smart” shovel, obviously. The kind with bluetooth that only works half the time.) Wired has been one of the more consistent cheerleaders of the tech apocalypse over the years and their recent turn towards criticising the current US administration doesn’t even come close to making up for it.

The silk gloves treatment Ed Zitron got from Wired – “the funny part of Zitron’s becoming the face of tech’s new pessimism. He is, in fact, its truest believer” – shows us that it would have been trivial for him to head this entire thing off at the pass.

Once the newsletter and podcast started to get some traction, he could have just fired his “AI” clients. Then if somebody had mentioned them, he’d have been covered by a simple “yeah, that was before I truly understood how bad it was”.

It wouldn’t have been perfect. Some people would have still dismissed him, but that would have largely been the people who were already dismissing him for being an asshole (which he is).

But he wouldn’t have been put in the situation of having a whole host of potential allies turn their back on him, forcing him to retool his media career on the spot.

Dude has a book deal that’s threatened by this kerfuffle. This didn’t need to happen.

Turns out, if you want to act like a journalist, write like a journalist, and fight the fights of a journalist, not practicing journalism can get you into trouble.

You can’t fully avoid anger in your life. Even if you aren’t the type to get angry, sometimes the world just steps up and puts you in a position where your coping mechanisms break down and unregulated emotion breaks to the surface, usually in the form of an unproductive outburst.

Anger has shapes and genres. It comes in types and variations. Some seethe just under the surface, only rarely breaking out in fury. A few know no other way of dealing with their emotions, their only feeling is rage. Some relish it even as it burns. Others just march through their life with a constant background radiation of annoyance and grumpiness.

One of the main skills you develop as you grow up is handling your own emotions. Maturity means emotional regulation – not absence or denial of emotion, but regulation.

This can be hard if you don’t have many examples or role models, such as when your parents are absent or suffer from their own inability to manage their emotions.

Not impossible, but can be hard.

Environmental factors have an effect. Hunger and malnutrition can compromise your ability to handle your emotions. The correlation between lead additives in fuel and global crime rates hints at the possibility that pollution might also be a factor.

Media is another.

There’s plenty to be angry about in life and being reminded of them can infuriate. Media – social, broadcast, news – can make us angry.

Media itself is never angry. Text has no emotion. It doesn’t feel. Video isn’t infused with a miasma of rage that infects those that watch it.

Those who make the media have emotions while making it. Those who experience media have emotions as a result of the experience. The medium itself is a tool shared by the two groups.

The side that creates sets in place structures, pacing, rhythms, symbols, and signals that play with conventions and precepts to convey a message to the other side. The “reader” decodes, interprets, deconstructs, and reassembles a meaning that’s built out of their experiences and expectations using their skills at understanding media.

It’s a tool on both ends and most of us on the receiving end have been doing our “decoding” for so long that we often forget that it’s a skill we’ve practiced and can improve. None of it is natural.

This is why generated media is often so vacuous, there is less intent behind it – mostly references and formulaic adherence to accepted conventions – leaving the burden of constructing meaning entirely on the consumer, and there’s a hard limit to how much meaning can be made out of what’s effectively an empty balloon: all surface filled with air.

It’s also why the entire “AI” bubble is, well, built on hot air. The intelligence people see in the chatbots is one they construct themselves. The model statistically assembles common patterns from a massive language data set and you are the only one that brings sense to the table. The other players only bring nonsense and bullshit.

This bubble didn’t happen by itself, but was made to happen by the tech industry and those who work in the industry.

Not everybody is complicit, obviously. Given the worst job environment for tech workers since the collapse of the dot-com bubble, it’s hard to fault anybody who, when ordered to use “copilots” at work or add a pointless chatbot to a website, just grin and bear it.

But the AI Bubble isn’t limited to the pointless and unproductive. It’s an outright political project.

Numerous executives in tech repeatedly talk about how they think “AI” is going to replace workers. By their own account, that seems to be the point of the technology.

So far, the impact seems limited to a few select fields. Copywriters have been hit hard. Translators and illustrators are losing gigs everywhere I look. Training, especially in software development, seems to have been hit hard. Voice actors are getting replaced with generated voices.

The goal, if we are to take tech executives at their word, is to make these trends the norm, not the exception.

That is a political project. Attacking labour, deskilling the work force, and driving down wages, is fundamentally a political project and an extremist one at that.

Centrally managing language, using pervasive chatbot adoption as a lever to change corporate writing at scale, is another explicit goal of these companies. When Musk and Altman argue about which of their respective chatbots is less “left-wing”, their intent is clearly that they want to make all writing done with their tools less left-wing.

