the reverse centaur's guide to life after AI: how to think about artificial intelligence before it's too late (cory doctorow)

Doctorow’s text is a bracing takedown of many of the AI myths, which, he suggests, are promoted in order to increase the share value of the tech firms that are driving the supposed AI revolution. These myths include the idea that AI can drastically reduce the need for a human workforce, as well as the fear that the machines will end up taking over the world. This is all, suggests the writer, a form of froth designed to pump up the value of the tech firms, attracting more and more investment, thereby creating a bubble which will, he contends, have to burst sooner or later. Doctorow is not anti-AI, he has many suggestions as to how it can be a beneficial tool (which is summed up by the perhaps clunky reverse Centaur metaphor), but he is anti the way the quest for AI is manipulating political and economic practice.

 

how to win an information war (peter pomertantsev)

Arrived at Pomertantsev’s book about Sefton Delmer via reading Marias, who cites Delmer in his recondite spy novels. Pomertantsev talks through then way Delmer coordinated and was the creative urge behind the British propaganda campaign against the Nazis during WW2, mostly via the medium of radio. Delmer is a curious character, whose approach was amoral, Wellesian, instinctive, and possibly brilliant. The word ‘possibly’ is because the author seems so taken by his subject that it becomes hard to evaluate from the book how effective Delmer’s broadcasts were - at times, it’s hinted, they were even counter-productive. Pomertantsev connects Delmer’s work with the way in which information is manipulated in the 21st century. The upshot would appear to be that you have to fight fire with fire: the power of coordinated propaganda is so effective that the only way to fight back is by playing dirty, ignoring any arguments based on idealism. In a fucked-up world, this might be true. Then again, it might not. 

to lose a war (jon lee anderson)

Anderson’s prose is elegant and efficient. Unlike TV journalists, he’s always after the story that hides behind the headlines. It’s old school reporting. He finds people whose voices would never normally be heard. He also hangs in there. This book is a compilation of nearly thirty years of reporting on Afghanistan, from the departure of the Russians to the departure of the North Americans. He recognises the patterns, not least because the Afghanis themselves repeatedly spell this out to him. This isn’t a territory that can be conquered. It still consists of warring tribes and factions whose loyalties are willing to shift to whoever will best serve them, be that Russia, NATO, the US or the Taliban. Out of all this emerges the hubris of empirical overreach. Even as the US and NATO are installing themselves in Kabul, ‘modernising’ the city, Anderson is aware that out there in the plains, deserts and mountains, there are local people biding their time, waiting for the moment when the imperial mission will crumble. Part of the reason he’s so aware is that, unlike most reporters, he has actually gone beyond the capital and spoken to ordinary people. With the current flirtation with the idea of invading Iran, there is no more timely book for the decision-makers in Washington to be reading, even if one questions whether many of them would have the intellectual capacity to read and engage with Anderson’s book. 

lou reed - a life (anthony decurtis)

Having read a biography of Arthur Miller last year whilst working on All My Sons, it is fascinating to see how Reed and Miller, seemingly two very different beasts, had so much in common. The offspring of the pre and post war Jewish immigration to New York were a generation that was intellectually ferocious and creatively brilliant. (Sontag is another that comes to mind.) Both Reed and Miller lived in the shadow of their fathers. Both rebelled in their fashion by choosing to take up a career in the arts. Thereafter their lives might be said to have taken a different course, but both were provocateurs and rebels, an impulse forged in the furnace of their family background. DeCurtis’ biography of Reed is rigorous. He shapes the book around the albums Reed produced, which were numerous. The music is the key to tracing the singer’s concerns, desires and psychosis. Reed comes across as complex, difficult and a slave to his own creativity. In another era he might have died in a pauper’s grave, but the biographer informs us he actually accrued considerable wealth. The tension between maintaining a stance on the outside of the industry whilst still seeking critical and financial validation is clear from the book. Reed’s relationship with the transexual, Rachel, is perhaps the apex of this dialectic. Rachel, who was Reed’s partner for several years but from whom he split, unceremoniously, (as he did with almost all his partners, romantic or musical or professional), ended up as a lost figure in the Reed mythos, someone who vanished into the dirty boulevards of the city, whilst Reed ascended towards its heights. 

the song of the earth (jonathan bate)

