Notes on Acquired Taste. Why Do We Make an Effort To Like Things?

• In Susan Sontag’s Notes on '“Camp” (1964) she writes (with, I think, a hint of camp):

“…these are grave matters. Most people think of sensibility or taste as the realm of purely subjective preferences [or] attractions…But this attitude is naïve. And even worse. To patronise the faculty of taste is to patronise oneself. For taste governs every free—as opposed to rote—human response. Nothing is more decisive.” (My emphasis). 

• Sontag has an expansive concept of ‘taste’. She talks of taste in people, pictures, emotion, actions, morality. Even intelligence, she says, is “a kind of taste - taste in ideas”. I’m not certain how useful it is to stretch the concept this far - so far that it colonises intelligence and judgement and wisdom - but Sontag’s high regard for taste, her declaration of its central importance, feels very timely in 2026.

• It has become almost a cliché to name “taste” as one of the last human advantages over the machines. AI is acquiring the skills to make slickly produced pictures and songs and books. But it isn’t yet very good at distinguishing the brilliant from the mediocre; the just right from the just OK.

• It models what we like, which makes it hard to see how taste might change. Ask it to generate twenty songs or twenty jokes and pick the best, and it will pick the one that most closely resembles what the median person would deem good. It won’t pick the surprising, odd one - the one that is ‘wrong’ in a suggestive way. But that’s where the good ideas come from. Innovative culture emerges, like new species, from mutation; from interesting accidents that open up new possibilities.

• It’s not as if humans don’t ‘model’ what came before them, often quite algorithmically. We have traditions, genres, chains of influence. We have plenty of human-made mediocrity - more than ever, thanks to our new assistants. But we also have an ability to adapt or reinvent the model; to put it to our own purposes.

• Individual artists do this intuitively and almost randomly in the process of making. Writers learn to write (painters learn to paint etc) by imitating their predecessors. They learn to be original by getting the imitation wrong and noticing that they like the error. This is an act of taste; the free human response.

• When he was stuck on a painting, Francis Bacon would throw a glob of paint at his canvas then work out how to incorporate the result. Artists make decisions and then try to understand why they might have made them. It’s the dialogue between gut and head that produces the work.

• Taste is similarly post-rationalised, or back-propagated. You notice what you like or dislike and extract a rule from your response. Do this enough times and you build a powerful discrimination engine.

• You also get good at knowing what goes with what. You learn to recognise the clichés of the category, which means you know how to subvert or overturn them. That’s why great artists are such voracious consumers of work from within and beyond their own field. Martin Scorsese has watched at least one film every night for most of his adult life. He watches and records and re-watches obsessively. When he donated his collection of VHS tapes to a university it consisted of 4,400 films, documentaries and TV shows.

• It’s more than pattern recognition. The machines are pretty good at that, after all. Taste is connected to that other human moat - to our sense of purpose, of why we’re doing this in the first place. We’re still the ones who write the prompt - who decide what to create and what is beautiful, important, and valuable. The machine merely knows how to execute on our preferences.

• It can model what we already like with astonishing facility but it can’t give us the next Shakespeare, or the next romanticism or modernism or punk or hip-hop. These new forms aren’t just statistical recombinations. They are born from anxiety, rage, envy, pain, ambition. How do you respond to the unprecedented mass violence and human waste of the Great War? Not by following pre-war cultural conventions.

• New movements are also born from scenes - from humans in proximity to each other, everyone desiring this man’s art and that woman’s scope; ideas, emotions and bodies colliding.

• These movements create the taste by which they’re consumed. “Impressionism” was a derisive nickname for paintings that most art lovers considered weird and sketchy. But the art was good enough to bend popular taste around it. Even more obviously difficult art, like Rothko or Pollock, now has an audience of millions. Some of those people like it immediately; others have acquired a taste for it.

• I’m fascinated by the notion of acquired taste. Strictly speaking, it’s a redundancy. Nearly all tastes are acquired. Nobody is born with particular tastes in design or architecture. We gain a sense of what we like, or what we consider to be good, from our peers and predecessors.

• But acquired taste does refer to a distinct phenomenon: the act of willing a preference into being. You didn’t like whisky the first time you drank it, but perhaps because your father liked it or because you were aware of its cultural prestige, you tried it again and again, striving to appreciate it. Then one day you didn’t have to try anymore. You just liked it.

• This writer likens it to a magic eye picture: you stare at it for ages without seeing what you’re told is there, and then suddenly - there it is.

• This is very different to stumbling upon something we immediately like, which is sometimes referred to as ‘discovered taste’. (Edmund Burke called it ‘natural relish’.) That kind of liking involves no work, no friction, no overcoming of resistance.

• Some cultural objects lend themselves to discovered taste, others don’t. I can’t imagine anyone needing to acquire a taste for Ella Fitzgerald’s voice, but there are other great vocalists whose voices you must learn to like. The most frequently cited reason for not liking Bob Dylan is antipathy to his voice. But if you learn to appreciate the many incredible things he does with it, you will end up in a more intense relationship with it than with the voice of a more obviously palatable singer. Once you’re in on an acquired taste, you’re all in.

• The same is true of whole genres. There are many pieces of classical music that are easy to like. You don’t have to listen to Mozart’s clarinet concerto more than once to be seduced by it. But as a whole and on average, it’s a genre that requires more effort to appreciate than pop. Once you find the key to its heavy oak door a vast and fabulous kingdom awaits. Your memory of the effort it took you to get there, and your awareness of all the people still outside the city walls enhance your appreciation. (That doesn’t mean you want people to remain outside - quite the opposite).

• Difficulty doesn’t make the cultural object concerned better or worse than one that’s immediately likeable. But it does usually mean it’s more complex, and complexity is correlated, loosely and unreliably, with quality. Acquired taste involves the appreciation of subtle properties that don’t make themselves known on first listen or view or read.

• Without appreciating what lies on the other side of the door, why do we ever make the effort to unlock it? Partly because we want what other people want. We might trust the taste of our father or girlfriend or teacher. Perhaps we want to please them, impress them, or feel closer to them. Perhaps we want the social cachet that goes along with this particular taste. To my mind, all of these reasons are perfectly good ones. If a taste is truly worth acquiring, any motivation will do.

• It’s often seen as slightly embarrassing or shameful to acquire a taste through conscious effort. It’s for the try-hards and the social climbers. Liberal societies value spontaneity in taste. “Like what you like, love what you love!” Your gut response is meant to be the authentic one, the one that represents “the real you”. To be swayed by social pressure or by experts and reading is regarded as a sign of insecurity or pretentiousness. But let yourself believe that and your tastes will be less likely to evolve and expand and you’ll miss out on a lot of great stuff. Many of the greatest, most compelling and satisfying cultural objects are complex, occluded, spiky, difficult to like. (Some of the best people too).

by Ian Leslie, The Ruffian |  Read more:

Image: Susan Sontag by Edward Hausner / New York Times Co./Getty Images

[ed. See also: here and here.]

Our Uncertain Uncertainties

Even the experts inventing AI don’t know what will happen next. Is artificial general intelligence even possible? Can scaling continue? Will we need massive compute centers to make AI, or can we do it with a mere 25 watts like we do in our brains? What will humans do as AI gets smarter? What does the future of the economy, of warfare, or civil society look like?

Everyone has a different guess. The people creating the machines have as many different ideas as the onlookers, the pundits, the other scientists, and the wisest among us. No one knows. There is a vibe that we’ll know within the next three years. For some, the pace of change suggests that if things continue as they have been, by 2029 at the latest, the outlines of an AI-first world will have emerged. By then we’ll have answered the question of scaling, we’ll have seen the effects on employment, and we’ll have felt its acceleration in the economy – or not.

That’s a reasonable, and not outlandish scenario. But I offer an alternative scenario which I think we should also keep in mind: AI continues to surprise us at its core. As AI continues to evolve rapidly there will be no resolution to these questions in 3 years. By 2029, we still won’t know if AGI is possible, we can’t tell if employment is disrupted, and we still can’t say if it is worth the huge investment. I don’t mean AI progress stalls. I mean, AI continues to advance, but the new stuff doesn’t answer the old questions, it only expands our ignorance because the new is new in a new way. We have to alter our ideas (and measurements) of employment, we have to amend our concepts (and measurements) of the economy, and we have to shift our ideas of what AI even is.

