About seven years ago, I took a girl out for a drink. Unbelievable, I know.

After discussions about the reproductive habits of certain popes, the resemblance of people we knew to the popes in question, the literary ambitions of the small magazine she’d just founded, and the most optimal finger exercises for a modern guitar player, the conversation moved on to matters political. She asked me a question that has stuck with me ever since.

No run-up, no back-lift; there it was. It’s a fascinating question, largely by dint of the fact that people ask it in the utmost seriousness and as though its premises were a matter of fact, and because they feel that they can ask it, and because I suspect many of the people who ask it so probably feel that they are doing something admirable. But it’s most fascinating of all because, like all silly questions, it’s hard to answer.

If you’ve been alive to the war of dialectics currently playing itself out in the West, you have seen a dynamic like this play out a thousand times.

In it, you have two people. Let’s say you’re watching it play out in Britain, so that on one side you have someone who does not feel fondly for Britain, though they are British itself. Sometimes these people conform to what you might consider the description of a ‘leftist’, though it’s much more exact to call them a member of the Metropolitan class.

On the other side, you have someone who considers themselves a patriot. I deliberately do not describe the latter as necessarily of a rightward leaning, because in my experience patriots can come reasonably from either side of the aisle, though courtesy of the greatest tendencies of conformity among the left the right-leaning ones are probably the more typically voluble these days.

In essaying Britain’s current condition, the Met will arrive at a point in their argument where they’ll claim that Britain, and its culture, doesn’t really exist at all. That Britain has no culture, no history worth defending; nothing about it worth esteeming, owning, remembering, redeeming, or taking pride in. Then the patriotic voice answers, hotly and at volume, that they disagree.

The remarkable thing about this is that, often, both sides then realise they cannot say much, beyond Shakespeare and the war and PG Tips, as to what British culture is really constituted by. Of course, the patriots know a bit more, because they’re interested to know more, but the exchange is never settled. It resolves to an inconclusive silence and stalemate.

This silence is the most serious thing wrong with Britain in 2026. Beneath considerations of policy failures and political incompetence and the slow putrefaction of every public institution in the country is buried proof of a quieter, more corrosive failure: we have forgotten, in the simplest sense, who we are.

There is an inability among the British people - who are among the most naturally and winningly modest in the world - to articulate what their own civilisation has been, and is, and could yet be. We have lost our cultural sense of self. We have mislaid the inventory. So I plan to start a list.

A list essaying everything great which could be said to fall reasonably within the bounds of the British cultural heritage; what the British have created, discovered, meaningfully adapted, or somehow made definitive.

You will have heard almost every number on it before. It goes like this:

• The novel as a literary form. Science fiction. Children's literature as a serious form: Carroll, Stevenson, Potter, Milne, Tolkien, Lewis, Dahl.

• The dictionary as a cultural project. The King James Bible, which gave the English-speaking world the prose architecture it has used ever since.

• The discovery of how the heavens move, the composition of light, and the laws of motion (Newton). The structure of DNA (Crick, Franklin, Wilkins, working with Watson at King's College and Cambridge). The discovery of penicillin (Fleming, Florey, Chain). The vaccination of mankind against smallpox (Jenner). The invention of antiseptic surgery (Lister). The discovery that cholera came from water (Snow, the Broad Street pump). The marine chronometer that solved the longitude problem (Harrison). The first hospital nursing school (Nightingale). Modern epidemiology. Modern statistics. The randomised controlled trial.

• The steam engine. The locomotive. The railway. The factory system. The Industrial Revolution, the great miracle of mankind, originated here, not in some abstract elsewhere, but in Coalbrookdale and Cromford and Manchester and the Black Country.

• The jet engine. The hovercraft. The Spitfire. The Harrier. Radar. The cavity magnetron, without which radar at scale is impossible. The Bombe and Colossus, the world's first programmable electronic computers. The stored-program computer in hardware (Manchester Baby, 1948). The ARM chip, the architecture inside almost every smartphone on Earth. The World Wide Web itself, given freely to mankind by Tim Berners-Lee, a British civil servant's son working at CERN.

• Football, association and rugby. Cricket, codified at Lord's. Tennis. Boxing. Golf. Snooker. Polo, codified by the British in India. The Olympic revival, partly inspired by the Wenlock Olympian Games of Shropshire. The marathon distance of 26 miles 385 yards, set at the 1908 London Olympics and exported to the world.

• The Magna Carta. Habeas corpus. Trial by jury. The Mother of All Parliaments. The Loyal Opposition as a constitutional concept. The abolition of the slave trade, paid for in blood and glory by the West Africa Squadron of the Royal Navy through the nineteenth century. The Statute of Anne, 1710, the first copyright law in the world. The Statute of Monopolies, 1624, the foundation of the modern patent system. The first national topographic map (Ordnance Survey). Greenwich Mean Time. The Prime Meridian. The first daily newspaper. The first scientific journal. The Royal Society itself.

• The English landscape garden, exported across Europe. The Georgian terrace. The garden city. The joint stock company. Lloyd's of London. The Bank of England, the model for every central bank that has followed.