Bate’s examination of the links between romanticism and ecology offer up the moral that the poet is the unacknowledged connection between the soil and the mind. As such the poet, like the aborigine in the outback, can sing us out of the dystopia which we have constructed. At times beautiful and other time befuddling, the book ranges from Heidegger to Clare and gives perhaps unexpected prominence to Byron. Bate is strong on that paradox of modernity whereby an appreciation of nature is coupled with an alienation from nature. Are his conclusions in the end somewhat hippy-chic, as he discourses from this Oxonian ivory tower? There was a feeling in the reading of the book (and feelings are not to be negated according to his thesis) that the urgency of the opening chapters, or the radicalism of the opening chapters, became diluted as the book expounded its argument. However, this might also be an inevitability in the actual process of writing itself; perhaps according to Bate, the tendrils of poetry are the truest form of the word, and the more that writing seeks to investigate the roots of those tendrils, the less, ironically, it becomes possible to hear the flower’s song.

The Graeco-Roman counterpart to the story of Eden is that of the lost Golden Age. It is a story which has had an extraordinarily long and fertile history as a mythic and literary archetype. It tells of how all beasts had horizontal backbones and a gaze that looked down towards the earth, until there came Prometheus who ‘Upended man into the vertical’, and ‘tipped up his chin / So to widen his outlook on heaven’. Once man looked away from where he walked, the earth became vulnerable. The desire for transcendence, the aspiration to higher realms, was predicated upon a denial of biological origin, a departure from ground.

souvenir (michael bracewell)

This slight half-fiction, populated by pop stars and flaneurs, does what it says on the tin. It remembers. In a succession of vignettes, Bracewell traces an unofficial history of the capital from ’78 to ’85. This is the land of music and fashion, of the unheralded and the heralded. People who went to parties in council blocks or art galleries, people who walked the streets wondering at the dazzle, clocking the passers-by, living outside thoughts of the future. It’s a small, beautiful book which captures the city in the years before I knew it, albeit the traces of that time were still around when I arrived in 88, the last gasp of the pre-digital era. If you really want to know what London was like in those days, you can do much worse than spend an afternoon with Bracewell’s Memoir. 

These Polaroid photographs, by contrast, were deeply English, neo-Romantic in spirit: Paul Nash, John Minton, Derek Jarman; the lane in deep green evening light, abstraction on the beach, the personality of inanimate objects (a jar on a windowsill, a dirty windowpane, a stricken tree, moss on blackened brick); the stilled or violent atmosphere of time and place thickening to numinosity.

jumping jack flash (kieron pim)

This is a biography of David Litvinoff, a figure from sixties London who moved between the worlds of rock and roll, crime and cinema. He moved in the same circles as the Kray Brothers and the Stones, to name but two of his extensive web of connections. He was a friend of Donald Cammell and, the book asserts, the hidden animus of Performance. Events in that film directly echo incidents within Litvinoff’s own life. His face was slashed at one point in Earl’s Court as a punishment/ warning from the Kray twins for betraying them. All of which is fascinating, and Pim’s account of the interweaving of the criminal world and the rock world is comprehensive. However, there comes a point when the reader starts to realise that Litvinoff, whilst a larger-than-life personality, might not be quita as interesting as he or the book believe. Pim threads his personal fascination with LItvinoff and their shared Jewish heritage through the book. He travels to Australia, hangs out with Eric Clapton and minor aristocracy, as he seeks to get to the nub of his subject’s mystery. The B-narrative is why the author is so fascinated with Litvinoff, and there were moments in the second half of the book when this reader wishes that the author had gone further into exploring his own personal obsession. 

this is not propaganda - adventures in the war against reality (peter pomerantsev)

