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.

It is the right way to go: leaving the EU has been a disaster. But refusing to admit it has cost Labour precious time and credibility

The UK government is trying out a new Brexit stance, not to be mistaken for a change in policy. The shift is tonal.

Previously, Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves talked about Britain’s detachment from the rest of Europe as a feature of the natural landscape, awkward to navigate perhaps, but nobody’s fault. Now they are prepared to say it is an affliction.

Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist

Two incidents took place this week, which didn’t initially seem to have much to do with each other. In one, Labour leader Keir Starmer called Nigel Farage’s mass deportation policy racist. In another, the American writer Ta-Nehisi Coates challenged commentator Ezra Klein on whether it was right of him to praise the far-right campaigner Charles Kirk after he died.

On the face of it, they seemed like very distant events. Starmer’s speech took place at the height of British politics. Klein’s interview took place in a US podcast studio. But in fact they centred on precisely the same question: What’s the shit you won’t put up with? Where do you draw the moral line in an era of prejudice and authoritarianism? And what happens when you do so?

We all think we have an easy answer to that question. We don’t. It’s much tougher than we expect. No-one has a decent response. Those that do are either impotent or cynical.

This is about one of the most challenging and least understood questions in politics: when you should compromise and when you shouldn’t.

Subscribe now

Halfway through the Coates interview, Klein said something very interesting. He revealed a fundamental element of his political personality.

“The president of the United States is a person who, in his comportment as a human being on the public stage, I would have said in 2008, 2012, in 2016, should be on the other side of the line,” he said. “I think he’s a person who does not act with any sense of public, or even personal, decency. And then he won in ’16, lost sort of narrowly in ’20 and then won in 2024. And the thing that this has led to, for me, is recognising that I don’t get to draw the line. Now it doesn’t mean I don’t have one in my own heart. But the thing that I am struggling with is that for most people, or a lot of people, the plurality of the voters in the last election: He is somehow not way over the line. That means there are a lot of people who are willing to accept things that I thought we would have found unacceptable.”

A similar sentiment was expressed after Starmer’s conference speech, in which he used strong moral terms against Farage for the first time. Several MPs anonymously whispered to journalists that it wasn’t wise to do so, because Reform voters will think they’re being called racist. A Times commentator debating me on BBC Scotland said that he would have thought Farage’s policy was racist years ago, but now the public mood has changed, so it isn’t.

In the Statesman, data journalist Ben Walker wrote: “Starmer has made contentious debate more contentious and has told the median Briton they are wrong. The median Briton would be seeing not an attack on policy, but an attack on the sentiment. And on the sentiment, the median Briton would feel they’re part of that. They’re being labelled racist too.”

The Klein interview and the Walker piece comes from the same place: No matter what we might think of these things, the median voter is comfortable with them. It is therefore wrong to say that they are racist or immoral. And even if it is not wrong, it is unhelpful - it alienates those whose support you need to attract.

It’s not clear that Walker’s argument holds on the basis of the evidence he presents. He focuses on whether Farage is racist rather than the policy itself - a different issue. And even then, the data he uses suggests the median voter isn’t actually sure if Farage is racist and is therefore persuadable. He understates the median voter’s wariness of Reform’s extremism. He stresses “immigration vibes favour Reform more than they do Labour”, but does not make any effort to look into public feeling about individual policies - like a mass deportation programme - where Labour clearly feels it can win the argument. It’s a very weak piece.

But the main problem with the Klein/Walker position is not empirical, it is about practical consequence. It assumes that the public have no moral sense at all, or at least one so far removed from basic progressive values as to be non-existent for our purposes. And then it dictates that we keep our mouths shut about egregious assaults on immigrants so that we stay on the right side of public opinion.

Subscribe now

Walker says: “There’s a time and a place for calling a policy or a party or a politician racist. That time was not now.” This is a very popular view in political circles. It sounds composed and respectable. You must be terribly careful with this word, old chap. Don’t use it too quickly or it’ll lose its power. Don’t use it unwisely or it’ll backfire, and you won’t be able to deploy it when it matters. It’s an easy default position to adopt because it seems unflustered, the product of a mind which is insulated against leftie hysteria.

Although the view sounds like a dismissal of political activism, it is in fact a form of activism in itself. It seeks and achieves political outcomes. Earlier this year Tory MP James Cleverly attacked Starmer for using the words ‘far-right’ when discussing a far-right media campaign led by Elon Musk. “Accusing those who disagree with him, or who seek legitimate answers about repeated failures of child protection, as ‘far-right’ is deeply insulting and counterproductive,” he wrote on X. The Mail tried the same tactic this week with its headline: “Worried about immigration? Starmer says you’re racist.”