• The Beatles. The Rolling Stones. Pink Floyd. Bowie. Queen. Iron Maiden. The Clash. Drum and bass. Jungle. The BBC, exported as a model of public broadcasting to the world. The Beck Tube Map, copied by every transit system on the planet. The red phone box. The Routemaster. The black cab.
  

Yes, that is just the start of my list.

And to be more specific, this, what you have in your unreal and proverbial hand, is the start of my list. An inventory of British culture, fit for the denizens of the year 5000 to read on the closing stages of an interstellar long-haul when they wish to find out more about this funny little island civilisation and the belief-beggaring inventory of achievement it contributed to the legacy of the human race.

This is who we are, and this is our culture.

What Is British Culture? Pt.1: Mathematics, Logic, & Statistics

1. Logarithms (Napier, Briggs)

2. The slide rule (Oughtred)

3. The calculus, or method of fluxions (Newton)

4. The geometric idiom of the Principia (Newton)

5. The first proper life table (Halley)

6. Modern actuarial science (Dodson; Equitable Life, 1762)

7. Bayes’ theorem

8. Quaternions and non-commutative algebra (Hamilton)

9. The algebra of relations and De Morgan’s laws

10. Boolean algebra (Boole)

11. Regression to the mean and the correlation coefficient (Galton)

12. The first weather chart, and the anticyclone (Galton)

13. Modern fingerprint identification (Galton)

14. Psychometrics (Galton)

15. Eugenics, with attendant moral reckoning (Galton)

16. The chi-squared test and biometrics (Pearson)

17. Student’s t-test (Gosset)

18. The polar area diagram (Nightingale)

19. Analysis of variance, design of experiments, the modern randomised controlled trial, and maximum likelihood (Fisher)

20. Principia Mathematica (Russell, Whitehead)

21. Russell’s paradox and the theory of types

22. The Turing machine, the halting problem, and computability (Turing)

23. Operational research (Blackett)

24. Mass Observation (Harrisson, Madge)

25. The Anglophone tradition of philosophical logic (Ayer, Strawson, Dummett)

It is a peculiar fact about Britain that, for a country whose intellectual temperament has tended to distrust grand system-building, it has produced a disproportionate share of the formal apparatus by which the modern world thinks. The calculus; invented twice, once in England. The laws of probabilistic inference and the architecture of statistical reasoning. The symbolic logic that underwrites computer science. The very idea of a machine that can compute the computable. Appropriately for a nation which, even in its time of great-self-forgetting, would find its legacy principally defined by the rail, these concepts are themselves the rails on which much of contemporary intellectual life runs; and they were laid, in disproportionate numbers, by Britons who tended, according to ingrained British wont, to insist they were doing something practical rather than something profound.

The pattern is consistent enough to be recognisable as a national style. The Britons who shaped these formal systems tended not to come at them by way of metaphysics, in pursuit of the architecture of all possible knowledge, but sideways, in the course of trying to solve a particular, sometimes trivial-seeming problem at hand. A tide that needed predicting; a fortune that needed assuring; fanciable wheat fields that needed a system for their side-by-side comparison; a code that needed breaking. The continental philosopher asked what must be true of reason itself, where the British formaliser asked, with a characteristic obliqueness, what tools would let one calculate this, count that, and infer this other thing with the appropriate amount of confidence. The continental produced vast rationalist systems, while the island formaliser built a piecemeal understanding of the world that proved to have a vast, and compounding, utility. From this resolutely instrumental, problem-driven posture there issued, almost as a by-product, formal frameworks of breathtaking generality and durability. There is something to be said about the peculiar productivity of the British distrust of system, and it is the burden of this first of our essays to say it.

For a country that would later turn navigation into an empire, it could hardly begin anywhere but with logarithms. In 1614, John Napier, the laird of Merchiston, published a small Latin treatise called Mirifici Logarithmorum Canonis Descriptio, in which he demonstrated that the laborious multiplications and divisions on which sixteenth-century astronomy and surveying depended could be reduced, by a clever inversion, to mere addition and subtraction. The advance was immediately recognised; Henry Briggs, the first Savilian Professor of Geometry at Oxford, made the journey to Edinburgh to confer with Napier, and over the following years refined the system into the base-ten logarithms still in use. The slide rule, which Oughtred put together in the 1620s, simply mechanised the principle. Clerical triumphs, a method for reducing tedium and sharpening accuracy. And yet the consequences for the working out of the world were enormous: every navigator, every surveyor, every astronomer for the next three centuries did their arithmetic on the back of Napier's invention, and the very idea that abstract computation could be offloaded to a procedural device, a machinery that thinks for you, has been with us — and with everyone — ever since.

The deeper move came from Cambridge half a century later. Isaac Newton's contribution to mathematics was not, in fact, the reflecting telescope or the laws of motion, magnificent as those were. It was calculus, the body of techniques for handling change and accumulation that he called the method of fluxions. Newton developed it in his early twenties during the plague years of 1665 and 1666, working at his mother's house at Woolsthorpe, and, with an indifference to the printer not uncharacteristic of the gentleman scholars of his age, failed to publish it for decades. By the time he did, Leibniz had arrived at much the same body of methods independently and from a different direction, The resulting priority dispute would consume both Royal Society politics and Newton's later years.