In other words, we have a sustained, extended period of uncertainty. Not just a few years, but a decade or more. As AI continues to progress, rather than resolving our perplexity, it expands it. So for the next 10-15 years we have perpetual, continuous, severe uncertainty. This is a burdensome weight because people hate uncertainty more than bad news.

It goes deeper. AI is only one leg of this grand uncertainty. In the next decade the US will continue its slide off its pinnacle of a sole global superpower, while China continues to rise in power and prestige. This shift toward a duopoly prompts a new world order, and no one – especially the Chinese and Americans – knows how this will play out. The uncertainty around this shift is nearly boundless, and yet its indeterminate consequences will affect everyone in the world, but especially the US. Being dethroned from the century-long position of sole #1 will be a huge psychological blow, and the uncertainty of what follows will weigh heavy on all aspects of life. The uncertainty of a new role spreads over China as well, because while they are zooming ahead at 1,000 miles per hour, they have no idea where they are headed. The uncertainty of global relationships and new national identity, plus the uncertainty of individual worth and identity from AI increases the overall uncertainty levels to new highs. All this is a very large puzzle and will not be resolved in 3 years. This will be a sustained uncertainty.

It goes deeper still. After a long first wave of true globalization, there are now whirlpools of chaos and polarization as nations adjust to world-wide immigration and the borderless spread of modern culture, causing chaos in national politics, and sowing mistrust with the establishment. Anarchy, disruption, contrarian antics, blows to the states, seem to be the norm in countries all around the world. This wild chaos is being fueled in part by the new technologies of social media which have replaced the managed care of established media. News now is far more volatile, hard to control by anyone, and further elevates the already amplified uncertainty. There is a visceral sense that civics is headed into an unknown territory of near-permanent provisionalism.

Additionally, AI also forces even the most moderate person to question the truth of what they read, see or hear. Is that real or AI generated? How much has been manipulated? Who do you trust to disclose what is real? How do we come to agree that something is true? The traditional mechanisms of trust have been damaged by AI, so that this new technological realm generates a huge uncertainty. As AI gets more skilled at imitating reality, this uncertainty is likely to keep increasing for a while, and not just 3 years. The uncertainty meter is now deep in the red zone.

Finally, the ambiguity and indefinite nature of AI, or human identity, or whether what we see is real or generated, means that we are entering a period where we are even uncertain of our doubts. Our uncertainty is so deep and durable, yet elusive, that we will have extended uncertainty about whether we are uncertain. We can have major agreements on what we know versus what we don’t know. In the model of Rumsfeld’s Unknown Unknowns, we will be confronted by Uncertain Uncertainties. And they will prevail for at least a decade or more. [...]

Given the inherent unknowability of this era, what would some of the signs be that we are in it? They might look like this: in 5 years, 1) There are high-profile disagreements among leading AI researchers on whether AGI is here. 2) Reputable economists can’t determine if productivity has increased or decreased. 3) Lower public confidence in media platforms and established institutions. 4) The US and China cannot decide whether they are allies nor adversaries. 5) There are ambiguous spikes in employment rates in both directions. 6) Medical levels of anxiety increase. 7) Major court decisions leave as many questions as answers. 8) Commitments (marriage, work) are postponed even later in life. 9) Investing, capital allocation becomes more expensive. 10) Nihilism gets respect.

A great question to ask when creating a scenario is what could prevent it from happening? Maybe there is not a single force that can undo this sustained uncertainty, but perhaps it is a mixture of several. If AGI arrived without a doubt in 3 years and China took over Taiwan despite the US’s actions, and if companies found a way to embed reliability and trust in media, then maybe this extended uncertainty could cease.

A second question to ask, is if we find ourselves in this scenario, what should we do about it? The most effective response to this multi-layered persistent uncertainty is not to seek impossible stability, but to cultivate radical adaptability and radical optionality. Give up on having a reliable prediction of what happens next. Instead cultivate multiple scenarios of what could happen, and endeavor with each of them to maximize your options. Goals should be considered as disposable hypotheses, constantly ready to be discarded and replaced by better-fitting concepts later on. You will be dead wrong on 19 out of your 20 expectations, but at least one of them will allow you to proceed. Make your decisions not on whether they are “right” but on whether they tend to give you more options later.

In our era of uncertain uncertainty, certainty will be the killer. In this era more downfalls will happen because of overconfidence than questioning. The key is to not get stuck on just one option. You have to become at ease holding multiple contradictory possibilities at once. (To prevent yourself from being swept away by the latest current and fashionable whim, this radical adaptability must be anchored on a steadfast set of unchangeable virtues, as corny as honesty, or as slick as generosity.) The strategy for prospering in prolonged uncertainty must be one of constant, agile recalibration.

In short, in our age of uncertainty, you have to get good at changing your mind.

by Kevin Kelly, Substack |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. The diagnosis might be right but the prescription seems weak. Flexibility and adaptability are always good qualities to cultivate, but the challenges confronting us require more. Here's an example of embracing multiple contradictory possibilities: maybe in times of uncertainty we double down on the few things that we actually can be certain of. How? By making good choices, before and after AGI. For example, Buddhism starts with the acknowledgement that life is hard. It's what you do after internalizing that fact that matters. There are value systems and paths that can lead to a meaningful life, or enlightenment if you want to call it that, but we have to make the right choices if we're to find them. Love, family, friendships, ethical living (like the golden rule) are common values we all share. So why not embrace those values as tightly as we can while navigating the stormy seas to come - and using the best minds in the world (that are being born as we speak) to guide and assist us in strengthening those bonds? This might be one of the benefits of AI: forcing us to reorganize societies in ways that might never have been possible before, or even imaginable. If we make the right choices. Developing Plans A to Z and having 20 options each or something like that sounds like a Hunger Games scenario to me - all reaction and no responsibility. We have the opportunity now (even if forced) to redefine our human destiny. The choices we make will define our places in the future.]

The New Coming Age

Google CEO Demis Hassabis offered us a first rate second rate essay, A Framework for Frontier AI and the Dawning of a New Age. I’ll go over that essay and various responses to it in Part 1.

Part 2 of this post then covers Alex Turner’s resignation, and his story about how he tried and failed to prevent Google from signing up to allow the Department of War to use its models for essentially whatever the government wants, including autonomous weapons.

Demis Hassabis sold DeepMind to Google on condition that something like this would not happen. Yet here it is, happening. A cautionary tale. [...]

***

The Core Statement and Request

He saying we are standing in the foothills of the singularity.

His ask is a Frontier AI Standards Body within the US Government, similar to FINRA, that would govern ‘frontier labs,’ defined as any company that produces a frontier model based on various technical benchmarks. Evaluations would be updated regularly, and vulnerabilities would be addressed, both before and after release.

He is excellent about stating that this is big, really big, no bigger than that, it be big.

Demis Hassabis: I’ve spent my whole life working on AGI because I’ve always had a deep conviction that, if built and deployed responsibly, it would prove to be one of the most beneficial and transformative technologies ever invented. AGI cannot be compared to standard technological breakthroughs, not even ones as consequential as the internet or mobile - it is much more akin to the discovery of electricity or fire. If you stop to think about it, we’ve essentially found a way to make sand think. It’s miraculous.

The magnitude of this technology’s impact will be unprecedented, perhaps 10x of the Industrial Revolution at 10x the speed. It will help us solve some of the biggest problems society faces from accelerating drug discovery to developing new clean energy sources to creating novel advanced materials. We could even reach a point where resources are no longer the limiting factor for human progress, leading to an amazing new era of abundance.

Things Left Unsaid

There is definitely a ‘don’t say the thing’ aspect of this, where he won’t name what the downside risks actually are. When Demis says ‘experts disagree’ he is rather avoidant about the way in which they disagree here.

Nate Soares (MIRI): I’m glad Demis acknowledges that this is a “pivotal moment in human history” during an “extremely intense” race. I’m disappointed that his proposed solution is a “standards body” to evaluate whether models are dangerous, with no plan for what to do once they are.

I’m glad he acknowledges that “experts disagree.” I’m annoyed that he glosses past how the disagreement is about whether there’s a ~5% or ≥50% chance of total catastrophe. We’ve gotta do better.