A great deal of British political commentary takes place in this liminal zone between polling, strategy and morality. Data journalists write pieces about the public view, right-wing politicians and editors then use it to defend themselves against attack.

The primary effect of this sort of coverage is the death of objective reality. We get lost in a debate which is exclusively about what voters think about things. It completely ignores the core issue: Is the policy racist? Is it far-right? The idea that there is a real external world and that words mean something fades away. It is replaced by the shifting sands of public sentiment.

Without an objective moral standard, there is no depth to which we will not sink. Perhaps slavery is OK. Perhaps wives legally belong to their husband. Perhaps we should initiate a new era of colonialism. That sounds excessive, of course. But mass deportations would have been an unthinkable policy just five years ago. Now they’re discussed on morning television. The consequence of only discussing popularity and not morality is that there is no protection against deeply immoral ideas.

The secondary effect is to discourage centre-left figures from being able to speak honestly and confidently about their values. Once you stop holding to a moral line, you are part of the oppressor’s project. You are the handmaiden of the far-right. You give up on resistance. You not only stop fighting back yourself, but you actively discourage others from doing so.

You can see this very clearly over the first year of the Trump administration - people failing to resist, in newsrooms and courtrooms and boardrooms. People taking decisions which aid Trump without him even having to press for them. They do it by giving up on their values and refusing to fight for them. It is surrender. They hand him piecemeal what he would otherwise have taken at once.

There is something particularly egregious when you see people with very large followings - Klein is successful and widely read - giving up on maintaining moral norms. His sense of powerlessness is frustrating precisely because he does have considerable influence and yet refuses to use it. He is despairing at a world that is partly of his own making.

Subscribe now

It should therefore be entirely obvious which side I am on in this debate. I am sick and tired of watching people with decent, compassionate values constantly be told to accommodate the views of people who lack decency or compassion. I am exhausted by a world which seems like a macabre inversion of elementary moral principles. I want the kind to be strong and the cruel to be weak and I am sick of seeing things operate in the opposite direction.

But honestly, I feel considerable sympathy with Klein. You can hear in someone’s voice when their bones are scraping against their soul, when they’ve been hollowed out by events, when their view of humanity is being shattered on an electoral shore. He is searching for answers, which is more than most people do in similar circumstances, when they retreat back into their ideological shell.

Practical, pragmatic people often sound like they’re a moral vacuum. But in fact they are following a different kind of morality. Instead of trying to uphold moral norms, they are trying to secure moral outcomes, particularly by winning elections.

At one point, Klein and Coates discussed the way the Trump administration is poisoning the US against trans people. Klein then says something which is profoundly moral. “I think that in losing as badly as we have, we have imperiled trans people terribly.”

That’s correct. You can defend minorities as much as you like, but if your refusal to compromise makes you electorally irrelevant then you have not helped them. You have sacrificed them to your own sense of virtue. Compromise is not self-interested. It is the mechanism by which you win. When liberals and progressives forget how to win, they fail to help the people who need them.

Take Jeremy Corbyn. When it comes to refugees, I share his values. But what good has he ever done them? He has marched for them. He has spoken out for them. He has held a thousand microphones on a thousand marches and expressed a thousand words of solidarity. And I’ve no doubt that he’s done decent constituency work to assist them as individuals. But in terms of policy, he has never done anything at all to help them because he never had power.

The reason he never had power - and never will - is because he is unable to compromise. He is unable to find the space between his own values and the disposition of the British people. Those who loved him found something reassuring and principled in this. I thought he looked dead inside, a jumble of response-mechanisms without an internal intelligence to control them.

Take Margaret Thatcher. Early Thatcher was actually a pragmatic figure. She served as a One Nation education secretary. Even as prime minister she was initially cautious on policy. She never privatised rail, or the NHS, or the BBC. It was only in her later years that she became immoveable and dogmatic.

Her admirers have somehow contrived to make this the most cherished version of her. But in actual fact, it was the point that she basically went mad - unable to countenance criticism, unable to even comprehend it, so adrift from public opinion and any sense of natural justice that she made repeated catastrophic errors. It was the precise moment at which she stopped winning and started losing.

Subscribe now

This debate is basically about whether you follow the politics of values or the politics of strategy.

It’s incredibly revealing to me that it maps directly onto the core dispute in moral philosophy: Does an action become moral because of its consequences or on the basis of principles?