Centralised ideological control over all corporate writing is, again, an extremist political project, historically associated with violent authoritarianism.

We could go through how these tools are being used to power a wholesale takeover of our education systems, create a tiered system of healthcare access, and automate decisions to ensure that nobody can be held accountable for atrocious decisions, but it all comes down to the same, repeated point:

The AI Bubble is a right-wing political project that goes hand-in-hand with the ongoing resurgence of fascism.

It’s also fuelling a financial bubble large enough to threaten the stability of the global economy.

This is why it’s meaningless to talk about how the technology still has its uses, and that the fact that it’s mostly used in harmful ways at the moment shouldn’t be used to dismiss the tech as a whole.

The time to talk about what to salvage from the tech is after the bubble has been deflated, the political project to undermine our institutions stopped, and the machinery of political extremism has been dismantled.

It isn’t a coincidence that we’re seeing an increase in the number of people who have spent their careers in tech coming out with statements that there is a silent majority in tech that doesn’t believe in “AI” or the associated political machinery of disenfranchisement and deskilling.

The problem with these statements is twofold.

1. Tech isn’t a uniform community #

It’s possible that a majority of tech workers doesn’t believe in the bubble, very few of them work directly on “AI” in the first place and many only touch on it in ways that are truly incidental to their work. But a majority of management and the executive class absolutely do believe. Every survey to date of the management class shows that they overwhelmingly believe that “AI” is the future.

To claim that there is a silent majority of the tech management class that doesn’t believe in the over-hyped promises of the bubble is simply untenable.

2. Most influencers either stood by or outright attacked critics #

Tech is a pop culture. Very few of the decisions made in the industry are made rationally or empirically. Studies and tests are used to justify the emotional decisions of the executive or management class. Infrastructure and stack decisions are made hedonistically – “cool” tech that makes the engineers and devs feel good about themselves almost always gets a priority over “boring” tech that has no risks.

The industry, especially the software side of tech, is driven by emotion and a sense of what is fashionable. There is genuinely more grounded engineering – materials, machinery, process, supply chains, etc. – taking place in the fashion industry than there ever has been in the software industry.

That’s why it’s a pop culture, not a fashion culture.

What is “in” is defined by influencers and cultural authorities whose language is constantly grounded in emotion – “My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts” being a recent example – and what little argument the texts or videos contain doesn’t amount to more than a loose sequence of evocations or references that are specific to the community in question. Not even straw men. More reminder of the straw men that you saw that one time on Hacker News a few years ago. Placeholders of arguments past.

These are vocal investors, former and current executives, people who have built their careers on promoting the currently fashionable tech – all people who through their influence are the true driver of the nuts and bolts decisions in the software industry. The executives set the direction, but the implementations of most software companies are decided by whatever the current crop of dev influencers things is cool and trendy or, if your organisation is large enough, by however your internal “influencers” fixate on this quarter.

Overwhelmingly, this group of people, who hold enormous sway over how things get done in the industry, either went all-in on “AI” or, worse yet, consistently opposed those who have been trying to warn about the path that the “AI” project is taking

They actively opposed or dismissed critics while at the same time pointing out some of the implementation issues that have cropped up all in an effort to position themselves as the “reasonable” alternative.

Effectively their message was:

Pay no attention to the people warning about the political, economic, educational, and societal risks this technology presents. It’s a “normal” technology that’s fine as long as you take care about things like prompt injections.

The problem is that it isn’t a “normal technology”. It is outright a political project.

There will be a reckoning #

The average lifespan of a fascist government is around ten to twenty years. Sometimes, historically, you get lucky and they collapse in much less time.

Either way, there’s a reckoning. The long-lived fascist governments gradually tighten their grip on society and anything that threatens that grip, such as self-serving oligarchs or an unstable financial bubble, tends to get dealt with.

The shorter-lived movements leave their large-scale supporters defenseless and, in many cases, quite obviously culpable for many of the actions they supported.

Either way, a financial bubble that’s reportedly seventeen times bigger than the dot-com bubble will pop and, when that happens, nobody will want to be remembered as a supporter of “AI”. Tech industry leaders better hope that the US fascist project will have fizzled out by then because the fascists are much less likely to take kindly on them messing up the grift than a functioning democratic justice system.

No matter what happens in US politics, the days of the AI Bubble are numbered, and a number of people in tech – mostly those with enough savvy to consistently position themselves as the “moderates” of tech by pretending that technologies that predominantly have either libertarian or authoritarian politics baked right into the structure are somehow politically neutral – are realising that they need to distance themselves from the centre of the bubble.