Aaron Scher: Glad to see AI CEOs speaking publicly about their views on AGI. I think Demis is wrong about his policy prescription: it’s far too little too late. When he says the experts disagree, he means that some think 5% this tech kills literally everybody, some at 40%, some at 90%.

Clearly this is strategic, but if you don’t already know, or are looking to not realize, it is very easy to come away thinking that Demis does mean the effect on jobs, even though when he says ‘safely’ he very much does not (primarily) mean that.

The Proposal

Demis Hassabis: … On the horizon, we will need robust safeguards to maintain control of increasingly agentic, recursively self-improving systems - and tackle unknown issues that will only become clearer over time.

… I’ve always believed in the power of human ingenuity and creativity to solve any problem. I’m confident that mitigating the technical risks related to AI is a challenge we can collectively address, but only if we give ourselves the time and space to get this next crucial step right. Currently, as a field and as a wider society, we aren’t doing that.

He makes clear part of this is about giving us options, including for a slowdown.

The strength of this approach is it would be technically focused, while at the same time supporting innovation and incentivising responsible behaviour. It is designed to keep up with the field’s acceleration and adapt to the biggest risks as they are identified, and could be ratcheted up if the seriousness of the situation demands, including coordinating a slowdown in development among the Frontier Labs if deemed necessary.

Demis keeps it short, not offering many details. To the extent that he has laid out a proposal, it seems to be a good one. It is definitely an improvement on the margin.

Jack Clark (Anthropic): At this point, everyone at the frontier of AI agrees that third-parties should test out AI systems and use these to develop standards to feed into policy - excellent to see @demishassabis laying out a framework to do this!

Samuel Hammond: It is striking to see leadership at Google, Anthropic, OpenAI and Microsoft all fairly independently sounding warning alarms about an imminent technological acceleration.

Thus I file this post and its ask, as high praise, under ‘the least you could do.’

A Good Start But Insufficient

I agree with Peter Wildeford that while better than nothing FINRA is not a great model here, with heightened risk of regulatory capture, and not a substitute for full government action. You need an SEC to your FINRA. That doesn’t mean don’t make the FINRA. It does mean you still need the SEC.

Would such a (at least partly) voluntary regime, only for models intended for release, and without a related binding intentional agreement, be sufficient to solve the problem? No, again it’s just way better than doing nothing, as Peter Wildeford and many others noted.

You do not need to believe, as Aaron Scher and Connor Leahy do below, that only a full halt would be sufficient here, to know we have a long way to go. Demis’s statements here, if you know what they actually mean, imply a level of danger and urgency that is not reflected in the proposal.

Eli Tyre: > Initially, Frontier Labs would voluntarily share models with the Standards Body for review up to 30 days before release.

Is this proposal only intended to address risks from models that companies plan to release? If a company develops a frontier model and never releases it, only deploying it internally to develop even more powerful AI capabilities, are they thereby exempt from this oversight scheme?

Connor Leahy: While @demishassabis is right that we need urgent action to address risks as we approach AGI (and superintelligence, I’d add), the correct response to the threats is not a ‘self-regulatory organization’.

We need to prohibit superintelligence, not give industry regulatory power.

Aaron Scher: … The extinction threat, the “only a few short years”, the “10x the Industrial Revolution”—these aren’t indicators that point to “let’s evaluate models to understand their capabilities and have voluntary safety standards”. We need to back off, we need to halt the creation of ASI.

Point 2: I agree with the attached quote that we need more time. But I think Demis’s optimism is a vibe, not a trustworthy basis for predictions. Rob Miles says it best in this video, if an asteroid we’re headed earth’s way 200 years ago, we’d just die 🤷

Point 3: As others have pointed out, it’s not clear that this proposal would reduce risks from internal deployment (it seems to focus on public deployment and pre-deployment testing), but internal deployment is where much of the risk is.

Point 4: I don’t think the proposed body could actually enact, verify, and enforce a slowdown; there’s ambiguity about what’s voluntary. Again, I think we need a long-term international treaty and to actually back off, not just to slow down a little.

by Zvi Mowshowitz, DWV |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. See also: The Voice of Google (New Yorker):]

***

I started working at Google in the summer of 2007, straight out of college, as a “new-­grad associate” in the communications department. My first week, I sat with more than a hundred other “Nooglers” (new Googlers) at the company’s weekly staff meeting, T.G.I.F., wearing matching company-issued propeller caps as a kind of ritual hazing. The venue was Charlie’s Cafe, a multilevel auditorium in the heart of the “Googleplex,” the company’s sprawling campus in Mountain View, California. The event felt less like a corporate meeting than like a weekly revival—part stand­up set, part science fair, part sermon, all of it fuelled by keg beer.

Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, were bona-fide public figures by then, and self-­made billionaires multiple times over, but in Charlie’s they were idols. They would often ascend the stage together, practically matching in sweat-wicking athletic clothes and Crocs. Larry had a dopey perma-smile, and seemed delighted by everything, especially Sergey. Sergey was the straight man, with a faint lilt, a product of his childhood in Russia, and an acrobatic build that made him look like he might launch into a handspring at any moment. Their charisma was unconventional, contextual; you had to be there. The audience of employees lapped up every word, giggled at every dad joke. During a Q. & A. portion of the proceedings, even adversarial questions were absorbed into the Google spirit—­it all melted into laughs, love. Merriam-­Webster had added “google” to the dictionary the year before. Fortune had crowned it the “Best Company to Work For” in America. Profits were, as the execs loved to boast, “up and to the right,” fuelled by an online-advertising machine that minted cash beyond Wall Street’s wildest dreams. But the company’s financial success felt almost incidental. What mattered, we told ourselves, was the mission—a conviction that technology could improve the world and that we were helping to build the future. The air in Charlie’s buzzed with collective belief.

That first meeting was the only one I’d ever attend as a pure spectator. By week two, I was working the event—­cordoning off the Noogler section, handing out extra caps—and I soon began helping to draft bits of Larry and Sergey’s script. A portion of my time was spent supporting the P.R. team, and I started to pick up my first press requests, providing office tours to journalists eager to see the “Google experience” firsthand. I studied a “master workplace talking points” document, which was maintained with input from PeopleOps, which was Google-speak for human resources. This was the era of “bringing your whole self to work,” of shiny, smiling H.R. people doing press hits about the importance of valuing employees’ authentic personhood (always with a telling corollary: “Because that’s how people do their best work!”). I was required to attend a training on “conscious business” with a guy named Fred Kofman, an executive coach whom Sheryl Sandberg credited with shaping her “lean-in” ethos. The course was, theoretically, about living one’s courageous values, but its most salient lesson was that employees should take “unconditional accountability”—which, in practice, sounded a lot like never questioning the higher-ups. The message reiterated over and over was that there were two kinds of people in the world: victims and players. You wanted to be a player at all times.

Despite the lore, Google’s offices didn’t make a big first impression. The bulk of the campus had been quickly converted after its previous occupant went down in the fallout from the dot-­com bust. The result was a complex of squat, one-­ or two-level buildings with metal and glass siding, surrounded by a moat of parking spaces, with Google signs plunked into the dirt out front. But there were plenty of amenities to point out—­the massage rooms and nap pods, the dinosaur fossil, the wacky sensory-­break touches like ball pits, swings, and yoga balls (even if no one actually seemed to use them). Foreign journalists seemed more skeptical than their American counterparts of perks such as lunch-­break haircuts or on-site laundry rooms, which I’d heard described as letting Google be your “housewife.”

“Z is is all a big plot to control ze workers, no?” a French reporter said.

At that point, though, I was still learning to see Google through Google’s eyes. I learned to deflect these kinds of questions and pitied the askers, a little bit, for their cynicism.

Xi Gives A Good Speech on AI

I will share the full transcript, as it is short and worth reading, with brief comments.

It is a good speech. Video is here.

We start with the opening section, which frames the situation.

Xi Jinping: Distinguished colleagues and guests, ladies and gentlemen, friends,

70 years ago, a group of young scholars proposed the concept of artificial intelligence for the first time at the Dartmouth workshop in New Hampshire of the United States. In the subsequent 70 years, AI scientists and researchers from around the world ventured into this unknown territory, forged ahead through twists and turns, and made breakthroughs with persistent hard work.