On one side of that debate are consequentialists - people like Jeremy Bentham. They believe an action is moral because of the effect. If a train is out of control and going to hit one of two platforms, you should morally pull the lever and send it crashing into the platform where there are fewer people.

On the other side of that debate are the deontologists - people like Immanuel Kant. They believe an action is moral because it is based on basic rules. They think, for instance, that you can never morally torture someone, even if it secures vital information that stops a terrorist attack, because torture is wrong.

It’s telling that both of these views were founded by deeply weird and broken men. Both of them drive their adherents insane. A strict consequentialist, for instance, would argue that if your mother and a man who might cure cancer are on a sinking boat, you should save the man first. A strict deontologist would argue that if you were hiding Anne Frank and a Nazi asked where she was, you’d have to tell him, because it’s wrong to lie. No sensible person can abide by either of these systems.

Similarly, no sensible person submits fully to the politics of values or the politics of strategy. They would be either utterly dogmatic and irrelevant, or utterly cynical and empty. You wouldn’t want to know them, you wouldn’t want to read them, and you wouldn’t want to be governed by them.

Almost all of us are somewhere in the middle. We all believe in compromise. We all think you have to forsake some of your convictions in order to build alliances, or win over wavering voters, or get a piece of legislation through, or even just get on with your family at the dinner table. But we all also have things with which we simply will not fucking put. We have values we are unwilling to forsake, no matter what happens, no matter how unpopular they become, no matter what the consequences are of our obstinacy.

None of us are really on one side or other of this debate. Instead, we have dispositions, instincts, and even moods. At certain times, in certain contexts, we are more open to compromise. In other times, in different contexts, we are not.

Subscribe now

Is there a solution? No, of course not, we’re human and all messed up. But we can commit to thinking clearly about it. We can articulate which values we can compromise on and which we can’t. We can describe the outcomes which are tolerable and those which are not.

Most importantly, we can search for ways to combine the pragmatism of strategic politics with the force of values politics. That means being evidence led - looking for weaknesses in the populist argument, searching for where they’ve gone over a line and contradicted the public’s sense of natural justice, then zeroing in on that remorselessly. It means demanding a communications strategy which isolates these areas where their politics of division is most vulnerable.

Right now, for instance, several mainstream right-wing commentators are claiming that black people cannot be English. Matthew Goodwin has said it. Isabel Oakshott has said it. This is absolute poison, obviously, but it is also contrary to public opinion. It is unpopular. I would like to see a Labour communication strategy which punches that bruise. Make it the chief issue, focus remorselessly on it. Force everyone on the right to either disassociate themselves from it or be branded a racist for holding it.

This would serve an electoral function which appeals to advocates of strategic politics. It would splinter the right-wing populist alliance and create volatile internal disputes. It would get Labour on the front foot, defining the conversation, and force Farage onto the backfoot. This week alone has demonstrated how much less sure-footed he is when he is unable to set the agenda.

It would also serve a moral function which appeals to advocates of values politics. It would shore up anti-racist norms. It would beam out a message across society that this is a thing you should not say and should not think, or you’ll risk social isolation. In a period of progressive defeat, it would firm up a wall behind us.

The heart cannot function without the head and the head is useless without the heart. The binary is bullshit. There are no answers to be found from those who demand that we only pursue strategy, or only pursue values. Instead, we must think clearly about where one or the other is appropriate. And then look closely for where we can synthesise them.

Odds and sods

Really sorry there’s no audio this week. The recording equipment thing went horribly wrong. Normal service will resume next week when I’ve figured out how to do it. If anyone has recommendations for audio recording software/sites that work on a cheap as fuck Chromebook, hit me up.

Couple of pieces in the i paper this week. The first was on Starmer’s conference speech. I honestly expected to be more critical than I was and was extremely pleased to find myself writing something supportive. The second was on Labour’s growing confidence criticising Brexit and how this reveals that a consensus has really been reached. Quietly, without much drama and no single moment of realisation, the country has decided that it was a shit idea. Better late than never, I guess.

The first episode of our Origin Story two-parter on Marx came out on Wednesday. It’s a mad tale of stroppy philosophers engaging in pointless bad-tempered drive-by shootings on obscure German colleagues while occasionally pausing to sketch out some ideas that change the world. If you’ve ever wondered about Marx or wished you understood it without having to do all the reading, that’s basically what we’re here for. We will painlessly explain everything you need to know about his philosophy, independently and fairly, while making sure that it’s always an entertaining listen full of laughs and drama.

