For years, tech oligarchs have promised that their products would usher in unprecedented abundance.1 And so it has come to pass—we now live in an age of abundance. Alas, it is an abundance of slop.2 Foolishly, we forgot to ask the AI genie for good abundance. Paperclip maximising would be preferable—at least we could file away all the text it outputs.
In 1957, sci-fi author Theodore Sturgeon wrote that “ninety percent of everything is crud.” But now it’s more like 99.999999%. It becomes harder to find the good stuff. The gatekeepers can’t keep up. The tastemakers are poleaxed. No wonder people look to pre-Internet culture for canonical certainty3 or surrender to the algorithm.
For those who contribute to the culture, it becomes a question of trust. Can I be trusted not to squander the reader’s time? Am I on the side of quality or quantity? Am I curating the abundance or throwing what Tobi Lütke calls “slop grenades”? Is the post useful? Does it even need to be useful? These are the kind of thoughts that go through my mind when I click publish on a Saturday morning.
It has been a long time since I wrote a links post, but I love how they become time capsules for brief obsessions.4
1. Happiness
“Happiness is a place between scarcity and abundance”, Finnish proverb. Wise words from the happiest place in the world.
2. Holiday Photos
When I was in Crete a few weeks ago, I didn’t just spend my time among the burnt-out ruins. I also went to the beach.
3. Nicky Blair
I saw a video of Tony Blair talking about his sons canvassing in the 2005 election and was curious what Nicky Blair was doing now. It turns out that his career went: teacher > football agent > defence-tech startup founder. When I posted this fact on X, it amassed 357k views and was reposted by Aaron Bastani, George Galloway, and Tanita Tikaram.
4. “Shoot it now, because it will never look the same again.”
A quote from when Wesley Verhoeve met Jay Maisel, the photographer behind the cover of Kind of Blue, who died recently.
5. Fleury-Mérogis Prison
I love a window seat and was amazed by the scale of Fleury-Mérogis Prison, which I saw outside Paris. Apparently, it is Europe’s largest, with 4,300 inmates—a mere 40% over capacity.
6. Can AI do Type Design?
I am fascinated by the Arts and Crafts font on this 1896 edition of two Thomas Love Peacock novels and was curious to see whether I could vibe code a variable font based on it. The result is not perfect, but a decent start.
7. Typography is hard!
There are not many celebrity typographers, but Paul Barnes is considered one of the best-known. His foundry, Commercial Type, have designed typefaces for The Guardian and Vanity Fair among many others. Their new font family is Spectator, a so-called Scotch Roman with a marvellously nerdy backstory.
8. Authenticity
Good writing is never authentic to the self, because a good writer needs to know that the self is fundamentally unknowable: it’s the ‘wedge-shaped core of darkness’ that Virginia Woolf saw humming beneath the surface of daily life, and definitely not anything you can write autofiction about.
Link to Sam Kriss speaking to Gordon Glasgow.
9. Martin Amis performing Martin Amis
A short dramatisation of the scene in Martin Amis’s Money where John Self (Mel Smith) and Martin Amis (Martin Amis) bump into each other at lunch.
I heard about it from last year’s My Martin Amis live. Alas, Will Self’s brutal takedown of Martin Amis from this year’s event was removed from the web. If anyone has a bootleg, let me know.
Martin Amis once gave Will Self a blurb calling him a “cruel writer—thrillingly heartless, terrifyingly brainy”. Oddly, Self only mentioned the “terrifyingly brainy” bit in his talk.
10. Glasgow Art Weekend
Rumours of the demise of Glasgow’s art scene have been greatly exaggerated. Although one gallery is closing, new things always seem to be happening. I had a good time at Glasgow Art Map Newsletter’s weekend of activities, including seeing Jamie Crewe’s music side project, poisonous relationship.
11. Why We Like Things
Asterisk was originally the house magazine for the Effective Altruists. Over fifteen issues, it has developed into something much more interesting. This article on taste by Celine Nguyen is great.
12. UK AIDS Memorial Quilt
If you’re in Glasgow, don’t miss the UK AIDS Memorial Quilt at Tramway, which closes on Sunday. I have never been in a room that combined such heavy emotion with such joyful celebration.
13. Sonica
This is also the final weekend to see and hear Sonica, which has been a revelation, showing what is possible when you trust experts to curate a festival.
Sonica’s takeover of Pollok House was sublime, but my personal highlight was seeing art provocateur Dinos Chapman being berated for an hour by some third-year students at the Glasgow School of Art. I took this photo of him looking slightly battered after the encounter.
14. Kids’ Trends
Riley Walz scraped a website of children’s drawings to give an insight into a more innocent way of seeing the world. Check it out.
15. Note of the Month
This made me laugh from Mike Sowden, especially the comments from those who didn’t read it properly.
A recent example, from July, is when Elon Musk was interviewed by The Economist: “The most likely outcome [of AI technology] is an age of amazing abundance.”
Perhaps better described as bullshit, as IRRATIONAL TECHNOLOGY argues here.
If you like link posts check out this one from Sam Enright and this from Scott Alexander.
Happily—no slop here! Thank you.
That was a 'nice' read Neil, i dont always get time to do so... paperclip maximising - i had to look that up. None the wiser, but intriguing...