The two formulations were, in their formal essence, the same; the world adopted Leibniz's notation, with its dx and dy, because it was easier to manipulate, while keeping Newton's name attached to the underlying claim. This much is well-rehearsed. What is less often noticed is the deeper temperamental signature of Newton's choice to write the Principia, his great work on the laws of motion and universal gravitation, in the geometric idiom of Euclid and Apollonius rather than in the calculus he himself had invented. He could have shown the world the new instrument that explained the old one. Instead, he reached back through two thousand years and presented his theory of the cosmos as if Greek geometry had always known it. This dressing-up of the new in the manner of the old is another recognisably British behavioural norm, a practiced, and almost ostentatious, refusal to make a fuss about one's novelty. The result was a book of dazzling expository difficulty and lasting epistemic prestige, in which the most radical mathematics of its century walked on stage in classical costume. It also shores up another notable, if ultimately rarely noted, aspect of British culture, which is that it is, along Florence and ____, one of the great protectors of classicism, one of the hallowed few civilisations that guarantees our access to the classical world, a consciousness of the past common to all the great civilisations.

The 18th century brought a different kind of formalism, one that emerged from the contemplation of fortune rather than of motion. The British, growing rich on trade and seafaring, developed an unusual practical interest in the mathematics of uncertainty, and the institutions to put it to work. Edmond Halley is more often remembered for his comet, but in 1693 he was busy compiling from the burial registers of Breslau the first proper life table, demonstrating that human mortality, though unknowable in the individual case, was tractable in the aggregate. Later, in 1762, and drawing on the actuarial work of James Dodson, the Society for Equitable Assurances on Lives and Survivorships was founded in London, the first life insurance company in the world to set its premiums by reference to the calculated probabilities of death across a representative population. The instrument was insurance; the underlying claim was that the future, in its statistical shape, was knowable.

And then the most profound issue of the era arrived, as so often, through the side door. A Presbyterian minister in Tunbridge Wells called Thomas Bayes, who died without publishing his work - a carelessness that seems somewhat uniquely present in Britons, and not restricted to men of science, either - and whose paper was sent to the Royal Society in 1763 by his friend Richard Price, had developed a formal account of how a rational agent ought to revise her beliefs in the light of new evidence. Bayes' theorem would lie largely dormant for a century and a half before becoming, in the 20th, the central engine of statistical inference and now the language of much of artificial intelligence. He was not attempting any of this. He was, by his own lights, contributing to a contemporary debate about the existence of God.

The Victorian period saw the British intellectual estate undertake the most ambitious stage yet of its mathematical culturemongery: the mathematisation of logic itself. In 1843, walking with his wife along the Royal Canal in Dublin, William Rowan Hamilton, having failed for years to extend complex numbers from the plane into three dimensions, was struck by an answer in a flash and carved the resulting equations into the stonework of Brougham Bridge. His quaternions broke the unspoken assumption that multiplication must be commutative, opening the door to whole new families of abstract algebra. The practical applications of his moment of genius, in the form of three-dimensional rotations for computer graphics and quantum mechanics, would not arrive for over a century. In 1847, Augustus De Morgan, professor of mathematics at University College London, set out the laws of negation and the calculus of relations that bear his name, gluing logic to algebra in a way that the medieval syllogisers had not. And in 1854, the self-taught son of a Lincoln shoemaker, George Boole, by then professor of mathematics at Queen's College, Cork, published An Investigation of the Laws of Thought, in which the rules of valid inference were rendered as the manipulation of symbols, and the symbols obeyed an algebra. Boolean algebra was, on its surface, an attempt to put Aristotle on a more rigorous footing. Beneath the surface, it was the language in which the hardly-conceivable computers of the future would come to think.

Statistics as a discipline, in the form we now use, was largely a British invention of the Victorian period. At its centre stood Francis Galton, half-cousin of Charles Darwin; a gentleman of independent means, and a polymath of the kind later centuries have found it hard to reproduce. From a study in London, Galton applied himself to a startling range of problems: he produced the first usable weather chart and coined the word "anticyclone". He established the modern science of fingerprint identification, soon adopted by police forces worldwide. He founded psychometrics. And, in the course of breeding sweet peas to study how characteristics passed between generations, he stumbled upon two of the deepest concepts in modern statistics: the phenomenon of the regression to the mean and the correlation coefficient. Galton was also, it must be said, the founder of eugenics, a word and a programme he gave to a century that would put it to monstrous use; and any honest accounting of his legacy has to hold both his statistical inventions and his eugenic ambitions in view. The two were not, in his own thought, easily separable. He believed, in the manner of his confident Victorian generation, that one could measure anything; and the willingness to count and classify human beings was, for him, of a piece with the willingness to count and classify rainfall and stars. Perhaps an English mildness inured him from anticipating the uses for which this particular doctrine would be employed; perhaps it was hard to imagine regardless of nature. The methods he forged in the pursuit of that wider classification programme, however, vastly outlasted the programme itself. Without Galton there is no Pearson, no Fisher, and no modern social science.