Our core editorial principle is that intelligent people want to learn about the world, but that it should be entertaining to do so. This is a case in point. Check out the clip below. If you like that, you’ll like the show. You can find it on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

I love the podcast Search Engine. It’s funny and curious and searching and detailed. The idea is that the host tries to answer a question by talking to experts. The questions are usually fairly harmless but very revealing about the world around you.

This week, I did something odd, and went back to listen to one of my favourite old episodes. I’m not sure I’ve ever done that - treated a podcast like a favourite movie or TV episode. It’s an interview with Ben Brode, the designer behind the mobile game Marvel Snap.

That game, man. I was playing it once when my partner left for the night. Ten minutes she returned and I realised that I was sitting in the dark staring at my screen and four hours had passed. I deleted it the next day.

What starts as a conversation about mobile video games quickly becomes something else. It is about the mechanics of games in general and in particular about how a really strong game design includes chance and skills but does not treat them as opposites. It’s also about how we really improve at the things we’re good at and how play unites us as a species. Also, there’s a bit about professional rock-paper-scissors tournaments, which apparently involve one minute of trying to psychologically fuck up your opponent before you play. I think I may actually have to go to one of those, it sounds amazing. You can listen here. Strong recommend.

Right, that’s your lot. Fuck off you cunts.

Dani Rodrik asked a good question on twitter the other day: why has there been so much backlash against free trade but so little against finance?

In the UK, it’s moot whether there has been a backlash against free trade. But there certainly hasn’t been one against finance, so Dani’s question holds.

Three things make it especially puzzling.

One is that the costs of the financial crisis are vastly greater than any even half-plausible estimate of the cost of being in the EU, and yet there’s much more hostility to the latter.

A second is that scepticism about the financial sector is to some extent non-partisan. In his fine book Adam Smith: What He Thought and Why It Matters, Tory MP Jesse Norman accuses banks of “turbo charged” rent extraction and says: “The banking sector may be generating little or no net real economic value.” And there are countless small businessmen (and ex-businessmen) whose opinion of bankers would make even the hardest line Marxist blush.

And thirdly, the financial system’s rip-off doesn’t consist merely of the “too big to fail subsidy.” It’s also because people actually choose to be ripped off for example by buying poorly performing but high-charging actively managed funds. In its report into the industry the FCA said (pdf):

On average, both actively managed and passively managed funds did not outperform their own benchmarks after fees..when choosing between active funds investors paying higher prices for funds, on average, achieve worse performance.

So, why hasn’t there been a backlash against finance? Here are five possible non-exclusive explanations.

One is plain deference. We respect scroungers and fraudsters much more if they are rich and expensively suited than if they are poor and tracksuited. As Adam Smith said:

The great mob of mankind are the admirers and worshippers, and, what may seem more extraordinary, most frequently the disinterested admirers and worshippers, of wealth and greatness.

A second possibility is resignation. When inequality is great and entrenched, we become accustomed to it and don’t rebel.

Thirdly, we just don’t see counterfactuals. If we hadn’t had the 2008 crisis we’d now have not just higher incomes but also a tolerant society without the social divisions and political crisis that Brexit has caused, But we don’t see this world, We don’t therefore see so clearly the damage the financial sector has done.

This is true in another way. Even if there had been no crisis, the financial sector would still leave much to be desired. For one thing, it is exploitative and uncompetitive. As Thomas Philippon (pdf) and Guillaume Bazot (pdf) have shown, the cost of finance hasn’t changed in decades despite much technological progress. And for another, the financial sector has failed to develop useful products that might help us spread risk, such as house price futures, social care insurance or macro markets (pdf) linked to GDP, aggregate profits or occupational incomes. Because we don’t see the alternative world in which finance is competitive and offers useful innovation, we don’t realize how dysfunctional it is.

Fourthly, as David Leiser has shown, people are terrible at connecting economic facts. They just don’t link the collapse of banks with a decade of stagnant real wages. This is not helped by a media which has a bias against emergence. For example, in Jon Sopel’s interview with Gary Cohn yesterday neither party asked the extent to which the US’s economic performance might for good or ill be due to forces outside direct political control.

Which brings me to something else. For decades political debate about the economy has been framed by the presumption that capitalism is basically fundamentally healthy and that the role of the state is to provide the framework of stable policy and light regulation which frees this underlying dynamism. The question has been: how can the state serve capital? rather than: what must be done to fix or replace a rotten system? Because ideas often linger on after their factual base has withered, we are stuck in this paradigm. This is why the Tories managed to get away with describing post-crisis government deficits as the fault of Labour rather than bankers.

