I’m referring to the obsession with knights and their adventures — and especially those linked to King Arthur and his Round Table. These were the most popular stories in Europe for hundreds of years. Readers couldn’t get enough of them, and even as the stories got stale and predictable, the audience demanded more and more.
The situation is almost exactly the same as the Marvel Cinematic Universe. We have a major character named King Arthur, but he was linked to numerous spinoffs and sequels. The other heroes connected to him soon established their own brands — including Lancelot, Merlin, Gawain, Tristan, Percival, and many others. Readers who enjoyed one of the heroes, often became fans of others.
If you make a list, the Arthurian Narrative Universe (ANU) has more than fifty protagonists. Not all of them became major brands, but that’s no different from the movie business, where even Disney can’t keep every superhero on the payroll.
Even more to the point, these stories were business initiatives, expected to enrich their owners. It’s hardly a coincidence that the most influential collection of stories about King Arthur in English, Le Morte d’Arthur published in 1485, originated as a profit-making venture by the earliest commercial publisher in Britain.
William Caxton was not only the first person to set up a printing press in England, but also the first retailer of printed books in the country. He acquired the manuscript of Le Morte d’Arthur from Thomas Malory, the Stan Lee of his day, and turned it into the single most influential secular British book between the time of Chaucer and the rise of Shakespeare.
He didn’t do it because he loved English history. (The painful truth is that very little — in fact next to nothing — in the Arthurian tales comes from documented historical events.) He didn’t even publish the book because he loved a good story. Caxton wanted to make a buck — or a pound sterling, I ought to say. He had identified the right brand franchise, much like the Walt Disney Company in the current day, and would milk it for all it was worth.
But here’s the most amazing thing about his brand franchise: Arthurian stories had been circulating in manuscript for more than 300 years at this point. And many of the details in these narratives are much older than that, reaching back to accounts of knights who fought in the Crusades, if not earlier.
We can trace the story of Lancelot and his adulterous romance with Queen Guinevere at least back to 1180. The story of the knights’ quest for the Holy Grail dates at least back to 1190. The first mention of King Arthur is no later than 828 AD.
Stop and consider the implications. King Arthur was the most popular brand franchise in secular narratives when he was 650 years old!
Of course, it was absurd. Nobody undertook knightly adventures of this sort during the Renaissance, but storytellers pretended otherwise. Everything about these narratives was outdated, unrealistic, and repetitive — the people who read these tales didn’t own suits of armor or compete in jousting tournaments. Those things had disappeared from society. But the audience still wanted these stories, so the same plots and characters got recycled again and again.
Ted Gioia, “Don Quixote Tells Us How the Star Wars Franchise Ends”, The Honest Broker, 2022-11-09.
February 10, 2023
QotD: Before Star Wars or the MCU there was … the Arthurian Narrative Universe
February 9, 2023
QotD: Collecting taxes, Medieval-style
(Note: for a more detailed primer on what this kind of apparatus can look like, check out Wayne Lee’s (@MilHist_Lee) talk “Reaping the Rewards: How the Governor, the Priest, the Taxman, and the Garrison Secure Victory in World History” here. He’s got some specific points he’s driving at, but the first half of the talk is a broad overview of the problems you face as a suddenly successful king. Also, the whole thing is fascinating.)
In a pre-modern society, this task – assembling and organizing the literate bureaucrats you need to run a state – is very difficult. Literacy is often very low, so the number of individuals with the necessary skills is minuscule. Training new literate bureaucrats is expensive, as is paying the ones you have, creating a catch-22 where the king has no money because he has no tax collectors and he has no tax collectors because he has no money. Looking at how states form is thus often a question of looking at how this low-administration equilibrium is broken. The administrators you need might be found in civic elites who are persuaded to do the job in exchange for power, or in a co-opted religious hierarchy of educated priests, for instance.
Vassalage represents another response to the problem, which is the attempt to – as much as possible – do without. Let’s specify terms: I am using “vassalage” here because it is specific in a way that the more commonly used “feudalism” is not. I am not (yet) referring to how peasants (in Westeros the “smallfolk”) interact with lords (which is better termed “manorialism” than as part of feudalism anyway), but rather how military aristocrats (knights, lords, etc) interact with each other.