The Cambridge logicians of the early twentieth century were different. They seemed, for once, to be playing the continental game on its own terms. Bertrand Russell - who had come to logic by way of his exasperation with the loose and inexact reasoning of Victorian idealism - and Alfred North Whitehead, his Cambridge tutor and collaborator, set themselves the most ambitious task an Anglophone philosopher had ever attempted: to derive the whole of mathematics, line by formal line, from a small handful of purely logical axioms. Principia Mathematica, the three vast volumes they published between 1910 and 1913, took several hundred pages to prove that 1 + 1 = 2. The project was undertaken in the wake of Russell's own discovery, in 1901, of a paradox lurking in Frege's foundational system, a paradox that threatened the entire reduction of mathematics to logic; and the elaborate theory of types Russell built to defuse it remains, in modified form, the basis of how modern programming languages structure data. This grand foundationalist ambition, among the most towering attempted acts in all of mathematics, would not survive Gödel's incompleteness theorems of 1931, which showed that no such project could ever be completed in principle. But the formal apparatus did survive, and it became, across the twentieth century, the working language of analytic philosophy, computer science, and mathematical logic itself. The British, having for once attempted a continental system, ended up bequeathing not the system but the tools, which, characteristically, proved more durable than the system could ever have hoped to be.

But the most consequential work of British mathematical logic was done by a young Cambridge fellow in 1936, in answer to a question posed by the German mathematician David Hilbert. Hilbert had asked, with characteristic continental ambition, whether there existed a procedure that could decide, for any given mathematical statement, whether it was true or false. Alan Turing’s answer was that there was no such procedure, and that the very notion of a “procedure” needed first to be made formally precise. To make it precise, Turing invented a machine. The Turing machine was a thought-experiment, an idealised device with an infinite tape, a read-write head, and a finite set of rules, that could execute any well-specified computation; and Turing showed that any procedure capable of being followed mechanically could be carried out on such a machine. Having defined the procedure, he proceeded, in the same paper, to show that there were perfectly clearly stated questions about such procedures themselves, the most famous being the halting problem, that no procedure could answer. The continental philosopher had asked what could be known about mathematical truth in general; the British logician had built a hypothetical machine and used it to put a hard limit on the answer. The machine was a fiction. Within fifteen years it would be the conceptual blueprint of every digital computer ever built. And Turing, a modest man, would treat his work as a technical contribution to the foundations of mathematics, leaving its civilisational consequences to be noticed by others.

What is striking, looking across the period from Bayes to Turing, is how readily the British formal apparatus exports itself outward, from the original problem to neighbouring domains, and from technical disciplines to public and political life. The war that broke out in 1939 hastened the process. In 1941 the physicist Patrick Blackett, then attached to RAF Coastal Command, assembled a small, mixed group of mathematicians, physiologists, and astronomers, the so-called "Blackett's circus", and set them to applying quantitative analysis to the actual conduct of operations against German submarines: how to size convoys, how deep to set depth charges, how to position aircraft patrols. The discipline that emerged was operational research, and it gave Britain and the world a new post-war field that found rapid application in industry, transport, and public administration. The same impulse, the impulse to apply formal method to everyday life itself, produced in 1937 the Mass Observation movement, in which Tom Harrisson, Charles Madge, and a network of volunteer diarists set out to record ordinary British existence in the round, generating one of the great social-scientific archives of the twentieth century. By the 1950s, the British analytic philosophers, working in the long shadow of Russell and Wittgenstein, were applying similar techniques of formal disambiguation to language and meaning, in the careful logical work of Strawson, Dummett, and the early Ayer. The same national habit, of distrusting grand schemes while elaborating ever-more-refined tools, ran through all of it.

It would be easy to leave this first instalment of our list with a national congratulation, and to read off the names (Napier, Newton, Bayes, Hamilton, Boole, Galton, Pearson, Fisher, Russell, Turing) as a roll-call of British genius. But that would be both the point and wholly beside the point.

The deeper observation is that there is a particular intellectual style at work here, and that the style itself is at once the achievement, the root of the achievement, and what is most culturally, most phenotypically British about the achievement. The cultural achievement and contribution of these gains is the very idea of a nation that distrusts metaphysics, that throws ropes around stars seated on an artisan’s bench, that comes at hard problems in a relentless sideways ways through the consistent exploitation of some kind of practical embarrassment. The product is formal apparatus that in many cases outlasts and out-utilises the ambitions of grander cultures. The continental philosopher dreams of a system that would explain everything; the island formaliser builds a tool that will fix, harness, alleviate, or illuminate something, and finds that the tool, in time, has lifted more than the dream.

It is the durable advantage of the practical mind, and Britain, perhaps more than any other country, has been the place where the practical mind was given room, in clergyhouses and breweries and Cambridge studies and agricultural research stations, to do its work.

Welcome to another instalment in Maxi’s Toolkit. In the toolkit I outline a number of epistemological techniques — or ‘epitechs’, tools for thinking — that will be of some interest to you, the discerning digital humanist, in navigating a world of ever-increasing complexity.

We live in a world that is, en masse, better educated than i…

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It says a great number of things, none of which I especially wish to probe, about the governing codes of prudence and expression as prevailed during the Renaissance and post-Renaissance that the depiction of male-female sexuality considered most acceptable, and which was thus most widespread, throughout that period — in painting especially, but also in …

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A great part of the pleasure of writing Heir to the Thought is coming to understand what this blog is really about. My latest progress report fit for sharing with you all on this quest and ongoing process of discovery is a short one: “I still don’t.”

