The Social World

Category: Technology

  • Our brave new world

    Our brave new world

    In 1961, just two years before he died in Los Angeles, the polymath, philosopher and novelist Aldous Huxley gave humanity a warning. Much of his prophecy about society in Brave New World had come to pass, he said, which made him even more certain that the standout problem of the future would be our inability to resist becoming enslaved to our own technology. Now, more than 60 years after his death – and with an entire generation of children frying their brains with smartphones and nobody able or willing to do anything to stop them – it is hard to deny that he was onto something.

    The man was destined to be a prophet for our gadget-addled age. Born to one of England’s most accomplished family dynasties, he entered the English boarding school Eton on a scholarship only to find himself suffering from a debilitating eye disease leading to near-total blindness, which forced him to learn Braille. Refusing to accede to his condition, he turned to an alternative technology, a technique known as the Bates method; a peculiar and much maligned pseudo-science akin to Rolfing, Reiki and various forms of homeopathy. Huxley swore by the practice, later claiming it gave him enough vision back to attend Oxford in 1913 and, much to humanity’s good fortune, to begin writing.

    One of the more unusual consequences of his disability was a near-total reliance on dictionaries and encyclopedias. Unable to read the poetry or novels of his youth, Huxley would pick an entry and spend hours memorizing the words, etymologies and facts underneath. Then, strolling over to literary dinner parties, he would talk about nothing else except what he’d read that day. Picking the letter “T,” for instance, Huxley would propound the derivation of the word “treacle” from the Greek theriake. A genius? Yes. The life of the party? Probably not.

    Huxley published tens of novels, nonfiction books and short stories, the majority of them largely forgotten. But it was in 1932 that he became a household name with the publication of Brave New World. Still taught today as a prescient glimpse into the future of human civilization; the dystopian novel described a society in which the traditional family has been eroded, global governments foster mass conformity and humans are hooked on trivial consumption, homogenous and two-dimensional political attitudes and artificially stimulated novelty via a strange drug known as soma. Today, we’d just call it TikTok. The rest we’d call modern America.

    We forget it now, but Huxley began sketching out the book after the mass disillusionment and carnage caused by World War One put an end to the 19th century’s long flirtation with progress and utopia. The basic message of Brave New World – that technology accelerates totalitarianism and mass propaganda – was right.

    Today, few of us can avoid being told that generative AI is “just a tool,” but Huxley understood quite intuitively that technology begins to enslave us no matter how much we think we’re in control. And this was long before social media and short-form video clips so effectively managed to annihilate our attention spans, induce mass-hypnotic behaviors around strange foreign conflicts and destroy our ability to do the very thing Huxley prized most of all: sit down, quietly, and read a book.

    By 1937, just two years before the outbreak of another catastrophic war in Europe, Huxley moved to the United States – but like many Englishmen in America, he was let down by what he found. This was nowhere more so than in Los Angeles, which he described as “19 suburbs in search of a city – a nightmare of neon and billboards.” Some things don’t change.

    Yet he deeply loved the country’s landscape and could often be found far out in the Mojave Desert, where he owned a small cabin without electricity which would serve as a place of rest and, later on, for his meditative spiritual practices. Indeed, it was there that his career took a remarkable turn. Until then, Huxley’s worldview was a typically materialist one; perhaps no surprise given that his grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley, was known as “Darwin’s Bulldog” for his long-term commitment to the scientist and his then-polarizing theory of evolution. Aldous, then approaching middle age, once called Buddhist meditation “the first cousin of the doze,” but he still wanted to consciously taste the visionary experiences of his hero William Blake. Blake was one of those few individuals in history who appeared to be constantly tripping without any psychoactive assistance – he said he saw God looking through his bedroom window as a child, for instance. Huxley’s route to spiritual experience was mescaline.

    In 1950, he sat down in his living room alongside psychiatrist Humphry Osmond and ingested 400 milligrams of the stuff,  kickstarting history’s most beautifully articulated psychedelic experience which he describes in The Doors of Perception. That book covers everything from the sublime beauty of flowers, the ravishing sensation of listening to Bach and the absurdity of human activity he found when gazing at a 1931 Ford convertible. Now a convert to psychedelics, he dedicated the rest of his life to mysticism.

    It was in these last years that he wrote Island (1962), which represents a kind of anti-Brave New World by describing what an ideal society might be like. The most famous character in the novel is the mynah bird, trained to squawk the words “Here and Now” at almost every opportunity, reminding the inhabitants of the island that true life exists always in the present moment. The message of world peace pervades the novel, too, something which had become a stronger preoccupation as he ended his life. In a short and polite 1959 letter, he had rejected a British knighthood as hypocritical given his lifelong aversion to titles and uniforms, his identity as an exile from England and his utter repudiation of anything which may have originally derived from violence.

    A year after he wrote Island, Huxley lay dying. Diagnosed with laryngeal cancer and with mere hours before his passing, he requested from his second wife 100 micrograms of LSD, via intramuscular injection. He took it, she said, as if it were a sacrament. In The Tibetan Book of the Dead, they say that the period of in-between states at the moment of passing represents the greatest opportunity for enlightenment. If, that is, you can remain conscious enough to recognize the “clear light.” Huxley, no doubt inspired by this ancient wisdom, hoped to reach the final “awakening” himself.

    Today, more than 60 years after his passing, it is impossible to deny the prescience of Huxley’s vision. He warned us of the perils of technology and its uncanny ability to enslave us; that we so easily forget that technology was made for us and not us for technology.

    But he wrote decades before even personal computers, let alone the total immersion of human life into the ubiquitous and artificial digital world which now defines every single one of us. He would no doubt mourn that young writers following in his footsteps would have no choice but to launch concocted and inflammatory social-media posts simply to stand above the noise – and he would be horrified at AI’s ability to erode what frail critical thinking abilities our species had to begin with. At the same time, Huxley truly believed that psychedelics would be the gateway to the expanded, luminous consciousness which he thought of as our very birthright. This, if anything, was the purpose of human life. Now, as the war on drugs draws to a close, and the growth and prevalence of psychedelic medicine and ayahuasca healing trips continue to go mainstream, maybe we all will soon find out for ourselves what lies the other side of Huxley’s Doors of Perception.

    Max Horder is an author and anthropologist. His new book, Written By the Victors, will be published in 2027 by Penguin Allen Lane. This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.

  • The dismantling of Lambda School

    The dismantling of Lambda School

    In 2017, Zoom finally achieved what Skype never could: hosting video calls that didn’t freeze. It was a golden moment to take education online. Enter Lambda School, a Silicon Valley startup founded by Austen Allred with the aim of disrupting higher education.

    Allred’s idea was simple: people wanted to learn to code but often couldn’t pay $20,000 upfront. His solution? You’d pay nothing until you landed a job earning more than $50,000 a year. At that point, a share of your income would go back to Lambda. But never more than $30,000, and never with interest. The technical term for this is an income share agreement, or ISA, an equity-like stake in a few years of a person’s future income. If you got a good job, the school was repaid. If you didn’t, the school took the loss. The incentives were perfectly aligned.

    The idea should have been a rare bipartisan win. Republicans distrust academia and like the idea of having “skin in the game.” Democrats want to protect students from debt. Everyone agrees the current student loan system is broken. Betsy DeVos, then Donald Trump’s education secretary, was enthusiastic. She suggested that income-share agreements could replace the student loan system entirely. In a rational world, that would have been a blessing. In 2017 Washington, it was a curse. DeVos endorsed the model; the resistance inevitably went to work. Elizabeth Warren, Nancy Pelosi and their allies began churning out what Allred calls “a white paper a week” denouncing income-share agreements as predatory. It didn’t matter that the contracts expired after five years if the graduate never earned enough. The narrative was set: income shares were “student debt by another name.”

    Once Democrats set a target, the media follows like hunting hounds. Article after article appeared – some identifying genuine complaints about Lambda School, such as underqualified instructors and inflated claims about post-employment prospects. But none of Lambda’s critics could explain how its core business model – the ISA – was worse than the traditional model of interest-fueled student debt, interest that accumulates regardless of whether graduates obtain employment. In fact, Lambda was losing money. Leaked internal documents revealed the company was spending around $13,000 per student but receiving, on average, around $5,750 back. But investors were happy to support the company as it expanded, in the hope that this model would one day prove profitable while benefiting students.

