Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Author: Carrie

  • Everyone isn’t everyone

    There’s an accidentally enlightening headline on the BBC report about blatantly obvious crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried, who has been convicted of stealing billions of dollars by defrauding would-be crypto millionaires. The headline: “Everyone got duped by Sam Bankman-Fried’s big gamble.”

    But that isn’t true. There were lots of people pointing out that this emperor didn’t have any clothes for a very long time, but mainstream media chose not to listen to them in much the same way that most mainstream media was embarrassingly credulous about NFTs, most of which are now worthless. Long before the authorities moved in it was very clear to anybody with eyes to read or ears to hear that Bankman-Fried was as trustworthy as a three-dollar bill in an industry that’s an absolute paradise for fraudsters.

    Everybody got duped? No, a small section of people got duped because journalists didn’t do their jobs. As John Naughton wrote last year, “so many apparently serious media outfits let him get away with it… Some interviewers confessed apologetically that they knew nothing about the complex businesses he had run and allowed themselves to be bemused by the incomprehensible bullshit he was emitting.” All the signs were there, but supposedly reputable, authoritative news outlets didn’t want to tell that story because “the mainstream media were so invested in the founder-worship that is the curse of the tech industry, not to mention some of those who cover it.”

    All too often, journalists aren’t doing journalism: they’re doing PR. It may be PR for charismatic tech CEOs, or for the think tanks they and their cronies fund, or for more dubious attempts at controlling particular narratives. But it’s still PR. When “everyone” means “everyone who feeds me stories or makes me feel interesting and special”, many more people suffer the consequences.

  • A fountain of fakes

    The hype around artificial intelligence tends to focus on extreme scenarios of Terminator-related apocalypse, but there’s a very worrying kind of AI that’s already causing a lot of trouble. It’s the use of AI tools to create realistic fakes. The same tech that makes Johnny Cash sing Taylor Swift, that pulls John Lennon’s voice out of an old demo tape or that puts actors into movies they were never in can be used for considerably more wicked purposes.

    Here’s the Houston Chronicle on the elderly man who was called by the police about his son-in-law, who the caller said was in jail. The phone was passed to the son-in-law, who begged for bail money. The money was transferred, but there was no son-in-law and no police officer; the son-in-law’s voice was reportedly created by an AI tool good enough to fool his relatives.

    I can’t vouch for the veracity of the story, although I assume the newspaper fact-checked it. But I know enough about AI and things-called-AI to know how powerful and realistic these tools can be. Here’s Johnny:

    In New Jersey, teenage boys have been accused of creating fake pornography of their female classmates. As the WSJ reports, there is a lot of confusion about the legality or otherwise of this, and disagreement among parents regarding how it should be addressed: some are (rightly, in my opinion) demanding serious consequences while others are shrugging it off with “boys will be boys”. Given how realistic the results can be, I don’t see why this should be treated any less seriously than if the images were real: it’s still a form of sexual abuse.

    And this tech isn’t just used for sexual abuse. Earlier this year, students in New York used AI to make a fake video of a school principal making a racist rant; last week, a deepfake showed model Bella Hadid apparently supporting the Israeli government and apologising for previous remarks supporting the plight of Palestinian people.

    This is a new version of an old problem, which is technology’s ability to introduce new threats faster than we can decide if or how the technology should be regulated. And while it’s still possible to spot fakes, it’s getting harder to do that with each new generation. And as these systems evolve, they require less and less input to do what they do. The fake video of Bella Hadid used an existing video she’d been in (she was talking about Lyme disease) and repurposed it. Future fakes will only need a couple of photos.

    The solution, I think, isn’t just to regulate the technology – although the howls of protest by the pro-AI crowd just make it more clear that we need to do that too. It’s to regulate the behaviour. The law may not know its ChatGPT from its DALL.E, but then it doesn’t have to any more than it needs to know the difference between an AK-47 and an AR-15; it’s not the tool that matters here; it’s the person who wields it to harm others.

  • Dead cats

    In 2013, then-London mayor Boris Johnson described an Australian political trick which would come to be known as the dead cat strategy.

    There is one thing that is absolutely certain about throwing a dead cat on the dining room table – and I don’t mean that people will be outraged, alarmed, disgusted. That is true, but irrelevant. The key point, says my Australian friend, is that everyone will shout, ‘Jeez, mate, there’s a dead cat on the table!’ In other words, they will be talking about the dead cat – the thing you want them to talk about – and they will not be talking about the issue that has been causing you so much grief.

    Johnson himself has used it many times when in self-inflicted political peril, but the most recent example of it was yesterday when it was deployed by Elon Musk to distract from news that under his leadership Twitter has lost $25 billion in value in just one year. His dead cat of choice, like that of many politicians, was anti-trans bigotry – and it worked. There’s much more discussion online of whether, as Musk claims (bizarrely), “cis is a heterosexual slur” than of Musk’s disastrous time in charge of the social network.

