Along the way, I became an expert on Newton and his reception and on developments in twentieth century economics, and I found a home in professional philosophy (as a ‘historian of philosophy,’ a ‘philosopher of social science,’ and ‘HPS-type’). At least this is a way one can tell my professional story before I switched (or returned) to political theory. Once in political theory I recognized that Machiavelli’s great contribution to the art of government — that in the right conditions, which includes considerable layers of social opacity, social disorder can itself be informative — anticipates George’s insight into how successive approximation can be fruitful.

Be that as it may, the way professional philosophy is organized, there is no list of ‘open’ questions that are treated as ‘important.’ In fact, there are ways of posing my animating question in terms that made it sound vaguely Popperian (viz. ‘is there a scientific method;’ ‘a logic of discovery?;’ ‘could concepts be stress tested?’)—and so discarded. Sometimes I was directed to others — Alison Wylie, Nancy Cartwright, and Hasok Chang back in the day — whose projects had a family resemblance with my own.

There are some subfields in philosophy where through the force of personality and/or institutional entrenchment (or donor/foundation persistence) some questions do feel significant and open. But more often than not these are treated (after the fact) as evidence of ‘fashion’ in philosophy. Because there is no consensus on what really matters philosophically, and great jobs are scarce in the profession, lots of professional philosophers are in the business of artificially producing prestige (by keeping acceptance rates for the really important journals ridiculously low).

The previous was not really meant to be polemical.

Professional philosophers often think of themselves as constituting a field that’s not very far from professional mathematics. One of our core areas — mathematical logic — even has some overlap with foundational practices in mathematics. And I am just old enough to remember the time when some wise folk thought that having mathematical logicians around in philosophy was a thing thought good, perhaps standards-protecting (even standards-raising), for a department. And I was taught by and mentored for a long time by a philosopher, Jody Azzouni who himself studied mathematical practice, and found that useful in debating what other professional philosophers argued about philosophically important topics.

But judging by the reactions collected at ‘Proofs and Prompts’ to the Open AI math dump last week, the way enquiry is organized in professional mathematics is quite distinct from the relative lack of organization in philosophy. Or to put it differently, professional mathematics has much more of a closed guild structure than we do in philosophy. (Some evidence for this can be gleaned from the way the mathematicians use ‘community’ in ‘mathematical/mathematics community’—no philosopher would speak of our profession as such as a community unless it were in order to be satirical.) There who you study with and what ‘open’ problems you work on have a rather tight connection and, these in turn, have a rather tight connection to one’s professional identity and trajectory. To put it in terms of the economists: barriers to entry and, once in, path-dependent endowment effects are rather steep.

Having a list of such open problems, and an implied sense of their significance to the community, allows for much coordination, including the distribution of honors, jobs, and grant proposals. While there is, undoubtedly, a political economy to the institutions that fund all of this, it has allowed for a non-trivial amount of bottom-up intellectual and collective self-governance as well as exploration. It is, for example, pretty clear that quite a few leading mathematicians have been early adopters of LLMs in their own research and, thereby, have indirectly helped train the next generation of these.

The situation described in the previous paragraph is fairly unique in human history. Few civilizations have invested in pure mathematics to the degree ours has with the rise of the modern research university and dedicated research institutions since (say) the late nineteenth century. (By ‘civilization’ I am happy to be very inclusive.) But by making its official problems explicitly legible (to adopt social science jargon), the ‘mathematical community’ became sitting ducks when the barriers to entry were huge for individual researchers but a relatively easy technological hurdle for a few for-profit corporations with no hard budget constraint (relative to the mathematical community). These companies now control a vital resource that enables one to be on the leading edge of the mathematical frontier. My use of ‘one’ is, of course, a weasel word—because it is wholly unclear if any human can have any leading role on that frontier henceforth.

Perhaps the implied guild structure explains the unseemly schadenfreude with which the demise of professional mathematics has been welcomed by so many commentators. Cheering on the misfortune of those who harm nobody, and who are engaged in a noble activity, is itself evidence of the advanced corruption (recall) of our age.

One sometimes hears from economic historians and sociologists of technology that the technological disruption to the mathematical community, if it is one, is no big deal all things considered. The mathematicians turn out to be no different from the hand-weavers, the loom operators, and the human (mostly female) ‘computers’ that got displaced by machines in the context of progress. But while there is more than a kernel of truth in this (and there is quite a bit of intellectual labor embodied in modern machinery, etc.), this is one of the first times since the rise of the modern research university that a ‘pure’ field risks being overtaken and displaced by one of the (applied) technologies it partially birthed. Philosophers are somewhat used to being told by the practitioners in the fields it helped birth that philosophy is useless and pointless; but it may hit the mathematicians harder. Many mathematicians are in a state of “shock,” “loss,” and depression (as well as anger), but a guild that gets undermined also opens up new opportunities for those impatient or sidelined under the old regime.

As regular readers know (recall here), I argue that the structural (Humphreys) opacity that is inherent in LLMs enhances genuine expertise. But it doesn’t follow from this that the remaining place for human mathematical expertise is on the research frontier of commonly defined open questions. My own scholarly work (with Russo and Wagemans here) suggests that in such conditions there will be more work for certification and less for production. For, opaque systems, when used to produce results, systematically secrete new layers of opacity that need to be checked and monitored.

I increasingly suspect professional mathematics will turn into practiced and idiosyncratic virtuosity, where math slides back into modern art.1 (Danny Calegari’s examples of animations are worth pondering.) Since modern universities find ways to hire, evaluate, and promote all kinds of artists, this may require less administrative adjustment than one might fear.

Of course, if the cutting edge LLMs become more like a utility, then, alternatively, maybe credentialling within mathematics disappears entirely. Automated iterative feedback from deviations then mops it all up.

What about professional philosophy and the scholarship about it (i.e. history of philosophy)? Prestige producers and the journals they control are fighting a rearguard action against the use of LLMs. I expect more and more ‘professional philosophy’ to be co-produced by professional philosophers and LLMs, until we reach the point where LLMs ‘edit,’ referee, and summarize all such papers and are effectively the only ones actually reading them. Given the way it is organized the good news is professional philosophy is not so vulnerable to a hostile takeover; but the bad news is that it is vulnerable to increasing (ahh) hollowing out of its mode of production because that mode is not itself intrinsic to philosophy. (Okay that was polemical.)

That last claim is too strong undoubtedly. Such legibility to outsiders is, of course, a matter of degree and intensity, and one wonders if the philosophical contributions of (say) Jorge Luis Borges will be re-evaluated in light of such considerations (not to mention the fortunes of bits of continental philosophy). By emphasizing Borges here I do not mean to focus on his brilliant thought experiments, but rather on how he indicates new ways of discernment. That means, but this is self-serving, that philosophers will increasingly value and gravitate toward judgment and voice—but I would say that.

Let me rephrase that. You may think that if we take Liam Kofi Bright’s famous distinction between basically pleasant bureaucrats and Sexy Murder Poets seriously, I am predicting the demise of the former and the renewed attraction of the latter within professional philosophy. But while that result would greatly amuse me, it’s not what I am predicting. Rather I am claiming (recall my treatment of synthetic philosophy) that philosophy will rediscover that its vocation is in the tending, nurturing, and monitoring of the machinery of governance of the bureaucratic structure (including the LLMs) that is opaque to society.

• An earlier version of this post was published at Digressions&Impressions.

About 43 years and 3 weeks ago the soon-to-be late lamented You and Yours had one of those “off to University” shows, helping parents and about-to-be new undergraduates to understand what the first few weeks of University was going to be like.[1] Although fitting the latter category, I only listened because at the time You and Yours was among my regular listening. One comment struck me, and has stayed with me ever since. A woman in her thirties, commenting on Freshers’ Weeks, said that “in that first week of college you meet people who will be your friends for the rest of your life”.

I was skeptical. And it hasn’t been true for me. I’ve kept in much closer touch with several friends from secondary school than anyone from college (I did meet CB sometime in 1984, but only for a few minutes, and not again till Sept 12, 2001, so he doesn’t count; I’ve recently reconnected with someone else I was close to, but we hardly saw each other for 35 years). My first day at Bedford College was spent almost entirely with a girl called Alison who decided the next day to leave (not, I hope, because she spent the first day with me, but because she was trying to escape her home town of Egham, to which my college suddenly announced it was moving).

But it was also that week that I met Adrian.