So let us say you are a king who has suddenly come into a lot of land, probably by bloody conquest. You need to extract revenue from that land in order to pay for the armies you used to conquer it, but you don’t have a pile of literate bureaucrats to collect those taxes and no easy way to get some. By handing out that land to your military retainers as fiefs (they become your vassals), you can solve a bunch of problems at once. First, you pay off your military retainers for their service with something you have that is valuable (land). Second, by extracting certain promises (called “homage”) from them, you ensure that they will continue to fight for you. And third, you are partitioning your land into smaller and smaller chunks until you get them in chunks small enough to be administered directly, with only a very, very minimal bureaucratic apparatus. Your new vassals, of course, may do the same with their new land, further fragmenting the political system.
This is the system in Westeros, albeit after generations of inheritance (such that families, rather than individuals, serve as the chief political unit). The Westerosi term for a vassal is a “bannerman”. Greater military aristocrats with larger holding are lords, while lesser ones are landed knights. Landed knights often hold significant lands and a keep (fortified manner house), which would make them something more akin to European castellans or barons than, say, a 14th century English Knight Banneret (who is unlikely to have been given permission to fortify his home, known as a license to crenellate). What is missing from this system are the vast majority of knights, who would not have had any kind of fortified dwelling or castle, but would have instead been maintained as part of the household of some more senior member of the aristocracy. A handful of landless knights show up in Game of Thrones, but they should be by far the majority and make up most of the armies.
There’s one final missing ingredient here, which is castles, something Westeros has in abundance. Castles – in the absence of castle-breaking cannon – shift power downward in this system, because they allow vassals to effectively resist their lieges. That may not manifest in open rebellion so much as a refusal to go on campaign or supply troops. This is important, because it makes lieges as dependent on their vassals as vassals are on their lieges.
Bret Devereaux, “New Acquisitions: How It Wasn’t: Game of Thrones and the Middle Ages, Part III”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-06-12.
February 8, 2023
QotD: How do the “great works of art” become “great”?
That was what got him thinking.
Have you ever fallen for a novel and been amazed not to find it on lists of great books? Or walked around a sculpture renowned as a classic, struggling to see what the fuss is about? If so, you’ve probably pondered the question Cutting asked himself that day: how does a work of art come to be considered great?
The intuitive answer is that some works of art are just great: of intrinsically superior quality. The paintings that win prime spots in galleries, get taught in classes and reproduced in books are the ones that have proved their artistic value over time. If you can’t see they’re superior, that’s your problem. It’s an intimidatingly neat explanation. But some social scientists have been asking awkward questions of it, raising the possibility that artistic canons are little more than fossilised historical accidents.
Cutting, a professor at Cornell University, wondered if a psychological mechanism known as the “mere-exposure effect” played a role in deciding which paintings rise to the top of the cultural league. In a seminal 1968 experiment, people were shown a series of abstract shapes in rapid succession. Some shapes were repeated, but because they came and went so fast, the subjects didn’t notice. When asked which of these random shapes they found most pleasing, they chose ones that, unbeknown to them, had come around more than once. Even unconscious familiarity bred affection.
Back at Cornell, Cutting designed an experiment to test his hunch. Over a lecture course he regularly showed undergraduates works of Impressionism for two seconds at a time. Some of the paintings were canonical, included in art-history books. Others were lesser known but of comparable quality. These were exposed four times as often. Afterwards, the students preferred them to the canonical works, while a control group of students liked the canonical ones best. Cutting’s students had grown to like those paintings more simply because they had seen them more.
Cutting believes his experiment offers a clue as to how canons are formed. He points out that the most reproduced works of Impressionism today tend to have been bought by five or six wealthy and influential collectors in the late 19th century. The preferences of these men bestowed prestige on certain works, which made the works more likely to be hung in galleries and printed in anthologies. The kudos cascaded down the years, gaining momentum from mere exposure as it did so. The more people were exposed to, say, “Bal du Moulin de la Galette”, the more they liked it, and the more they liked it, the more it appeared in books, on posters and in big exhibitions. Meanwhile, academics and critics created sophisticated justifications for its pre-eminence. After all, it’s not just the masses who tend to rate what they see more often more highly. As contemporary artists like Warhol and Damien Hirst have grasped, critical acclaim is deeply entwined with publicity. “Scholars,” Cutting argues, “are no different from the public in the effects of mere exposure.”