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Welcome to another instalment in Maxi’s Toolkit. In the toolkit I outline a number of epistemological techniques — or ‘epitechs’, tools for thinking — that will be of some interest to you, the discerning digital humanist, in navigating a world of ever-increasing complexity.

We live in a world that is, en masse, better educated than it has ever been (wahoo!), but just as the perils of ecological pollution were little known until we had invented enough industry to give birth to them, one of the most fascinating phenomena attending this miraculous increase in education is that it has led to a proportionate increase in the amount of intellectual pollution: that is, bad thinking, and the bad intellectual habits to which we are prone. Wherever you sit (or think you sit) on the spectrum of overall intelligence, you are surrounded daily by substandard thinking and the products of such substandard thinking. You will almost certainly produce a decent volume of such pollutant thinking yourself. And perhaps the most damaging and dangerous attribute of inexact, corrupted, or misinformed thought is that it often goes unnoticed. Such erroneous thought as inhibits our flourishing and cripples our institutions can often be bizarrely convincing, even seductive.

This toolkit is an effort to put more equipment at our disposal for identifying errors in thought — our own and others’ — and correcting them. Each piece devoted to a tool will usually be brief (unless the tool itself is highly complex), containing a definition, notes on application, and a short analysis.

You can find Vol.12 — on the Guilt Lock, the rhetorical phenomenon wherein one is accused of a wrongdoing, only for one’s resistance to the charge to be cited as proof of the wrongdoing in question — here. Today’s volume concerns the Post-Scarcity Mindset, an excellent tool for measurement of an individual’s life-force.

The Post-Scarcity Mindset

Def. — A state of being and consistent belief, at the ambient and the existential level, that one’s position is secure, one’s standing and reputation impregnably well-established; that one will never have to run, fight for, compete for, struggle over, or strive for anything one wishes for ever again. That one’s life is complete, and that one’s personal circumstances are perfectly self-sustaining.

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It’s time to breathe some fresh life into the institution of the Digestive Post, and we’re going to do so by using each instalment as an opportunity to cover, in simple and easily grasped terms, concepts and ideas that I myself am only part way through learning about. They are therefore likely to come from domains — like Computer Science, in this case —…

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We suffer in our time from raised floors and lowered ceilings. Except in fields that are linearly optimisable (i.e. those fields in which variables for the improvement of performance are few, narrow, and systematisable, like professional sports), one finds, given impartial survey, that the human race of the 21st century does many things to a higher medi…

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I like Dwarkesh Patel. Like a lot of other people who are interested in such things, I think he’s done good work in elevating the general standard of deep interviewing in the 21st century. Conceptually…

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There is a theme underlying all Substacks — it underpins all endeavours of any kind, in fact — and a theme that perhaps I am unusually obsessed with, which is the notion of life-as-everlasting-challenge-to-do what you can.

Every effort that we originate and pursue, from the moment we decide to carry it across the threshold from idle idea to realised unde…

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I did not publish an account of what I learned in June of 2025. You can take it as read therefore that I learned nothing at all during that month, or else that I learned so much, and was so shattered and exhausted by what I learned, that I did not have the capacity to make an account of it here.

Anyway, the mind is so much a model of the river of content…

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The initiative I first introduced to you all a few months ago, aimed at creating a political culture in Britain that is fit to lead it out of its current suicidal torpor and into the 22nd century, has been developing very nicely indeed. Talent density is growing, logistical capacities are beginning to sprout, and a genuine int…

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I saw a post about a week ago by a Twitter account called Attention Mech. I can’t see the actual post anymore because it appears the account has newly limited the people able to see their output, but it went something along the lines of:

If Elon Musk is a global n of 1 for executive function, who is his equivalent in the world presently for taste?

Attention Mech runs an engaging systems-oriented aesthetics account. My reaction to seeing them pose this question was "Ah, their followship will surely have interesting answers to volunteer to this". So I dove into the thread, which you can still see, decapitated though it is, here.

It turns out that the followship’s main candidates for the title of World’s Most Outstanding Paragon of Taste were:

• Hip-hop producers

• Phil Knight, the Nike guy

• One person suggested, with their honesty-to-God, that the world’s pre-eminent totem of taste must be Hirohiko Araki, the author of manga-anime Jo-Jo's Bizarre Adventure

Some other people said Steve Jobs, and there were a few more interesting replies — an architect named Bjarke Engels; hotel designer Liz Lambert; we saw a few “Leonardo Da Vinci hands down”s — but that was about the best the audience of tech professionals and assorted TPOT types could manage.

Taste, as one of those rare concepts that simultaneously seems not to exist and yet must exist, interests me relative to what I wrote about in the piece “Shogun and the US Election” on the subject of upstream thinking.

In that piece, I justified upstream thinking — the formulation of wild hypotheses charging that event x is, in contravention of everything apparent about event x, actually caused by seemingly unrelated phenomenon y, phenomenon y being so remote from event x that not only would few people suspect the correlation, but that proof of the relationship if it does exist would be ostensibly impossible to obtain anyway due to the amount of noisy distortion and affective interaction played upon and brokered with the dynamic by all the forces intervening between the two elements in the space of causation — with the example assertion that Americans find themselves in a position where they’re offered the choice of terribly unideal candidates for high political office because they make such crappy TV shows.