On the Wednesday the first-year Philosophy students had some sort of meeting with our course tutors, after which we all sat together in the student coffee area. They all seemed so sophisticated and worldly to me, with the exception of the old Etonian who had come straight from school. The most striking was a slender balding man in a lumberjack shirt with a very generous mustache. He was poring over the student union handbook, commenting on the various student groups, all of them named the “something Soc” (which, of course, afforded an opportunities for lame witticisms – I presume the Methodists set up their group solely in order to be able to call it the “Meths Soc”, and the footballers displayed remarkable ingenuity — for footballers — with their “Soc Soc”). Adrian suddenly complained, very loudly, about the absence of a Christian Temperance Soc, and asked whether any of us would be willing to set one up with him.

It was, of course, a wind-up, and an absurd one at that, from a man who did look as if he had just walked out of Village People (it turned out that in fact he’d just walked out of Poison Girls, but, though a sort of fan, that would not have occurred to me). But it fooled the more provincial of us, some of whom believed him while others (like me) were just very puzzled.

He was older than most of us – just turned 27 – and had a life outside of college. At 18 he’d gone straight from Winchester to Cambridge to do English, and dropped out to become a kind of bohemian, gay musician in Brighton (where else?). His band, The Dandies, had been labeled punk by the music press because, as he joked, someone at the NME liked them, and for the NME the word “punk” meant “anything someone at the NME likes”. Later I heard some of the recordings, which were quite far from punk – more like glam rock done by musicians who grew up with classical music. For all I knew then glam was all like that (its only more recently that I’ve come to like it).

I’ve no sense of how we became friends, but it must have been very early in the year, because by the second term seeing him and hanging out (not that I would have used, or even known, the term ‘hanging out’ at the time) was a fixture of my day. Like me he studied hard, but unlike me he had a real flair for the subject; he immediately got why problems were interesting, and why arguments did (or didn’t) work; so studying didn’t dominate his, already well balanced, life. He lived in 23A Theobalds Road, which had until recently been largely occupied by leading members of the IMG, and was right opposite Holborn police station. It was through him, in fact, that I met CB that time, CB being a friend of one of Adrian’s housemates. I hung out there a lot, far more than anywhere else.

He had beautiful eyes, and a delightful leer, which he occasionally turned my way. I never really learned to be open with people, especially men, but I was more open with him than any other man till much later in life. He was flip and serious at the same time; tolerant of what he saw as nonsense, but not taken in by anything. He was left-wing, and gay, but thought the idea (almost pervasive at the time) that there was any association between gay rights and more traditionally left-wing concerns was risible; he was gay and politically left but not politically gay. We never discussed same-sex marriage because…. well, it was absurd to discuss it. As absurd as discussing the fall of the Berlin Wall, or the prospect of a Sinn Fein/DUP collaboration in government would have been. We never really discussed homophobia, weirdly, though I did experience it myself for the first (and last) time, because my eccentric dress and close friendship with Adrian marked me out as presumably gay at a small college where homophobia would now (if the college still existed) be more or less absent, but then was pretty much the norm (particularly noticeably, dare I say, with the oh-so wittily-named Soc Soc).

The best of many stories: On the very day we started, our college announced that it was closing, and merging with Royal Holloway College in Egham (hence the departure of Egham Alison after day one). About halfway through our second year a kind of college-closing reception was held for selected students and faculty to meet with our college patron, the Queen Mother. Most departments, sensibly, invited their 3 or 4 top students, but the Philosophy department, being democratic and (I suspect) republican, put a notice on the board asking interested students to put their names in a hat. I showed Adrian the notice, thinking he’d find it funny; instead of which he looked imploringly at me and said “Can we go? Please?”. We put our names forward and, of course, were picked out of the hat, being the only students politically incorrect enough to have put our names in. We received the invitations a week or so ahead of time, which contained, on the back, the following instructions:
Her Majesty requests that staff and students attend the function wearing their ordinary working clothes.

Naturally we got wet feet at once, and went to our department chair, Mark Sainsbury, to secure a promise that, if we did attend, we should not actually have to meet or talk to the guest of honour; he kindly agreed, pointing out that he wasn’t too thrilled about going either, but that it was the sort of thing one was expected to do. Relieved, we agreed to go.

And, it turned out, that we were the only truly loyal subjects she had. Adrian attended in leather jacket and jeans. I, well, did not look like I was out of Village People, more like a tramp (American: bum) with a skinhead cut; I wore only second-hand clothes at the time, with the exception of my shoes which were usually well-worn and often holey plimsolls. Every other attendee was, of course, dressed to the nines; even the Union president (now a Baroness) with her goth haircut had bought a brand new outfit, of the kind that later became mandatory for New Labourites (she became a New Labour peer eventually). Having made it through security, after being given a very skeptical eye (until we pointed out the instructions on the invitation!) we made a bee line to the Philosophy table where, I hope Mark won’t mind me saying, he and Adrian drank a good deal of the free booze (I was strictly TT, so nothing for me).

The Queen Mother was about an hour late, of course, so there was ample time for my two companions to cheer themselves up. When she arrived she was hurried from table to table by our college President and the Union President. Until they got to Philosophy, where the Queen Mother (who really was tiny) began an odd conversation with Mark Sainsbury (who is a giant) about whether philosophy got enough public support (they both agreed it didn’t). She was peering over his knee at me and Adrian all the time, while the college President was colluding with her minders in trying to move her along, lest she notice the eyesore that we constituted (I suspected it was me, not him, that they were trying to avoid). After a couple of minutes, shaking off one of her minders, she said directly to Mark: “And who are these people? I would like to talk to these people, they look interesting.”

I’ve never discussed it with him, but I presume something like the following reply went through his head:

No, your Royal Highness, you can’t talk to them, they’re a pair of reprobates, one of them a flaming queer and the other a scruffy lefty, but they’re the only students we could get to come, and we only managed that by promising them they wouldn’t have to actually meet you.

and decided, sensibly, that discretion was the better part of valour. She was duly introduced, and immediately started telling us how important she thought it was for people to be studying philosophy:

Adrian: “Oh, no it isn’t. It’s interesting, but it’s not at all important, its quite unimportant”

QM, “Oh no, I don’t agree, we need people to think about what the meaning is of life and why we are here”

Adrian, “Ah, but you see philosophy isn’t about the meaning of life, it’s about the meaning of meaning, and of words, and how arguments fit together, really, its not what you think”

The conversation continued in that vein for about 10 minutes, Mark Sainsbury occasionally trying to interject in support of HRH, and I being too bemused to say much, knowing, in addition, that one wasn’t often going to be in a position of witnessing two of the most charming people in human history having a ridiculous disagreement about the value of philosophy. For, to my complete dismay, and it still pains me to admit it, she was, as everyone has always said, utterly charming (less so than Adrian, but he set the bar absurdly high) and she clearly liked him enormously (a count in her favour, though, I suppose, it didn’t really mark her out!). After she moved on, the journalists who follow these people around, descended on us, wanting every detail of how it was that Adrian managed to hold her attention for an unprecedented amount of time, especially when she was already so far behind schedule, and what they talked about.

A few days later the college magazine devoted part of its front cover to a lovely picture of the diminutive royal discussing philosophy with a scruffy skinhead, a tall philosopher, and a the only person she’d ever met more charming than she was. Someone put it up on the Philosophy department noticeboard with a short-lived, and rather generous, caption: “We’re the only people in the room who don’t want to be here; how do we get out?”

Shortly afterward Adrian arrived excitedly to the student cafeteria telling me his news. A band that he regularly played with had invited him to join as a permanent member. It would mean giving up college, because of the touring. He was delighted, but he didn’t do it. I never knew quite what decided him against; I think that it was a genuine enjoyment of student life and the work we were doing. After graduating he signed on for a MA course at Birkbeck, and I suspect that he would have stayed in Philosophy and been successful if he’d lived.

An aside. It was during this time (in that refectory) that he coined the phrase I’d like to be my epitaph. I’ve spent much of the past 10 years in committee meetings and Board meetings, often saying things that no-one else is saying, and finding (to my surprise) that this does not seem to lead people to stop asking me to do the work (indeed, quite the reverse!). During a conversation about what we might do in the future, one acquaintance said he could see me becoming a Labour MP, at which Adrian just said “No, I see you sitting around in rooms, saying sensible things”. Pretty much every meeting I am in, and certainly every one where a decision of consequence has to be made, I remind myself of that, and hope I live up to it. There’s nothing I’d rather have on my gravestone than “Sat around in rooms, saying sensible things”.

Sometime in the Autumn of our third year Adrian failed to turn up for lectures for about a week. There were just three of us who never missed, so I figured something was wrong. No-one had phones in those days (and I’m not just talking about mobiles), so I trudged round to his house and rang the doorbell. Then I rang again, and rang again, and waited for maybe 10 minutes. Eventually an emaciated figure opened the door, barely recognizable as my friend. I helped him up the four flights of stairs, and apologized over and over again for getting him out of bed. It was 1984, I was 21, and HIV/AIDS was still a foreign, if frightening, disease in those days; I had no idea that’s what he had or that what he had might be fatal. He got back to strength after a few weeks, and finished the year thanks, in part, to an incredibly high protein diet. It didn’t occur to me, or to those of his friends I knew will, how bad things were going to get. My guess is that he did know, perfectly well, what was going on, pretty early on.