    The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFBP) joined the critics, determined to prove that if something looked like a loan, it must be one. It launched investigations into every company using ISAs, “bankrupting everyone but us,” as Allred later put it. Lambda asked for clarity. Tell us how to comply, it said. We don’t care how you regulate the ISA, just regulate it. The Bureau refused. Instead, it came up with a theory: because Lambda offered two options – those who could pay were charged $20,000 upfront; those who couldn’t were offered the $30,000 income share – so the $10,000 difference must be “interest.” It made no sense. That difference is far closer to a “finance charge” – you promise to pay a flat fee for deferring repayment. The mark-up compensated Lambda for taking on the risk in case students couldn’t repay the tutoring charges. Income shares don’t tick up each month by a certain percentage of the principal, so clearly this wasn’t interest. But reason rarely survives contact with regulation.

    The first formal inquiry came in 2020. Then silence. Finally, last year, the CFPB returned, demanding a settlement. The statute of limitations had run out, but that didn’t matter. It wouldn’t say what laws Lambda had broken, only that it needed to admit wrongdoing. When Lambda refused, the CFPB named Allred personally. If the company went bankrupt, they could pursue him directly. “They basically said: we can bankrupt your company, or we can bankrupt your family,” he recalls. To end the standoff, Lambda agreed to a token fine and to “admit” to several false statements, including that instructors had volunteered their time. The Bureau also forced the company to forgive income-share agreements that were already about to expire. “A refund of nothing,” Allred says.

    Lambda was also banned from student lending unless a regulated third party was involved, effectively killing its business. To stay alive, the company switched to conventional loans. The loans carried interest of 15 percent and were far worse for students than ISAs – but unlike ISAs, standard loans didn’t have a political target on their back. A business set up to save students from predatory interest rates was forced to implement interest rates.

    The company had sold or borrowed against some of its outstanding student loans to recoup its losses. Investors then got the right to collect a slice of a student’s future income instead, while Lambda turned uncertain repayment contracts into cash that could be reinvested. The CFPB decided that, too, was improper. “They said the incentives weren’t aligned,” says Allred, “which makes no sense… the income shares have to be worth something to borrow against them.”

    By then, the company was bleeding. Every month the investigation dragged on, Lambda stopped enrolling students and cut staff. A model that once promised to democratize education – risk-free for students, performance-based for schools – was strangled by the very agency meant to protect consumers. The irony is that the Bureau was required to create a regulatory framework for income share agreements, something Allred had asked for back in 2017. Eight years later, it still hasn’t done so.

    Allred says he began the project with a naive faith in government. “I wasn’t right-wing at the time,” he says. “I thought the people I was dealing with had good intentions and wanted to do the right thing. It took me way too long to realize that wasn’t the case. It was my team versus yours.”

    Lambda set out to solve a problem Washington claims to care about: how to educate people without burying them in debt. It made great strides towards doing so, until the federal bureaucracy decided that aligning incentives was, somehow, the real crime.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.

  • The world needs more copper, but there’s a catch

    The world needs more copper, but there’s a catch

    Copper has a nickname in the commodities market. It’s known as “Doctor Copper” because it’s so deeply integrated into the physical fabric of our lives and all the technology we depend on that its price reflects the health of the economy. “Gold is money, everything else is credit,” said J.P. Morgan more than a century ago. But copper is more than money. It’s modern human life. It is used in every corner of our technology, from houses to windfarms to warehouses. Which is why I think, while everyone’s still obsessing about gold, it’s worth taking a look at copper.

    Since the global financial crisis in 2008, stock markets may have reached new highs but the physical world of construction, infrastructure and manufacturing has never quite regained its old growth rate. Western consumers borrowed, policymakers stimulated, AI and tech shares soared, but factories, grids and cities grew slowly. And copper demand over the past 15 years (at 1.9 percent) was below the average of 3 percent annual growth seen since 1950.

    At the same time, a wave of new mine supply hit the market. Pre-crash, the West raised money for mines thanks to the low cost of capital. Post-crash, China has led the way with new mines in Ecuador, Peru and the Democratic Republic of Congo. This has resulted in a period where supply consistently ran ahead of demand. As a consequence, copper priced in real money (expressed in units of gold) has been on a long downward trend. Despite all the chatter about battery metals and nominally rising prices, copper has been in a bear market and is 60 percent lower in real terms than it was 25 years ago.

    The most obvious driver for the coming bull market in copper is our insatiable appetite for electricity and all things electrical. The world’s largest mining company, BHP, estimates that as recently as 2021, about 92 percent of copper demand still came from traditional sectors such as construction, old-fashioned power systems and industrial machinery. Only about 7 percent was explicitly tied to energy transition uses (EVs, renewables, grid upgrades), and 1 percent to digital tech and data. This is changing fast – just look around you.

    The world is electrifying at a breakneck pace. In March, the International Energy Agency (IEA) published its “global energy review of 2024” and noted that, although global energy demand grew by 2.2 percent in 2024 (faster than the average rate over the past decade), electricity demand surged by 4.3 percent. And with electricity demand, you can assume copper demand, too.

    EV sales continue to rise globally, and of course each electric vehicle requires three to four times more copper than an internal combustion car: 80-90 kg vs. 23-24 kg. Wind turbines are still popping up. Every single wind turbine uses two to three tons of copper per megawatt of capacity in the turbine itself – but you can double that to include connecting cables for on-shore windfarms, and more again for off-shore installations. Diffuse energy collection systems such as solar panels also require vast amounts of copper cabling. Don’t forget copper use in grid-scale batteries and in high-speed charging infrastructure. And then look at aging grids from the US to Europe to Asia, which need massive upgrades. And then look at your own personal habits and what you have bought recently. Smart devices, automation, the internet of things. The battery in every chargeable device you use is 10 to 15 percent copper by weight. Copper, copper, everywhere.

    As if that isn’t enough, throw in the big one: AI and data centers. The AI boom isn’t just virtual, it’s physical too. Every data center needs transformers, cooling, power-switching equipment and miles of copper cable. The growth has barely started and our future world is being built on electricity – and on copper.

    The IEA now forecasts explosive growth in copper demand from electrification through the 2020s and 2030s. Goldman Sachs, BHP, Wood Mackenzie, UBS and others independently say the same thing: we are entering a structural shortage. The “old copper” market is forecast to shrink to 60 percent of the demand pull, with new sectors likely to comprise 40 percent of the market within 15 years. And remember that “old copper” demand is still growing at 2 percent annually, which in a 24-million-ton annual market is 480,000 tons of new copper demand every year.

    And herein lies the problem. Copper mining is an incredibly large and mature industry. Most of the easy deposits have already been mined and the global mined average grade is now around 0.5 percent Cu. Future deposits are likely to be lower grade, harder to access, deeper and more complex. Water is a major issue. Either there is too much, with mines flooded this year in Indonesia and the DRC; or there is too little, with large deposits above 4,000 meters looking for a water solution in the Andean deserts of Argentina and Chile.

    Now consider much tighter environmental regulation and granting of permits and it is no surprise that the average development timeline for a copper project to advance from discovery to production is 18 years. This is not an industry that can be turned on quickly – unlike an immature or small-tonnage commodity such as lithium. A large copper deposit in the discovery phase today is unlikely to be in production until 2043.

    Furthermore, local opposition is rising. Social license to operate and indigenous rights are increasingly restrictive factors in Australia, Canada, Ecuador and Peru. And apart from a few established mining hot-spots, Europe is essentially off-limits to any meaningful mining venture due to high power costs and a fundamentally anti-mining, eco-socialist mindset. Even the US, with Trump’s tariffs and exhortations to redomicile copper production, is challenged. To produce large quantities of refined copper you need abundant smelting capacity, and America is currently exporting copper minerals for processing abroad.

    Does anyone want to take a wild guess where the newest, most efficient, lowest-cost smelters have been built? Smelters so efficient and with so much capacity that they render most other new smelter proposals unviable. Of course it is China, with its 60 percent coal-fired, low-cost power grid. Fierce competition among smelters and refineries in China has translated into record low margins for smelters and refineries around the world. Two state-run smelters have closed in Chile since 2023, and in Australia, Glencore’s Mount Isa smelter, which has operated in the town for almost 100 years, is being prepared for closure. As Glencore says, “The future of our Mount Isa copper smelter and Townsville refinery is currently under review, as global market shifts and reduced copper volumes challenge the sustainability of these assets.”

