News In Brief
Same As The Old Email
If you're reading this… well, go outside. Read a book. Do something more productive. But if you received this email, you might have noticed that this newsletter looks slightly different. The short explanation is that it used to come via Substack, but Substack turned out to make money from (and give money to) neo-Nazis. So I've moved over to Buttondown who, as far as anyone can tell, don't do that. It won't make any material difference to the quality or content of my output, and for that I can only apologise.
Election Roundup.
I need to be careful, as the last three guys who said this died of acute sarcasm overdose, but: Rishi Sunak is not disappointing!
I wrote recently that I couldn't wait to see how badly his campaign for Prime Minister went, and that was after only twenty four hours. During that period, he'd announced an election in torrential rain to almost universal ridicule and then travelled to Wales to speak with some commoners. He asked them if they were looking forward to "all the football" this summer, which they weren't as the Welsh are primarily a rugby nation and their football team failed to qualify for this summer's tournament.
Immediately after that, his PR team released a photo in which Rishi was on a plane (for some reason) and surrounded by people who were out of focus. The only things in focus were Rishi, who is expected to lose the election, and a big red EXIT sign behind him.
He went to the North of England to once again try to connect with the working classes, and then undermined the point somewhat when he took a private helicopter back to London. He had a photo oppourtunity at a supermarket in which he was pictured looking like a man who has no idea what bread is, and is trying to decipher its meaning.
The Deputy Chairman of the Conservative party has turned out to be BFFs with a major heroin dealer. Which is doubly awkward, as there are only about five people left in the party to begin with. Vast numbers of Conservatives are abandoning ship in a desperate attempt to say that they didn't technically lose their seat at the election, as they had already resigned. No, actually, THEY dumped US, etc etc. Even Michael Gove, a man so delusional about public opinion that he once thought Michael Gove could be PM, has thrown in the towel.
The whole Conservative campaign has been a calamity and there's still another month to go. It's incredible. If you asked smart, capable people to sabotage an election campaign, they couldn't have come up with anything worse than what this gaggle of cretins have already inflicted on themselves. Indeed, it should be written as some kind of law of nature that the only thing that incompetent people are better at than competent people is incompetence itself. We could call it Sunak's Paradox, and maybe then his place in history would be assured and he could put us all out of his misery.
Not that he's aware of his misery. His superhuman ability to remain blithely upbeat, coupled with his bizarre immunity to shame, mean that he hasn't yet had the sort of sobbing breakdown that would have occured in a normal human being. This has led many to suggest that Rishi is the sacrificial idiot for the modern Tory party - they know they're headed for disaster, and they just need an idiot to stand in front to take the brunt of the impact. The bread and "EXIT" photos, combined with the rainy election launch, certainly seem to imply that Rishi's PR team are just seeing what they can make him do, now, like a bored kid pulling the wings off an unnaturally cheerful fly. They very nearly succeeded in framing the bread shot so that the Morrisons supermarket logo read MOR———ONS behind his head.
The Left wing has a long and proud tradition of fumbling easy electoral wins, but fortunately Keir Starmer isn't remotely left wing, so it really does look like game over for Rishi and whoever is left in the Tory party, which at the time of going to press was just the Downing Street cat, three sock puppets and one of those Henry Hoovers with a face on it.
The cat and the Hoover are rumoured to be plotting to oust Rishi before the election. I'll keep you posted.
Macho Man Jerry Seinfeld.
Jerry Seinfeld has said that he is nostalgic for the days of dominant masculinity.
The multimillionaire irrelevance, 70, is best known for his whiny, pedestrian standup routines which he apparently believes made people think he was some sort of macho icon.
High school girls definitely thought he was cool, as we can tell by the fact that he was dating one when he was in his late thirties, a situation that persisted well into the run of the sitcom in which Seinfeld proved he couldn't act, portrayed himself as a useless man baby, and frequently got interrupted by a racist.
Julia Louise Dreyfuss, who is still considered talented and funny, has not commented on Seinfeld's longing for the macho past, although it's possible that even thinking of the years she spent in the presence of Seinfeld's stultifying virility reduces her, a mortal woman, into a speechless puddle of quivering hormones.
As Robert E. Howard wrote:
Hither came Seinfeld, the Comedian. Bouffant haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jewelled thrones of the earth under his sandaled feet.
“What is the deal with airline food?!” he asked a tavern crowd, pushing the sleeves of his sport coat past thick forearms that rippled with sinew, before going on to complain about women’s shopping habits, and that he couldn’t figure out how to program a VCR.
A.I., A.I., …Oh.
While Jerry Seinfeld pines for the days when virile specimens like him stomped around, brawling and carousing to their hearts’ content, the modern generation has more prosaic complaints.
One such trifling issue is that Google search is getting worse.
Alright, I’ll admit, it’s not “we lost four of our children to plague” or “I lost both my legs to canon fire in a war,” but as complaints go I’d still say that “the way most of the world accesses information is falling apart” is still valid.
What’s particularly galling, if you’re my age, is that you’ve lived through older people who didn’t understand technology at all asking you to fix all of their problems for them - printing out your boss’ emails so they could read them, or having your parents ask why their computer was running slowly after they downloaded endless malware.
With that storm seemingly weathered, a younger generation turned up that had been raised on touch screens and iPhones and who had no idea how to do anything with an actual computer, either, meaning that Millennials and the younger cohort of Generation X have ended up working as unpaid tech support for two different generations.
Now, Google has decided to add Artificial Intelligence to its search engine, and the results have been predictably poor. Google A.I. has variously advised people to jump off bridges, eat small rocks for health, declared that the mammal with the most bones is the boa constrictor, and that PVA glue could be used as a pizza topping.
This is funny, in its way, but its also frustrating. Google used to be a reliable way to gain information and pretty soon, if this keeps up, that will no longer be the case.
The aforementioned bad answers given by Google have been fixed, but only because people on the internet called attention to them and Google was mocked relentlessly enough that they felt they had to fix things. But part of what drew the mockery was a sense of novelty. “Hey, guys, Google A.I. is so dumb it said we should glue our pizza toppings on!”
That novelty is going to wear off, and Google will then be left to decay without anyone really paying attention or trying to get the problem fixed. For my generation, like so much else, it just feels exhausting. We already spent our teens trying to prevent our parents from sending money to email scammers or downloading browser extensions that stole their credit card details. For the last ten years, we’ve had to spend our time showing nineteen year olds how to use a mouse. Now we’re expected to fact-check Google and flag its errors?!
Obviously, it’s not just Millennials trying to stop the slow collapse of Google and the internet in general, but for my generation in particular it feels like another step in an endless cycle. We’re going to have to start explaining to our now-retired parents that, after we FINALLY started to get them to look things up on the internet when they needed information, the information may no longer be correct. We’re going to have to show Gen’s Z and Alpha that you can look things up in books, and also how to fact-check things without the use of search engines that have lost their minds due to A.I., a sort of digital syphilis that spreads from one technology to another and decays them from the inside.
More broadly, once people stop pointing and laughing at Google’s A.I. mistakes and just start ignoring search engines altogether because they can no longer be trusted, I worry that we will have seen the last of what might, in retrospect, have been a golden age of information. There was a period when anyone could access all the information in the world, and the gatekeepers of that information did their best to make sure it was accurate.
I worry that A.I. and its hucksters are leading us down the road to a new age of ignorance. Google results, if the current trend continues, will soon be no more valid than rumours and supposition and half-remembered anecdotes.
Call me a coward if you want - I’m no Jerry Seinfeld - but as a generation, we already fixed everyone’s computer problems. Twice. I’m not fixing all of Google as well.