Pomerantsev’s book is an investigation into the world which shaped the world we live in. Even though it was published less than a decade ago, it already feels as though history is running away from those pre-pandemic times when the reality of what was about to confront us was something that people were warning about, rather than living through. Pomerantsev investigates on a global basis the evolution of the post-truth world, fuelled by social media and its bot farms, by individuals like Nix for whom ethics are an offshoot of capitalism, entirely beholden to the idea of profit. In the process of which are facilitated sense-deranging attacks on reality, allowing the wanton killing of women and children, the elderly and the innocent, to be reframed as actions taken in self-defence, and promoted as such to the point that anyone who questions this logic is in danger of being excommunicated. This is the world Pomerantsev saw coming, and now it has arrived. The dangerous edges of democracy, a system beholden to the manipulation of the masses, are laid bare. The author of the book outlines his personal journey from Soviet Ukraine to the UK. His family fled from a repressive totalitarian regime towards the hope of something called ‘the west’. But the west is not an ethical construction. It is a market driven society. And now the fusion of vast wealth which the technocrats of the internet have succeeded in generating and seek to preserve, with the autocratic ambitions of wealthy men and women driven by nothing more than personal ambition, threatens to decimate the planet with an uncontrollable ferocity. Anything that stands in the way of this behemoth will be levelled. Pomerantsev sees the writing on the wall and traces the way that this is a global epidemic. But there’s a sense that his concerns have been overtaken by the actuality of the present. 

the adventurist: my life in dangerous places (robert young pelton)

Pelton’s book is in a breezy autobiography. The author has so many stories to tell, it’s impossible to fit them all in, but the book is ultimately anchored, somewhat awkwardly, around his life story. It feels as though the book is an attempt to wrestle with and understand why his restless soul has taken him to so many extreme locations. Is it a result of his dysfunctional parenting? His absurd schooling? Does he belong to a line that goes back to the Victorians like Burton and Baden Powell, with their need to escape the confines of a stunted, conventional society? All these questions run through the book, even if it never really gets to grips with the conflict between his more conventional stable home-life and his quest for danger. The presence of his wife and daughters is a ghostly one. They are, he acknowledges, the other side of a coin which sees him rushing towards the world’s hotspots, knowing he has their love to come home too. In this sense, in spite of the love of adventure, the story is not one of a radical, Rimbaudesque figure. Pelton always seems to have his get-out covered. He is very much a North American hero, albeit Canadian rather than US; safe in the security that this culture bestows, in terms of money, equipment and kudos.  

stasiland (anna funder)

Funder’s non fiction book is an anecdotal investigation into the legacy of the DDR. An Australian living in Berlin ten years after the wall fell, she takes on a journey into her own curiosity about the ghost country she inhabits. What was it like to live there during the days of communism? Funder uses her easy-going naivety to reach places a more formal investigator might not. The result is a series of encounters with the winners and losers of the regime. Those who helped to shape its repressive regime and those whose lives were devastated by it. She gets drunk with rock stars and speaks to the people are who literally trying to piece together the crimes of the Stasi, from the shredded paper they left behind. Perhaps because she’s such an outsider, a female antipodean, people seem willing to open up to her and her account is at once shocking, amusing and melancholic.

red love: the story of an east german family (w. maxim leo, tr shaun whiteside)

What was the DDR? A country that only existed for less than half a century, like a hangover from a 19th century Europe where the borders were constantly shifting. A state founded with counter-fascist ideals that soon became almost as repressive and fascist as the state it sought to replace. The birth and death of the communist ideals within Western Europe. Leo’s book is an account of the state he was born into, one that didn’t exist when his parents were born and wouldn’t exist when his children were born. A brief, melancholy state, which was also a state of mind. Using his family history, he investigates how the DDR came to be and what it represented for his grandparents’ generation, and then his parents’. His parents, Wolf and Anne, come across as beautiful children of the post-war generation, their struggles every bit as romantic as those of their contemporaries through the sixties and seventies in the west. (My father’s original first name was Wolf, and the account of Leo’s father’s young life in the immediate post-war Berlin might echo that of my father’s.) By the time Leo himself reaches adolescence, the dream has well and truly died. Although his father was a committed doubter, his mother sought to kept the socialist flame alive. But Leo belongs to a generation that is in thrall to the west, and in his account the collapse of the wall and the DDR has such an inevitability to it that the ultimate experience of its end is almost mundane. There is still, to my mind, a sense of urban quiet to the leafy streets of east Berlin. As though, no matter the political state of the nation, this strange tranquility will always predominate. Leo does not appear to mourn the loss of his birth country, but perhaps, even in the act of writing about it, of excavating that past, there is a latent nostalgia, even if this is a nostalgia for something that never really existed.  

the living stones: cornwall (ithell colquhoun)

We came across Ithell Colquhoun’s artwork at an exhibition in Falmouth. The artwork, which could be classified under the rubric British Surrealism, is extraordinary. Vivid colour, complex forms, organic abstraction, much of it inspired by the Cornish landscape. Colquhoun was interested in the occult, and its relationship with nature. Yet, in this text dedicated to the time she spent in a corner of Cornwall called Vow Cave, where she had a cottage, she comes across as an extremely dry, level headed soul. The book’s chapters escort us on her journeys to witness folk fairs and find hidden wells. She is an archeologist/ anthropologist and her love for her adopted county is evident, even if the book lacks the strangeness and mystery of her artwork. 