Ian Leslie, “The Mona Lisa Effect”, The Ruffian, 2022-10-29 (originally published in Intelligent Life in 2014.
February 7, 2023
Disney – An Empire In Collapse
The Critical Drinker
Published 6 Feb 2023Disney isn’t looking too healthy these days, with massive financial losses, collapsing stock prices and internal power struggles threatening to tear the House of Mouse apart at the seams. How did this happen? Let’s find out.
(more…)
Big Sky fascism, according to the New York Times
In The Free Press, Walter Kirn expresses dismay to discover that he’s been living in a “quasi-fascist” state for 30 years and didn’t even notice until the Grey Lady informed him about it recently:
Just a few weeks back, I sat down with my morning coffee, opened up the paper and learned that I now live in a quasi-fascist state. It said so in the paper.
The paper wasn’t a local publication but one from a couple thousand miles away, the New York Times, whose glossy Sunday magazine included a lengthy, illustrated feature with the five-alarm headline How Montana Took a Hard Right Turn Toward Christian Nationalism. To illustrate the state’s alleged swerve toward neo-fascist theocratic rule — a dire development I’d somehow missed — the story included a scary gothic photo, heavily filtered to bring out its dark tones, of a ghostly white cross on a bare hillside reflected in a passing rearview mirror. It also included, of course, a Yellowstone reference and Kevin Costner’s name — right up top, where the search engines would see them.
Since moving to small-town Montana from New York City over 30 years ago, I’d lived through at least a couple of cycles of ominous national coverage of my state. Without going into the details, let me assure you that this article was bunk, as exaggerated as the photo.
But fiction is fact where Montana is concerned, particularly on the country’s coasts, where tales are told about the country’s interior that the country’s interior lacks the clout to counter, much as our guns lack the range to bring down aircraft. Despite our legendary swagger, Montanans are largely helpless against the country’s more powerful forces. The missiles on our prairies aren’t missiles we asked for, just missiles that formidable others wished to plant here. They make us a target, but we don’t control them.
Do I sound defensive? Perhaps I am.
I live in a state with zero big-league sports teams, not a single Fortune 500 corporation, and no national media influence to speak of — unless you count made-up shows about fake ranchers slugging it out in scripted brawls. I’m one of about a million residents, all of whom, no matter their circumstances, are up against the myth-making machines of cities and states of imperial wealth and numbers. And imperial attitudes, dare I say, which emerge in their basic, perennial story about us: those folks from the steppes and mountains are growing restless, including the ones who’ve just moved there to go skiing, who appear to be worse than the ones already living there, who we’ve always found unsettling enough.
When the spy balloon floated across America, the rest of the country got a taste, perhaps, of Montana’s stoic colonial impotence. For days, we could point, but we weren’t allowed to shoot — great-power diplomacy prevented it. Americans may think we’re tough, as Montanans may think they’re tough, but it seems that we’re tough in the way that actors in westerns are: only with the permission of the director, only symbolically. Down went the balloon on Saturday to much applause, but the spectacle was pure cinema by then, like a fistfight on Yellowstone that draws fake blood.
But at least we proud Montanans kept our honor. We spied the lurking villain, we called the sheriff, we warned our neighbors, we did what we could do. I suspect we’ll continue in this role, watchful vigilantes of the skies. There’s trouble afoot – you can feel it everywhere, particularly if you dwell near nuclear missiles, particularly if you live where there’s no cover — and someone has to stand lookout on the hill.
February 6, 2023
TikTok – threat and menace
At Wrong Side of History, Ed West linked to this post by Gurwinder on the TikTok threat to western civilization:
For thousands of years, humans sought to subjugate their enemies by inflicting pain, misery, and terror. They did this because these were the most paralyzing emotions they could consistently evoke; all it took was the slash of a sword or pull of a trigger.