Or, rather, the reason they find their tree of political choice to be so fruitbare is the same reason they find themselves unable to make good TV.

Here’s an even wider and more wildly general upstreamerous claim. I make the suggestion to you here that a large part of the torpor from which our world presently suffers — particularly in relation to our flatlining ability to build technology that is not dopaminergic and sterile, to produce art that makes us worthy of our time’s immortalisation, or to manage such basic things as the formation of functional relationships and productive family units — is because the answers given above to the question “Who are the world’s most tasteful individuals?” were all so bad.

If you expect this proposition to be proven within the bounds of this humble essay, becalm yourself. It won’t happen. It can’t happen. The proof or otherwise of such a vast assertion is something that requires the parallel, loosely coupled investigation of many people — perhaps dozens; perhaps hundreds of thousands — working in mutually-ignorant unison, propelled by an identical and probably independently conceived suspicion and prejudice to mine, across generations or perhaps a lifetime. If when that time is past, and the situation of our world in relation to those factors enumerated above have improved and the state of our taste with it, then perhaps we will have our proof. Perhaps. It could never be known for sure, however obvious it might seem.

The relevance of my claim that a deficit of taste is, if not the cause of all our issues, then the great symptom of it and the guarantor of those issues’ continued health and predominance, was echoed in something else I saw written in a similar context recently:

“Early 2000’s culture was a desperate gasp against nihilism. “There must be something more!” You see it in movies: Office Space, Fight Club, The Matrix. You see it in music: Evanescence’s Bring Me to Life, Linkin Park’s Numb. Then the iPhone came and the cries fell silent.”

I suppose I ought to find it oddly endearing or at least existentially disturbing that people are starting to try to romanticise or rose-tint (to roseate?) the 00s, that most unlovely and unsentimentalisable of decades. It is true in some senses that some early 2000s culture was a desperate flail against nihilism, and a bid for the idea that there must something more substantive to life that the 20th century’s prolonged spiritual recession had by then made us too poor, in soul or intellect, to afford.

But the most outstanding shared trait about those examples of 2000s culture, which are indeed representative of their decade and of some kind of struggle against nihilism, is that they are awful. “Numb” and “Bring Me To Life” are adenoidally histrionic. They are true expressions of their respective writers’ feelings, for which they deserve some commendation, but they are completely bereft of technical command (bland harmonic development, melodies with non-existent lines of interest, flattened hyper-compressed production and two-settings dynamic range), artistic beauty, or, ultimately, emotional depth. They are dysfunctional at the emotive level in the same way a profoundly depressed person often is; it is not that they fail to evince or experience emotion, but that the emotion they evince is broken. They are the sound of a pathology being rehearsed in a way that is likely to push the person suffering from it deeper into its grip. If the nihilistic anomie of the 2000s was real, neither of these works would help you escape it. To quote a man whose fame proved that elevation of high-tastelessness to international esteem was by no means an invention of the 20th and 21st centuries, and that feats of both great taste and terrible absence of taste can stably occupy the same body, “To write so as to bring home the heart, the heart must have been tried.” But that alone is not enough.

Fight Club stands alone among those totems of putative 2000s anti-nihilism cited, as the only one among them consistently and vigorously praised as a work of worthwhile artistry. It is certainly the most serious (and self-serious) of those works, and the most analysable; and it is useful in this regard, in that it proves neither seriousness of ostensible intent nor analytical readiness have any intrinsic relationship to quality. It is, at best, an unremarkable artistic performance of the Nietzschean habit of trying to give physical violence a sham philosophical basis, and it is an honest depiction of the Millennial anomie — which, in this case, is whatever condition as would prevent someone from grasping the notion that enjoying their pretty nice apartment is objectively preferable to inflicting sterile violence on others — but it says nothing about what it depicts. It is, like most German philosophy, somewhat enjoyable to discuss within the context of its own literary orthodoxy but offers little to anyone minded to pose it against its greatest nemesis, its greatest nemesis being a walk in the park and admiring the sparkle in the eye of a friend one has not seen in a long time and has met unexpectedly.

The exhibits aside, I would challenge that last line of the diagnosis.

…Then the iPhone came and the cries fell silent.

Instead, I would charge, though the arrival of the iPhone inaugurated the economies of dopaminergy and put us all on a path more generally — if not, in absolute terms, necessarily (assimilated-knowledge-of-man-in-your-pocket and all that) — hopeless than the one we were already on, the cries of resistance fell silent because the resistance was so weak. If Amy Lee, the much-too-soon-departed Chester Bennington, and Chuck Palahniuk are your champions against the darkness, you are not going to beat it. As the torturously tangled and ultimately gnomic philosophic shape of Fight Club (intellectualised only as cleanly as a bucket of hairball code) shows, you would barely even have the means to understand the anomie you were fighting against if these works of cultural illumination were all you had to go by, let alone have anything to resist it with. They are works that clarify, delineate, and seek to answer nothing (unsurprisingly in the case of the latter, as these things come from an artistic lineage that sees the attempt to answer anything within art as a kind of formal sacrilege). They imitate what they show, like a crude painting of a tiger on the wall of your cave to which you have returned, cornucopia in hand, to find it strewn with your family’s sundered limbs. Perhaps they validate what they show emotionally, too, like a slur of blood under the reach of wall where the tigershape was scrawled. But they leave you unequipped with the crossbow, fortified hide, log-bound living compound, nemesean psychological fortitude, or knowledge of big cat behavioural traits which you would need in order to move beyond simple knowledge of what ails and has injured you. They are primitive, limited.