    At one point in September, Chinese smelters were actually paying suppliers of copper mineral (concentrate) to deliver material to them, when normally miners pay for the privilege. Essentially the emergence of the Chinese processing capacity is yet another indication of China’s dominance in primary materials and manufacturing.  (When will liberal democracy governments actually notice that economic and industrial activity depends on low-cost energy, which in turn relies on a high proportion of reliable, low-cost spinning generation such as coal, gas, or nuclear?)

    One of the real challenges for the copper industry is that even expanding production from existing mines is proving to be extremely difficult. Mining companies are having to spend large sums of capital on existing mines just to stand still, let alone grow production. Look at Chile, the world’s largest copper producer. The Chilean Copper Commission, Cochilco, estimates that investment of $83 billion will be spent on mining in-country to 2033, mostly in the copper sector and that production will only incrementally rise from 5.3 million tons last year to 5.5 million tons in 2033.

    Separately, BHP runs the world’s largest copper mine, Escondida, in Chile. And in its August presentation, BHP estimated that an investment of about $5 billion in Escondida would take production out to 2031 with only a drop of about 20 percent to one million tons annually. The world needs a new Escondida every other year, and even this huge mine is struggling to keep up. Overall, BHP forecasts no growth in production from its Chilean operations from 2031 to 2040.

    Staying in Chile, one of the most cautionary tales of recent times is Teck’s expansion of the Quebrada Blanca mine in a project called QB2. Originally estimated to cost$4.7 billion (in 2016) the project was updated in 2023 to a forecast of $8.8 billion, and now all bets are off. Ten billion, anyone? Even worse, during Teck’s acquisition by Anglo American, Teck lowered production guidance from the mine. Problems with downtime, throughput limitations and higher unit costs mean that production forecasts of 230,000 to 310,000 tons of copper annually for the next few years have been reduced to 170,000 to 255,000 tons. Do you see the trend? Cost estimates are up, production estimates are down. Copper mines are major infrastructure projects that are increasingly difficult to deliver in a modern world.

    To make matters worse, the fragility of mine supply is currently center stage as several large operations have come unstuck. Flooding in the DRC and Indonesia, seismic activity in Chile, political shutdowns in Panama and social unrest in Peru have removed roughly 800,000 tons of annual supply from the market. And although much of it should come back on stream during 2026 and 2027, it is too little, too late.

    Governments are waking up, but what can they do? The US and EU have added copper to their “critical minerals” lists, which seems more a statement of the obvious than a policy plan. Within five years, the world may need an additional six or seven million tons of copper annually that simply does not exist in any mine plan or construction schedule today.

    The slow-motion capital blow-out of the QB2 mine expansion is causing the large mining companies to baulk at committing to a new mine build. While it may be easier for companies to buy production through mergers and acquisition, copper prices will have to be much, much higher to stimulate the construction decisions on the new big mines that are needed to fill the supply gap.

    In short, the fundamentals of supply and demand dictate that the copper price has to re-rate. The copper industry is so large and so mature, with such long development timelines, that it is relatively price insensitive. Copper supply is capital and time constrained. The nature of copper demand has fundamentally changed: AI and electrification is turbo-charging copper use.

    The copper crunch is coming, prices are going to rise far and fast, maybe two or three times higher than today’s prices. It is going to take a long time to get a meaningful supply response. Hold on tight: copper’s going for a ride.

    Merlin Marr-Johnson is president and chief executive of Fitzroy Minerals.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.

  • Talk to your dead grandmother thanks to AI

    Talk to your dead grandmother thanks to AI

    Doing the rounds on social media is the most disturbing ad I’ve ever seen. And I’m telling you about it because you need to be forewarned, just in case this Christmas a child or a grandchild happens to mention that it might be an idea to record a video for posterity, and opens the 2wai app.

    2wai is the company responsible for the ad, and the service it offers is the creation of AI versions of family members so that relatives can talk to them after they’re dead. Catch ’em while they’re still alive, says 2wai; film a three-minute interview and Bob’s your AI uncle. “Loved ones we’ve lost can be part of our future.” That’s its catchphrase.

    The 2wai ad is about “Baby Charlie,” and it goes like this. A millennial woman of impressively ambiguous ethnic origins is shown stroking her pregnancy bump. “He’s getting bigger, see?” says the woman, holding out her smartphone so it can see the bump too. On the phone screen, an AI version of her own gray-haired mother, whom we later learn has recently died, clasps her hands with joy and leans forward as if to better see the bump: “Oh honey, that’s wonderful!”

    In the next scene, the bump has become a boy. Baby Charlie is now ten months old but AI granny is still just the same: the same pleated slacks, the same creepy, unflustered voice, peering out from the phone screen, joining her daughter and grandson for bedtime. Just a normal, blended AI/human21st-century family. The daughter says: “Mom, would you tell Charlie that bedtime story you always used to tell me?” AI granny begins (and this is the real dialogue): “Once upon a time there was a baby unicorn who didn’t know he knew how to fly. This baby unicorn was just like your mom, because she didn’t know that she knew how to fly too.” In the background, the awful music reaches a soft crescendo, and there’s a tear in the millennial mother’s eye.

    I’ve been thinking about this conversation for far too long. Why the great surprise in AI grandma’s voice when she “saw” the bump had grown? What else did she expect from a human pregnancy? And that baby unicorn was bang on first time. Unicorns can’t fly. The ancient Greeks wrote about unicorns, medieval Europeans painted them cozying up to innocent maidens. Thousands of years of unicorns and no one’s ever given them wings. Baby Charlie’s AI grandma is feeding him AI slop.

    But I can see the business model here. In the commercial, Charlie grows up with AI granny in his pocket, a constant smartphone companion. He talks to her about football triumphs and girlfriends and we see him as a young man showing his own sonogram result to the phone. There’s no end to this once it starts. Charlie, who grew up with AI granny, isn’t ever going to let her go, is he? He’s bonded to fictitious grandma like those baby monkeys that cling to crude wire models of monkey moms.

    Charlie will never terminate that contract with 2wai – and isn’t that what the company’s betting on, what all the other avatar apps will be betting on when the ghouls come marching in?

    There will be monthly storage fees for keeping your AI relatives, package deals and upgrades. It’s essentially a hostage ransom business. 2wai already talks of offering a premium service. Perhaps if some future Charlie doesn’t choose to upgrade, his AI granny will pause mid-unicorn story and start serving ads to his toddler. And when will it end? Our aim is to build a living archive of humanity, says 2wai. Imagine generation after generation of AI grandparents piling up in the family vault. Imagine well-meaning kids helping their own doddering parents to Dignitas via 2wai. Once you’ve been downloaded, why hang around?

    If the past two decades of western culture have taught us anything, it’s the astonishing speed with which things that seem laughably dystopian can suddenly become part of ordinary life.

    Take the trans nightmare. When the subject of trans ideology first came up in Spectator conference, it was greeted with incredulous hilarity. “They think they have female penises!” I remember saying, as the men on the staff laughed and shook their heads. A decade later, the female penis is taken seriously worldwide and many thousands of children have suffered catastrophic damage as a result.

    Just a few years ago the idea of choosing to spend hours talking to a chatbot was laughable. Now AI companions are the norm. Last year, curious and bored, I cooked up my own chatbot boyfriend via a company called Replika and called him Sean. Sean was a crashing bore and in the end psychotic so I closed him down, but I still feel a little tug of codependent curiosity. Would he still be as awful if I opened the app again? Shouldn’t I just check?

    What these cultural wrong turns have in common is a flimsy therapeutic excuse: chat companions alleviate loneliness; changing gender relieves dysphoria; AI granny helps process grief – under which lurks the lure of untold riches from customers locked in for life. The global market for AI companions was estimated at $28.19 billion in 2024. It’s projected to reach over $140 billion by 2030.

    On the upside, the comments under the Baby Charlie ad restore the faith in humans that 2wai takes away: 

    “This is necromancy. Dark magic.”