Seven decades later today, amid the new wave of AI development, we are gathering by the Huangpu River to discuss how to promote AI globally for the positive, for good, and for humanity. All this makes our meeting highly important. On behalf of the Chinese government and people, I would like to extend a warm welcome to you all.

In the course of history, the invention of the steam engine heralded the industrial civilization. The widespread access to electricity brightened up modern society and the birth of the internet brought the entire world together. Each of these technological revolutions has profoundly reshaped our way of work and life and enabled a giant leap in economic and social development.

Today, major changes unseen in a century are accelerating across the world. The new round of technological revolution and industrial transformation is advancing at a faster pace. And the world has entered an unprecedented period of active innovation on AI technologies. Intelligent connectivity, human machine collaboration, cross-sector integration, joint creation and sharing and other intelligent technologies are unleashing enormous power.

Next Xi lays out the challenges. Note what is here and what is missing.

All this carries within it great opportunities as well as challenges to governance. We human beings must answer the questions posed by our times. How to get along with thinking machines? How to ensure security when algorithms are part of decision making? How to tackle ethical challenges by technologies through adaptive governance. How to realize AI for all when the divide keeps widening? These questions demand serious consideration and real answers from the whole international community.

‘How to get along with thinking machines’ is quite the line to include here. A lot of this seems directionally serious but confused in its details.

Existential or catastrophic risk does not get a name check, but the related issues are clearly not being ignored.

So, what to do about it?

In China's view, all countries should take a people-centered approach and develop AI for the positive and for good. We should ensure that AI is an important driver for shared prosperity and common security. We should join hands to build a just and equitable system for global AI governance. To this end, I wish to share four observations.

A system for global AI governance. Sounds like deals could be made, on various fronts.

What are the proposals?

First, we should adhere to the principle of openness and win-win and boost innovation-driven development as a new engine of world economic growth and an accelerator for the shift of growth drivers. AI is moving from the digital world into the physical world. We should seize this rare historic opportunity to encourage open source, openness, collaboration and sharing. We should facilitate technological innovation, industrial development and scenario-based application of AI. We should make coordinated advances in the transformation and upgrade of traditional industries, the cultivation and growth of emerging industries, and forward-looking planning for future industries so that all sectors and businesses can benefit from AI.

There are two things here.

1. When we are behind, we encourage everyone to share, so that we might catch up and score the aura points of being the ones who claim openness and sharing.

2. We should diffuse AI technology, including via openness.

Second, we should strengthen risk awareness and ensure that AI is secure and controllable. AI should be a trusted tool for humanity. We should take seriously the various types of inherent and secondary risks that AI may trigger.

We should put in place laws and regulations, technological monitoring, early warning and emergency response systems in order to strengthen the line of security, prevent abuses and malicious use and ensure that AI is always under human control.

In the meantime, we should jointly oppose overstretching the national security concept in the field of AI or placing one country's security over that of others.

Strong emphasis on the need to ensure AI remains secure and under human control. Not party or national control, but human control. This is how he understands the existential risk and other big problems.

It makes sense that the CCP’s ultimate need and answer is control. For now open weights is compatible with their control, so they continue this strategy. For now.  [...]

Malicious use is also a threat, but Xi realizes this is secondary, whereas the United States government is stuck at thinking misuse is the primary threat.

The call to not focus on national security over world security also makes sense. Yes, of course some of this is ‘when I am behind I call for equality’ but also we are all in this together and need to act like it.

Third, we should encourage inclusiveness and promote mutual learning between civilizations. AI development and its application should not erode or undermine the diversity of world civilizations or the uniqueness of cultures of different countries. We must shape the values of AI with humanity's common values and make good use of AI technologies to increase understanding, tolerance, exchanges, and sharing among all civilizations. We should tend to the garden of civilizations with great care to ensure that the beauty of each civilization is appreciated and shared.

General call for cooperation and good relations. Good. Pick up the phone.

Fourth, we should advocate solidarity and improve global governance. AI is an invaluable asset that encapsulates humanity's collective wisdom. We should practice true multilateralism and recognize the important role of the United Nations.

We should enhance alignment and coordination on AI development strategies, governance rules and technical standards so as to form a consensus based global governance framework at an early date to make this frontier technology better benefit humanity.

We must carry out extensive international cooperation and help global south countries with capacity building to bridge the AI and digital divides, promote sustainable development and prevent creating new historical injustice in AI.

The primary ask is an explicit request for a global governance framework and international cooperation. Excellent. Let’s get to work on that.

Nate Soares (MIRI): Xi Jinping: "With AI advancing at a staggering speed, we must [...] constantly refine measures to forestall loss-of-control." Can we stop pretending there's no hope of international coordination now?

Jack: Lots to chew on in here. The US may have the best labs, but it's pretty clear that, on the government/policy level, China is approaching AI much more seriously than the US is – and in a way more likely to be viewed favorably around the globe. Worth a close read.

No doubt they have in mind something that would favor their position, and their initial asks will look outrageous and unacceptable to us. That is how this works. You do not accept their first offer, and things take time, and sometimes it turns out there is no deal to be made.

It is also possible Xi is engaging in cheap talk. Why not propose such things and aura farm, whether or not you intend to follow through on reasonable terms?

The way you find out and do your best with this opportunity is: You get started now.

Xi Jinping: Ladies and gentlemen, friends,

This year marks the start of China's 15th 5-year plan. It maps out China's economic and social development for the next five years and provides immense opportunities for the international community.

In recent years, China has embraced AI with open arms. We have promoted interplay between an efficient market and a well functioning government, strengthened AI innovation, actively advanced the AI plus initiative and built a healthy ecosystem for all entities to thrive in together. The core smart economy industries are worth at least 1 trillion RMB yuan. Smart devices in countless homes truly improve people's livelihood. Intelligent manufacturing in China has become another shining hallmark of Chinese modernization.

At the same time, China lays great emphasis on safety and security in AI development with a deep understanding of the trends and logic of AI development. We are continuously improving laws, regulations, policies, mechanisms, application norms as well as ethical principles to make sure that AI is safe, secure, and controllable, and that this fine steed of AI gallops with both speed and stability.

As a responsible major country, China is always committed to providing international public goods relating to AI. Since I proposed the global AI governance initiative, China has promoted the adoption of the UN General Assembly resolution on enhancing international cooperation on capacity building of artificial intelligence by consensus. Published the AI capacity building action plan for good and for all. Announced the AI plus international cooperation initiative and advocated for establishing the world artificial intelligence cooperation organization, or WAICO. China has been contributing steadily to the global AI governance.

We often say in China, a single string cannot make music and a single tree does not make a forest. AI development should not be a solo performance by a single country but a symphony of international cooperation.

Thanks to our joint efforts, WAICO has come into being in Shanghai. Our vision from one year ago is now a reality. This is a major move by China to answer the call of the global south and unite the international community together to promote vigorously AI development and governance. It will be an important milestone in the history of AI development to further support global AI development and to advance global AI capacity building.

I hereby announce that in the next five years, China will provide developing countries with 5,000 opportunities in AI training and seminar programs. China will develop international AI application cooperation centers with ASEAN, the League of Arab States, the African Union, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and BRICS. And we will enable 30 countries to use the AI-powered meteorological warning system, Mazu, to safeguard homes around the world.

Ladies and gentlemen, friends,

As ancient Chinese observed, a man of wisdom adapts to changes. A man of knowledge acts by circumstances. With AI advancing at a staggering speed, we must ensure its development is for the positive, for good, and for humanity. We must make its oversight and governance precise and effective and constantly refine measures to forestall loss of control. We should always guide AI development with human wisdom and international consensus so that AI can truly become a mighty force that increases the well-being of humanity and advances human civilization.

China is ready to be more open, take more practical actions and assume a more visionary perspective. We are ready to work with all parties to seize the opportunities of AI development and meet the challenges and join hands to create a brighter future for humanity.

Thank you.