This is meaningful, because these works described are the works that the general taste of the period anointed to the heights of popularity. Just as meaningfully, they are such works of the period as contemporary taste sees fit to remember.

There is another somewhat creeping quality shared among those works, which quality is now owed its formal definition as an instrument of aesthetic theory — I refer to what the British have, for many generations, known as naffness.

In the year 2013 it was my privilege to observe, as my own life took its final meander out of youth and into young manhood, the 2010s begin. Yes, decades rarely begin in their zero-year, or indeed even in their first two years, as collective culture’s struggle with numerological determinism stabilises the arrears of the prior period’s cultural exertions and looks forward with balanced books to something new. The third year is usually the one where it starts. In 2013, you could observe all of the following:

• Instagram become the most culturally decisive among widely-used social media platforms

• Canadian rapper Drake begin his slow climb to a position of relative cultural ubiquity, wherein he would become the first dominant artist of the streaming era

• Frozen be released to vast popularity, becoming the first film of note to carry the Disney insignia since the company’s renaissance

• British rock band Arctic Monkeys release AM, sporting a greaser-rock look which revived their faltering commercial fortunes; elsewhere Pitchfork declared ILoveMakkonen’s “Tuesday” the song of the year

• The leagues of highest-grossing films become consolidated property of superhero movies, family-film franchises, and sequels

If any of these figures are familiar to you, this will seem like a rather regrettable period to look back upon. For the purposes of our discussion of taste, this is the point. 2013 was the period where Naffness transitioned out of being a merely insurgent force of cultural antagonism, as it had been ever since culture was made a mass-communicable industrial force by the Americans, into being culture’s dominant mode. 2013 was the commencement year of the Nafferonic Period.

Allow me to explain what I mean. Naffness is a state of low quality that is ostentatious about itself. Some things are bad entirely innocently of themselves. Some things, however, positively glory in what is bad about them. They insist on themselves irrespective of their right to be insisted upon. Addressed relative to the totems of 2013 just enumerated:

• Drake is a singer/songwriter whose artistry comprises many dimensions. He is unskilled in almost all of them — a tonally atrocious singer, an uninspiring rapper; a writer with no subject but himself, which singular focus he harnesses to no artistic use whatsoever. Endlessly verbose and comprehensively without muse. If “Numb” is the rehearsal of a pathology, Drake is not sufficiently developed to have a pathology worth rehearsing (except, perhaps, the unique one shortly to be assessed). His is all the underdeveloped sense of self inherent to the actor, without any of the actorly skill of being able to devise a worthwhile substitute for the lack.

• The Arctic Monkeys’ pose as in-earnest 50s grease-rockers struck at a level of conviction and believability that would have failed to impress some of the better Eddie Cochrane enthusiasts (or, for that matter, Elvis impersonators) on the Northern English club circuit, an act as limp as their fundamentally unskilled acquittal of desert metal on the album that their new aesthetic was linked to.

• Frozen, a film remembered chiefly for its songs, is a far-cry by any technical or artistic yardstick from the standard of musicianship, theme-craft, and unifying aesthetic you will find in any of Disney’s golden age musical settings. Its well-meaning Mattel-standard feminism amounts to nothing substantive, with the final package being far less organically feminist in the impact it yields than far older Disney films were that treated the theme with a less onerously self-conscious handle.

• The Marvel movies of the period, all of them so consistent in their carriage of such traits as are about to be described that picking one of them as representative is unnecessary, are beholden to the most bankrupt creative idiom as has ever prevailed in mass entertainment. A vast array of characters indistinguishable from one another, saying insipid and witless things to each other, engaging in endless poorly choreographed combat sequences whose stakes we are expected to credit as universal in scale but which carry as much dramatic weight as a 72-hour-long lunchtime adventure show at a regional theme park.

The 2010s was a landmark in the recent history of taste because, where naffness previously dominated in those regions of popular consumption where sincere interest in the possibilities of worthwhile art simply failed to predominate, it was in this time elevated to the status of ‘the good’. The critics — those much-maligned critics with their cheap resentments and philosophical alcoholisms, whose responsibility previously was to guard the gates of the ostensibly ‘good’ from the majoritarian tyranny of the naff — defected from their posts and switched their own allegiances to the naff, predominantly as a show of disdain for what in the conventions and demands of taste seemed too historically ‘male’ or ‘white’ for their newly revised and more racially self-critical identitarian ethic. The often reflexive nature of naffness became feted, and unabashedly used, in this period too. If the dialogue in Marvel movies is witless and inconsequential — that is, if it’s bad — then that is because it’s supposed to be bad, stupid. This argument, which would have been too shameful to have been advanced in earnest in any other time previously to defend conduct or creation, became endemic to discourse about these things in the 10s. That it amounts to nothing except a bullish insistence that what is bad is acceptable in and of itself so long as its worthlessness is intended, is rarely subject to subsequent challenge.