About HIV/AIDS. A close college friend, who Adrian knew through me, told me that shortly after I left England she was with a group of her college friends in London, and saw Adrian (whom they all knew, of course) across the street. She skipped through the traffic to hug and kiss him (despite knowing her only a little, he completely adored her, which frankly shows he had better judgment than I did). When she returned they all berated her for kissing someone who was gay, because ‘what if he has AIDS?”. Which, of course, he did have.

One of my happiest memories of my college days is the two weeks of our Finals in June 1985; I’d arrive at his house early in the morning, we were both well prepared, he was openly nervous, we walk up to Bloomsbury for the exams, then have lunch together at his house (usually with assorted housemates teasing us; often his rather pugnacious steady boyfriend would sit with us encouragingly), and, if there was an afternoon exam, saunter back. In my memory the sun always shone. He got a First, after a viva. I learned this from an indiscreet Mark Sainsbury, into whom I bumped right outside the British Museum one day; he had just heard the results himself an hour earlier, told me mine, and then after I had, with staggeringly uncharacteristic nerve asked Adrian’s result, the one I really cared about, he told me. I ran down to Theobalds Road, and spent two hours completely failing to convince him of the result: he genuinely seemed to believe I was capable of lying to him about it for fun.

And then, after finals, the casual freedom that 15% graduate unemployment and a low-consumption lifestyle allowed us. Adrian, along with many other friends and acquaintances, attended my Miners Strike-related trial for assaulting a police officer. Mark Sainsbury appeared as a character witness, and his comment that “Brighouse was one of our two finest students, whom we presented to the Queen Mother when she visited the college” drew breaths of horrified disillusion from the assorted Trotskyists in the crowd, along with Adrian’s loud cackle of laughter. Adrian’s behavior on my conviction was exemplary; knowing that I would be tempted to refuse to pay the fine (I wasn’t guilty, after all), but knowing too that not paying was absurd, since it would only make a political point in a match that had already been lost hands down, he walked straight into the back office and paid the fine himself (I repaid him later, courtesy of my proud great uncle Dewi, who sent me a note saying, “We are all so proud of you”, with a cheque for fifty quid).

I went to my graduation ceremony mainly to see him there; and last saw him in December 1985, the night before I left the UK for California. He came to a farewell party some friends held in Abberbury Road. The last time, I suppose, that I was really, truly, English. I wrote to him a good bit, but he was one of several poor correspondents. The reason was clear when his only letter to me arrived in October 1986, just two days before another letter from a mutual friend, Elspeth, telling me he had died. His letter was a long and funny rumination on domestic life in London after the defeat of the left, but had a restrained sadness that alerted me that things might not be well. Our friend’s letter devastated me. I wandered around in a kind of fog for days, until the man who is now my ex-brother-in-law but was then just another graduate student, told me to forget the expense and call Elspeth to talk about Adrian; we spoke for an hour and a half, which must have cost at least $50, except that it mysteriously never showed up on the phone bill.

Adrian has haunted me. I would have endless conversations in my head with him, composing letters never to be read. I would guess that I thought of him every day for 16 years. During my 2-year stint at the Institute of Education I passed the spot where we would meet before the Birkbeck intercollegiate lectures every time I went to work, and occasionally I ate lunch, alone, in ULU simply to remember him. It is not entirely a tribute to him that I did this; somehow in death he became a focal point of my homesickness. Not an unhappy one; my actual thoughts of him were much more cheery than maudlin, and still are. But when, at long last, my homesickness dissolved, so did my daily thoughts of him. It was as if a fog had lifted, and his ghost with it.

But not completely gone. I still think of him often; I regret the rest of the life he didn’t have; I wish he knew my children and especially as my oldest has grown and envies stories of my youth I wish I could send her to stay with him for a month; I delight on the rare occasions I hear a Poison Girls song he was involved with; and the compilation of his recordings that was released for a benefit event after his death is an essential part of my music collection — as is a collection of The Dandies that his best friend sent me after reading the earlier version of this on CT. I used to see a kid round here with a Poison Girls T-shirt (what’s with that; isn’t it like someone of my generation wearing an Al Bowlly T-shirt?) and I would smile.

Here’s an indirect indication of what he was like. When I posted an earlier version of this a decade ago I got a lovely note from a mathematician who was at Winchester at the same time as him, and didn’t even know him, but was glad to be reminded of someone he’d admired… in secondary school! And, recently, he sent me a lovely note congratulating me because he noticed I’d been elected to the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences. Literally nobody who knew Adrian will find that at all surprising.

I wanted to write something about him. Things being as they are there’s a chance that some of our readers knew him; attended classes with him, taught him; maybe one of you was even a fan of The Dandies. If so, I hope you are glad to be reminded of a lovely person who taught me, and perhaps you, so much about how to love life (something I have never ever been good at, but have done better than I otherwise would). No-one told me then the exact date of his death at the time, but according to my calculations from the letters I was sent it was October 12th or 13th, and I always chose to remember him on the 12th — which his sister has subsequently confirmed was the day. 40 years ago today , exactly. He’d be 71, now in old age, which is inconceivable. And, just as the woman on You and Yours said, I know that we’d still be friends. I wish it had been not just for the rest of his life, but for the rest of mine, too.

[1] Yep, You and Yours has been around that long, and, yep, I was pathetic enough to listen to it as a teenager. I don’t anymore. And I guess I won’t be able to in the future.

I wasn’t surprised by this. Farley is the epitome of the navalist view that serious expertise on the technology of naval warfare is a crucial requirement for commentary, whereas being right is irrelevant.

Given this respect for credentialed expertise, however, I was a bit surprised to see Farley endorse a piece by Bret Devereaux making the claim that “the United States Navy is a load-bearing component of the global economy”. You might think that the relevant expertise here included at least some knowledge of both transport economics and the global economy. Devereaux, who is an “ancient and military historian”, has neither. Still, I’m not going to pull academic rank here. Let’s see what Devereaux has to say and how well it stacks up as a piece of economic analysis.

I take the architectural metaphor to mean that the global economy depends critically on the supposed role of the US Navy in protecting maritime trade. This is a stronger version of a claim commonly made by navalists, to the effect that US naval expenditure is a form of global foreign aid, offsetting the notorious stinginess of the US in ordinary aid (now massively exacerbated by Trump and Musk).

A notable example of this latter claim is this piece by Brookings Institution researcher Michael O’Hanlon, notable as a prominent Iraq war hawk who hasn’t paid any price for being wrong. Like Devereaux, he also lacks any economic qualifications and shows no evidence of having learned anything on the subject. O’Hanlon claims that US naval activity is crucial to the maintenance of free movement through vital waterways including the Strait of Hormuz.

Now let’s turn to Devereaux. He begins well enough with the observation that trade is an important part of the global economy. He presents, but doesn’t really explain, the concept of comparative advantage. Next he explains that, while shipping is slow, it is much cheaper than air or land transport. For that reason, most seaborne trade is focused on staples like food, rather than luxury goods. These familiar facts are presented rather breathlessly with lots of bold and italic font, as is the observation that “ships can be really, really big”.

Devereaux asserts that all of this trade depends on the fact that piracy has been almost non-existent since 1945. That’s an important claim which obviously needs assessment in the light of that post-1945 experience.

What we get, however, is a lengthy history of piracy from the Greek Dark Age to the Barbary Wars, in which Devereaux’s expertise in ancient history is displayed. Unfortunately, there is no modern history. The story stops 200 years ago, omitting the much more relevant experience of piracy in the waters off Somalia.

To recap briefly, Somali fishers, whose traditional fisheries were being devastated by industrial-scale extraction undertaken by fleets from rich countries, began attacking merchant ships and holding them and their crews for ransom. This turned out to be a profitable enterprise which expanded rapidly. The US and other rich countries responded by sending destroyers and other high-powered naval vessels. However, these vessels weren’t well suited to dealing with fisher/pirates in speedboats, and piracy continued.

The eventual answer to the problem, amusingly enough, was a combination of lawyers, guns and money. Legal processes were developed to ensure that pirates, once apprehended, could be prosecuted. Shippers reluctantly hired armed guards and installed safe rooms to slow hijackers down to the point that help could be called in. And financial aid to Somalia helped reduce the desperation that drove piracy in the first place (piracy has ticked up again since the Trump administration cut that aid).