What would the world be, once bereft 

Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left, 

O let them be left, wildness and wet; 

Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

a short history of cahiers du cinema (emilie bickerton)

I don’t know if young romantics like I might have been, once upon a time, still grow up with Les Cahiers du Cinema acting as a kind of idealised wallpaper for what life, cinema and the arts ought to be. I don’t know if I ever actually read the magazine, but it inhabited a mythological place in my mind. The space from whence the young turks of the Nouvelle Vague emerged, encompassing a cultural diversity which ranged from Hitchcock to Godard, a place where cinema was treated as an art form rather than a business. All of this blended with the romanticism of Paris as depicted in the works of early Godard, Truffaut and company. All of this was summoned up by the title of the magazine itself, so allusive, so distant from the philistine perspective of the Anglo-Saxons.

Bickerton’s book is both a guide and a corrective. The early chapters document the magazine's origins, the incorporation of these young turks (even if Rohmer wasn’t so very young.) The relationship between Truffaut and Bazin is alluded to, and suggests a book or movie of its own. The middle part of the book deals with the way the Cahiers became consumed with ideological dogma, so much so that it excluded most cinema, treating it as beyond the Maoist pale. (Or whichever other pale was the dominant ideology of the day.) Finally, the book looks at developments in the 80s and 90s when the magazine abandoned ideological pretensions and became, according to Bickerton, just another film mag, competing for shelf space.

In her account of this final development, Bickerton is unflinchingly critical. Her thesis is that the magazine effectively sold its soul. Its repute was constructed on the independence of intellectual thought, which permitted it to distance itself from the idea of cinema as industry. Whilst Hollywood might be capable of making films which are beyond this paradigm, the marketing machine and festival circuit determine that, in general, films which refuse to acquiesce to their formulaic demands will be marginalised. Whereas in the sixties and seventies, Cahiers was interested in discovering and vindicating those films which were outside of the system, (and the early works of the Nouvelle Vague were informed by this), now it has become just another industry rag. Bickerton is deeply critical of what has happened to Cahiers, and, by implication, the way in which market forces have become the regulator of directors’ aesthetic choices. Cahiers, and cinema as a whole, has become the poorer for this, even as the magazine pretends to be richer and more popular than ever. But the romantic vision which I had as a teenager is, she avows, categorically dead. 

when we sold god’s eye (alex cuadros)

Where  is the frontline of the greatest conflict on earth, one that has been raging for over five hundred years? If one looks at earth’s history on a wider, geological scale, the one of the Anthropocene perhaps, then this line is to be drawn between the forces who are at war with nature and those who seek to engage in a mutually beneficial feedback loop with nature. The conflict between  those who believe in the idea of the human as part of nature as opposed to those who would place humanity ‘above’ nature’.. (I initially posited the idea of an urbanised concept of civilisation versus the hunter-gatherer model, but given recent archaeological evidence from the Amazon, this division seems outdated and artificial - the ancestors of those who live off the forest as hunter-gatherers might well have belonged to urban cultures before the genocide initiated in 1492).

Cuadros’ book takes us to the heart of one of the last remaining frontiers of this conflict. It tells the tale of a tribe which has lived the last 500 hundred years of history on fast forward. In the 1960s, the Cinta Larga were still an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon. Then the white men appeared, followed by mass extermination through disease, followed by a period of retrenchment on the part of the survivors and adaptation. Those who endured began to fight for their rights and also to ensure that the pillage of the jungle, their home, was something that might benefit their people as well as the imperialist invaders. Firstly in the seventies with the hardwood trade, then in the nineties with the diamond trade. The book delivers a comprehensive overview of this process, where vast sums of money are in play, and nobody wins.