But as our understanding of psychology has developed, so it has become easier to evoke other emotions in complete strangers. Advances in the understanding of positive reinforcement, driven mostly by people trying to get us to click on links, have now made it possible to consistently give people on the other side of the world dopamine hits at scale.
As such, pleasure is now a weapon; a way to incapacitate an enemy as surely as does pain. And the first pleasure-weapon of mass destruction may just be a little app on your phone called TikTok.
[…]
Other platforms, like Facebook and Twitter, use recommendation algorithms as features to enhance the core product. With TikTok, the recommendation algorithm is the core product. You don’t need to form a social network or list your interests for the platform to begin tailoring content to your desires, you just start watching, skipping any videos that don’t immediately draw your interest. Tiktok uses a proprietary algorithm, known simply as the For You algorithm, that uses machine learning to build a personality profile of you by training itself on your watch habits (and possibly your facial expressions.) Since a TikTok video is generally much shorter than, say, a YouTube video, the algorithm acquires training data from you at a much faster rate, allowing it to quickly zero in on you.
The result is a system that’s unsurpassed at figuring you out. And once it’s figured you out, it can then show you what it needs to in order to addict you.
Since the For You algorithm favors only the most instantly mesmerizing content, its constructive videos — such as “how to” guides and field journalism — tend to be relegated to the fringes in favor of tasty but malignant junk info. Many of the most popular TikTokers, such as Charli D’Amelio, Bella Poarch, and Addison Rae, do little more than vapidly dance and lip-sync.
Individually, such videos are harmless, but the algorithm doesn’t intend to show you just one. When it receives the signal that it’s got your attention, it doubles down on whatever it did to get it. This allows it to feed your obsessions, showing you hypnotic content again and again, reinforcing its imprint on your brain. This content can include promotion of self-harm and eating disorders, and uncritical encouragement of sex-reassignment surgery. There’s evidence that watching such content can cause mass psychogenic illness: researchers recently identified a new phenomenon where otherwise healthy young girls who watched clips of Tourette’s sufferers developed Tourette’s-like tics.
A more common way TikTok promotes irrational behavior is with viral trends and “challenges”, where people engage in a specific act of idiocy in the hope it’ll make them TikTok-famous. Acts include licking toilets, snorting suntan lotion, eating chicken cooked in NyQuil, and stealing cars. One challenge, known as “devious licks”, encourages kids to vandalize property, while the “blackout challenge”, in which kids purposefully choke themselves with household items, has even led to several deaths, including a little girl a few days ago.
The Chinese government — not wishing this kind of insanity spreading among their own people — have ensured that it’s only foreigners getting the full TikTok experience:
Last month FBI Director Chris Wray warned that TikTok is controlled by a Chinese government that could “use it for influence operations”. So how likely is it that one such influence operation might include addicting young Westerners to mind-numbing content to create a generation of nincompoops?
The first indication that the Chinese Communist Party is aware of TikTok’s malign influence on kids is that it’s forbidden access of the app to Chinese kids. The American tech ethicist Tristan Harris pointed out that the Chinese version of TikTok, Douyin, is a “spinach” version where kids don’t see twerkers and toilet-lickers but science experiments and educational videos. Furthermore, Douyin is only accessible to kids for 40 minutes per day, and it cannot be accessed between 10pm and 6am.
Has the CCP enforced such rules to protect its people from what it intends to inflict on the West? When one examines the philosophical doctrines behind the rules, it becomes clear that the CCP doesn’t just believe that apps like TikTok make people stupid, but that they destroy civilizations.
How We Make Our Videos (and what it costs)
World War Two
Published 5 Feb 2023We’re excited to finally answer all your questions about where Indy lives, how we produce the series, and how many of us there are in the TimeGhost Team!
(more…)
February 5, 2023
“[E]very story now assumes ‘white supremacy’ as the core truth of the world”
Andrew Sullivan on the state of the American legacy media in an age of young, woke reporters driving the narrative forward at the expense of any hint of objectivity:
Memphis police officers charged in the beating death of Tyre Nichols.
