Over the past twenty years or so, the adult world that I was brought up to expect—a world featuring travel agents, newspapers, and the nightly news—has been more or less deposed, replaced by a creeping goo of permanent adolescence in which everything is social media.
They’re not stupid: they quite intelligently understand that they no longer need any of what they are destroying and that they no longer care about the long-term. The only thing that matters is the pleasure of power right here, right now. Let us eat, be in a k-hole and have a ton of fun laying waste to an entire society, for tomorrow we might live forever. Even if we don’t, we can’t possibly lose whatever we do.
Put all of that together and you have a lot of people in charge who are fundamentally immune to arguments couched in terms of prudence, risk, duty, that are about preserving what you have today in order to pass it to your heirs. It’s the end times.
They don't know anything about what they're wrecking, naturally—these are creatures that do and eat and shit on things, not ones that know—but it is more salient that they don't care enough even to try to know anything about it. They are busy and stupid in a way that mirrors their rancid imago—hardcore in a way that is mostly just erratic and impatient, secretive but grandiose, prissily paranoid, conducting their nasty business on an amphetamized and whimsical timetable—but they are also not really doing anything for the reasons that people or institutions do things.
WE MUST ASSUME BASED on his silence that Graeme Bird is dead, in an institution, or in any case is beyond authorship. This was a man whose incredibly prolific commenting and blog posting in the Australian internet and beyond, through the 2000s and early 2010s, makes his present absence from the internet inexplicable except by force.
This was a man of unparalleled delusions, conspiracy, idees fixes, persistence, vulgar linguistic creativity, violent hatefulness, and a geniune literary talent, the Celine of crankhood. He inspired a small but dedicated legion of, if not admirers, then certainly entertained fans (of which I am a paid-up member), amongst whom 'Cambria, if we are to survive as a species' ranks in opening lines with Dickens and Austen. Graeme, if you are reading this, I invite you to comment, though if you do, I'll probably end up banning you.
That silence is for the best, I think. Sure, he was, as far as you can really place him in the normal political spectrum, very right wing. For all his human flaws---of which his cup overfilled---I cannot imagine Bird ever being an uncritical admirer or MAGA chud; his brand of crankhood was forever a solo, individualistic, endeavour. He was genuinely crazy, not a sucker, or as an American might put it, a goof, not a rube. The good fortune of his being absent now from the internet is that he achieved that rare glory of cranks: becoming a prophet.
Almost all of his central fixations, from funny money and tax schemes, to the perfidy of the US Federal Reserve, to the need for mass sackings, to skepticism of known facts about other planets, to the need to colonise Mars, to antisemitism so strong it was indistinguishable from magical thinking, are now no longer crankhoods, but quite simply the platform of the governing Party of the United States. Bird's central dream, the destruction of NASA, is at hand, and who could say how he might have greeted it?
It's his world now, we just live in it. MORE LATER.
THE POINT OF MAINTAINING a blog is a fundamentally personal and political one, shared with almost all writing that matters. Now, certainly, this blog will never ever matter; but that infinite irrelevance is even more reason I feel to think out the politics of maintaining it.
Here is my policy: I don't like AI, and will never use it for writing. That's for me less a position held on the grounds of its known environmental wastefulness, or its intellectual property theft from other, better creators, than simply on the aesthetic grounds that I know I write my own voice better than a statistical model. The writing that I want to read is that put to words by other humans, who've thought about what they mean, and interpolating processes of production like AI add little except to distance writers from readers. If large language models have any use it is certainly not to supplant creative acts.
I reject the notion that language models are simply tools in the same order as other creative ones (the camera, the synthesiser). Technologies are tools most useful when they're known, and when they're subject to human creative control; those are not qualities that language models enjoy.
Large language models hallucinate, by nature and inevitably, because they're agnostic to meaning. We will never be able to fully trust one to be right, or to be true. Now, humans do this too: we get things wrong by accident or deliberately, we fail and we trick and we lie. But here's my promise, all the errors and propaganda you'll read here are mine.
SOME HOLIDAYS ARE ABOUT taking one's ease. Some holidays aren't, and I have just had one of the latter. To go and see the 2025 Women's Ashes I decided to travel the hard way to the MCG from Sydney, all in all 2,495km in a scenic loop, on a motorbike a bit too small for touring. Why? Why not?
One way to describe it is the legs: Sydney to Gundagai, an unpleasant struggle in the heat down the Hume Highway, then Gundagai to Cooma over the mountains via the Snowy Mountains Highway. A completely spectacular ride and a (doubly-significant) high point of the trip, though one that tested the engine of my motorbike, struggling for air in the altitude. Cooma overnight and into Victoria to Cann River, through forests, and the long road west into Melbourne, squinting into the late evening sun, finishing the day exhausted, with city roadworks, and an enforced hook turn. An easy afternoon of Melbourne to stay at Echuca. Echuca through the Riverina, flat wheat fields and isolation, emus and whirlwinds, Narrandera and the central west, the plane museum at Temora, and a final night in Cooma. From Cooma, through Bathurst where the endurance race was on, and the motorway back to Sydney.
By the side of the road, somewhere between Echuca and Jerilderie
Another way to describe it would be the physical experience. Yamaha's SR400 is nobody's idea of a touring motorbike (though some make even worse choices than me). It's a very light, upright-stance, single-cylinder bike ideal for city riding, but that struggles up to 100km/h and will do 110km/h only with a bit of encouragement. I had a backpack full of water, warm clothes, and spent a lot of time hunched like a jockey. The very best riding was in isolation, in the rural roads of the Central West and the Snowy Mountains, where I could choose my speed and pick my line through curves, the worst was the Hume Highway where mere violence rules and the law is a figleaf over vehicle mass. 10 litres of fuel tank (with another 2 reserve) and a range of ~200km means a lot of mental arithmetic, careful route planning, and a lot of stopping for fuel.
Or yet another, way, in terms of consequences. I didn't expect the trip to be painless. Still, in Adaminaby I stopped by the side of the road to adjust my bag, hit a piece of gravel, and went down at walking speed. A truck driver who was stopped helped me up, checked me over, and bade me on my way towards Cooma, where I discovered I couldn't weight bear on my leg; so a trip to the Cooma Hospital emergency to be x-rayed, and an unplanned overnight stay above a pub in town. I have no broken bones but a gigantic bruise, and a lump the size and colour of an avocado.
And finally another way, in terms of metaphysics. Don't read Robert Pirsig: Zen is not the kind of book that has dated well outside the 1970s, and it was culty back then, but do consider longish, demanding, focus-requiring tasks to have some value in their own right. To go riding is to reduce the number of things you can actively think about to a very very few, largely what is in front of you, or immediately behind. It was a much needed few days of focus.