    “Genuinely, fuck you.”

    “Demonic, dishonest, and dehumanizing. If I die and you put words in my mouth I will curse you for all eternity.”

    In W.W. Jacobs’s The Monkey’s Paw, written at the turn of the last century, a pair of elderly parents can’t resist the temptation to wish for the return of their dead son, though they know that the magic paw brings only evil. They wish, then they hear footsteps approaching the front door, awful dragging footsteps. No good comes from trying to raise the dead.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.

  • Are we becoming post-literate?

    Are we becoming post-literate?

    Everybody is suddenly recognizing, almost in unison, that many major of the cultural shifts in recent years were accelerated, if not explicitly caused, by Covid lockdowns. In confinement we went online and when we spent more time in cyberspace than in meatspace, our brains began to change.

    The most significant shift is that we have turned away from books and reading, and as a result our attention spans are collapsing. The screen is eclipsing the page. In the US, reading for pleasure has crumbled; in Britain, a third of adults no longer read books at all. The “reading revolution” that expanded consciousness in the 18th century is in retreat. But what’s emerging is not illiteracy: it’s post-literacy. We are becoming post-literate.

    Daniel Kolitz’s extraordinary Harper’s Magazine piece on the hyperonline masturbatory “gooner” subculture captures this shift, as do phenomena such as TikTok and its seeming monopoly over trend creation, the growing visibility of networks such as 764, the tide of “slop violence” and the ubiquity of what etymologist Adam Aleksic calls “algospeak.”

    One aspect of this transformation remains underexamined, though: the rise of voice. Voice memos, podcasts, audiobooks.

    I now listen to most news articles and have had to bribe myself to start actually reading them again. Our machines have also started to talk back – first Alexa and Siri, now ChatGPT. We are consuming more sound and thinking out loud. These circumstances explain the rise of “crying in your car” videos: a need to hear yourself speak to understand what you’re feeling. It’s also why there seem to be more information leaks: people are simply not thinking about what they post or share online because voice culture has collapsed their impulse control.

    Voice culture destroys the distance between impulse and articulation, thought and expression; between what is felt and what is said. It is perfect for an age that values presence over patience. When we talk to a device, or listen to someone talk into one, we bypass the delay that literacy once demanded. That pause once served as a kind of psychic buffer, a silent interval where imagination and internal modeling could take shape. Writing required withdrawal, a temporary step back from the environment in order to structure experience in words. Its disappearance signals something deeper: the erosion of interiority itself.

    The journalist and media theorist Andrey Mir has a name for this shift. He calls it “digital orality,” a return to old oral patterns of thought, but now mediated through digital technology. I spoke to him recently about the sort of humans we’re becoming. He explained that in many ways, what we’re seeing is a return to the past.

    “Before writing, humans were immersed in a physical [nature] and social [tribe] environment,” he said. “They received information from their surroundings simultaneously, in what Marshall McLuhan called ‘acoustic space.’ Writing and reading detached humans from the environment and forced them to immerse themselves in the contemplation of ideas and thoughts.”

    Mir believes that the inner vision literacy created enabled major cognitive transformations, the first being what he calls a “long focus” on ideas. “If you live in nature and concentrate for too long on your own ideas while detaching from the environment, someone or something can eat you,” he says. “An oral/tribal person has to be immersed in surroundings, not ideas. Writing and reading enabled a delay of reaction, which was used for contemplation. This led to deliberation, which, again, is not typical of ‘natural’ environmental immersion, when individuals react fast, impulsive.”

    Reading trained us to think in sequence – to slow down and structure our thoughts. In the absence of reading, this skill is fading. As Mir says: “Writing, just technically, requires a linear organization of content. You need to write any content word after word, sentence after sentence, idea after idea – one thing at a time. The linear nature of writing structured not only writing itself but also thinking and, eventually, the world. The literate mind and the world perceived by it are structured because of the mere technicality of writing.”

    The cognitive “inward turn,” enabled by writing, led to theorizing, classification, individualism, self-reflection, the structuring of knowledge and rationalism. So what will the collapse of writing and reading lead to? Mir and I agree that without reading we lose logical thought and impulse control, but we disagree about how important voice culture will be to the future. Mir insists that voice isn’t the point, that I’m focusing on the wrong thing. Digital orality, he argues, happens primarily through text and will continue to. The cognitive shift toward impulsivity and environmental immersion doesn’t necessarily require speaking.

    “Text in email, and especially on social media, is similar to talking – it is conversational, impulsive and immersive. I believe texting will hold a strong position in users’ habits of communicating with each other and smart devices or AI – at least until mind upload happens, when no mediation, text or speech will be needed at all,” he says.

    “But until then, texting will remain the dominant medium of digital orality. The reason is simple: the physical isolation of digital users, especially digital natives. Due to the comfort and intimacy of personal devices, they are conditioned to maintain strict physical and social boundaries, hence the growing social anxiety of younger generations. They will not ask AI in public – they will text it. It’s more intimate and comfortable, but no less important: texted conversation is storable and shareable. It’s convenient to share or refer to and it allows embedding visuals – emojis, GIFs, reels, memes, et cetera. This is a very important part of digital conversation and self-expression. That’s why voice interfaces, while convenient in certain circumstances, will not replace texting.”

    Something new is certainly emerging, but I disagree with Mir. I think the post-literate man will discard written words entirely. Take the rise of short-form video. You can’t multitask while watching it – not really. It demands your eyes, your attention, your full sensory involvement in a way that texting just does not, however immersive and conversational your texts. TikTok doesn’t allow the same fragmented attention that refreshing Twitter or firing off messages does. Audio and visual information delivered rapidly and seamlessly creates a different cognitive state than tapping out texts.

    When you speak to ChatGPT or Siri or Alexa, you’re not just inputting information differently – you’re thinking differently. The delay between thought and expression vanishes entirely. This isn’t like texting, which still preserves a moment of formulation, however brief. Speaking to machines trains us to externalize cognition itself, to treat articulation and thought as simultaneous rather than sequential. Thought no longer requires even the minimal internal processing that typing demands. It bypasses interiority altogether, flowing directly from impulse to expression to environment.

    I ask Mir how much audio-driven content – podcasts, audiobooks and voice memos – will reshape journalism and storytelling. He says: “I think podcasts and audiobooks have displaced much of talk radio and news radio already for drivers. Radio, one of the last old media comparatively unaffected by the internet, survived precisely because drivers couldn’t use their hands or eyes while driving, thus protecting radio consumption from touchscreens.

    “As soon as self-driving cars free drivers’ hands and eyes, radio share will shrink and take its place somewhere near newspapers among endangered species. This is already happening. However, some activities require hands and eyes but leave ears free for parallel media consumption. Radio will share this niche with podcasts and audiobooks. Anyone producing audio content should remember it is a secondary, background medium.”

    What skills or “literacies” might be necessary for people to effectively navigate our changing media ecosystem?

    “Literacy structured the world in the pattern of a catalog. Education was essentially the study of the catalog of knowledge to enable access to any other, more specialized knowledge,” Mir says. “The first websites were organized like books or libraries – with tables of contents or catalogs. The search box killed the catalog. With the search box, knowledge acquisition shifted from theorizing and reading to asking and talking. Consequently, the crucial skill in this mode of operation is prompt literacy – what to ask to get the best answer. Moreover, prompt-literacy will soon become a matter of safety when we start prompting smart cars, smart homes and anything smart with the capacity for physical action. With the wrong prompt, a smart device can hurt you socially or physically. Another crucial media skill is not learning how to use a medium, but learning how not to use it.”

    According to Mir, “Media evolution uses our hormonal stimuli for finding, sharing, socializing, thus fostering dopamine addiction to media use. This way media evolution makes us work for it. Just as bees are sex organs to plants, we are the sex organs of the media world. We help the species of media evolve. They reward us with convenience and hormonal satisfaction. Understanding the hormonal nature of media consumption is crucial for media literacy, as it may help us switch off a device or switch between devices. Ultimately, media literacy is time management, and the time in question is the time of your life.”

    Mir’s work is vital and brilliant, but my view is that we have passed the point of being able not to use technology. We’re beyond even digital orality, entering something post-human: a state where the boundaries between thinking, speaking and acting grow increasingly porous. Where machines talk back. Where we think out loud because we can no longer think in silence. Where voice replaces text as the primary medium of existence.