My point here should be a trivial one. Our perceptions of complex systems are distorted by cognitive biases. Sometimes these distortions help to legitimate inefficiency and exploitation. Behavioural economics and Marxist theories of ideology are much more compatible than is often realized.

Donald Trump’s state visit to the UK was supposed to offer a vote of confidence in the British economy, a moment of respite for a Labour government so gaffe-prone and unpopular that it appears to have been taking PR advice from Prince Andrew. Before the wheels of Air Force One hit the tarmac at Stansted, a series of announcements had been arranged to showcase American investment in the UK: a new partnership on nuclear power; a £5bn investment by Google. Investment is the key to growing the economy, but it comes with strings attached, particularly when it comes from the US.

The main reason for this is that the US owns so much of Britain already. The most recent US Internal Revenue Service data (for 2022) records 1,369 multinationals reporting more than $836bn in revenue in the UK, a number equivalent to more than a quarter of that year’s GDP. Large chunks of what we think of as the British economy – from leading companies such as the AI pioneers DeepMind to everyday entities such as Boots and Morrisons, to energy suppliers and nursery chains – are American-owned.

This gives American business interests huge power over the UK economy, and consequently Britain’s politics. The investments recently scrapped by major pharmaceutical companies in the UK might suddenly be un-scrapped if the government decides to allow them to charge the NHS more for drugs. If the government allows Silicon Valley to keep helping itself to Britain’s intellectual property, the data centres will keep on coming. New deals on technology are on offer if we reconsider the laws our elected politicians made on online safety and taxing digital services.

We have already been making these compromises for a long time, and the cultural and economic consequences are now obvious. Nine of the ten highest grossing films in the UK last year were American. The only Brit on the list was Paddington, whose citizenship is, let’s face it, uncertain (Michael Bond never got round to writing Paddington and the Indefinite Leave to Remain). All the major online streaming platforms are US-owned. The UK spends more than three times as many hours watching YouTube as it does watching BBC iPlayer. Of the ten biggest-selling songs in the UK last year, eight were by Americans (Sabrina Carpenter appeared twice; the other was by an Irish person, singing in an American accent). On Britain’s bookshelves, the five biggest-selling print novelists of 2024 were Richard Osman and four American women.

The internet, as experienced by British people, is basically America. Of the 20 most visited websites in the UK, only the UK government and the BBC are British. Social media is America. The one social platform that wasn’t already American – China’s TikTok – is being switched to US-controlled ownership, because Americans are not stupid enough to let another country have direct, unaccountable control over their citizens’ main source of news.

After Elon Musk appeared via video link at a large far-right rally in London on 13 September, the Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey wrote a sternly worded letter to Keir Starmer warning, in case the PM hadn’t noticed, that Musk was in his view “deliberately spreading misinformation, stoking anger and encouraging violence”. Davey then published this letter on X, the platform Musk owns, where the attention it generated made some more money for Musk. Davey continues to post multiple times per day on X, using his time as an MP to create free content for someone he believes wants to “undermine our democracy”. Musk both profits from Davey’s posts and controls the algorithm that decides by whom and in what context they are seen. The bile and ridicule to which Davey is subjected are variables for which Musk holds the dials.

Vying with Musk for the title of the world’s richest individual is Larry Ellison, a friend of Donald Trump and ex-CEO of Oracle – a strategic supplier to the British state – and a fellow investor in Britain’s culture and its politics. Two notable investments are £1bn in Oxford University and more than $350m in the Tony Blair Institute, which is highly influential on Starmer’s government. The Blair Institute is known for espousing technological solutions to social issues, a position that is not inconsistent with Ellison’s commercial goals.

America even helps to decide the price of our debt. When Rachel Reeves makes a decision, the yields on government bonds are checked hastilyto see if the shadowy forces of the market have been angered. In reality, these numbers are partly decided in the US. Trump’s tax cuts are adding trillions to America’s immense debt pile, and a market that is being asked to gorge itself on US Treasuries consequently has less of an appetite for UK gilts. If Trump manages to gain political control of US interest rates, then this too could have significant effects on the UK economy.

There is a huge amount to gain from Britain’s relationship with the US, but we should never forget the power relationship involved. What we do is of little consequence to the White House, but we have to deal with the consequences of American risk-taking. We are a mouse sharing a bed with a walrus.