But even at its peak, the economic cost of piracy was minimal, no more than around $10 billion a year on a generous estimate. That’s less than the running cost of a single carrier strike group. And the low level of piracy wasn’t due to the “tiger-repelling rock” effect of the US Navy. Even with 11 carrier groups, the USN isn’t big enough to patrol every coastline from which pirates might operate. And it obviously didn’t stop the Somalis from trying their luck

Devereaux next presents the standard navalist claim about “choke points”, that is, “narrow sea passages where alternative routes are either much longer or simply unavailable”. As with the discussion of piracy, Devereaux sticks mainly to the distant past, looking at tolls charged by Denmark in the 19th century.

Devereaux claims that “every country on a choke-point tried to maximize extraction off of it, the result would be a major drop in global trade, which, as discussed above, would lead to a sharp decline in living standards in rich and poor countries alike.”

At this point, an economist would immediately ask “how sharp would the decline be, and how much should we pay to prevent it?” The big question about “choke points” is how much it costs to go the long way around them, rather than fighting a way through. Such cost-benefit calculations never occur to navalists.

As with pirates, we have plenty of evidence. The Suez Canal is among the most important of choke points, and it’s been closed repeatedly, notably during the eponymous 1956 crisis and from 1967 to 1973. It’s been largely closed for the last three years thanks to the conflict in Yemen.

The economic effect has been trivial. Shipping has been diverted around the Cape of Good Hope, adding 6–8 days to a typical voyage, and around $100/container to the shipping cost. For a container-load of, say, 25 fridges, that’s $4 apiece.

We can also make estimates for a hypothetical closure of the Panama Canal. Comparing this route to US intermodal rail, you get a bigger increase in cost (about $1000/container), but that’s offset by faster delivery and more flexible routes (and, for US domestic trade, the Jones Act wipes out most of the cost advantage, effectively replicating the impact of a blockade).

And this calculation implicitly assumes that naval power can keep these choke points open. That hasn’t been the case in the Suez Canal, which is still under Houthi/Ansarallah control. Some oil has been flowing out of the Strait of Hormuz. But that doesn’t mean the strait has been reopened. The flow appears to depend primarily on traditional blockade-running techniques, sailing by night without identification, ship-to-ship transfers and quiet payoffs to the blockaders (in this case, Iran).

Fortunately, while an increase in the price of oil is, as Devereaux says, no fun, its impact on the global economy is marginal. The crisis is politically problematic, but it amounts to adding a few tenths of a percentage point to inflation rates and an even smaller effect on economic growth.

It is true that sufficiently powerful navies can still impose blockades, as the US is doing now. But that does not help the global economy. And since no blockade in history has ever compelled the surrender of an adversary without the assistance of land forces, it’s a weak reed for navalists to lean on.

This fight has been going on too long, so I’m going to leave it there. Should the Iran war end in an unambiguous victory for the US, I commit to publishing a correction. Otherwise, that’s it from me.

I got to know members of the Oxford branch of what was then the Socialist Group (a successor of the Worker’s Socialist League, via a fusion with, and then a split from, the International-Communist League), through the Oxford Miner’s Support Group, of which they were the backbone, in the wake of strike’s defeat in 1985. I saw Perry Cullen and Ted Heslin several times a week for the whole of that autumn, and spent less, but quite a lot of, time with Alan; and kept up with them for several years after leaving for the US. Autumn 1985 was when the Workers Revolutionary Party started to fragment, after Gerry Healy’s history of sexually assaulting comrades came to light. (For what it is worth, the SG comrades knew nothing of this, though obviously had experienced serious abuse themselves including, in one case, kidnapping, at Healy’s bidding). The Socialist Group were at that time briefly, and I thought absurdly, hopeful of reconciliation with the less terrible offshoots of the the WRP, so they were in a moment of muted (and unwarranted) optimism.

Nevertheless they were mostly realistic about what it meant to be a revolutionary in the mid-1980’s (or ever, perhaps), and Ted and Perry shared with Alan a dry and self-deprecating sense of humour that doesn’t come out at all in the International Viewpoint obit. We once went to some agitprop performance of a play about the Silesian Weavers Strike, and Ted commented to me “This is going to be awful. I like real plays, and musicals. But, you know, you have to go. For the cause”. Another time, on a particularly rainy day, after 3 hours of shaking tins together, Ted said “You do realise that I’m not going to do any of this after the revolution, right? I want to have an allotment, and enjoy growing vegetables once we actually have communism”.

Alan once told me this about Healy. “For years we were envious of the other groups. Cliff and Grant wrote books, and the IMG had all those intellectuals. But Healy just gave speeches. He was a great, great speaker, but we never really understood what he was saying. So we decided to transcribe some of the speeches, and turn them into books. We did that for about four speeches, and then we pored over them, trying to make sense of them. But we were all working class, uneducated, and couldn’t make head nor tail of them. We just assumed we were stupid, and couldn’t keep up with his brilliance. It was only much later that we realised the problem might have been with him, not us”.

“This is already the best archive ever!”

 

Pic: incredibly cute research assistant with literal puppy dog eyes

This is not an open archive so I’m incredibly grateful to the archivist for having me, even though it is not a requirement of her job.

The archivist has laid out on trolleys the sample of ledgers from the Wiradjuri (Western) goldfields, which is where I am generally concentrating my research.

Ledgers are a funny historical source, consisting mainly of lists of numbers. But they are absolutely crucial to taking what Perry Merhling calls the ‘money view’ of the history of capitalism. I’ll come back to that in a bit.

Ledgers are the outcome of work performed by my favourite kind of banker: ledgerkeepers. This is work now done by massive computers. But before the computers there were huge leather bound books with details of all bank transactions, kept by humans.

Pic: Hill End Ledger on Trolley. I couldn’t rotate it without losing half the ledger, sorry it is sideways.

This was crazy important work, absolutely as foundational to the bank’s money as Wiradjuri gold. More, in many ways. Banks cannot function without the ledger. They can, as they discovered in more recent decades, operate pretty well without (much) gold.

Money doesn’t work – it loses its money-ness – without trust. Wiradjuri gold (and gold from other First Nations land in Australia, Aotearoa, Canada and the USA) was sitting in the vaults of the growing financial centres in Sydney and Melbourne, the Bank of England underpinning currency and smoothing global trade-enabling finance.

But those piles of gold, all now of a standardised composition (I’ll write about that later), embodied trust in money in the aggregate.

Trust in money specifically needed the ledger. It was a very responsible job. Most ledgerkeepers were very experienced bankers. They knew their ledger so intimately that they watched out for death notices of the people whose accounts they kept. In cases of flood or fire or emergency evacuation of a war zone (with ledgers too heavy to carry out), ledgerkeepers were known to accurately reconstruct their ledger from memory.

Seeing Wiradjuri Gold in the ledger

The ledgers also indicate how extensively local people held deposit accounts; how much gold was purchased directly by the bank; how much diggers were ‘advanced’ money pending their own sale of Wiradjuri gold to someone else; what sorts of surpluses were found in the gold after assaying (I think they estimated higher levels of dirt and other non-gold stuff in Wiradjuri gold when it was initially sold and refunded any surplus value found after the assay).

Human Relationships Mediated by Money

Diggers and miners and most other people typically deposit some cash in one go – often around £30 – then they withdraw it, often £10 at a time. Occasionally there is a name against a withdrawal (‘self’ if themselves), indicating payment by cheque or note to someone.1 The ledger does not cover that long a period, so often a line or two is the only activity associated with that person’s account. This suggests, I think, that the hope by the banks that having branches on the goldfields would increase their deposits didn’t really work. Money went in and was withdrawn, almost certainly in place and within a few days or weeks.

There were plenty of things to do with your money on the Wiradjuri gold fields. These were informed by the global sensibility enabled by the the increased velocity of global trade and people increasingly attached their currency to gold, creating more certainty about the value of contracts or bills of exchange helping encourage and speed up trade. In the process financial institutions across the world grew, and became more entangled with one another – also connecting them to the gold fields.

So in this picture you can purchase a ‘Paris’ haircut. In others there is ‘American tobacco/whisky/shoes’. Chinese products, including silk, were widely available.

Fancy goods was the catchword. There were watches, jewellery. Studio photographs. Bowling and shooting galleries. A theatre. Pubs and purveyors of spirits.

For gold to go out, money had to come in. We can see from Richard Angove’s store that he bought gold in quite large quantities. £200 pounds twice on 25 Feb 1871, £300 on 4 March. He deposits more than £300 from gold sales a bit later.

Richard Angove buys stuff for the store – butter and mining equipment (picks), often. Pays an account at the Post Office, pays for freight. Deposits cash regularly, presumably from sales in the store. Sometimes he takes cash for himself.