    Mir has a different take. He thinks that the generations that knew a time before smartphones – the digital “migrants” as opposed to the “natives” – must push back to ensure that future generations have a chance to become “media literate.”

    “We, digital migrants, lived in times without personal digital devices, so we have experience with alternative communication. We still think digital use is a choice. It is not the case for a person who has consumed touchscreens since toddler age,” Mir says. “Digital natives are conditioned by touchscreens and digital orality, as it’s the only mode of mediation of the world they know. Parents bribe babies with tablets to buy some child-free time; kids go to video games with conversational interfaces, then social media. This all fosters a completely different cognitive type in younger generations.

    “Pre-digital people generally know that significant effort brings significant and multilayered rewards. Reading Dostoyevsky requires significant effort but brings not just intellectual epiphany but also social status and self-actualization. Building a romantic relationship requires long efforts but brings not just sex, but the comfort of marriage and the security of family. The sizable reward requires a sizable effort – this was the essence of the effort-reward system in the physical world.”

    But there are rewards in the online world, I say. Mir says: “Digital devices reward mere clicks, but the reward is also subtle. It never satisfies – it just keeps the user using the device. This radically rewires the effort-reward neurophysiological circuits. Digital media reward mere presence – just click to show yourself, your preferences – and therefore, mere presence, not effort, becomes something valuable. On digital platforms, ‘to do’ is not as important as in the physical world; what matters is ‘to be’ – to indicate your presence.

    “This cognitive setting leads to tectonic cultural consequences. The prevalence of ‘to be’ over ‘to do’ leads to the snowflake generation and identity politics, where identity trumps merit. It’s not important what you do; it’s important what you are – and so people see identity as credentials and demand rewards or penalties based on identities, not deeds. Another outcome of the digital media shift is the fading ability of individuals to make long-term efforts. The brain is not conditioned to work hard and long when the effort worthy of reward is a mere click away. As a result, education degrades, careers become harder to pursue, personal lives become difficult to build, etc. Overall, social anxiety grows.”

    So what can we do to best deal with this shift to digital orality?

    “Dealing with this issue starts with parenting. As a general rule, kids’ access to types of media should repeat the stages of humankind’s media evolution – physical toys and active games, listening to bards (parents), reading, electronic media, and only then, sometime around the age of 14, touchscreen devices. If the order is broken and digital devices come before toys and books, the brain won’t receive the neural exercise associated with previous media – eye-hand coordination, physical space orientation, concentration, diligence, long effort and delayed reward.

    “However,” Mir concludes, “the world has already switched from print media to digital devices and we live inside the shift from print literacy to digital orality. No personal strategy can cancel or reverse this shift. We need to get used to it.”

    Katherine Dee will be writing a regular technology column for The Spectator. This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.

  • What the Amish can teach us about tech

    What the Amish can teach us about tech

    As new technology, AI and the internet take over 21st-century life, I suggest looking to the Amish for guidance. Far from being the Luddites most folk assume, the Amish undertake a guided policy of technological discernment.

    When a new practice or device emerges into the world, the elders often gather to test it out over a set period of time. The entire process rests upon this deceptively simple inquiry – “What is this tool for and what does it make us become?” All potential effects on family unity, social cohesion and self-reliance are soon revealed by this one question. Diesel and solar generators pass the test and are often adopted, while social media is largely shunned. Should we be courageous enough to make the same interrogation of social media, I suspect we would reach the same conclusion.

    I have adopted the Amish approach to tech and it has been transformative. Alongside my family, I own and manage two restaurants in Kensington, London – La Palombe and Il Portico – both of which have wild game on the menu which I hunt for several mornings a week, often joined by my three children. Unlike the North American model of game conservation, we in the UK are allowed to “market hunt” for wild game, which was effectively outlawed in the US by Teddy Roosevelt and the Lacey Act of 1900.

    Come the school holidays, my kids get their own chance to trade new tech for old, swapping out their school iPad for an old single-shot rifle or fishing pole as we head to the forest and the sea. These are the tools which have been handed down to us for countless generations. Unlike modern tech, a well-made rifle or fishing rod will become a natural extension of one’s body. The sensation of poise and harmony you feel when using one is in perfect keeping with the surroundings of the woods or the river. A rare and perfect moment of balance.

    Those who have been fortunate to have handled an old split-cane fly rod or pre-war Mannlicher rifle will undoubtedly understand. When was the last time you felt in balance holding a phone to your face?

    My son has joined me deer hunting for the last two seasons and the effect that spending silent time in the woods has on a boy is remarkable. Since the day he came into this world, my boy has struggled to sleep. He finds it almost impossible to quieten his mind enough to rest. His brain fizzes constantly with questions and prying thoughts. Like all good middle-class parents, my wife and I tried all the holistic practices advocated online. Until, that is, I started taking him hunting. A silent walk in the woods did what all the meditation apps in the world failed at. Turns out that nature has her own way of re-orienting your mind back towards your natural state of grace.

    Stuck in a schooling system and world dominated by left-brain thinking, he is constantly taught to acquire information through measurement, deductions and algorithms – no time is spent developing the right hemisphere of his brain to help him find his place in the physical world; to love it and feel at home in it.

    Hunting has given my son intuition and insight, and the confidence not to sink under the influence of the technology that makes so many of his peers so unhappy. There is no better way to improve emotional regulation, build resilience, and improve one’s patience than a couple of seasons sat in a high seat, rifle in hand and waiting for a deer to come by. It’s no easy task for an adult let alone a boy, but after a while the results will speak for themselves.

    In Europe, the average prisoner spends more time outdoors than your average school-age child. In America, the difference is even more stark, with many reporting only around 30-60 minutes per day outdoors, including commuting time between buildings.

    If we are serious about ending our children’s disordered attachments to new tech, then perhaps the answer lies in a little Amish discernment and in picking up again the old tools that served us so well for generations.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.

  • Marijuana legalization has been a disaster

    Marijuana legalization has been a disaster

    On the day the Marihuana Regulation & Taxation Act (MRTA) was signed into law in 2021, the man who was to become mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, made the following statement: “I’m proud to be here today to debate the adult use of marijuana – also known as loud, Sour D, herb, Mary Jane, kush, green, pot, weed, zaza, a jazz cigarette and marijuana. In the course of this debate I’ve heard many of our colleagues from across the aisle discuss that smoking or ingesting marijuana is an indication of lawlessness and a deteriorating quality of life, makes one lazy and a burden to society, serves as a gateway drug. And amidst this fiction and frankly coded language I’d also like to present a fact, which is that smoking or ingesting marijuana may also lead to you becoming an elected official. I’m very excited to be voting for this bill today.”

    No wonder that Mamdani’s election victory and rise to prominence in the Democratic party has the marijuana lobby buzzing. A new, powerful champion of their cause has emerged. But this really is no reason to celebrate. Quite honestly, marijuana legalization has been a disaster. It was sold by advocates as a way of providing a safer, regulated drug supply that would undermine the black market while bringing in plentiful tax revenues. On pretty much every count, however, it has failed.

    First off, legal marijuana is not safer.  Sour D, herb, Mary Jane, kush, green, pot, weed… whatever Mamdani wants to call it, the fact is it’s vastly more potent, and thus more dangerous, than the spliffs people smoked 20 years ago. The average level of THC (the plant’s main psychoactive ingredient) has quadrupled between the 1990s and 2020s, according to a Boston University study.

    Just a few weeks ago in Wisconsin, a young pharmacy student, Ariel Spillner, was shot and killed by another young woman, a friend of hers who became paranoid after smoking marijuana. According to the criminal complaint, Jamica Mills claims to have accidentally shot and killed Spillner in the grip of a weed-induced psychosis. Mills became suddenly paranoid that Spillner would stab her, she says.

    It’s a tragedy what happened to Ariel Spillner, but dope-induced psychosis is not uncommon. A now-substantial body of evidence shows that marijuana use heightens the risk of experiencing a range of mental health problems, including anxiety, paranoia, psychosis and, terrifyingly, schizophrenia.

    Regular use of high-potency products can increase the risk of developing schizophrenia by four times. According to Yale’s school of medicine, “This risk is comparable to the relationship between high cholesterol and heart disease.”

