#36: A horde, numberless, a shoal
#36: A horde, numberless, a shoal
This week: Misinformation and the UK riots // Plus this week's reads, news and must sees in the Creative R&D ecosystem, and your chance to try Existent's BETA at 50% off.
This is a last edition before an August vacation.
I’ll be back at the beginning of September, at just about the year anniversary of the newsletter, with some reflections on what I’ve learnt so far, and some changes to how I’m going to do things for year 2.
This week, I want to reflect on the way social media misinformation has caused and organised the violence that’s broken out the last few days on Britain’s streets, and make a plea for artists to make it a subject of their work.
Plus the usual must reads and more from the week in art, ideas and technology.
Britain’s streets have erupted into violence; a vile, racist malcontent whose cause is complex but whose accelerant, no doubt, has been the ghouls and phantoms of social media.
On the 29th of July, a mass stabbing took place a Taylor Swift themed dance party in Southport, a town about 20 miles north of Liverpool.
Three children were killed, and ten other people – eight of whom were children – were injured . A 17-year-old male, later named as Axel Rudakubana, a Cardiff-born child of Rwandan migrants, was arrested at the scene, and has been charged with three counts of murder, ten counts of attempted murder and possession of a bladed article.
A former member of the same theatre school the attack took place at, we have no clear sense yet - if we ever will - of why he carried it out. It is, in my own memory, the first event of its type in the UK since the Dunblane killings of 1996.
All of this is true.
But a hold on the truth has been lost over the last week, and a toxic mix of rumour, anti-migrant, anti-Islamic racism; resentment over the wider state of the country and a deep distrust of the police and government has come together to see outbreaks of rioting across the country - in Liverpool, in Sunderland, Hull, Nottingham, Bristol, Blackpool, Manchester.
Those are big cities, small and medium ones. Places where real wealth is present, like Bristol, and places where wealth has left the cities behind.
But everywhere they’re being fuelled by the same combination of social media noise.
As someone who tries to find the good in digital media, it’s a heartbreaking reminder of the horror in society that lurks always just out of sight.
I’m not going to try and analyse the hows and whys of it, except to say that the best analyses have gone looking for the trigger points - the specific people who said things first, and then the accelerants, those comments by people like Nigel Farage that undermine truth and trust. And excellent investigation that has gone even further, like The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, who’ve looked at whether and how Russian media might have played its part also helps give a boundary to how far things have gone.
Beyond the heartbreak, all I could reflect on here is how little misinformation seems to have been a topic for art.
It is one of the key aspects of how our technology-mediated world works.
But what art really grapples with it?
I named this newsletter after a line from Aeschylus’ “Seven Against Thebes”, just about the oldest play we have, which deals with society’s fear in face of invasion. But that’s really about a need for people to stand up for truth over fear, not about the lies that cause that fear.
I can think about the riot at the ending of Nathanael West’s incredible Day of the Locust, and the 70s movie version, where Los Angeles breaks out into an orgy of violence. But it has a direct cause - main character Homer Simpson chases down and attacks a boy who threw a rock at him. In a misinformation story, that cause and effect line would be broken.
Don DeLillo gets close to it. At the ending of Underworld, crowds gather around a billboard where the face of a murdered girl, Esmerelda seems to appear at night. But that’s more about faith in a technologised, mediated world.
Or maybe David Fincher’s film Zodiac, with its endless attempt to track and identify the Zodiac Killer, who becomes more a myth and a memory than anything. But that’s framed more about the obsession of the policeman who refuses not to track him down.
The brilliant anime series Paranoia Agent, made by Satoshi Kon whose Paprika Christopher Nolan used as inspiration for Inception, gets close to this, as the ramifications of a murderous teenager, spreads fear around Tokyo. But again there’s cause - the kid is the killer.
Misinformation art doesn’t really exist.
But it needs to. And it needs to break the line between cause and effect to happen.
Misinformation narratives occur when something happens, but society picks up a radically alternative interpretation, and the story plays out from there.
We need artists to tell those stories. Fast.
They won’t stop what’s happening now, but they will help innoculate us against it for the future.
Because right now, today, we’re lost in the echo chamber, struggling to get out.
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Ideas! // Stories from the digital edge
A year on from the opening of The Sphere in Las Vegas, I loved this poetic take on its architectural meaning in Dezeen, which saw it as “the final form of the 20th century American city”. I prefer to think of it as the herald of a new kind of architecture and the cities of the future, but let’s not split hairs this morning…. Lots of useful references on books on this topic I need to get to.
Also good, this piece in The Conversation on the importance of Philosophy in the age of AI.
I am watching far too much of the Olympics, though the partial package of rights the BBC now has makes watching it more like a Instagram feed than a coherent body of content. JUST LET ME WATCH THE WHOLE HOCKEY MATCH. Anyways, for better or worse 2025 will see the first esports Olympiad - an official Olympics bi-product - in Saudi Arabia. I don’t honestly know what to think about this so will reserve judgement.
Last but not least, I wrote about the weird world of sleep sounds and sleep devices in Issue 23, well here’s the latest innovation a kind of noise cancellation for the brain. A kind of brain computer interface, it stimulates (or really dampens) specific types of brain wave to help you drop off. Basically two whiskey’s and a ten minute attempt to read a novel. Interesting stuff as ever from the must-read Spectrum IEEE site.
Ok, I’m off now for August.
Have a great summer everyone.
Pray for peace, as always.
CM