There are times when I actually feel some pity for the editors in mainstream media. In the last few years, pressured relentlessly by young, super-leftist staffers, they have slowly and then precipitously dropped the goal of objectivity and news in favor of subjectivity and narratives. The struggle against white supremacy has become too urgent for news that may not advance “social justice”. Here’s a glimpse of what the old guard is dealing with, in a leaked transcript of a NYT staff meeting in 2019. An early question from a NYT reporter was:
I’m wondering to what extent you think that the fact of racism and white supremacy being sort of the foundation of this country should play into our reporting. Just because it feels to me like it should be a starting point, you know? … I just feel like racism is in everything. It should be considered in our science reporting, in our culture reporting, in our national reporting. And so, to me, it’s less about the individual instances of racism, and sort of how we’re thinking about racism and white supremacy as the foundation of all of the systems in the country.
And, as you can see every day, this is what the NYT subsequently did. Distilled that year with The 1619 Project (now airing on Hulu!), everything was and is parsed through the lens of critical race/gender/queer theory — from birdwatching to knitting to “literally abolishing the police”. It’s their foundation.
The same ideological fervor swept over the WaPo, of course — right down to the racist birds! And this week, the former executive editor, Len Downie, a near-icon of the old school, published a report on journalism and found a broad consensus among his colleagues that, in the words of one editor-in-chief, “Objectivity has got to go!” So every story now assumes “white supremacy” as the core truth of the world.
So what happens when stories arrive which, on the face of it, seem to refute that entirely? Take three recent events: two mass killings of Asian-Americans within two days in California by an Asian-American (in Monterey Park) and a Chinese national (in Half Moon Bay); five black police officers in a majority-black police force with a black police chief all but lynched and murdered an innocent black man; and a trans woman was convicted of the rape of two other women with the use of her penis.
How on earth do these fit into the pre-arranged “white supremacy” template?
They can’t of course. They reflect a reality far more complex than the crude racial hierarchies beloved of actual white supremacists and woke activists alike. They show individual actors, with a range of possible motives, in unique moments that will always escape predictable narratives. Maybe racial prejudice is present; maybe not; or maybe mixed into a range of other possible factors. You work empirically from the ground up.
But if the facts don’t fit the narrative, you move on quickly to a story that will. So with the Asian-American massacres, after some initial excitement, the MSM lost interest as soon as a white man could not be blamed. (Contrast that with the days-long feeding frenzy over the Atlanta spa massacre, despite zero evidence of any anti-Asian motive from the white killer.) Or they try to force it into their narrative anyway.
“We need to find a couple of big-fish donors who want to see a bunch of vets going out and collecting digital Nazi scalps”
Chris Bray examines the cutting edge of anti-Nazi crusading:
So here’s the most important political story to appear in Rolling Stone since Sabrina Rubin Erdely earned early retirement:
There’s a growing movement of American Nazis, you see, so military veterans are pulling on their boots to fight for their country again, hunting those Nazis and taking them out. But actually reading the story is, pardon me for a moment, a little like hammering a fucking spike into your brain. Every claim self-refutes; paragraph by paragraph, the story tells you X and Not X, side-by-side, with equal authority.
Start with the foundation of the claim. Goldsmith’s work, Rolling Stone explains, “centers on exposing the inner workings and public wrongdoing of neo-fascist groups through deep-dive intelligence reports that can give prosecutors the evidence they need go after the hatemongers in court.” Try to find a definition of “neo-fascist” in the story, though, and you fail. Fascism, it turns out, is being mean. It’s politics for the TikTok era: fascism is haters! Actual fascists thought they believed in the sacredness and centrality of the state, government as the highest form of human expression; the LARPers tracking fascists in 2023 think it means you didn’t contribute to WinBlue last month.
And so Goldsmith says he’s tracking “these people who would literally kill their fellow Americans to install a fascist dictator”, which would be a pretty dire confrontation. Then, making the claim concrete, Goldsmith gets to this description of the Patriot Front, his primary Nazi nemesis:
I have come to understand them as a unique threat against the people of the United States. While they’re a small group — they may have 200, 220 members at any given time — the thing that makes them so dangerous is the cult like atmosphere.