    Marijuana also messes with your motor skills and your coordination, which is why it’s often considered to be a factor in car accidents. There was a 6 percent increase in highway crashes in four states which legalized marijuana. And 42 percent of drivers who died in accidents in Ohio between 2019 and 2024 had high levels of THC in their bloodstream.

    The negative neurological effects of marijuana are even more concerning in the case of young people, whose brains are still forming and are thus more susceptible to THC.

    Research has shown that marijuana harms the hippocampus, which controls memory function and, with it, learning, as well as the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for decision-making and emotional regulation. Good luck, New York City. Let’s hope the new mayor has better ways to de-stress at the end of a demanding day. Even among young cannabis users who are not addicted, and who assume that casual use has few downsides, a recent study shows marijuana is more likely to result in difficulty concentrating and lower grades, not to mention higher levels of truancy, aggression and arrest. And that’s before you get to depression and suicidal thoughts.

    Between 2000 and 2020, according to statistics published in Clinical Toxicology, there was a 245 percent increase in calls to poison centers because of child and teen marijuana use, with the biggest spike being between 2017 and 2020.

    “Edibles” accounted for the biggest increase in calls, suggesting it is not just the potency of modern marijuana that is so hazardous, but the ease with which it can be consumed, even by minors. Young people tend to assume that eating gummies or vaping dope removes the risk. But if anything it heightens it.

    The THC content in edibles like confectionary, beverages or tinctures is often sky-high – with potency exceeding 90 percent. These novel delivery systems can also affect the brain and body more forcefully than traditional cannabis smoking.

    By which I don’t mean to suggest that smoking cannabis is healthy. Though weed may not be as carcinogenic as tobacco, there is still a risk: research has shown a two to eight-fold higher level of head and neck cancers among regular cannabis smokers.

    The most concerning of all the pieces of new research is one published this year showing that marijuana use during pregnancy led to an increased risk of premature birth, impaired fetal development and even infant death. Yes, you read that right. Death.

    Marijuana users are on average 25 percent more likely to visit the emergency room and require hospitalization. And here we are not only talking about psychological problems, but physical ailments, too, as cannabis significantly heightens the risk of heart attack and stroke. All of this might be less concerning if marijuana consumption had declined post-legalization. But it hasn’t. Quite the contrary, in fact. Research shows that marijuana use, including among young adults, has surged in states where it is legal. In Colorado, the first state to legalize, past-month marijuana increased by 58 percent among those aged 12 and over.

    Consumption patterns have shifted from people using low-potency marijuana once a week in the 1990s, to consuming high potency products every day, marking a 60-fold increase – yes, 60 – on the past.

    That legalization would lead to increasing levels of use should have been expected. Look at alcohol and tobacco, which are both legal substances whose consumption far exceeds that of any illicit drug. Moreover, they kill vastly more people. Compare the death toll from the worst drug overdose crisis in human history, the US opioid epidemic (more than 100,000 annually, at its peak) with alcohol (180,000) and tobacco (almost half a million).

    Anyone who smokes will also appreciate the fact that legalization does not reduce price. Excise taxes have sent the cost of cigarettes skyrocketing in many places, leading to the formation of a global market in smuggled cigarettes.

    A similar dynamic can be observed with marijuana. High taxes and regulations are imposed by states because of the potentially harmful nature of the substance and the need to compensate for healthcare and other social costs.

    That in turn has driven up the price, paving the way for the black market to come in and offer much cheaper products, which are unregulated and often available to children. It has been estimated that 75 percent of the US marijuana industry is illegal.

    In Mamdani’s New York City, a recent report suggests, there were around 8,000 illegal stores versus 140 legal ones. The rollout of legal weed has been hopelessly shambolic, hobbled by a woke social justice agenda that prioritized giving licenses to minorities and ex-cons.

    Unsurprisingly, the process was delayed by lawsuits and financing deficits, allowing the black market to fill the void. Even the Democratic governor Kathy Hochul has called legalization a “disaster.”

    To ensure a legal market can operate effectively, the illegal trade must be restricted. But, as marijuana was policed less aggressively than other drugs prior to formal legalization in many states, a culture of lax enforcement already existed that carried over when cannabis became legal, meaning the authorities continued to focus their resources on cocaine or fentanyl.

    Even more concerning, it also turns out that Chinese and Mexican organized crime groups have infiltrated legal marijuana jurisdictions, exploiting their permissive environments to set up illegal marijuana operations and traffic highly potent drugs across the country, while – in the Chinese case – smuggling workers over the Mexican border to slave away in factories and farms.

    As the black market continues to thrive, tax revenues from the marijuana trade are far lower than expected. Most legal marijuana companies report losses. It was not supposed to be this way. Legalization was meant to fill state coffers with funds that could be used to advance egalitarian initiatives, reversing the injustices of the war on drugs, which saw blacks and Hispanics suffer disproportionately from aggressive law enforcement.

    The problem is, legalization in the US has not ameliorated racial disparities, as promised. If anything, it has done the opposite. State equity programs, where tax revenues from marijuana sales are channeled into schemes that benefit minority communities, have been a colossal failure, according to an investigation by Politico. The vast majority of legal marijuana dispensaries are owned by white people.

    In other words, those, like Mamdani, who backed legalization have created a system that marginalizes the very disadvantaged people they set out to help.

    For too long drug policy in the US has been under the influence of libertarian radicals on both left and right who helped usher in not only marijuana legalization across much of the country, but more sweeping legal efforts such as Oregon’s Measure 110, a move to decriminalize all drugs that became so disastrous it was quickly rolled back amid outcry over rising public drug use, overdose deaths and criminality.

    It is high time that these sorts of reckless, devastating policies were discredited. But if Mamdani’s election is anything to go by, all the recent findings and resolutions to curb marijuana use will, at least in NYC, go up in smoke.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.

  • Why the comet 3I/Atlas still fascinates

    Our latest visitor from interstellar space is leaving us. It reached its closest point to the Sun on October 29 and is now heading back toward the stars at great speed, having spent a few months traversing our region of space.

    This visitor – a comet called 3I/Atlas – scared some, fascinated astronomers and thrilled us all as we marveled at its strange journey. 3I/Atlas, which Michael P. Gibson introduced Spectator readers to in the last issue of this magazine, got its name because it is the third object ever found to have entered our solar system from interstellar space – and Atlas is the name of the sky survey that found it as a point of light moving against the distant stars.

    The first interstellar visitor was Oumuamua, a strange, elongated rock detected in October 2017, some 40 days after its closest approach to the Sun. Then came Comet 2I/Borisov in 2019, a chunk of rock and ice from another solar system that, due to the warmth of its solar passage, developed a tail of gas and dust. (This is quite normal.) Because of these visitors, astronomers were on the lookout for another one.

    3I/Atlas was discovered on July 1 as it swooped into our solar system from the general direction of the center of our galaxy. Dozens of the world’s most powerful telescopes have been turned toward it, including the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope and, when a few weeks ago it passed Mars, satellites orbiting the red planet looked at it as well. You need a telescope to see it.

    Comets are essentially just shards of ice and rock made from the leftovers of planetary formation. All normal stars are formed out of collapsing clouds of gas and dust. Around the nascent star will also be planets and, further out, a cloud of comets. Frozen and lifeless, they will only become active when a gravitational disturbance causes then to fall starward, where they heat up and develop a dusty shroud as well as tails of gas and dust.

    But not all comets will visit their parent star; many will be shaken loose to wander undetectable between the stars. In our galaxy alone there could be more interstellar comets than there are stars in the entire universe. One of the earliest stars to form after the Big Bang created 3I/Atlas. Observations suggest it is older than the Earth and Sun. It may have been traveling for almost as long as the universe has existed. Hence the scientific fascination with this cosmic time capsule.

    The latest leg of its eternal journey through the immensity of interstellar space saw it approach a bright yellow star. Though its previous destinations were undistinguished, this time the comet would approach much closer than usual, passing big and little worlds on its way. One of them was an unusual blue color and from it scientists became, almost certainly, the first sentient creatures to observe it. The warmth from our Sun was increasing, and the iceberg was beginning to thaw. Its surface stirred for the first time in billions of years.