And then a whole lot of interactions with people and businesses. Deposits of cheques from people and payments to others: the publican pays a lot out to the local butcher.

As global finance shaped gold towns on Wiradjuri land, human relationships were transformed, redefined by their relationships to commodities sold in town, by cheques and cash that changed hands.

This is how money matters – is turned into matter, that is. On one hand, money is imbued with the idea of value, the ur-commodity, an abstraction. But when it is in action, changing hands because people find they need to pay for stuff, it is material stuff and has material effects. The relationship between money-as-fetish and money in action will be important in a future post (almost certainly). But first:

If money is the bond binding me to human life, binding society to me, connecting me with nature and man [sic, or eye roll], is not money the bond of all bonds? Can it not dissolve and bind all ties?

…If I long for a particular dish or want to take the mail-coach because I am not strong enough to go by foot, money fetches me the dish and the mail-coach: that is, it converts my wishes from something in the realm of imagination, translates them from their meditated, imagined or desired existence into their sensuous, actual existence – from imagination to life, from imagined being into real being. In effecting this mediation, [money] is the truly creative power.

Karl Marx, 1844

I think we can all agree that Marx is not a fan of capitalism and the money it creates, but he’s surely capturing here something of how money, which seems an abstraction of value, comes to matter – is brought into material existence, in embodied practice.

More-than-human Relationships also mediated by money

All through the ledgers are diggers, miners (I don’t know what the difference was between diggers and miners – certainly they don’t seem to deposit more money than one another), who appear selling (or getting advances on) Wiradjuri gold that they spent the day or week extracting from Wiradjuri country.

Gold rush histories give a lot of detail about mining techniques. Very few gold rush historians care about gold as/and money, but gosh they seem enamoured with the ways of getting it out of the ground. I have to admit that, although I am the daughter of a mining engineer, I don’t really care much about mining practices.

But on Wiradjuri land, mining changes the relations humans have with the environment. In this sense money not only commodified human to human relationships and their connection to society, but it also changed human relationships to Country.

Image: section of the Aboriginal Map of Australia, showing Wiradjuri land

Many started out hand-dredging the bottom of rivers, disrupting freshwater aquatic life. By the time of the ledgers I’m using, huge rock crushers are needed to crumble the granite and extract the gold. For some reason that I don’t care much about, this released mercury into the river, poisoning fish – and probably was not great for the health of anyone else drinking the water, whether human or non-human.

Humans and other life were part of the same Country. Commodifying the relationships between humans also commodifies the relationship to Wiradjuri land and water. This was made ‘cheap’ (or even ‘worthless’, or perhaps better reimagined as an ‘externality’ to the stuff of economic value) in the pursuit of the substance needed to make money make the world go around. That is, Country, landscape, water and everyone who lives in it or needs to drink it are not in the ledgers. But they also really are. Invisible, sure. But their value is making money nevertheless.

In fact, this is a kind of environmental arbitrage. Gold is ‘bought’ cheaply because the environment is not monetised. It is ‘sold’ dear on the other side of the world where everyone behaves as if Wiradjuri country is invisible – or faces the same ‘inevitable’ decline as white people often considered to be the fate of Wiradjuri people themselves.

Country, as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people continually teach us, has agency, but not immeasurably so. Wiradjuri people have more agency, arguably, and by seeing themselves as inalienable from Country enacted customs, practices, protests and forms of love and protection that nourish all of us still, who live on Aboriginal land.

Consistent with the diversity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders politics, some Wiradjuri people joined the mining of gold. Some went and found gold in their own way and turned up to exchange it for money while keeping its location secret. Others lived on the edge of gold towns, seeking tea and flour in place of the resources settlers stole and disrupted. Still others refused to participate, fought back when they could – keeping in mind that in the past decade, a major pan-Aboriginal uprising was (with difficulty) quelled by the colonial government.

But for all, the gold rush was a major disruption, not only environmentally and by the massive influx of settlers into Wiradjuri country, but also by disrupting the inalienability of humans and environment that kept Wiradjuri Country safe and productive for thousands of years. The only thing that could enable the gold rush was to see the land, the rivers and the gold as alienated, separate to the humans. And then, the money obtained in exchange for Wiradjuri gold became the only way to survive.

The ‘Money View’ meets ‘Follow the Thing’

I recently watched one of those shows where the gambling addict can’t repay his debts to the organised criminals from whom he stupidly borrowed. I can’t pay today he says, every time, in every one of these show. Give me a week/day/month whatever, I’m good for it. But like everyone who needs to pay a bill on time, having the money at the moment you need it is what keeps the economy in motion. Not having it, on telly and sometimes in real life, kills you/loses you a finger/forces the business or bank (think of what happens after a run on a bank) to close.

This is the ‘survival constraint’ that is the basis of what Perry Mehrling calls ‘the money view’. This is one of the key approaches I am taking to this whole gold/money history thing.

In some ways the gold rush helped overcome a huge survival constraint. It was, after all, the middle of the industrial revolution. The global economy was growing fast. Not having enough cash would constrain (or nearly as bad, slow down) the whole thing. And cash, at this time, depended on gold. It was the thing that backed British money and it was being adopted everywhere because having something that everyone agreed was worth something fairly stable helped smooth global trade, enabling things and money to circulate at a velocity that could keep up with the new pace of production (and consumption).

This is all fine, but I want to also understand the historical connection between this ‘big money’ (of trade and global finance) to the ‘small money’ of buying bread, milk and fancy goods. For this reason I’m combining this money view bizzo with what material culture studies calls ‘follow the thing’.

By following Wiradjuri gold from the stars that collided to make gold to wherever it is now (spoiler alert, most of it is probably in the vaults of the Bank of England), the historical moment of the Age of Gold (from the gold rush to the Great Depression, which I will get to) shows us something of the way money – the same money, connected and inescapable – comes to matter.

This post is part of my work as CH Currey Memorial Fellow 2026 at the State Library of NSW.

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The recent panic about a breach of Medicare computer security by an “AI agent” contrasts sharply with other recent cases such as the Telstra and Optus outages that left many Australians unable to reach Triple Zero. In those cases, no one blamed the computers involved. The mistakes were clearly sheeted home to the corporations that operated them.

This wasn’t always the case. When the term “artificial intelligence” was coined some 70 years ago, the first mainframe computers (absurdly primitive by modern standards) were viewed with the same awe and concern as the AI agents of the present day. There were even “algorithms” (though the term wasn’t used in that way at the time) that were supposed to pick ideal dating matches.

Failures were inevitable, and blame-shifting became routine. “The computer made a mistake” was the 1960s equivalent of “your email must have gone to junk”. Gradually, however, we realised that the problem was not with the computer but with incorrect information fed into it or badly written programs invoked as a result.

We need to make a similar adjustment when we discuss AI “agents”. If someone enters a prompt like “find Australian medicine statistics” into a program like ChatGPT or Claude, and the result is a breach of Medicare’s site, the responsibility does not lie with a piece of code. Either the human who entered the prompt or the corporation producing the code made a mistake, and they should be held liable for the resulting damages. If it’s impossible to work out who is at fault, liability should be joint and several – that is, both are liable for the full amount of the same loss, and the cost can be allocated between them.

Fixing the problems of agentic software won’t be easy. The frequency with which early computer programs malfunctioned made “debugging” (a term predating its use in computing) an essential part of information technology. Bugs might be found in the operating system, the program itself or the information fed into it. In one case, the problem was a literal bug: a moth that got caught in the relays. But with enough determination the source of the problem could usually be found and fixed.

Traditional debugging is much more difficult with agentic programs. It may be possible, after the fact, to work out what the program has done. But it’s impossible to inspect the hundreds of billions of parameters in a large agentic model and work out why the agent did it.

In this context, the idea of constraining the program with “guardrails” or “harnesses” is naive in the extreme. The whole point of telling a computer program to perform a task is to get around obstacles to that task. And with no understanding of the internal workings, external constraints will be treated as obstacles.

In most cases, the only solution will be to abandon many of the capacities that are supposed to make agents useful, such as the ability to log in to sites using passwords or to make payments on the user’s behalf.

This will be a huge wrench for corporations that have grown up with the Silicon Valley ethics of “move fast and break things” and “ask for forgiveness, not permission”. They are far more comfortable talking about “hallucinations” and “rogue agents” than about their own responsibility for programs that produce massive errors and real-world damage.

But once AI corporations are made to bear the financial consequences of their reckless negligence, a different kind of calculus will come into play. Instead of thinking, “what cool thing can we make this program do”, the first question will be, “what could go wrong if we let it run”.

Forcing corporations to bear liability for damage caused by their actions will, in all probability, drastically slow the “hyperscaling” rush to produce more and increasingly powerful agentic software. That’s a good thing for the environment as well as the economy.