So the headline is a life-and-death struggle between the rising tide of American fascists who are preparing to kill us all and install their Hitler; the story is 200 people — maybe 220! — “at any given time”. Here, by the way, is a leaked Patriot Front training video, so you can see just how terrifyingly dangerous they are:
The only thing the Patriot Front threatens is the retail availability of your favorite product at Dunkin’ Donuts, but let’s go on.
Standing across the battlefield from this terrifying group, the story reveals, Goldsmith & Co. now total a force of “two dozen volunteers”. Then comes this exchange, deep into the Q&A:
Rolling Stone has turned a cosplayers-on-cosplayers circle jerk into the Battle of the Bulge. Compare THE NAZI HUNTER NEXT DOOR to a living room’s worth of unpaid hobbyists who could really turn into something if someone would just, like, give us some money.
Now, the punchline: The NAZI HUNTER is very much having his big media moment, scoring a series of profiles since the start of the year. Here he is being interviewed by the New York Times (where his wife is an editor) in January, for example, under an intro that says he’s hunting “antigovernment” extremists who are fascist. We all remember how the original fascists were passionately anti-government, of course. Hitler, Franco, and Mussolini — big libertarians, all. Hardly wanted to have any government, so people could just hang loose and roll however they chose.
The tediousness of pumping all this sad-sackery into a big national story is exhausting, as is the news media in general. But we need the distraction of Nazis and insurrections, or we’d risk talking about things that are real.
February 4, 2023
“Ghost Riders In The Sky”
Audio Saurus
Published 30 Oct 2015Neil LeVang in 1961 on The Lawrence Welk Show.
February 3, 2023
A spectre is haunting Ontario politics: the spectre of [Shock! Horror!] American-style healthcare!
Everyone in Canada has heard alarming stories of people in the United States being presented with five- or six-figure bills for hospital care, and any hint that one of our provincial healthcare systems might move in that direction scares the pants off almost everyone. Politicians know this well, and salivate at the chance of deploying charges that their opponents favour “American-style” changes to our system because it’s a guaranteed vote-winner. None of it has to be true — very few Canadians know much about US systems aside from the horror stories — but it’s always effective.
In The Line, Harrison Ruess makes the sensible point that there are more healthcare systems in the western world than those of Canadian provinces and our closest neighbour:
Toronto General Hospital in 2005.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.
First, to be emphatic on this point, we need to be realistic about where our system ranks globally.
It is truly bewildering to me the lengths that otherwise smart and empathetic Canadians will go to to defend the status-quo approach to health care in Canada. The results we get, versus the money we spend, is simply not brag-worthy. The argument that our system works great, if only we threw more money at it, doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
Is our health care okay? Sure. Decent? Probably. Is it great? Hardly. Could we do better? Yes, much. Do we need to spend more? Maybe a tad, but not likely much, if any. To wit:
According to OECD data, on life expectancy Canada ranks 16th. On mortality rates from avoidable causes, we’re 23rd. On cancer survival rates we range from 13th down to 18th, depending on the cancer type. On the number of one-year-olds vaccinated for diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis, we rank an abysmal 37th (even the U.S. is higher here at 27th. Gulp.). One area where we do rank closer to the top is spending as a proportion of GDP, where we sit seventh.
World Health Organization (WHO) data wasn’t any more flattering, where Canada’s health care ranked 30th in overall performance despite being 10th in spending. The Commonwealth Fund ranks Canada 10th out of 11 in performance and 6th out of 11 in spending. In report after report Canadians aren’t getting the outcomes we need or want based on the money we’re spending on our current system.
Besides for reasons of nostalgia, why would anyone spend their energy defending these sorts of results? “We’re 16th! We’re 16th!” is hardly a chant you’d hear at a rally. It’s time to do better. And I get the feeling most people recognize this – certainly when you get onto Main Street.
Ipsos polling from December 2021 reported that 55 per cent of Canadians are “somewhat satisfied” with their health care, alongside 22 per cent that are “somewhat dissatisfied.” I.e. three quarters of Canadians find themselves in the middle of the road on the quality of our health care. This seems about right — mediocre support for mediocre health care. (The strongly satisfied and strongly dissatisfied were about even, at 12 per cent and 10 per cent respectively.)