Cuadros touches on the epistemological and existential aspects of the accelerated historical changes that the Cinta Larga have lived through. It’s a tale of bitter fruit and inevitable tragedy. This is reporting from the true Great War, the one that has haunted the edge of our consciousness, a window onto a way of life the world has foregone, another consciousness free of the traps of our supposed civilisation. Which is not to say this might be some kind of utopian perfection, but it represented an alternative, and as the tales of the the Cinta Larga reveal, an alternative whose advantages might well have outweighed the benefits of our chosen way of living. 

the view from the train: cities and other landscapes (patrick keiller)

Keiller is the maker of several cult films, which I have never seen, even if they have dwelled in my consciousness for decades. So it is perhaps perverse to engage with a book of his before seeing them. Having said that, the author is self-consciously operating, both as writer and filmmaker. within a defined intellectual framework. He cites the writing of Aragon, Lefebvre, Benjamin, amongst many others. His space is space: the space of the city, the space of the city within film, the space of film. His writing interrogates the representation of space, and how this has lead to its reconfiguration since the genesis of film and photography in the nineteenth century. The book is composed of various essays, written over the course of twenty years. This allows him to trace how the city he inhabits, London, has shifted over the course of this time, as well as permitting him to reference Dickens among others as descriptors of the city that came before. The book is something of a pot-pourri, but the essays on the early years of cinema, and how that medium was received and changed perceptions, are gloriously readable. 

the big goodbye (sam wasson)

Wasson’s book narrates the story of Chinatown, the film. How it came to be conceived, developed, made, distributed. It focuses on four key figures: Bob Towne, screenwriter, Robert Evans, producer, Polanski, director and Nicholson. In a sense the book is a tragedy, a paean to a world that might have been but never was, due to the obvious flaws of these four key players, but also because of the changing face of Hollywood and, by implication, the drift within the USA towards a more stupid vision of what it aspired to be as a nation/ culture. More commerce, less art. The balance between these two poles of a film’s production has always been a delicate one, film being an industry as well as an artform. Wasson describes how Chinatown’s success as a model of a certain kind of Hollywood filmmaking was the result of Evans’ indulgence and patronage, a production model which, even as the film was being released, was already in the process of being disassembled. For those interested in this complex equation, Wasson’s book is a masterly guide. The book doesn’t shy away from the Polanski issue, laying bare his crimes. However, it does look to contextualise this within the framework of the director’s life, noting the tragedies which befell him from birth, his mother killed in a concentration camp and the later murder of Sharon Tate and his unborn child. All the characters, save perhaps Nicholson, emerge ultimately as monsters of one kind or another, the product and victims of a kind of high Roman empire Hollywood epoch, where excess and wealth were celebrated, but whose fruits were a succession of films engaging with the artform in a manner that has never been equalled. Nicholson is described as a Falstaffian character within this network, at once vain, generous and brilliant. 

the shock of the anthropocene: the earth, history and us (christophe bonneuil + jean-baptiste fressoz, tr. david fernbach)

Not being au fait with current trends in intellectual thought, I don’t know where this obron of Bonneuiland and Fressoz sits in the firmament. What I can say is that it is a comprehensive and disarming read, which  brings together a collection of thought and references regarding the Anthropocene in a manner that makes one think, as one reads, that this book ought to be compulsory reading for anyone over the age of six months. Not that it will be, of course, as people are soon going to stop reading and process information through visual memes, which is part of the problem. It’s hard to read this book and think there is any coming back from the brink, be that the brink of extinction or radical social change. Hopefully the latter. However, the truly dispiriting element of the book is the way it shows how every step taken towards the present situation has been contested and could have been altered. My only question is whether the book’s conclusions/ implications don’t lead towards humanity moving into post-political era; which suits some of the current usual suspects down to the ground. Some might argue that such a thing does not exist, others might say we are already on the brink. 

disaster nationalism: the downfall of liberal civilization (richard seymour)

How has it come to this? I vaguely remember, it must have been in 2014 or thereabouts, walking through a barrio of London, and seeing stickers for UKIP all over the place. I know, thanks to the accounts of friends, how present the National Front had always been in London and the UK, but it tended to be something clandestine, kept out of sight. A guilty secret. All of a sudden, there it was, out in the open. A fringe political cult which was being celebrated en masse. UKIP’s greatest victory, thus far, has been Brexit. But now Farage has finally become an MP, Musk is supposedly on the point of financing them and they loom larger than ever in the national consciousness. UKIP, rebranded as Reform, is a retrograde, divisive, nationalistic movement. It had no place in the Britain of yesteryear, of if it did, it was hidden away somewhere, the weasel under the cocktail cabinet.