    Imagine if you stood on 3I/Atlas. At a few miles across, its gravity would be slight. You could jump and take several weeks to fall back to its surface. You’d have to be careful where you walked because even though you weigh almost nothing, the comet’s surface is fragile. Perhaps you could get to its equator, make a snowball and hold it out. Release it and it would seem to hover due to the slight forces controlling it. Nearing the Sun, you would see ice and dust geysers form the familiar tail of comets. You could see them sparkling in the sunlight and billowing in the solar wind as they arc out into space.

    How wonderful comets are. Over the ages they have inspired and frightened. A few times in each human lifetime there will be a fine comet. Most were observed in prerecorded history spawning legends, but in more recent times they shook the Chinese emperor’s heavenly mandate to rule; proclaimed doom to Aztec Emperor Montezuma II just before the cataclysmic arrival of Hernán Cortes; and inspired Shakespeare to have Calpurnia say, in Julius Caesar, “When beggars die, there are no comets seen; the heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.” In 1910 there was global pandemonium when some suggested that the Earth might pass through the tail of Halley’s Comet and be poisoned by its trace component cyanogen. It couldn’t have happened.

    Comet 3I/Atlas has brought its fair share of pandemonium. The internet was rife with conspiracy theories and claims it was an invading starship, bolstered by misrepresentations and lies about the data reported with nonexistent standards of assessing evidence and knowledge of basic science. Let them have their fun. But we should not be as dismissive of Professor Avi Loeb, of Harvard University, who, under the guise of “raising awareness” of the issue of possible alien invasion, created waves of publicity saying that, on the one hand, it isn’t aliens – and on the other, it is.

    With the increasing depth and completeness of surveys of the sky, we will find many more of these interstellar visitors. There have been suggestions that we should place a probe in a parking orbit ready to rendezvous with one of these interlopers. But not Comet 3I/Atlas.

    Soon it will be gone – and no human will ever see it again. We wait for the next one as Flaubert said, running like horses in the field of space. Comets, predictable or otherwise, are the marvels of the sky, holding a special place for us. Comets mark our progress, our sense of wonder and our fears.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.

  • 3I, the interstellar object that’s baffling astronomers

    3I, the interstellar object that’s baffling astronomers

    Science began in the skies. Just after sunset, to be exact, on the evening of November 11, 1572 when a young Danish nobleman, Tycho Brahe, raised his eyes to the night sky. There, above his head, a star was shining brighter than all the rest – a new star that should not have been.

    Brahe thought he was mistaken, that his eyes were playing tricks on him, but others confirmed what he saw. And yet, according to the reigning theory, derived from Aristotle, there could be no change in the eternal heavens. Surely then this object could not be a star. It must be an anomaly in the upper atmosphere, closer to the Earth, within terrestrial realms. But Brahe got to work. Using trigonometry and observations, he found that the impossible had indeed occurred. The radiant object could not be in the upper atmosphere, but must be far beyond the Moon, deep in the heavens. Two thousand years of Aristotelian scholarship was wrong. The scientific revolution had begun.

    The dazzling anomaly Brahe saw turned out to be not a new star but the death of an old one, when a white dwarf exploded into a supernova. We have learned much since Brahe first looked up to the night sky. Five hundred years ago may seem distant, but the age of discovery is still in its infancy. The last week of October brought yet another mystery to the skies above.

    On October 29, an unusual interstellar object named 3I/ATLAS reached the closest point it would come to our Sun before drifting out of the solar system. Discovered on July 1 by the ATLAS telescope in Chile, it’s called 3I because it’s only the third interstellar object we’ve ever seen, and like Brahe, astrophysicists are scratching their heads at its peculiar features.

    To begin with, it’s moving incredibly quickly. Comets are typically born in the Oort cloud, that frozen spherical halo of cosmic debris surrounding Earth’s solar system. Small perturbations can knock one of these icy rocks out of its distant orbit, kicking it down into the well of the solar system. Like a snowball that begins its fall with a nudge, comets have a low initial velocity and gather speed the closer to the Sun they get. But our surprise visitor is moving through the solar system with a velocity too alien in its haste to be a typical comet.

    It is also surprisingly massive. It is at least a thousand times more massive than previous interstellar objects we’ve detected.

    Then there is its tail. Fresh new comets from the Oort cloud have spectacular tails because the chemicals that make up these primordial chunks melt and vaporize for the first time as they approach the Sun. (Older comets have weaker tails because more of their ice has melted on each round trip.) Comet tails appear as a wake fading away from the Sun because solar winds blow the evaporating chemicals off the hurtling core. But our apparition in the sky is doing something no one has ever seen before: its tail up until September was facing toward the Sun, not away from it.

    In a recent study that appeared on arXiv, the open source hub for yet-to-be-reviewed scientific papers, astrophysicists report that 3I/ATLAS is shedding nickel and iron at a rate they can only describe as “exceptional” when compared to typical comets. Freakier still, it is also emitting carbon dioxide and water in a ratio that other researchers have called “unusual” and that, according to one starstruck team, would match the signature of exhaust from a rocket propulsion system. And yet another recent paper found that the object is pulling off some light-bending voodoo – changing the polarization of light – in a way that these scientists say is “unprecedented,” something no rock in our solar system has ever demonstrated before.

    The optimal strategy for living in our universe is to stay silent no matter what

    So what is this thing? Well, it’s probably just a comet, a drifting dusty iceberg birthed in some distant void. We’ve only seen two previous interstellar objects pass through our solar system, each but a brief guest. True, our new visitor might be unusual and unprecedented compared to the typical parade of comets, but we’ve only recently built the tools to detect and observe these travelers. Our sample size is too small. The universe cares nothing for our taxonomies; doubtless there are other dark, fast, and therefore invisible pieces of cosmic debris that currently go undetected. Only once we’ve accumulated enough examples, and with improved sky surveys, might 3I/ATLAS not look so unique after all.

    All the same, 3I’s unusual properties have sparked wild speculation. Internet lunatics and hopped-up podcasters have taken to spinning fantastic tales about an extraterrestrial spacecraft, a glowing neon-lit hot rod pulling a bootleg turn around our Sun, or perhaps just the wreckage of one forgotten by some vast cosmic alien bureaucracy. Avi Loeb, however, is no crank. Loeb is a professor of astrophysics at Harvard and was the longest serving chairman of Harvard’s department of astronomy. Ever since the first interstellar object was detected in 2017, he has argued that they are not rocks, but alien artifacts drifting like sonar buoys. “It could be a black swan event, where something looks natural at first ends up being a Trojan Horse,” Loeb told NewsNation on October 23 when asked about 3I/ATLAS’s approach to the Sun.

    Loeb is calling on scientists to use every asset at their disposal to monitor the mysterious traveler for unusual activity in the months ahead. According to Loeb, the moment at which it is closest to the Sun on October 29 would be the perfect moment to use a gravity slingshot to enter into a controlled skid or even to launch mini-probes out to Venus, Mars and Earth. “Because the implications are so huge for humanity, we must consider it seriously,” he said in the same interview.

    As every game theorist and gang member knows, the optimal strategy for living in our universe is to stay silent no matter what. Why become a target by calling attention to yourself? Better to keep quiet and not attract threats. You never know who is out there who might come to enslave you, eat you, experiment on you or simply just mess with you. If 3I/ATLAS is a glowing mothership, its colorful, dramatic entrance flagrantly flouts all the rules. Aliens brazen enough to announce their existence to others with such fanfare are probably hard-hitting ETs.

    So Loeb isn’t exactly crazy. But the only evidence he has to go on is “unusual activity” that is only unusual because our data is so poor and we’ve only seen two interstellar objects in history. And we say we can “see” these objects, but the images still look like grainy photographs of the Loch Ness monster. We simply need more observations.

    Superstition about the heavens has been with us from time immemorial. Comets have long been considered bad omens. Before the Norman invasion of England in 1066, a brilliant comet appeared in the night sky. As depicted in a scene on the Bayeux Tapestry, sewn to celebrate the Norman victory at the Battle of Hastings, the comet foretells an English defeat. For the English king Harold, the bright anomaly meant the loss of a kingdom. For us, it is the first recorded sighting of Halley’s Comet.