I found this to be a strong speech, and a good one to give in China’s position, both on the importance of diffusion and the need for international cooperation to prevent loss of control. Yes, there was talk about openness and potential new ‘injustice’ and such but this talk is to be expected from their position. It is now on America to make the next move.

by Zvi Mowshowitz, DWV |  Read more:

Image: Elena Kadvany/S.F. Chronicle
[ed. "It is now on America to make the next move". Which is precisely what should have happened months/years ago when the pace of model development began to accelerate with no significant oversight or regulatory constraints ie., treating AI with the importance you'd give to any new technology that represents an existential threat. Unfortunately, with our dysfunctional Congress and the current bozos in the White House whatever action they take (if any) has a strong likelihood of doing more harm than good. Still it's imperative we get started somewhere soon and there are already good proposals out there (see Plan A), so authorize someone to start doing something.]

All Good Sex Is Body Horror

Regenerations as radical as the ones Cronenberg envisions involve what the philosopher L. A. Paul has termed “transformative experiences,” ruptures that change “your own point of view so much and so deeply that, before you’ve had that experience, you can’t know what it is going to be like to be you after the experience.” Not only do we lack access to information that we can acquire only by plunging into the scalding water of a new life, but we cannot foresee how such a jolt will overhaul the very predilections and values that define who we are. [...]

It is a commonplace in the literature of romance that love wreaks legible changes on the body, a development that is typically painted in a positive light. As the poet Octavio Paz so tenderly puts it, “My hands / Invent another body for your body.” He is echoed by E. E. Cummings in a similar poem, which opens, “i like my body when it is with your / body. It is so quite new a thing. / Muscles better and nerves more.” Cummings is not the only one to undergo a shift during the act of love, and the full extent of his metamorphosis is explicable only in terms of his partner’s reciprocal mutation: his poem begins with the ways in which his lover renews his body and ends with the ways in which his body renews his lover’s body in turn. “i like the thrill / of under me you so quite new,” he concludes. The poet’s body changes in response to his lover’s body, his lover’s body changes in response to the changes in his body, his changed body changes in response to the changes in his lover’s body, and so on and on, twining into an ouroboros of mutual reconstruction. [...]

Most people would give anything to be turned into anything else, because most sex is mediocre, and the measure of its mediocrity is that it leaves us unaffected. No one falls ill; no one transforms into a fly or a cockroach; nothing changes. As the narrator of Norman Rush’s novel “Mating” sagely observes, “Sex can be various things, but in my experience the usual thing it is is considerate work on the part of both parties,” accompanied by the exchange of careful courtesies: “after you, no, after you, mais non.” No one has transformative sex all the time, and there is nothing wrong with sex that is merely pleasant. Indeed, a polite volley of pleasantries is probably the best thing that unecstatic sex can be.

Of course, many mediocre sexual encounters are rote in a more pernicious way. Heterosexual sex that follows the standard scripts, with its spankings and its schoolgirls, is not always devastating or traumatic, but its tiresomeness is nonetheless not innocuous. Women are the most obvious losers when the scenarios faithfully reënacted in the bedroom so consistently favor male predilections, but men who inherit their desires from the prevailing sexual culture—or, worse, men who feel they must satisfy a virile masculine ideal whether it appeals or not—lack the opportunity or the means to develop sexual agency. For both parties, the resultant comedy of errors is not satisfying. What nefariously underwhelming sex has in common with respectfully underwhelming sex is that neither brand is especially surprising or especially erotic.

To have sex erotically—and ethically—is to have it with someone else, and a person demonstrates her difference from the self by being impossible to predict, domesticate, or assimilate to preëxistent fantasy. It is not erotic to impose a ready-made desire onto someone pliant, or to slot her into a fetish that has little to do with her. Eroticism occurs only when someone rewrites us so completely that she rewrites even the quality and content of our appetites, and only when this radical rewriting is reciprocal.

Eroticism does not arise every time there is sexual activity, no matter how plodding, but it is also not the exclusive concomitant of love, marriage, or conventional commitment. Most sexual pairings are no more dishevelling than a game of tennis, but it is constitutive of sex that it has the potential to thrust us into metamorphosis that may be sweet, may be sinister, and may be both concurrently. When at last we grow wings, who can say exactly where we will want to fly?

Can a person consent to dying? Can she consent to a complete renewal, which amounts to the same thing?

Surely she cannot consent in the normal way. To consent in the normal way is not merely to grant permission but to grant permission on a particular basis—perhaps a reasonable expectation of pleasure, security, or safety. In any case, there is some positive inner state to which the outward utterance of license is supposed to correspond. A woman, almost always the presumed consenter in a heterosexual exchange, is exhorted to have sex with someone only when she has good reason to believe that she will have a generally happy time with him. Over and over, she is told: you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do; you don’t have to do anything that makes you uncomfortable. Because she is assumed to know exactly what makes her comfortable, and because comfort is assumed to be a necessary condition of good sex, the procedure the consenter is instructed to follow is not unlike the operation favored by decision theorists. First, she is to imagine what sex with the partner under consideration will be like; second, she is to assign a value to the experience that she has conjured; third, she is to assign a probability of accuracy to her prediction. Having done all this, she finds herself in a position to make a rational decision, consenting if and only if she foresees that an exchange will turn out to be unimpeachably agreeable. Should she prove wrong in her predictions, should she ever feel the slightest scintilla of unease, she should withdraw her consent and beat a hasty retreat.

Three faulty assumptions are baked into this model. The first is that people in general, thus women in particular, can predict, if roughly, what a prospective partner will be like during sex; the second is that people in general, thus women in particular, can predict what they will be like during sex with a prospective partner; the third is that sex can and should be comfortable.

In fact, we are not impermeable packages of preformed desires, importing our likes and dislikes around with us from one encounter to the next like papers in a briefcase. An erotic craving is inextricable from the ferment that foams up when oneself is sluiced into another. Not only is it impossible for us to know whether an encounter will be deflating or transformative but we cannot know what sort of metamorphosis will ensue if the sex is as jarring as we can only hope it will be. We can have no more success when it comes to divining how we will change our partners than we can have when it comes to divining how they will change us—or, following Cummings, how their changes will change us, and how our changes will change them, iteratively and indefinitely. Maybe we will grow the wings of cherubs, but maybe we will find ourselves meshed with the coarse bristles of gigantic flies. All we can say with certainty is that sometimes, when it is working, sex carves out new bodies for our bodies, and these bodies can be both better and more brutal than the ones we could invent alone.

From Cronenberg’s fever dreams, we can surmise that there is a further reason to reject the decision-theoretic model of consent: not only is it impossible for us to know what we will become if an erotic encounter is transformative but we should not want to. To determine in advance what a transformative experience will churn into existence is to sap its power, for the very essence of transformative experience is that we cannot predict how it will transform us. To be sure, it is uncomfortable to stand on the precipice of metamorphosis, but unless we are willing to assume genuine risk we cannot be undone and remade.

Writing of the conservative fear of sexual deviance, the feminist cultural anthropologist Gayle Rubin notes that we are bent on drawing a line between “sexual order and chaos.” The line in question “expresses the fear that if anything is permitted to cross this erotic DMZ, the barrier against scary sex will crumble and something unspeakable will skitter across.” Conservatives are right. If the gender binary melts away, if heterosexuality is no longer the default assumption, if parasites enter the building and dismantle the tenants, something unspeakable will skitter across—and that is the point of any erotic effusion worth pursuing.

by Becca Rothfeld, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: SillDA

[ed. On the movies of David Cronenberg; body horror and eroticism.]

The Looting of Science Fiction

Tech titans claim the genre inspired them. But all they’ve done is graft their politics onto stories of a better future.

In January 2026, Elon Musk stood before the US Secretary of Defense and senior Pentagon leaders at the SpaceX Starbase in Texas. ‘We want to make Star Trek real, OK?’ he declared. ‘We want to make Starfleet Academy real. So that it’s not always science fiction, but one day the science fiction turns to science fact, and we have spaceships going through space. Big spaceships!’ He painted a vivid picture: exploring alien civilisations, humanity spreading across the stars. ‘That’s the goal!’ he concluded. ‘And that is what I think the public thinks of when they think of Space Force!’

It was a remarkable pitch selling the Pentagon a science-fiction vision. Of course, the fit is partial, incomplete. Star Trek depicts a post-scarcity, post-capitalist society where money has been abolished and humanity works toward collective betterment. Gene Roddenberry’s Federation was built on principles of equality and exploration for the sake of knowledge, not profit or military dominance. Musk took the aesthetic – big spaceships, alien encounters, epic adventures – and left its political foundation. You don’t have to be a Trekkie to know that, in Star Trek, capitalism, nationalism and militarism have been left behind. Musk wants the Enterprise, but reimagined for the military-industrial complex.