    As Evan Urquhart writes in Assigned Media:

    What he’s doing so transparently is the same thing the entire right wing media establishment, backed by conservative billionaires, has been doing with the entire anti-trans panic.

    In many cases the people pushing anti-trans nonsense don’t necessarily believe it; it’s just convenient and when it stops working they’ll find another kind of cat to throw. But while I think this is absolutely a dead cat strategy, I also think that with Musk it’s coming from a more personal place: one of his children is trans and wants nothing to do with him. Which is worth bearing in mind whenever Apartheid Clyde, Space Karen, Poundland Iron Man or whatever else you’d like to call him embarks on another round of transphobia. He’s the trope made flesh of the racist, vaccine-denying, gammon-faced Fox News viewer furious that their kids don’t visit any more.

    On a slightly related note, Musk also announced yesterday that he intends to turn Twitter/X into a dating app. Suggested names in my social media feeds so far include OKStupid, Plenty of Fash, OKKKupid and my own contribution, Fash-ly Madison.

  • AI won’t save publishing

    A wise post by Ian Betteridge on AI as a “burning platform moment” for publishing: publishers who see AI in editorial solely as a way of reducing costs aren’t seeing the big picture. AI reduces barriers to entry too: if you’re publishing “good enough” AI-written content, your rivals are everybody else with access to AI. And that access is cheap.

    You cannot gain competitive advantage at the cheap, low-cost end of the market. Trying to do so will not only make you vulnerable to anyone else with the same tools (at $20 a month) but also devalue your brand over the long term.

    As tech writers of some vintage, Ian and I have both seen many technological waves disrupt publishing: the move to digital, the pivot to video, the rise of search engine optimisation, the rise of reviews that aren’t reviews and many more. Each time, some publishers – including very big and successful ones – have sacrificed long-term credibility and ultimately viability for short-term returns, only to see those returns disappear as a new disruptor comes to town. There are countless formerly great publications that have lost significant readerships, or disappeared completely, because of that short-termism.

    And AI isn’t the only disruption that’s here right now: the current obsession with Google traffic and affiliate revenues that means everybody covers the same product stories and deals is running out of time too.

    As Betteridge rightly points out, publishers have assets that AI and cheapskate rivals don’t: “decades worth of experience, context, contacts and knowledge of audiences in your editorial teams.” Wise publishers will be thinking of how to empower and amplify them, not replace them.

  • Donating to hate

    The Huffington Post has a new article about another very rich American donating money to fund anti-trans groups. This one is Joseph Edelman, a billionaire hedge funder. He’s not alone: rich men’s money has been funding huge swathes of the anti-trans movement for some years now, and not just in the US and its UK affiliates: there’s a lot of Russian oligarch money in there too, especially in mainland Europe. You might argue that Paul Marshall, a significant funder of right-wing media in the UK including UnHerd and GB News, is part of the same pattern – the super-rich funding outlets that push division and portray the world’s most privileged people as victims of sinister, shadowy “elites”.

  • Acceptable damage

    My friend was humiliated on the Glasgow subway last night.

    My friend is a conventionally attractive thirtysomething cisgender woman with great fashion sense and brightly coloured hair. This, apparently, was enough to convince a carriage full of men that she was transgender. In between breaks to snort cocaine from a shared bag, the men loudly abused her, shouting the t-slur and other transphobic and homophobic abuse.

    She’s as okay as you can be in such circumstances, but it was a horrific experience – and it’s an experience that’s becoming increasingly common in public for anybody who doesn’t fit a very narrow view of acceptable femininity, because transphobia has become the bigotry it’s okay – and often even encouraged – to express. To the anti-trans mob, the abuse of cisgender women is simply acceptable, collateral damage mixed with victim blaming: if cis women don’t want to be abused by howling arseholes on public transport, they should present themselves more demurely.

  • Unethical. Unscientific. Unsafe

    The ever-growing waiting times for adult trans healthcare have effectively privatised medicine for trans adults: good luck waiting 25 years or more for a first appointment if you can’t afford a private GP and a life of private prescriptions; shared care, where a private GP prescribes your medicine and your local GP oversees it, is largely banned (so for example it’s been stopped in my bit of Scotland). And now the NHS in England is turning its attention to teenagers. Its new policies are unethical, unscientific and unsafe, and have effectively banned best practice healthcare for trans teens.

    Healthcare will be withheld – a clear human rights violation – if patients don’t agree to be part of research studies – another human rights violation; patients have the right not to be forced into such studies – and private clinicians who provide the care the NHS denies may be investigated by regulators with the threat of withdrawing their licence to practice medicine. The proposed protocols enshrine dangerous and discredited conversion therapy as a preferred course of action instead of providing evidenced and effective treatment we know to be life-enhancing and in some cases life-saving.

    This article by Susie Green goes into the detail.