And none of this will preclude the many benign uses of “AI” software, including massively improved internet search, document summarisation and translation, and software coding. These uses come with the adjustment problems that always arise with new technology, eliminating some jobs while creating others, and so on. But there is no reason to fear that they will accidentally cause a nuclear holocaust or even drain our bank accounts.

Personally, I think the British version is, indeed, brilliant. Because of that I was excited to watch the first few episodes of the America version when it came out, and found it almost unbearable. I expected it to fail, as I think most sitcoms that move from the UK to the US do. In fact, though, it transformed itself and succeeded. And I admired the writers and the star, Steve Carell, for understanding how to make that happen.

The Office falls in a specific category of British sitcom that is particularly difficult to replicate in the US: the sitcom that revolves around somebody who is, basically, a monster. The prototype is Hancock’s Half Hour. Although Hancock is not, himself, quite a monster, the character Galton and Simpson went onto create, Albert Steptoe, is – utterly selfish, wantonly cruel to his trapped son Harold (one of the genius aspects of Absolutely Fabulous is that Saffy is written with more than a nod to Harold Steptoe except that we know, for sure, that Saffy will, eventually, get out[1]), really unbearable.

Subsequently: Alf Garnett in Til Death Us Do Part, Rigsby in Rising Damp, arguably Captain Mainwairing in Dad’s Army, Basil (but also to some extent Sybil [2]) in Fawlty Towers, Eddie Booth in Love Thy Neighbour, Victor Meldrew in One Foot In the Grave and… David Brent in The Office. Of course, few of them are quite completely unbearable [3], but, interestingly given what I’m about to say, Steptoe and Garnett are truly awful, as is David Brent.

The traditional US TV sitcom does not allow for complete monsters to dominate a show. I can only think of one American sitcom I’ve watched a lot of with a thoroughly unlikeable central character, and even in that case he seems to have been written with an aim to please, just not to please me.[4] Are there other examples of network sitcoms where somebody thoroughly unpleasant dominates?

Not All In the Family, Sanford and Son, or The Office, all of them direct copies of British shows. What salvaged The Office was that the writers and Steve Carell learned the lesson from All In The Family and Sanford and Son, that American audiences cannot tolerate a complete monster dominating. Archie Bunker is pretty terrible, but not heartless, or at least nowhere near as heartless as Garnett; Fred Sanford is softer, warmer to the audience, and funnier than Albert Steptoe; and Lamont is a less despairing, and desperate, character than Harold.[5] If you’ve watched Sanford and Son or All in the Family, and what I am saying sounds implausible, that’s because you haven’t watched enough of the English shows on which they are based.

Some Brits think that the lack of monsters at the center of American sitcoms reveals a defect in American taste. My theory is that it reflects two (related) differences between the US and the UK that shape rather than reflect taste.

The first is that in the UK sitcoms are, and always have been, made in 6-8 episode tranches, whereas network TV sitcoms were made in seasons of 30 or more up to the late 1960s, and 20-26 subsequently. The aim for the US was to get a show into syndication, which required 80-100 episodes; and once in syndication the show would be on every bloody day of the week.[6] Even Americans can enjoy watching a monster tormenting their families for 6 to 8 weeks; even Brits couldn’t stand it week in, week out for most of a year, let alone daily. The monster had to be tamed not for the Americans but for anyone watching that many episodes.

The second, related, fact is that American sitcoms are written by multiple people, whereas British sitcoms have mostly been written by individuals or pairs (Galton and Simpson, Cleese and Booth, Clement and La Frenais, Perry and Croft, Saunders (and Wax?), Speight, Gervais and Merchant). Obviously: even if they could write 30 episodes a year, most of them would find it hard to write a monster week in week out [7][8]; more tellingly, it seems to me that it would be hard to maintain the monstrousness without a very strong consensus in favour, which is harder to achieve when lots of writers are collaborating. I’d love to hear from people with experience in writers’ rooms about whether this is accurate.

So I do, personally, prefer the UK to the US Office, and not only because of the Slough connection. But what the US writers did, and especially what Carell did, in softening and humanizing Michael Scott was both brilliant and necessary, reflecting, it seems to me, the different structures they inhabit, not some deep difference in cultural tastes. [9]

.
[1] Are Eddie and Patsy monsters? I’m not sure – maybe because there are two of them? Somewhere on the internet someone said that Elizabeth Mainwairing is a monster, which seems a bit unkind, given that she never appears onscreen; it was never clear to me that she even actually existed. Hyacinth Bucket, maybe? Frances De La Tour is brilliant, and, ironically given her role in Rising Damp, somewhat monstrous, in Big School, which I find utterly hilarious (Big School, not the irony).

[2] One wonderful thing about Fawlty Towers is how we do feel sympathy for Sybil, because it must be awful to be married to Basil, but also for Basil because it must be awful being married to Sybil.

[3] Presumably PhD theses have been written about Eddie Booth, or if there haven’t been there should have been, though maybe nobody with modern sensibilities could stand to watch all 53 episodes. I heard the other day that the writers of Love Thy Neighbour also wrote for The Fosters (the UK’s first black sitcom), but I can’t find evidence of that on the web. One of them did write for Mind Your Language, which is almost as notorious as Love Thy Neighbour despite, I gather, also intending to skewer rather than promote the attitudes displayed.

[4] Seinfeld. It’s easy to see the parallels between Seinfeld and Hancock when they’re pointed out: Seinfeld is (a more self-satisfied version of) Hancock, George is (an unlikeable and charmless version of) Bill, Elaine is (an unsympathetic but interesting version of) Moira or Andree (but not Miss Pugh), Kramer is (a stupider and unloveable version of) Sid.

[5] As I said, we are certain that Saffy will eventually get out; Harold is stuck till death do them part. In Lamont’s case we aren’t certain, but we think he probably will.

[6] I haven’t checked but I doubt that any of the UK sitcoms I’ve mentioned has more than the 80 episodes of Dad’s Army, and most have substantially fewer.

[7] It’s notable that despite his generally arse-y public persona, Gervais’s subsequent characters are all quite a bit softer and more human than Brent; indeed, some are rather delightful. Speight, I suspect, is the one person who could have written monsters forever, but maybe even he would have mellowed with age.

[8] Gina asked me if there are any examples of sitcoms that have failed in transposition to the US because their writers determinedly kept the monstrousness in. I don’t know of examples. There were three failed attempts to transpose Fawlty Towers, one of which probably didn’t fail from retaining the monstrousness because it wrote Basil out! I find it hard to imagine any world in which monstrousness rather than complete lack of any folk memory of a home defense force would be the cause of the failure of an attempt to transpose Dad’s Army – the few minutes of (the only episode of) The Rear Guard that I have seen seem to depend on a startlingly thoroughgoing sexism and attempts to make the voices of The Hair Bear Bunch sound refined and their scripts sound Shakespearian.

[9] I don’t know why I’m feeling defensive about this but, despite appearing to be a thoroughgoing English chauvinist, I love and have watched all or most episodes of many American sitcoms including but not limited to The Monkees, The Munsters, Bilko, the Dick Van Dyke Show, the Mary Tyler Moore Show, Rhoda, Alice, The Partridge Family, Wait ‘Til Your Father Gets Home (a minor masterpiece), WKRP in Cincinnati, Family Ties, Roseanne, M*A*S*H, Eight is Enough, Bewitched, Taxi, One Day at a Time, Cheers, Newhart, The Bob Newhart Show, The Jeffersons, Good Times and, believe it or not (yes, you probably can believe it) I prefer Three’s Company to Man About the House. I even like those weird ones in which a family tries to live normally despite having a wise-cracking alien puppet living with them or a fat Englishman trapped in their kitchen. Don’t get me started on radio sitcoms like Our Miss Brooks, The Halls of Ivy, Gildersleeve…

There is a simple method to detect and weigh bias in philosophical debates about justice (Dumitru, 2023). It has three steps:

1. Identify the principles of justice that philosophers frequently discuss or teach, whether they support or reject them.
2. Examine how the principles are discussed with regard to different social groups (e.g., women, immigrants)
3. Interpret the results:
   a) If philosophers discuss various groups in roughly the same way –> almost no bias
   b) If philosophers neglect some groups –> mild bias (to forget is human)
   c) If regarding some groups, philosophers discuss not the usual principle but its opposite –> heavy bias

Example: The principle of equal opportunity ( as non-discrimination or affirmative action) is often debated – sometimes to support, other times to reject it

For women: the principle is not neglected. Philosophers do not discuss whether women should be discriminated against, instead they debate how non-discrimination or affirmative action should be applied. Therefore, political philosophy has (almost) no gender bias on this principle.