That’s why we’re seeing a number of blog posts, videos, and social media posts saying that most people in tech were only pretending to support the bubble, that their enthusiastic blog posts, exuberant social media posts, and angry dismissals of critics were all insincere and born out of a fear for their careers.

They claim to be a part of a responsible majority that, very responsibly, helped implement the bubble to preserve their career and now, very responsibly, are saying that they didn’t mean it.

Even as they, at the same time, claim that the technology itself is neutral and “normal” and that once the bubble passes we can continue right where we left off and find “reasonable” uses for a tech purpose-designed to deskill, destroy the labour force, and drive creative industries into extinction.

It comes across as insincere, is all I’m saying.

This is only happening because that destruction is already making people angry, the bubble popping will only make more people angry, and pretending that nothing’s happening will only serve to pour fuel onto the fire.

So, they’d like us to just focus our anger on the TESCREAL cultists, please and thank you. They were just doing their job.

But they genuinely didn’t have to do their jobs this way.

Unlike the ground infantry of the industry – coders, designers, support staff – the influencers, who have a platform and a voice, and the management, who made the decisions, are absolutely to blame for all of the useless chatbots that were pushed into unrelated apps, the wholesale takeover over education, the deliberate positioning of diffusion models as an alternative to photography and illustrations, and a long long list of intentional destruction of people’s livelihoods, environment, education, and community.

They are to blame and, because we have no other tool at hand and no mature outlet for justice, people will inevitably be angry.

This obviously helps nobody because anger, motivating as it is, is a loss of reason that makes us vulnerable to manipulation and exploitation.

The inevitability of anger #

Almost all of our experiences of politics and how society is governed are mediated through either TV or social media. News is delivered simultaneously as a twenty-four hour broadcast cycle and a constant bombardment of hearsay and paraphrases on social media.

• A link with clickbait text.
• News stations filling the endless hours with lies and misrepresentations.
• Posts on X, Bluesky, or Threads that provoke and enrage.
• Videos that manipulate and take things out of context.

These media have a shape and a set of affordances that mould whatever message they convey. Once you boil down what you want to say to fit in a video or a social media site’s character count, you peel away all nuance and moderation.

What you’re left with is text that enrages, even if that wasn’t what you were feeling at the time.

This essay is almost 2500 words. The Bluesky equivalent I posted yesterday while I was working on a draft of this piece, with all of the argument and context stripped out, was little over a hundred words:

In the late stages of the bubble we’re starting to see multiple “people in tech don’t really believe in all of this, honest, we just act like it because we think we have to”, but the truth is that it doesn’t matter. What matters is that you’ve been acting like a true believer and you are what you do.

In work and politics, it genuinely doesn’t matter what you were thinking when you actively aided and abetted in shitting on people’s work, built systems that helped fascists, ruined the education system and pretty much all of media. What matters, and what you should be judged on is what you did.

An argument for moderation and consequence becomes a provocation – an incitement of the crowd – and the easiest emotion for the reader to construct from their end of the tool that is text, is “justifiable” anger. Mixed but reasoned emotions are boiled down to rage.

We live in a world where our most accessible forms of expression – the ones that we all marinate in day in, day out – have been confined, dismantled, sanded off, and stripped down until its mechanisms are too limited, too simple, to easily convey anything other than the simplest of emotions: anger or mockery.

There are people who manage to push the boundaries of the form and, within specific contexts, deliver more, whether it’s poetic, artistic, or simple clarity.

But they aren’t the norm and the work they do is harder than it should be.

We need to click past the “AI” summaries, rage-baiting social media posts, and read the text itself.

Anger is inevitable. You can and should minimise your exposure to triggers, but even with the greatest care it will sneaks up on you and, at least temporarily, some of your reason will leave you. The trick isn’t to prevent anger, to never become angry about anything in your life, but to recognise it when it arrives – the warning signs of when it takes hold of you – and defuse it before it does you harm. Walk away from the trigger. Talk about your feelings instead of what’s triggering your feelings. Focus on the facts, in context, instead of just the parts that enrage.

All of which requires space and nuance.

The only way we can counter the inevitability of anger is by fostering and participating in a wider selection of media than just social media and TV-like video platforms. We need movies. We need books. We need the support and structure of longer articles. When we are faced with the anger triggers that are baked into social media, we need other media to serve as a distraction from the triggers, a space for us to explore facts in a more nuanced and holistic way, and – which is a key part of our long, long history of art and media – give us an avenue to explore our emotions and feelings in healthy ways that don’t involve shouting at people.

Social media is confined.

We need space to spread our wings.