    What we’re seeing here is healthcare decisions made not by clinicians but by columnists; not by medical experts but by propagandists.

    Green:

    So where did these protocols come from? Who created them? We don’t know and they aren’t telling us. It seems ridiculous that they would ignore WPATH Standards of Care V8, especially when you consider the rigorous work done to ensure that it is based on extensive literature review and contributions, and scrutiny from over 4,000 clinicians worldwide who specialise in transgender healthcare. But with a government hellbent on damaging trans people as a way to distract from their failings, I don’t think it is difficult to work out that NHSE has become a politically manipulated service. And trans people are the ones who are suffering because of it… [the NHS] doesn’t want to improve trans healthcare for children. They want to stop it.

    These new protocols aren’t medical. They’re political.

  • Training wheels of hate

    I don’t generally comment on modern horrors such as the deaths in Gaza or in US classrooms because I don’t have anything to say beyond heartfelt but trite platitudes. But there’s a detail about the ongoing situation in Maine, where a man recently discharged from a mental hospital has killed nearly 20 people, that’s worth highlighting.

    At the time of writing the mass murderer Robert Card is still on the run, but there’s a growing body of evidence showing what motivated him. And surprise surprise, Twitter is in there – so much so that Elon Musk apparently had Card’s account pulled from the service, presumably because it shows how much time Card spent on Musk’s timelines and on those of other right-wingers. The logs are widely available online and it’s very much a case of Musk Musk Musk Carlson Musk Donald Trump Musk… you get the idea.

    Not only that but one of the paths to his radicalisation appears to be that favourite of the far right, the supposed danger of trans people: among his recent likes on Twitter, Card liked posts from Donald Trump Jr and by Tucker Carlson railing against the supposed dangers of “trans/non-binary mass shooters” and how the trans movement is the “natural enemy” of Christians and “pushing their gender affirming bullshit on our kids”. As Wired puts it, his Twitter profile “was filled with conspiracy theories about trans mass shooters and pro-MAGA content.”

    I’ve written about this before: it’s called stochastic terrorism, a way of inciting violence while keeping your own hands clean. The Donald Trump Jrs, Tucker Carlsons and other sulphurous bastards of the world don’t commit acts of terrorism. But their words are read by and fuel the hatred of people who do. And in a country where severe mental illness and domestic violence convictions are no barrier to assault rifle ownership, that hatred can lead to unspeakable horrors.

    It’s too early to say definitively what caused Card to become a killer, and of course these things are multi-factorial: this particular toxic cocktail appears to include severe mental illness, among other things. But again and again we’re seeing the internet radicalising people to kill, and increasingly that radicalisation includes anti-trans propaganda – because the far right use that as a gateway to further radicalisation, the training wheels of hate.

  • HRT+DNA

    Over at Stained Glass Woman, Doc Impossible has written a fun piece about HRT and what it does regarding DNA.  As ever, the “basic biology” crowd are ignorant about actual biology: the super-short version is that DNA is an instruction book but hormones decide which specific instructions your body will actually follow. Change those hormones and the body changes too, and not just superficially.

    I love this stuff: as in other areas of science, the more we know the more we discover about the sheer complexity, variety and, if faith is your thing, miraculousness of it all. To paraphrase Hamlet: there are more things in heaven and Earth than are understood by social media science deniers.

  • Going the distance

    There’s a fascinating piece in Scientific American that brings together many years of debunking: The Theory That Men Evolved to Hunt and Women Evolved to Gather Is Wrong.

    Man the Hunter has dominated the study of human evolution for nearly half a century and pervaded popular culture. It is represented in museum dioramas and textbook figures, Saturday morning cartoons and feature films. The thing is, it’s wrong.

    This appears to be one of those things that “everybody knows” but which turns out to be based on a bunch of guys making shit up, in this case in a collection called Man The Hunter published in the mid-1960s. The authors of the collection arrived at their conclusion – essentially, Men Are The Best Because Science – by ignoring all the evidence that disproved it.

    The religious and social conservatives on the internet, inevitably, are losing their shit over this because the article makes it very clear yet again that many of the tenets of gender essentialism – that male and female roles are hard-wired in biology, so women should be kept barefoot and pregnant while men go out and do man stuff – are absolute bollocks. Man is not a hunter and woman is not a gatherer; that view is based on an interpretation of history that is increasingly proven to be false. Biologically speaking, women are much more suited to hunting – of the prehistoric kind – than men and there is no evidence that they were left to look after the kids while the men went chasing prey. And that’s an inconvenient truth for the faith over facts crowd.

    Where the article gets really interesting is in its focus on a key hormone: not testosterone, but estrogen.

    Given the fitness world’s persistent touting of the hormone testosterone for athletic success, you’d be forgiven for not knowing that estrogen, which females typically produce more of than males, plays an incredibly important role in athletic performance.

    It’s well worth a read.