What about immigrants? Here, the principle discussed is often the opposite. The question often debated is whether exclusion is justified. Some says yes, other say no but discrimination (the opposite of equal opportunity) is the starting point. Another frequent question is whether hiring people born in some (poor) regions would harm other people either at place of birth (in the case of skilled migration) or at workplace (in the case of unskilled migration).

Even philosophers who are pro-migration and who teach equal opportunity on a regular basis do not discuss nondiscrimination of migrant workers (although it is a basic principle of European integration adopted since 1957). And to my knowledge, no one asks whether there should be preferential hiring for immigrants – if only to reject the idea on philosophical grounds. Yet, privileging foreigners over natives was a common idea in modern Europe (Dumitru, 2026)

I conclude that contemporary philosophy of immigration has a heavy bias that does not merely affect its conclusions; it constraints its creativity and the range of questions that philosophers imagine.

What got me started on this was talk about “demand destruction” in oil markets, often claimed to be a term used by economists. This piece of idiocy conflates reductions of consumption in direct response to price changes (movements along the demand curve), reductions for other reasons like the arrival of electric cars (shifts in the demand curve) and permanent shifts away from oil as a response to (presumably temporary) price shocks arising from events like the US-Iran war.

Next up is “algorithm”. Until recently an algorithm was a defined procedure, guaranteed to yield a correct answer to an appropriate class of problems given the right starting conditions and sufficient time. The classic example is Euclid’s algorithm for finding the greatest common divisor of two numbers.

Now the term is used to mean the undefined and incomprehensible way in which a variety of decisions (from the content of social media feeds to the selection of bombing targets) are derived from the inputs fed into complex models[1]. The term carries over the connotations of precision from the original definition, often for people who would deride any inference described as coming from a “model”. This battle is pretty much lost, but I’m not giving up quite yet.

On the other side of this coin are spurious attempts at sophistication, rather like children putting on lipstick. My favourite is “methodology” (the philosophical study of scientific method) used as a fancy synonym for “method”.

Runner up: contorted attempts to use “data” as a Latin-derived plural (presumably of “datum”[2]) rather than as a mass noun like “water”. To see how wrong this is, compare “a large amount of data” with the clunky “a large number of data”. In the rare case when we need a singular/plural distinction, correct is “data point(s)”, with the associated collective term “data set”.

Finally, my favorite peeve is “begs the question”. Its original form, meaning “assuming the conclusion” is an absurdly literal translation of the Latin “petitio principii”. The most common modern use, meaning “raises the question”, just marks the user as unaware. Best to avoid it completely.

As I said at the start, there is no way of setting the language in stone. But some innovations make for more clarity or expressiveness, while others collapse useful distinctions (like methodology for method) or are inherently dishonest (like algorithm for model).

[1] There must be an algorithm somewhere inside the model, maximising an objective function of some kind. But since we don’t know what the function is, that’s not very helpful.

[2] “Datum” is a technical term used by surveyors with the ordinary plural “datums”.

A bit of context: Dutch universities are publicly funded, and while finances are currently tight, the situation is far less disastrous than what it seems like in some other places, e.g. in the UK. But there is a lot of political pressure to move in directions that are “useful for society,” for example to generate more graduates for fields that have employee shortages (as if universities could so easily convince young people which field to enter…), and to focus on technological and medical innovation. Many funding streams are tied to societal problems (defined politically), and there is also a growing expectation that universities should collaborate more with the military in the future, to meet NATO goals. At the same time, there are lots of expectation on scholars to also do outreach, collaborate with businesses, and somehow make “impact”. And there is a general sense, undergirded by employee surveys, that work pressure is too high, because academics are asked to do everything at once.

Van Berkel’s book is a rallying cry to not forget, in all this busy-ness, what a university is about. He discusses three core values: Respect for knowledge and learning, academic freedom, and the interconnectedness of teaching and research. Very Humboldtian, you might think, and he indeed owns this label. He is not against impact per se, but wants universities to remember what their core is, and to institutionally separate this core from other functions.* Hence the provocative title about the ivory tower.

Now, I have lots of sympathies for these values – who wouldn’t! I want universities to stand up and confidently defend their intrinsic value, also by pointing out that curiosity-driven research without an impact agenda has, time and again, proven extremely useful to society (as captured in the notion of “serendipity”). And yet, I don’t feel quite comfortable with the three cheers for the ivory tower. In places where I’ve studied or worked that could make a claim to being very ivory-towery (no names shall be named here), I’ve met wonderful teachers, inspiring colleagues, individuals coming pretty close to the ideal academic. But I’ve also encountered sexism, old-boy networks, and types of scholarship that seemed closer to a battle of egos, than to a contest of ideas committed to the collective search for truth. Lack of accountability, and a complete disinterest in the world outside of the tower, does not always bring out the best in individuals.

Now, Van Berkel wants the ivory tower to have windows and doors and to remain connected to society. But this leads to a challenge: how to find the right balance between the preservation of an institution’s core values and the loops with other institutions and the outside world? This is a challenge not only for universities, but for any institution that is meant to serve a specific function, but where this function cannot be defined independently from what is going on in the wider society. At the book launch, one audience member pointed out that the developments in Dutch universities mirror those in many other sectors, e.g. in medical and care work: neoliberalism, new public management, etc.  – without academics resisting them a lot. But the vision of academia not at all reacting to societal developments is not attractive either, and you can only tell in retrospect which trends expressed genuine progress and which ones were misguided.

I’m so obsessed about how to find solutions to this problem because functional differentiation, and institutions that are held to account for fulfilling specific functions in society, are for me a key building block of an economic model that stops relying on economic growth and market value as the only orientations for the economy. Neoliberalism was, at its core, the idea that a certain kind of Hayekian market logic should be applied to all spheres of society. This doesn’t work, for so many reasons, and arguably even markets that would otherwise be functionally justifiable lose their positive features if they are absolutized in this way.** So, to come to an alternative, we need to return to a model in which different social functions are governed according to their own logics: health should be the guiding value in the medical sector, knowledge and learning in academia, etc.

But earlier versions of self-governance of these sectors, before the era of market dominance and quantitative accountability, were often socially exclusive, and centered very much on the interests of insiders. Instead of being nostalgic about previous model, we need to ask how to find a better balance in the here and now: how to preserve the core values an institution needs to be oriented towards to fulfil its societal function, while also remaining sufficiently linked to outside developments to stay relevant with this function.

I don’t have a full answer, but I have some elements that I think need to be part of it: some form of self-government by employees and their representatives, but also the inclusion of other stakeholders in the governance. A willingness to be accountable to the outside, but a refusal to let one’s contribution be captured in indicators that are meaningless for what is at stake. A disposition to experiment, and to try out new things, but also to reverse to previous practices if the new ones actually don’t work. And a culture of trust in which there is a strong ethos of collaboration and a joint commitment to the core values.

The last one is the hardest part. In some places where I’ve studied or worked, such an ethos was simply there, and new people coming in would easily adapt to it. Despite lively debates about concrete issues, there was a consensus on core values, and it felt like a matter of fact that this is the way things had to be – we’re academics, after all, right? In other places, there was infighting, status seeking, and distrust, and it felt like the mere shell of a university, with something rather different, and quite rotten, going on inside. How to get from such a bad equilibrium to the happier, and more functional state in which there is a core consensus about the point of what one is doing, is a question I keep mulling over. If we could figure out how to do this for universities, the answers might be relevant beyond them.

* Part of the discussion here is about student numbers: how large should universities be? That discussion is rather specific to the Dutch context, however (ultimately having a lot to do with details of the funding structure, which create perverse incentives to grow student numbers endlessly) so I omit it here.

** Lots of people have argued that; my own take on the issues, in full detail, can be found in chapter 7 of Citizen Knowledge.

The New York Times has a thumb-sucker about the rise of the European far right, which would greatly mislead anyone not up with the facts. The picture is one of inexorable advance, citing parties such as “the Party for Freedom of Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, the Sweden Democrats and the Reform U.K. party of Nigel Farage.”

The New York Times doesn’t mention that:

• The right-wing coalition of which Wilders was part collapsed when he withdrew support and lost the subsequent election. Wilders’ party split and is competing with two other far-right parties, also in opposition.
• The right-wing Swedish coalition, which had promised the Sweden Democrats a role, was defeated at the recent election, with the SD vote declining.
• Farage’s Reform party has also split, and Farage himself is now massively unpopular.

There have been more consequential losses than this. The most successful far-right government in Europe, that of Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz in Hungary, was crushed in elections earlier this year, and the party is now splitting. Poland’s Law and Justice Party (PiS) lost office in 2023 and has now also split.¹

Other successes have turned sour for the far right. Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party, a successor to various neo-fascist parties, won elections in 2022 and has held together since then. But the government hasn’t delivered much of the far-right agenda, beyond stunts like a recently announced ban on burqas in schools. The Finns Party’s participation in a right-wing government (in Finland, obviously) has seen a big loss of popularity.