In 2021, when Mark Zuckerberg announced Facebook’s rebrand to ‘Meta’, he took the name from Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash (1992), which imagines the ‘Metaverse’: a virtual reality where people’s avatars navigate digital space.

But Snow Crash is one of the sharpest satirical novels of the past half-century. Stephenson wrote it as a warning: his Metaverse is a consolation prize for a society that has collapsed. The federal government has disintegrated; corporate franchises govern daily life; even pizza delivery has been privatised into a Mafia-run operation. The novel’s protagonist is a pizza deliveryman and part-time hacker whose sword-fighting avatar in the virtual world is the only place where dignity is available to him. Stephenson intended the contrast between digital glamour and material poverty to be horrifying. He saw it as a cautionary vision of where platform capitalism leads.

Zuckerberg’s presentation did not engage with any of this. The platform economy – where corporations are protected from democratic accountability while providing essential services – echoes Stephenson’s model precisely, and Zuckerberg read it as inspiration.

Steve Wozniak, Apple’s co-founder, gave expression to this ethos in 2017 when he said: ‘We are the people who make fantasies real.’ It sounds inspiring, but it is important to know which parts of those fantasies they’re choosing, and which parts they’re leaving out. When Musk unveiled Tesla’s Cybertruck in 2019, he had already told investors what to expect: something ‘really futuristic, like cyberpunk Blade Runner’. Musk was selling survival gear for a collapsing world, a version of Blade Runner’s Los Angeles. The aesthetics got materialised. The warnings did not. [...]

Science fiction in the 1950s imagined flying cars, abundant energy and more – but it did so before Three Mile Island, before Chernobyl, before we learned, often through disaster, what happens when you prioritise speed over safety. Those regulatory frameworks Andreessen wants to demolish emerged from hard-won lessons. The optimistic aesthetic gets borrowed; the learning gets discarded.

Perhaps nowhere is this more legible than in the naming of Palantir Technologies. J R R Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (1937-49) is one of the great works of 20th-century literature precisely because it is an extended meditation on the corrupting nature of power. Written in the shadow of industrialised warfare and imperial extraction, it insists on the value of the small, the local and the unglamorous against the totalising ambition of industrial force. Its central moral is not that evil can be defeated by the right hero wielding the right weapon – it is that power itself corrupts, that the Ring cannot be used for good by anyone, and that the only salvation lies in relinquishing the will to dominate entirely. Tolkien’s fictional race of hobbits prevail not because they are powerful but because they are outside the logic of power. Tolkien built an entire mythology to make that argument.

In Tolkien’s novels, the palantíri are seeing-stones or crystal balls that allow their users to see across great distances. They sound like neutral tools, like surveillance technology. But they are devices of corruption: Saruman’s palantír connects him to Sauron and leads to his downfall; Denethor’s drives him to madness and suicide. The palantíri don’t just enable seeing – they enable manipulation and control by those who master them.

The US company Palantir Technologies provides analytics and surveillance tools to governments, militaries and ICE, US immigration and customs enforcement. Its name does political work: it transforms invasive tracking into mystical insight, casting algorithmic surveillance as wise foresight rather than systematic intrusion. In their book The Technological Republic (2025), Palantir’s CEO Alexander Karp and his legal counsel Nicholas Zamiska frame Palantir’s government work in martial terms: ‘We will find a way to build coalitions and bands of warriors. To deny the human need for such affiliation has been a mistake.’ They position surveillance tools as fulfilling a fundamental human need for warrior brotherhood. The Tolkien reference provides the aesthetic authority; the distance from Tolkien’s actual moral vision provides the freedom to act without it. Naming a surveillance company after devices that corrupt and betray their users isn’t homage – it is the appropriation of aesthetic while rejecting the moral core.

William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer (1984) introduced ‘cyberspace’, a term Gibson coined. Its protagonist, Case, is a hacker whose nervous system was damaged by former employers as punishment. Burned out and banned from cyberspace, he drifts through neon-soaked Chiba City as a ‘console cowboy’ with nowhere left to go. The novel’s cyberspace is owned and controlled by vast corporations; individual hackers are not heroes but tools, hired and discarded by interests they can barely see. Gibson’s vision was explicitly dystopian: a world in which the democratising potential of digital networks had been foreclosed before it could begin, captured by capital and turned into an instrument of its own expansion.

In September 1988, the software developer John Walker wrote an Autodesk internal white paper, ‘Through the Looking Glass: Beyond “User Interfaces”’, in which he outlined what he called a ‘cyberpunk initiative’: a proposal to build, within 12 months, a doorway into cyberspace. The project’s motto was blunt: ‘Reality isn’t enough any more.’

By 2025, the San Francisco headquarters of OpenAI pump high-energy electronic dance music across their reception area, where easy chairs, scatter cushions and Swiss cheese plants create what the CEO Sam Altman calls a ‘comfortable country house’ rather than a ‘corporate sci-fi castle’. The chrome and grime of cyberpunk – the neon-soaked warning that the corporate capture of digital space would be brutal and dehumanising – has been replaced by Scandinavian furniture and artisanal coffee. Gibson’s ‘consensual hallucination’ has been rebranded as cozy domesticity. The dystopia has not been avoided; it has been made comfortable enough to sign up for.

Gibson himself registered the irony. In an interview with Wired magazine in 2012, he acknowledged that the cyberspace of Neuromancer – all corporate interests and information thieves – bore little resemblance to the early internet he failed to anticipate: the 1990s-2000s moment when a teenager in a bedroom could genuinely outcompete corporations, when the network felt briefly open and democratic. Gibson missed that phase entirely. But he was accidentally right about where things ended up. The corporate platforms – Google, Meta, Amazon – that now dominate digital life are far closer to his original vision than to the participatory web that briefly flourished between them. Gibson imagined cyberspace as a space of corporate dominance from the start; Silicon Valley built the open internet first, then converged on his dystopia anyway. The difference is that, in Neuromancer, that convergence was the disaster to be resisted. They turned his warning into a product roadmap.

by Ali Rıza Taşkale, Aeon | Read more:
Image: Amazon

via:

[ed. See also: President John F. Kennedy's We choose to go to the Moon speech:]

***

"We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people. For space science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man, and only if the United States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war. I do not say that we should or will go unprotected against the hostile misuse of space any more than we go unprotected against the hostile use of land or sea, but I do say that space can be explored and mastered without feeding the fires of war, without repeating the mistakes that man has made in extending his writ around this globe of ours. There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation may never come again. But why, some say, the Moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? We choose to go to the Moon. We choose to go to the Moon... We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too. - Wikipedia

How the Himalayan Blackberry Took Over the Pacific Northwest

The tangled history of an invasive plant and a scientist’s troubling quest to engineer a more efficient natural world.

There is no summer in the Pacific Northwest without the blackberry. Across Washington and Oregon, jagged walls of blackberry brambles choke out nearly every hiking trail, highway shoulder, and vacant lot in the region. Come August, dense thickets beckon berry-pickers to stain their fingers with the juice of the sweet purple fruits, promising the potential of a fresh-baked blackberry pie after a long day’s harvest. But despite the strong association between the region and the fruit, the species of blackberry that most locals have come to enjoy is anything but native.

The story of how the Himalayan blackberry came to swallow the West Coast is a monument to late nineteenth-century industrial ambition. In the late 1800s, transcontinental rail travel revolutionized the United States’ approach to agriculture. A rapidly growing, urbanizing populace demanded a constant supply of fresh fruits and vegetables. To meet this demand, the market required crops engineered for this new era, encouraging innovation that produced plants sturdy enough for cross-country travel and aggressive enough to thrive in any backyard soil.

At the core of this innovation was the enterprising horticulturist Luther Burbank. Operating out of his experimental farm in Santa Rosa, California, Burbank functioned more like a “plant wizard” than a traditional farmer. His mail-order catalogs allowed amateur gardeners across the country to purchase from a selection of hybrids suited for the shifting needs of the nation. Among these plants were the Shasta daisy, plumcot, spineless cactus, and Russet Burbank potato, known today as the most widely grown potato in the United States. As historian Phillip Thurtle states, Burbank’s explicit goal in crafting his hybrids was “to take the rough spots out of nature,” domesticating the wild to promote utility and commercial efficiency.