But today Canadians are also, rightly, very worried. Leger polling in January 2023 showed that 86 per cent of Canadians are worried about the state of our health care.
“Lady of The Dark” – Milunka Savić – Sabaton History 117
Sabaton History
Published 2 Feb 2023One of the most badass and decorated soldiers of the Great War was a woman. Serving first in the Balkan Wars, this Serbian war heroin became a celebrity when she won the Karađorđe’s Star — the highest Serbian decoration — in 1914 and 1916. Those weren’t her only decorations either — watch to find out more.
(more…)
Who will be the first ones to lose their jobs to ChatGPT? The confidence men
Ted Gioia somehow manages not to fall for the ChatGPT con:
The fast-talking hero of the TV show Sneaky Pete hates it when he’s called a con man.
“I’m not a con man”, he insists, “I’m a confidence man.” And that’s actually how the term originated — as “confidence man”. The scam only works because of that happy and confident relationship between criminal and victim.
“I give them confidence,” Pete explains. “They give me money.”
In the ultimate con, victims don’t even know they’ve been conned. They really think they’re sending cash to some gorgeous babe in Moscow, or bought a genuine Rolex, or whatever.
The confidence game is a real art — more than just cheating or lying. Those are boring and pathetic vices by comparison. A con job requires something grander, a fast-talking sureness that always seems to be right, even when it’s dead wrong.
If you’re caught in a lie, you just build a bigger lie to hide it.
Which brings us to the subject of ChatGPT, the AI bot that’s the hottest thing in tech right now.
Judging by my Twitter feed, ChatGPT is hotter than Wordle and Taylor Swift combined.
It’s even hotter than its predecessor Sam Bankman-Fried, who was doing something similar 12 months ago. ChatGPT is just better than SamFTX in every way. It can’t even be extradited — because it’s just a bot.
People love it. People have confidence in it.
They want to use it for everything — legal work, medical advice, term papers, or even writing Substack columns. If I believed half of what I heard about ChatGPT, I could let it take over The Honest Broker, while I sit on the beach drinking margaritas and searching for my lost shaker of salt.
But that’s exactly what the confidence artist always does. Which is:
- You give people what they ask for.
- You don’t worry whether it’s true or not — because ethical scruples aren’t part of your job description.
- If you get caught in a lie, you serve up another lie.
- You always act sure of yourself — because your confidence is what seals the deal.
Am I exaggerating? Is the hottest AI chatbot in the world really doing this?
Instead of offering up my opinions on this, I’ll just share some tweets from knowledgeable observers who are starting to suspect the con.
I’ll let you decide for yourself whether this measures up to a confidence game.
February 2, 2023
Gerry Rafferty’s “Baker Street” lyrics
When I first subscribed to Ted Gioia’s Honest Broker substack, I figured I’d find one or two posts a month that I found interesting enough to share on the blog … I have to be careful not to link to several of his posts every week. He writes a lot about the music industry, so when this popped up in my inbox, I assumed it was Ted and got to the point of scheduling it before I realized it was Jon Miltimore instead:
I was recently in a bar having dinner with a friend when Gerry Rafferty’s hit 1978 song “Baker Street” came on. When my friend mentioned that he loved the song, I agreed and noted the song’s powerful lyrics.
“Really?” he responded. “I never paid much attention to the lyrics.”