Europe isn’t out of the woods yet. A victory for the National Rally in the French election next year would pose some significant problems. But compared to the defeats listed above, the fact that the German AfD might form the government of a small German state is not a big problem.

It’s important to observe at this point that the rise of far-right parties does not imply an increase in the proportion of voters with far-right views. In almost any country, at least 20 per cent of voters, and maybe more, hold far-right views of one kind or another, which will emerge if given the chance. As I observed back in 2016, the neoliberal consensus meant that “mainstream” right-wing parties could no longer rely on the votes of (white Christian) tribalists/Trumpists. They made symbolic gestures in their direction, but largely ignored them, particularly if their interests came into conflict with those of big business. After the 2008 financial crisis, this was no longer possible.

Finally, it’s true that far-right parties have succeeded in pushing European countries to adopt more restrictive immigration policies. But anti-immigrant bigotry has always been a winning issue for the political right. The UK Conservative Party, normally classed as centre-right, has advocated and implemented policies more restrictive than those of many European far-right parties, only to be outflanked by the further-right Reform and Restore.

And that brings us to the elephant in the New York Times room: the sanewashing of the Trump administration and the US voting public.

The article contains a passing mention of rhetorical claims made by Vance, Rubio and Trump along lines similar to those of the European far right. But no one reading it would realise that the Trump administration has implemented policies more extreme than those of even the AfD, the furthest-right of the European parties discussed, and has done so with the near-unanimous support of US Republicans.

Admittedly, we haven’t seen what the AfD might do with untrammeled power, but The stated AfD policy on remigration is much milder than the one in force in ths US, focusing on deporting criminals and voluntary return. And it includes disclaimers like

“We firmly reject unconstitutional demands — such as the arbitrary, collective deportation of foreigners regardless of their individual right of residence, or even the deportation of German citizens with a migration background.”

The Trump administration has gone far beyond this, detaining and deporting people who have committed no crime and have sought to pursue residency through legal processes. And it has repeatedly trashed constitutional protections of all kinds, with heavily armed secret police snatching people off the streets and disappearing them into concentration camps.

This is not just a MAGA policy. Every Republican member of Congress, with the exception of Lisa Murkowski, voted to support this regime of terror.² And what’s true of politicians is true of voters. Unlike European far-right parties, which rarely get more than 20 per cent support, Trump and the Republicans got nearly 50 per cent of the vote in the 2024 election. And while they are likely to lose ground in the next election, that’s not because of repugnance against these crimes. Immigration is the issue on which Trump’s support is highest, at around 40 per cent. That includes 80 per cent of Republicans.

These aren’t (only) the left-behind denizens of Midwestern diners. Forty per cent of white Americans with four-year degrees share this approval. Given the gender gap, the figure for white college-educated men would be close to 50 per cent.

In summary, the New York Times would get much more insight into the roots of right-wing extremism if its reporters took the Long Island Rail Road to Suffolk County,³ went to an upscale bar or restaurant and chatted to the patrons there. But it’s far more comforting to read about foreigners nostalgic for Mussolini and Hitler than to consider the likelihood that your next-door neighbour shares their views.

¹ Admittedly, a PiS candidate scraped in to win the most recent presidential election, but he has limited power.

² As usual, Susan Collins got a hall pass to support a failed amendment before falling into line on the final vote.

³ The second-richest county in New York, with median household income of $130,000 and a 54 per cent vote for Trump.

Much of political philosophy over the past three centuries or so has consisted in elaborating a picture of what it means for a society to be one of free and equal human beings, and the implicit self-understanding of most of our societies has been to have that as our imagined collective destination, perhaps delayed by practical concerns and by deep and unresolved questions about what it would mean, about who is included in the scope of freedom and equality (and who not). When John Rawls wrote about an overlapping consensus or when Joseph Carens discussed shared democratic values or even when Habermas outlined the conditions of an ideal speech situation, they were pointing to possibilities unrealized in our actual societies but implicitly acknowledged as the promise of the future. And radical critique of our societies, such as articulated by Marxists or anarchists, did not so much renounce the aspiration to freedom and equality but argued that the desire for it that capitalism and modernity called forth would inevitably be frustrated within an actual society that reproduced domination and exploitation: that liberal society failed to keep its own promises, which would instead be realised by a socialist alternative.

But now we find ourselves on the edge, or perhaps over the edge, of a descent into a world where such visions of freedom and equality are unimaginable and where, to borrow a cliché, resistance is simply futile. The herald of this predicament was Edward Snowden, who revealed how comprehensive a monitoring of individual thought and action was possible in the world of the internet. Anyway it has turned out that, for most of the population, privacy is something they are perfectly happy to sacrifice, just so long as the algorithms end up being better tuned to the satisfaction of our wants and desires. And progress is no long measured in terms of our liberation from various forms of oppressions but rather in the ever increased abilities we have to acquire and consume, even if that comes at the expense of the natural and physical basis of our very survival.

Benjamin Constant thought that a private sphere was one of the constituent parts of the “liberty of the moderns”, and if he was right then Snowden’s revelations and, subsequently, the panopticon of the tech oligarchs have put an end to freedom already. But it is one thing, perhaps, to have all that information about us and to put it to effective use beyond the satisfaction and shaping of our consumer choice. Well, a first step in politics is to tailor our information environments so as to manipulate us, or enough of us, to cast our votes in favour of the preferred candidates of crypto billionaires, and we are already beyond that stage thanks to the likes of Palantir. It turns out that enough of us can be scared by the threat of “illegal immigrants”, “fighting-age males”, “grooming gangs” or simply brown people standing up for their rights, to make it likely that far-right populists will take power in parts of Europe as they already have in the United States. And when they are in power they will benefit from the fact that our conventional and sensible politicians have already weakened or removed the guardrails that limit state power, undermining human rights and criminalising those who have been active in protesting the climate emergence, the Gaza genocide or the tens of thousands of migrant deaths.

When Le Pen, or Farage or the AfD are in power, as Meloni is in power in Italy, Trump in the US, Erdogan in Turkey, Modi in India, and, indeed Xi in China, what makes us think that it will ever be possible to remove them? Well perhaps that thought is too soon, for now, because there are still a few institutional obstacles in the paths of some of them, and ageing and death will at least deal with some individuals eventually.

But this only puts off the day when states, armed with vast amounts of information about every single on of us, are able to interrogate that data using artificial intelligence and able to thwart or anticipate any organized political resistance. States are already criminalizing people, such as Just Stop Oil protesters in the UK, for discussing online how to resist. For people to resist they need to co-ordinate with one another, to plan, to argue, to locate their fellow thinkers. Good luck with that if all that planning, co-ordination and chat is analysed in real time by AI, which can dispatch law enforcement to arrest the putative conspirators forthwith.

More than that, we can we even hope that if political resistance is impossible we, or at least a few brave individuals, might maintain a faint light by acts such as harbouring the regime’s victims, as people did in Nazi Germany? For such acts would likely be quickly detected by AIs questioning the vast pool of data generated by our moving around, shopping, adjusting our central heating and all the mundane actions that interact with “smart” devices of various kinds. The “illegal immigrants” hiding in your basement will, almost inevitably, generate changes to the digital readings from your building that will distinguish it from the other buildings in the neighbourhood. Again, the police, of ICE, can be sent to investigate on the basis of the data.

It is tempting, in the face of such thoughts, to advocate that people who wish to live as free and equal individuals should simply find somewhere to live off-grid, perhaps practising some form of subsistence agriculture to meet basic needs. But such an option is unattractive for those of us who have been negligent enought to allow our wants to be irremediably shaped by living in a consumer society and we would, of course, also be depriving ourselves of many of the benefits of modern science and in particular of medical technology without which many of us could not survive. Moreover, there is no land in which we could live beyond the boundaries of states, as once there was, so we cannot escape to form Maroon communities or their latter-day equivalents. Insofar as any such experiment were successful, it would likely be suppressed as a threat by the incumbents of state power who would perhaps dress up their intervention as the humanitarian rescue of, for example, children, deprived by their parents of the benefits of modern civilization, including artificial intelligence. Again the “terrorists” or the “separatists” can be led away.

Of course, I’d like to believe that my fears are unfounded, that approximations to freedom and equality can still be attempted and that resistance to tyranny can still be viable, perhaps using the Master’s tools. But for now I’m gripped by a deep pessimism, sometimes relieved by the thought that I will probably not see the worst, a thought that is immediately undermined by reflection on what my children and my children’s children will have to live under.