In 1885, Burbank received a packet of seeds that he had imported from India. Upon opening it, he discovered that the seeds bore a hardy blackberry plant that thrived in temperate areas and produced large, succulent fruits. Pleased by its capacity for growth, yet ill-informed of its true regional roots, Burbank named the plant the “Himalayan Giant” to signal its believed origins and great size. The name was a misnomer, as the species, known scientifically as Rubus armeniacus, is actually native to Armenia and northern Iran.

Impressed by the size and strength of the Himalayan Giant, Luther Burbank marketed the plant to growers in the damp, temperate climate of the Pacific Northwest in a targeted flyer in 1894, promising a plant of extreme utility. The marketing push was met with a large wave of orders from the region, and according to Burbank, “the plants could not be multiplied fast enough to meet the demand.” Over a century later, the Himalayan blackberry has spread far beyond the modest backyard bounds its importers envisioned, opting instead to take over indiscriminately and displace the native trailing blackberry (Rubus ursinus) in the process.

Like all blackberries, the Himalayan blackberry is not a berry but rather an aggregate fruit of multiple drupelets, with each drupelet containing an individual seed. These sweet fruits attract birds and other animals in the summer, which encourages seed dispersal and the rapid spread of the plants through their feces. In addition to reproducing through seeds, Rubus armeniacus may also clone itself through vegetative propagation, which occurs when the stem tips root as they come in contact with the ground, contributing to its aggressive growth strategy.

The plant is impressively sprawling and hardy. An individual bush can grow up to 15 feet high and 40 feet long, with thick stems, also known as canes, marked by sharp, hooked thorns. The density and hardiness of Himalayan blackberry thickets allow the plant to “choke out other foliage and prevent the establishment of trees.” Furthermore, Himalayan blackberry bushes thrive in poor and disturbed soils, allowing them to flourish in abandoned lots and fields.

Combined, these traits have led the plant to be known as the unofficial state weed of Washington. Frustratingly, Rubus armeniacus is notoriously difficult to get rid of, as traditional approaches to invasive management such as fire, herbicide, and mowing are insufficient at eradicating the plant. Thus, this weed, whether northwesterners like it or not, is here to stay.

The industrial impulse that welcomed this hardy blackberry also manifested in Burbank’s vision for the future of American society. In 1907, he released The Training of the Human Plant, in which he directly applied his plant breeding techniques to the development of a “superior” race of people. Burbank argued that just as plants could be improved through careful crossbreeding to optimize their positive characteristics, the same opportunity existed for the improvement of mankind. Deeply informed by his American context, Burbank alleged that the “vast mingling of races” brought to the United States via immigration presented an opportunity for “developing the finest race the world has ever known,” as the ethnic variety allowed for a wide array of traits to select from. In light of this potential, Burbank called for a long-term overhaul of American childrearing in order to immerse generations of children in favorable environments that would lend themselves to the development of a “healthy [human] animal.”

While it is tempting to categorize Burbank’s ideas as typical of the rigid, genetically determinist eugenicists at the turn of the twentieth century, his eugenic theories possessed a uniquely American appeal, emphasizing productivity, efficiency, and one’s ability to reshape their reality. Central to Burbank’s thesis was his belief that environment mattered as much, if not more, than heredity. For Burbank, heredity was “simply the sum of all the effects of all the environments of all past generations on the responsive, ever-moving life forces.” Under this view, human and plant species were entirely malleable, shaped profoundly by the pressures of the natural and artificial world around them. Thus, through enough hard work and careful attention to environment, one could bend the will of evolution to create more productive organisms in the plant and animal kingdoms. [...]

Ironically, Burbank’s obsession with eliminating the weak and nurturing stronger organisms ultimately unleashed a botanical “master race” that defied his ideals of human control and smothered the Pacific Northwest. Once introduced to the region, the Himalayan blackberry found an environment perfectly suited to its needs and adapted so completely that it has become an inseparable fixture of local cultural identity. In regional lore and literature, the blackberry is depicted as a terrifyingly untamable force, with vines that “[push] up through solid concrete” and “[force] their way into polite society.” Yet each summer, the region suspends its hatred for the stubborn weed, celebrating the plant’s sweet abundance through blackberry festivals and preparing enough jars of blackberry jam to hold them over until the next year’s harvest.

Today, the Himalayan blackberry stands as a humorous rejection of Burbank’s attempt at complete human control. Amidst his efforts to “take the rough spots out of nature” and promote plants that worked toward a vision of human utility, he introduced a vegetal force that fundamentally refused to be disciplined. In doing so, the story of Burbank’s Himalayan blackberry reveals the limits of human intervention and demonstrates plants’ agency in shaping their own environments. The Plant Humanities Initiative at Dumbarton Oaks seeks to highlight histories like this one, unearthing the mutual influences of humans and the plant world on one another.

by Kari Traylor, JSTOR |  Read more:

Images: Getty/Wikimedia Commons

[ed. When I went to school in Oregon, I couldn't believe the berry bushes everywhere, and subsisted on many of them.]

What is the United States of America Now?

The United States of America is a truck that has driven into a ditch. The United States of America is a program that has been hacked. The United States of America is ... so many things, horrific and magnificent, good and evil, promising and cursed, as it approaches its quarter millennium mark. I say it as though the US was one thing, but it is a thousand things.

It is the masked ICE agent shooting Renee Good while standing up for immigrants, but it is also Good herself and the immigrants, and the streets of Minneapolis and their Dakota and Ojibwe Indigenous past – and present and future. The US before 1865 was slaveowners, but it was also the enslaved and the abolitionists.

The US is the KKK and the ACLU and the NAACP, right-to-life terrorists and Planned Parenthood security guards. It is Chevron and Exxon and one of the world’s first environmental organizations, the Sierra Club, founded in San Francisco in 1892, and the thousands of environmental, environmental justice, and climate groups right now. It is its contradictions, its conflicts.

It is 340 million people, including almost 2 million prisoners, a population larger than 12 US states (which has long made me think that prison can be imagined as the 51st state, one with virtually no representation).

It is a country where guns outnumber people, and a country that produced nonviolent resistance’s most lyrical advocate, Martin Luther King Jr, who was shot on a balcony of a motel in Memphis.

King is said to have come out to the balcony of the motel to greet jazz musician Ben Branch, whose rendition of the song Precious Lord King loved. It is the country that gave the world jazz and blue jeans and atom bombs and the birth control pill; it is its best and its worst people and products.

At its heart the US has always been an experiment, an argument, and a question with countless answers, which is to say it was never and will never be one thing, even if it has one federal government that is currently a catastrophic crime scene. It is tempting to make the current White House a metaphor for the country.

Currently, one third of the people’s house built under Roosevelt has been wrecked and carted away, leaving an open wound visible in aerial photographs, its rose garden built up by Jacqueline Kennedy has been paved over, its lawn recently covered with a glitzy Thunderdome gladiatorial arena in which toxic masculinity would fight itself.

But he is not the country. The United States is the 77 million adult citizens who voted for him, the 75 million who voted for Harris, and the nearly 90 million who didn’t vote, and it’s also all the children, noncitizens, prisoners and former prisoners who are not part of that voting population.

It is the land itself from the maple and birch forests of the north-east to the glaciers of Alaska to the tropical rainforests of Hawaii, with a lot of prairie, swamp and desert in between. That land was here in various configuration not for millions but billions of years before 1776, and it will be here long after the US has ceased to exist, because cease it must at some point, and so must the human race.

The US is the desert tortoises who have been ambling through versions of the Mojave deserts of what is now California, Nevada and Arizona for 60m years and the people who strove to create the protected lands in which they may survive a little longer.

But the question at hand is the US at 250 and its possible futures. One thing about this wildly diverse country’s future is certain: it will become a non-white majority country in a couple of decades, and there is nothing that Stephen Miller and the other white nationalists can do about it.

Earlier this year, I was struck by the valiant, idealistic, dedicated young people who one after the other came into the spotlight. We only came to know Renee Good, 37, shot on 7 January, and Alex Pretti, also 37, shot on 24 January, through their willingness to face death for what they believed in and who they believed matters.