Seymour’s book looks at the emergence of nationalist movements around the globe, many of them proto-fascist. He is well aware of the difficulties of defining someone or something as ‘fascist’ so treads the linguistic line carefully, using historical parallels to make his case. The book looks at selected aspects of the nationalist movement, from the Lone Wolf killer to genocidal regimes. His analysis looks at how power manipulates emotion, which, rather than the classic capitalist idea of self-advancement, he takes as the primary driver of human action. People will take decisions against their own better interests if they can be emotionally engaged. Hence, for example, Brexit. He also skewers the lie of the white working class as the prime mover for the nationalist movements: suggesting that the forces of nationalism have infiltrated society on a far more pervasive level. The current state of Israel being a prime example.

Most disturbingly, he shows how the logical culmination of the nationalist movement is a desire to expand borders, to create an other that needs to be conquered. Nationalism is about the “us” against the “them” and the uncontrolled barbarity of actions in Gaza, against muslims in India, in Rohingya, are evidence of how the manipulation of this idea can lead to a societal breakdown of the moral order. In an existential nationalist conflict, there are no limits: indeed the more extreme and barbaric the actions of the neurotic nationalist force, the more it satiates the bloodlust of ‘its’ peoples. 

“Disaster nationalism today harnesses the insecurity, humiliation and miseries of heterogeneous classes and social groups, including some of the poorest, to a revolt against liberal civilization, with its pluralist and democratic norms.”

“Historical fascism reposed its trust in myth. Disaster nationalism, coming of age in the era of the internet, trusts in the simulacrum.”

immediacy: or, the style of too late capitalism (anna kornbluh)

Kornbluh’s book is by turns devastating and impenetrable. The latter would be down to this reader’s philosophy deficit; some half-remembered fragments of Hegel and a thirty year old reading of Writing and Difference aren’t going to do the trick here. You will get lost along the way. But you will also stumble into corners of brilliant elucidation. Above all the way in which the author riffs off up to the minute references (Knausgaard, the Safdie Brothers etc) to interrogate where the fuck we are at, culturally, psycho-culturally, as a species etc. I might get this all wrong, but it feels as thought she is constructing a connection between rampant ‘late’ capitalism and its cult of the individual (pace Foucault?) and the vogue for auto-fiction in things literary and immediacy in things audiovisual. Auto-fiction is the attempt to erase the idea of the fiction within fiction, even if the act of writing and ostensibly translating reality into words is of itself an inevitably fictional process. It also encapsulates a society where the individual has become prioritised over the collective. Kornbluh is very effective in the manner she explores the negative aspects of this process and how it betrays some of what might be called the fictional project. Immediacy has to do with a quest to extract the middle man from the audio visual process, a clearly paradoxical endeavour, in keeping with a world where we expect everything, everywhere, all at once. The way in which this restricts the possibilities of depth, or reflection, are self-evident, and noted.

All of this and more is contextualised in rampant theory. Although there was much in the book with which this reader struggled, to see the way it articulated a theory in defence of the collective, against the cult of the individual, which is so clearly an apolitical cult, one with a strong capitalist vibe, was refreshing. 

sunken lands (gareth rees)

The subtitle of Rees’ waterworld is “A Journey Through Flooded Kingdoms and Lost Worlds”. The author notes how, since his childhood, he has been fascinated by the idea of lost underwater worlds, and in this book, part historical exegesis, part travel guide, part eco-warning, he gets to explore this fascination in more depth. The author skilfully interweaves mythic lore to substantiate his theories about how previous moments in humanity’s history have been impacted by rising sea levels and tsunamis. We are, at the end of the day, the servants of Mother Nature, not her masters, as some from the techno-industrial world would like to believe. Rees ranges across Britain to Italy to the southern states of the USA to make his case and it is a fascinating one. There are times when one longs for his scope to have been less anglo-centric, but there is nevertheless a great deal of scholarship in his integration of mythic history, geological data and gut instinct.