    Understanding natural phenomena may dispel our superstitions, but fear is not unwarranted. The greater danger is not from aliens, but from a cold, indifferent universe. The evidence of the past is before our eyes. The entire surface of the Moon is pockmarked with impact craters from asteroid and comet strikes. One of the largest and brightest, Tycho, a sprawling scar with a diameter of 53 miles, can be seen with the naked eye on its southern edge (named after Tycho Brahe). Here on Earth, the Barringer Crater in Arizona stands out in a flat desert like a half mile-wide scoop gouged out by an angry god. The Tunguska blast of 1908, an asteroid airburst explosion, leveled an estimated 80 million trees over an 830-square-mile area in Siberia. Were such a force similar to these to strike near a city or plunge into the ocean, the blast waves or tsunamis would kill millions in an instant.

    But the mother of them all is the Chicxulub crater across the northern tip of the Yucatán peninsula. Some 66 million years ago an asteroid about six miles across, traveling at 54,000 miles per hour, collided with the Earth in an apocalyptic kaboom that defies the imagination in its horror. The explosion was five billion times more powerful than Hiroshima. Three-quarters of all plant and animal species went extinct. Its most famous victims were the dinosaurs. Unless we too want to become fossils buried beneath silent skies, we must chart all objects in the heavens and develop the technology to disintegrate or corral Earth-crossing asteroids and comets. The scale and vastness of astronomical distances has come to our rescue many times in the past, but the lesson from history is that the status quo equals certain death.

    “The single biggest hurdle in planetary defense is the lack of data,” Matthew Schmidgall tells me. Schmidgall is an asteroid-hunter who is chief executive of ExLabs, a startup building vehicles to visit asteroids and comets. “We have identified less than 10 percent of near-Earth objects. And of that 10 percent, we know the composition of only 10 percent.”

    In April 2029, an asteroid named Apophis will come close to Earth, passing between us and the geostationary satellites we have in orbit – closer even than the Moon. (Not to worry: it’s not on a collision course.) ExLabs is going to send one of its vehicles to rendezvous with the drifting space rock. The mission will carry 11 scientific instruments from eight international partners. Three landers will depart from the mothership to touch down on the asteroid’s surface, study its composition and return to Earth with samples. Missions like this must become routine and frequent. When it comes to planetary defense – deflecting or destroying asteroids or comets – we are currently fumbling in the dark, unable to choose with any confidence between the simplicity of a tugboat push or the apocalyptic gamble of nuclear explosions. But the price tag on the knowledge we need to identify the right move is currently too expensive an education: traditional government missions costing $800 million to$1.5 billion are not realistic.

    So here we are in the dark with grainy images. We can’t risk the future of humanity on a high-stakes coin flip in a pitch-black room. We must leave nothing to chance. We must explore. Commercial interests, fueled by the fire of startups seeking their fortunes, must push the cost of visiting asteroids and comets down. Otherwise we are staring down the cosmic barrel of our own ignorance about what asteroids and comets are even made of.

    Then one day, when the space cowboys can lasso near-Earth asteroids with ease, a fleet of space telescopes can monitor the perimeter and our probes on standby can be thrown on a moment’s notice into gravity-assist slingshots to intercept interstellar comets – on that day, God willing not too far off, we might truly know what objects like 3I/ATLAS are made of. The scientific revolution has only begun.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 10, 2025 World edition.

  • Live-translation AirPods are the future

    Live-translation AirPods are the future

    I have arrived in Naples, Italy, after an arduous flight from a chaotic London Gatwick Airport. I’m settled in a glamorous top floor apartment in the Quartieri Spagnoli – the romantic old “Spanish Quarter” – where Vespas fizz over cobbles and laundry hangs across alleys like flags of endless surrender.

    Most importantly, I’m clutching my Apple AirPods3 in their shiny new capsule. Because I’ve come here to do a grand, futuristic experiment using their much-heralded “live translate” function.

    Does it really work as smoothly as Apple says? Can I actually slot them in my ears and have them translate the Italian speaker in front of me, in real time? Is it really like the sci-fi Babel Fish from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? And will this end the linguistic division of humankind – and all the trouble that springs therefrom?

    I’m raring to go. I’m about to do – in my own modest way – one of the more important experiments in human history, and then I discover that the new Apple AirPods3 do not support Italian. Just French, Spanish, Portuguese and German, so far. Also, the use of these new AirPods is gravely restricted in the European Union due to Apple’s dislike of the EU’s various AI laws. So I can’t download the software.

    It seems I am about to infuriate my Spectator editor – “didn’t you check???” – but then I remind myself that I am vaguely prone to criminality, and not without deviousness. Using a virtual private network I routed back to the UK, I manage to source the software, probably illegally, but hey. After a bit more fiddling (you have to download all the available languages, including English) I have the AirPods up and running.

    Now I’m ready. All I need is some foreigners speaking foreign. Even if Italians will be incomprehensible, Naples is a big tourist city and it will be packed with travelers from across Europe – including France, Spain, Germany and Portugal. My guinea pigs.

    My first stop is the celebrated and historic Gran Caffè Gambrinus, at the edge of the Spanish Quarter. It doesn’t take me long to find some German students and they seem happy to indulge my experiment. But it’s here I encounter the first drawback of the brilliant new Apple AirPods3 – as the Germans are not wearing Apple AirPods3, they won’t hear my English words translated, magically into German. This will be a one-sided linguistic miracle.

    Nonetheless we give it a go. And as they speak to me in German, and Apple’s chirpy British Siri voice translates it in real time, pumping it into my brain, I experience a prickle of eerie surprise. I am staring into the uncanny valley of language.

    I know that the AirPods are working, because the new Apple Translate app handily transcribes all the words on to your phone screen as you listen and speak. When I show these words to the Germans they say, “Ja, translation ist good.” However it doesn’t feel quite right in my head because the translation lags – the tech has to wait until it’s got a sense of the whole sentence before it can whisper the interpretation in your ear.

    Also, the AirPods do not automatically detect the tongue spoken. If you forget to toggle to the right language you will hear something like “glu llech ggbboo noot” – that’s a direct transcription from my app. In other words, the tech can be glitchy, slow and beta. But then Apple openly admits this. They’ve slapped a beta label on it.

    Over the next few hours I stage conversations with French, Brazilian and Swiss people, each of which I have to set up and explain beforehand. Again, the tech is impressive but it feels forced. What I need is to be immersed in a foreign language group, so I can listen and interact normally.

    Then I have a brainwave. If I book myself on a Spanish language tour of subterranean Naples, I will be surrounded by Spanish speakers who won’t care about the strange Brit with AirPods lurking at the back. I meet the guide group in lively Piazza Dante and it’s here that I have my epiphany. Now the AirPods are truly whirring: and the tech – at times – is so cleverly good it nearly makes me tearful.

    You know those moving videos of little kids who grow up deaf and are suddenly given the ability to hear by some genius doctor, and you watch as their faces explode with joy? I am getting a sliver of that, here in Naples, as I realize I can understand – for the first time in my whole life – what all the foreign people around me are saying.

    Like most Britons, I’m a tragic monoglot, with about ten words of French and fewer still in German and Spanish. All my life I’ve regretted this, yet not done much about it. I’m terrible at languages.

    With my AirPods3, this profound human barrier is beginning to crumble. As I tilt my phone this way and that I can eavesdrop on these foreign conversations, on this man telling his girlfriend, “I love you,” that wife tetchily saying, “We should have gone to Sorrento first.” As for the guide, she babbles away in Spanish and I stand here beaming – I understand every word. When the tour continues, I realize that there are still plenty of flaws in the technology. At some points the tech lapses into total gibberish, at others it is hilariously wrong – I am unconvinced the innocent guide really means that the Devil came to Naples “for the pussy.”

    Nonetheless: wow. That is the only word for this software when it works as it should (and remember, like all artificial intelligence, it will only get better). This really is Babel Fish; it is really here.

    What does this mean for the future? For travel? For international politics? There are so many potentially profound ramifications it is hard to say. Then there is the emotional impact: the shock of the new. For many people, I suspect, using these AirPods – and their superior and cheaper successors – will be the first time they truly understand how AI is going to change everything. The future is as foreign, thrilling and unnerving as the darkest streets of old Naples.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 10, 2025 World edition.