Most people, of course, remember “Baker Street” for its wailing saxophone, and my friend was no different. Nor was I, for many years. But at some point—I don’t know when—I began to pay attention to the song’s lyrics. They go like this:
Winding your way down on Baker Street
Light in your head and dead on your feet
Well, another crazy day
You’ll drink the night away
And forget about everythingThis city desert makes you feel so cold
It’s got so many people, but it’s got no soul
And it’s taken you so long
To find out you were wrong
When you thought it held everythingYou used to think that it was so easy
You used to say that it was so easy
But you’re trying, you’re trying now
Another year and then you’d be happy
Just one more year and then you’d be happy
But you’re crying, you’re crying nowWay down the street there’s a light in his place
He opens the door, he’s got that look on his face
And he asks you where you’ve been
You tell him who you’ve seen
And you talk about anythingHe’s got this dream about buying some land
He’s gonna give up the booze and the one-night stands
And then he’ll settle down
In some quiet little town
And forget about everythingBut you know he’ll always keep moving
You know he’s never gonna stop moving
‘Cause he’s rolling, he’s the rolling stone
And when you wake up, it’s a new morning
The sun is shining, it’s a new morning
And you’re going, you’re going homeThe lyrics — in contrast to the seductive sax and upbeat strings and keyboard — are rather dark. It’s not your typical rock/pop song about finding or losing love.
I’ve never heard “Baker Street” explained, but my take on the song is this: It’s about two lonely people in a city. They find comfort in booze, chemicals, and (occasionally) each other. The relationship is probably dysfunctional, but they are struggling to change. Struggling to grow. Struggling to find meaning.
“Baker Street” peaked at #3 in the UK and held the #2 spot in the U.S. for six consecutive weeks. I think part of the reason the song was such a success is because the lyrics touched on something a little deeper than most rock tunes, something that resonated with audiences. And though the song is 40 years old now, I have a hunch it resonates even more now than it did then.
February 1, 2023
It’s the job of the music critic to be loudly and confidently wrong as often as possible
Ted Gioia points out that a lot of musical criticism does not pass the test of time … and sometimes it’s shown to be wrong before the ink is dry:
When I was in my twenties, I embarked on writing an in-depth history of West Coast jazz. At that juncture in my life, it was the biggest project I’d ever tackled. Just gathering the research materials took several years.
There was no Internet back then, and so I had to spend weeks and months in various libraries going through old newspapers and magazines — sometimes on microfilm (a cursed format I hope has disappeared from the face of the earth), and occasionally with physical copies.
At one juncture, I went page-by-page through hundreds of old issues of Downbeat magazine, the leading American jazz periodical founded back in 1934. And I couldn’t believe what I was reading. Again and again, the most important jazz recordings — cherished classics nowadays — were savagely attacked or smugly dismissed at the time of their initial release.
The opinions not only were wrong-headed, but they repeatedly served up exactly the opposite opinion of posterity.
Back in my twenties, I was dumbfounded by this.
I considered music critics as experts, and hoped to learn from them. But now I saw how often they got things wrong — and not just by a wee bit. They were completely off the mark.
Nowadays, this doesn’t surprise me at all. I’m painfully aware of all the compromised agendas at work in reviews — writers trying to please an editor, or impress other critics, or take a fashionable pose, or curry favor with the tenure committee, or whatever. But there is also something deeper at play in these huge historical mistakes in critical judgments, and I want to get to the bottom of it.
Let’s consider the case of the Beatles.
When the Beatles went on the road, stories like this followed them everywhere
On the 50th anniversary of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the New York Times bravely reprinted the original review that ran in the newspaper on June 18, 1967. I commend the courage of the decision-makers who were willing to make Gray Lady look so silly. But it was a wise move — if only because readers deserve a reminder of how wrong critics can be.
“Like an over-attended child, ‘Sergeant Pepper’ is spoiled,” critic Richard Goldstein announced. And he had a long list of complaints. The album was just a pastiche, and “reeks of horns and harps, harmonica quartets, assorted animal noises and a 91-piece orchestra”. He mocks the lyrics as “dismal and dull”. Above all the album fails due to an “obsession with production, coupled with a surprising shoddiness in composition”. This flaw doesn’t just destroy the occasional song, but “permeates the entire album”.
Goldstein has many other criticisms — he gripes about dissonance, reverb, echo, electronic meandering, etc. He concludes by branding the entire record as an “undistinguished collection of work”, and even attacks the famous Sgt. Pepper’s cover — lauded today as one of the most creative album designs of all time — as “busy, hip, and cluttered”.
The bottom line, according to the newspaper of record: “There is nothing beautiful on ‘Sergeant Pepper’. Nothing is real and there is nothing to get hung about.”
How could he get it so wrong?
