The Bluestocking, vol 309: Kate Truthers and Habsburg AI

None of them are actually real.

Happy Friday!

Guess what I wrote about this week! Yes, royal conspiracism, which is particularly acute in the Anglo-American context, since British papers won’t go near stuff that American media is all over.

i know, apparently I don’t own a hairbrush

This week also saw the release of my episode of Lucy Worsley’s Lady Killers, filmed last year in what I now realise is also the set for Traitors: Unmasked. You can listen to me talking about murderesses here.

Helen

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QAnon For Wine Moms (The Atlantic)

There was a time, not that long ago, when mainstream-news consumers pitied people who had succumbed to the sprawling conspiracies of QAnon. Imagine spending your days parsing “Q Drops,” poring over cryptic utterances for coded messages. Imagine taking every scrap of new information and weaving it into an existing narrative. Those poor, deluded, terminally online saps. What a terrible modern affliction.

And then some of my friends became Kate Middleton truthers.

In the past few weeks, my WhatsApp groups have been taken over by friends wondering what is wrong with the Princess of Wales. American acquaintances, perhaps assuming that my Britishness gives me some mystical connection to the Windsors, have started texting me for updates. Everyone has a theory. Everyone wants to know.

But it’s more than that: Everyone also seems mystified by the simple fact of not knowing. We have become so used to smartphone surveillance, oversharing on social media, and the commercial harvesting of life events for content that the prospect of remaining uninformed about the state of a stranger’s intestines now seems like a personal affront.

I wrote abut how online guessing games ate the news—and what journalists can do about it. Contains a fairly brutal dig at the principality of Monaco.

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even the Hapsburgs weren’t THIS inbred

Are We Watching The Internet Die? (Where’s Your Ed At)

“After the world's governments began their above-ground nuclear weapons tests in the mid-1940s, radioactive particles made their way into the atmosphere, permanently tainting all modern steel production, making it challenging (or impossible) to build certain machines (such as those that measure radioactivity). As a result, we've a limited supply of something called "low-background steel," pre-war metal that oftentimes has to be harvested from ships sunk before the first detonation of a nuclear weapon, including those dating back to the Roman Empire.

Generative AI models are trained by using massive amounts of text scraped from the internet, meaning that the consumer adoption of generative AI has brought a degree of radioactivity to its own dataset. As more internet content is created, either partially or entirely through generative AI, the models themselves will find themselves increasingly inbred, training themselves on content written by their own models which are, on some level, permanently locked in 2023, before the advent of a tool that is specifically intended to replace content created by human beings.

This is a phenomenon that Jathan Sadowski calls "Habsburg AI," where "a system that is so heavily trained on the outputs of other generative AIs that it becomes an inbred mutant, likely with exaggerated, grotesque features." In reality, a Habsburg AI will be one that is increasingly more generic and empty, normalized into a slop of anodyne business-speak as its models are trained on increasingly-identical content.”

Hapsburg AI! Have you ever seen a phrase more expertly tailored to my interests? Here is an enjoyably vitriolic piece by Ed Zitron about the parasitism of Silicon Valley disruption.

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Quick Links

1. “In the old days, you needed to leave six months between a procedure on your face and your public debut of the new visage in order to make sure all the swelling was gone. But now, with Ozempic, the timing is almost a year out.” How Ozempic ate awards season (The Ankler, Substack)

2. Fot the first time in ages, the new Royal Court season is exciting. I’ve already booked for Bluets and Giant.

3. James Graham talked about seeking help for workaholism in his Desert Island Discs. Overwork is a difficult compulsion to address because everything around you says you are doing the right thing, even as your friends and family tell you to stop.

4. “You can always tell who in Hollywood has family money by their Instagrams.” This Defector article on nepo babies and the death of social mobility is about morden fame, but it’s an old story; 17th century plays are full of disdain for arriviste merchants. Like it says, passive income—whether from your country estate or from residuals—has always been the dream.

5. “The chapter on British so-called TERFs is a compendium of smears culled from online teenagers about their gender-critical mums.” Kathleen Stock reviews Judith Butler (Unherd).

6. On the other side of the aisle, the Pulitzer-winning critic Andrea Long Chu makes the argument that children should be allowed o have mastectomies if hey want them. It’s a view, I guess, and I get a name-check as a “TARL”—essentially a sloppy liberal who bangs on about free speech and evidence when there’s a sexy revolution happening. Guilty as charged! (NY Mag)

7. “In 1633 king Charles I’s newly-appointed Lord Deputy for Ireland, Baron Wentworth, advised controlling its salt supply as a way to make the Irish utterly economically dependent on England.” Salt is the best luxury resource in Civ. This historical analysis of its use shows why (Age of Invention, Substack).

See you next time!