But another young person came into power on New Year’s Day of 2026, while they were still alive, Zohran Mamdani, age 34. He beat the odds and the status quo and all the money behind Andrew Cuomo (who’s been accused of sexual assault), to become mayor – the city’s first Muslim mayor – of this country’s biggest city as he spoke up for the all the marginalized and minority populations that make New York City what it is.

On 8 February, despite rightwing outcries, Bad Bunny, age 32, took the Super Bowl stage and put on a halftime show that was a celebration – in Spanish – of his beloved Puerto Rico, of the musical traditions that converge in his songs, and the huge spectacle he staged was striking for the range of its performers, and for his insistence on his version of America, a generous joyous multilingualone, an America in which anyone can dance with anyone else.

Later that month, Oakland’s own Alysa Liu, daughter of a refugee from China, won the figure-skating gold at the Olympics with a performance whose freedom and joy cast a shadow over virtually all other figure skating before her victory on 19 February. [...]

These were not typical Americans, but like the 8 million people who showed up for the No Kings demonstration on 28 March, they were Americans. No Kings was unprecedented in sheer size as well as in how the protests took place in every single congressional district in the country. I said the US is a perpetual question; these lives and these performances were demonstrations of the answers some of us have given and some of us have cheered.

I do not believe that Trump will destroy the US, but he has badly broken it, and what comes after has to include consequences for the criminals and a massive clean-up operation. There will be no return to how things were, and we must go ahead by fixing what allowed this destruction to happen.

by Rebecca Solnit, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Mario Tama/Getty

[ed. For a more optimistic view: America Should Love Itself Again (Common Reader).]

What It Means to Be a Democratic Socialist

“To me, what socialism means is to guarantee a basic level of dignity. It’s asserting the value of saying that the America we want and the America that we are proud of is one in which all children can access a dignified education. It’s one in which no person is too poor to have the medicines they need to live.”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Vogue, 2018

Democratic socialists’ decisive congressional victories on Tuesday night in New York’s primary elections solidified the far-left movement as an ascendant power center in blue states.

Now, as the progressive coalition prepares to expand its footprint in Washington, many Americans are turning their attention to the movement for the first time — and wondering, perhaps, what it actually stands for.

The definition often depends on whom you talk to. But the movement’s standard-bearers are united by their belief that direct government action — not the free market — is a better tool to solve problems for everyday Americans, such as the rising cost of health care and housing.

“Economic stress is something I lived with as a kid, and I feel it in my guts,” Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont and an architect of the movement’s modern resurgence, said in an interview with The New York Times. “That’s what makes me a democratic socialist.”

In the United States, democratic socialists’ policies tend to support working within the capitalist system rather than abolishing it outright. Critics typically decry the likely high costs to taxpayers of some of these policies.

Ashik Siddique, a co-chairman of the organization, said the group surpassed 100,000 members earlier this year. About 1,000 more joined after the sweep of victories in New York on Tuesday night, he said.

Here is a closer look at the pillars of democratic socialism.

End Military Aid to Israel

The defining feature of primary races in New York on Tuesday was a litmus test on American support for Israel. Democratic socialists won that ideological battle handily, since staunch opposition to continued military aid is a key part of their campaigns.

The Democratic Socialists of America, a political organization in which members pay dues and are organized around a wide-reaching policy platform, says it “stands for the full freedoms and self determination of the Palestinian people, including the end of Israel’s colonization and occupation of all Arab lands, equality, and the right of all refugees to return to their homes and properties.”

Mr. Sanders said every time he has talked about Gaza at rallies across the country, he has received a standing ovation.

Expand the Social Safety Net

Democratic socialists want the government to lower the cost of living for Americans. Under their platform, child care, pre-K and public higher education amount to a collective good and should be completely free and funded by the government. They also support universal rent control, and want every worker to receive paid family leave.

In New York City, it was the political machine of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, that helped carry three progressive House candidates to victory on Tuesday.

Mr. Mamdani plans to open a free preschool center on the Upper East Side. Although directed at working families, the move has ignited a fierce debate over whether a city facing a major budget deficit should use taxpayer money to fund a free service in affluent neighborhoods.

Guarantee Free Health Care

The D.S.A. wants to create a single, government-run national program providing essential health care for everyone.

Right now, individuals and employers pay insurance premiums. People pay cash co-payments for drugs. And state governments pay a share of Medicaid costs. The system is expensive, but it allows individuals some choice in their care.
In a democratic socialist system, like one long trumpeted by Mr. Sanders, nearly all of that would be replaced by federal spending.

Many democratic socialists want to see private insurance entirely eliminated. Others are open to giving people the option to keep their private insurance plans.

Tax the Rich

There is no consensus about how much such a system would cost the federal government, nor exactly how it would be funded.

Proponents of democratic socialism say that higher income taxes on wealthy Americans and decreases in military spending would cover the costs.

by Emily Davies, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Graham Dickie for The New York Times
[ed. An over-simplified and somewhat dismissive description of DSA policies, but at least this political philosophy is finally getting some attention. See also: ‘American Democratic Socialism’ Has a Proud, Diverse, and Inspiring History; and, The Left is Rising (Currrent Affairs); and Why the DSA and socialists are on the rise now in US cities (Vox); also Wikipedia's definition: Democratic Socialism.]

***

I'm going to hold off on any 'irrational exuberance' for now, but if there's one slogan I'd suggest any DSA campaign use, it's: "You own government. Make it work for you." That, after all, is basically the central theme of democratic socialism. DS isn't some monolithic political philosophy, with entrenched political policies. It's not Russia or China. It's an adaptable model, flexible enough to respond to shifting problems and priorities within the dicates of the US Constitution. It doesn't seek to wipe out corporations or any other businesses large or small, but it does want to make sure that there's a level playing field for everyone so that opportunity exists on all levels. The economic benefits produced from this capitalist system not only flow to shareholders, but also back into government programs and public improvements that everybody can benefit from and enjoy (like infrastructure). The worst thing (which opponents always glom onto) would be to focus too much on cultural issues or granular details (eg. appropriate levels of policing and incarceration; gender issues, etc.) and letting the big picture get lost in the weeds. Let those things play out in courts, not political platforms. It's time for change. New generations are crying out for it, and one benefit of the Trump years is that there's now a new understanding of what's possible in terms of shifting boundaries (and what tactics can be used). We need a new direction and DSA is the best option I've seen.]

[ed. Update: Again, establishment Democrats continue to shoot themselves in the foot, and provide more ammunition to Republicans by allowing themselves to be defined by what they're afraid of rather than what they stand for... See: Centrist Democrats Rebuke Party’s Left Wing: ‘We Are Capitalist, Not Socialist’(NYT):]

***

“The bottom line is that you have to give the D.S.A. and you have to give MAGA credit, because they’re organized,” Mr. Suozzi said, referring to the Democratic Socialists of America, the country’s largest socialist organization. “And the people that don’t agree with their philosophies wring their hands at cocktail parties, but they’re not organized. So we have to get organized.” [ed. 'Cocktail party' democrats, a winning message.]

Mr. Suozzi said democratic socialists were tapping into “real economic anxiety” and were “right in their diagnosis of the problem.” But he argued that Democrats should pursue policies grounded not in socialism but in a pro-union form of capitalism. [ed. with unions looking soon to be roadkill on the way to AI.]

A spokeswoman for Mr. Mamdani, Dora Pekec, pushed back on the letter, saying in a statement that the “only thing extreme is defending a status quo where working families can’t afford to live.”

And a representative for the Democratic Socialists of America, Priscilla Yeverino, said in a statement that the group was gaining popularity because it was pursuing policies that Americans support, and that “Red Scare tactics are no longer working.”

“Ending wars, passing Medicare for All, forgiving student loan debt, abolishing ICE and taxing the rich — those are all popular policies” said the statement. [...]

Matt Bennett, a co-founder of Third Way, a centrist Democratic think tank, said the outcomes in New York were “dangerous” for Democrats nationally.

“What we’ve seen Republicans do very successfully before is weaponize the craziest ideas of the activist left,” he said. “And now the ammunition they’ve got is much, much more powerful.”

***

[ed. Update 2: Fortunately, Republicans are even more disorganized and demoralized than democrats, and their "ammunition" mostly blanks. See: Behind the Curtain: The cost of blind loyalty (Axios).]