Uncanny Virtue (Griffith Review)

I first heard Peter Singer speak at the University of Western Australia (UWA) in the summer of 2009. The subject was the ethics of what we eat, and the tone of the talk was open and generous. Some in the audience were hardcore animal-rights people, as one would expect at a Singer gig. But the philosopher’s message was that ethical eating is, in fact, a pretty complex matter, bearing not only on animal welfare but also on economic justice and the environmental impact of agriculture, and that what counted as ethical behaviour in one sphere was often difficult to reconcile with ethical behaviour in others. His advice was therefore to do what we could, advice I for one resolved to follow before hogging into the free wine and nibbles around the Beaux-Arts-style reflecting pool.

On Tessa Mackay’s Social Realism

When Tessa MacKay first got in touch to suggest that we meet for a coffee and a chat, I did what everybody does these days and immediately fed her name into Google. What I discovered were some remarkable paintings, but also – and less remarkably – a creation entitled ‘Tessa Mackay’ whose talents, successes, ambitions and interests had been (to some extent) curated in the ‘experience machine’ that is the Worldwide Web.

Two Hours of Despair (Arena)

As far as I can recall, the audience laughed just three times at the Perth preview of Raoul Peck’s new documentary, Orwell: 2+2=5: once when the cinema manager, introducing the film, almost said ‘Enjoy!’, before correcting course and wishing us ‘a meaningful experience’; once on hearing Orwell confess his desire to give Sartre ‘a kick up the arse’ in his review of Antisemite and Jew; and once at some footage of a Trump supporter batting away a reporter’s questions on the basis that any criticism of her President was fake news.

On Enshittification (The Saturday Paper)

As neologisms go, ‘enshittification’ is not the most efficient specimen. Unlike, say, ‘nearlywed’ or ‘broligarch’, it is neither wholly self-defining nor reminiscent of some other word to which it is related in meaning. Clearly the term has struck a chord: both the American Dialect Society and Macquarie Dictionary have bestowed word-of-the-year status on it in recent times. But what, specifically, is going to shit, and what are the processes by which it does so?

Paradise by the Dashboard Model

In November 2022, any residual feeling that Silicon Valley represented a clear-cut boon for humanity vanished like a fart in the wind. In an act of breathtaking arrogance, OpenAI released GPT-3.5, a free preview of its chatbot ChatGPT. Confronted with a technology that could synthesise humanlike text in response to prompts from actual humans, journalists and commentators rushed into print to weigh its likely implications, often using the chatbot itself to generate the first few paragraphs of their articles (which is a bit like a caveman ostentatiously sporting a bronze medallion towards the end of the Stone Age) ...

Minority Retort: a review of Ash Sarkar’s Minority Rule

The British journalist and activist Ash Sarkar is one of the most engaging members of the group of leftwing radicals who make up Novara Media. Established in 2011, in the long wake of the GFC, and at the dawn of Prime Minister David Cameron’s savage reign of austerity, Novara now has over a million subscribers, not least because of Sarkar’s ambassadorship in the otherwise solidly centrist world of mainstream UK political commentary ...

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