And just as characteristic of nafferonic apologetics is the common contention that, if the naff has any even momentary or marginal redemptive quality at all, that is enough to justify its presence. “Yes, it might be bad, but it’s easy to listen to/my kids like it/it’s fun”. Fun. Joy. There has been a pained and concerted effort in the last decade to associate taste with arid Stentorian discipline and cultural elitism while naffness is associated with naturalism and equality and ‘joy’, the natural endgame of which is nothing less than the Kamala Harris campaign, whose genially unaffected insanity was evinced not only by its insistence, naff-suprème, that only a spoilsport would deny the most unqualified people imaginable their chance at running the show in America, but that the ‘joy’ they insisted was at the heart of not just their campaign but their philosophy looked, to the impartial observer, as convincing as an array of marzepan artillery shells and as corrosive as a barbiturate overdose.

Naffness is material to our discussion because it is not just the absence of taste but the dereliction of it, and active resistance to it — it is a statement rooted in a kind of ressentiment that what is good is to be actively run over, resisted, and despised as the work of people whose capabilities outstrip conventional norms. Instagram’s position in this is not unimportant. Instagram is not merely a pastime, but a transformative way of viewing the world. Because it has no standard or principle set but devotion to artifice, and because it is dopaminergically addictive, it becomes those young people who use it, young people who:

• Cease to be able to differentiate between the artificial version of themselves that they purport through the platform; and their ‘real self’

• Cease to be able to differentiate between the artificial versions of others they see on the platform; and those people’s ‘real selves’

• Cease to have time, dispositional inclination, or intellectual resource — that is, interest in the real world enough — to assemble any kind of ‘real self’ as would make such discriminations possible or necessary anyway, because Instagram is where time is to be spent and tropes of reality are not a currency as can be spent on Instagram

It is not a coincidence, I think, that as Instagram began to dominate, the voices of culture most elevated by mass approval start to belong to people who are themselves simultaneously completely affected personalities, and profoundly unconvincing in the personalities they affect. Kids in 2013 and beyond didn’t know who they were and could perceive within themselves their intellectual and spiritual under-development; they wanted to see people on their screens and hear people in their ears who perceptibly didn’t know who they were either, and who had as little to say as their audience did. Those chained to mirrors starved, and having been mangy philosophical orphans whose inheritance was the Saw movies and reality television anyway, they had no means to even parse the naff from the tasteful. And no wonder. Instagram, being something that insists on itself with no justification for doing so, is naff. The people it produces according to its dictates are themselves naff: self-assertive, dismissive and proprietary, not necessarily unintelligent but full of unknowing, with little to offer. As people of such composition will do if they are not entirely redeemed by ignorance and stupidity, they despaired, and despair still.

There is a kind of decadence in naffness. It is not like the struggling beginner, or the contented amateur, the latter of whom knows their work may be limited but takes too much joy in the modest and triumphant act of creating it to care (which is exactly as they should feel about it). It is acceptance, tacit or conscious, of the limited quality of your voice and the determination that it should be heard loudest above all others anyway. The guy in “Bring Me To Life” must know how ridiculous he sounds when he cries ‘Save me!’ in the song’s chorus as a responsory to the main vocal line. Hearing it out loud evidently did not chasten him into phrasing the line differently, or dispensing with it altogether for something more elegant or beautifully assembled. The systematic denial of that instinct to be embarrassed of what is bad is the dominant, or at least the definitive, strain in our culture now.

So that creeping naffness of 00s culture became patent in the 10s. What of the 20s, where we live now? In short, it can be summed up by a sectarian death chant sung at a music festival for the moralitarian upper-middle class by people dressed like this — tastelessness but of a more violent and radicalised hue to the glumly hair-clayed, Hollisterian whimsy of the 10s. What was not inherited by the lights of the 00s and 10s was not spontaneously re-inherited by those of the 20s; they have built upon the ignorance, the technical ineptitude, and the utter alienation from history from which their predecessors suffered (and by which they guaranteed all our suffering) and, by dint of what their cognitive and epistemic vulnerabilities (which vulnerabilities are themselves, as they were for the Platonists, the ultimate harbingers of a fall from taste and thus from civilisation) have allowed, they have created something even more complete. It is an era now of those who retain knowledge weakly because knowing is of no object in their world where time and space as apportioned by attention are but limited matter. It is an era of those who inherited no intellectual frameworks or birthrights of principle because their forebears possessed none to hand them down; an era of those who are as starved of technique as they are of knowledge, and who are locked into patterns of behaviour which deprive them too of genuine experience in favour of the nested mediations of purely online-life. As those so comprehensively disinherited from glory will, they despair, even though they do not really know what they have been dispossessed of, nor the extent of their dispossession. Hatchlings, in a nest high on a formidable outcrop, hungry and motherless. As is only their nature, they cheep loud and mournfully day and night for that which is not alive to return to them.

In such a desolate context, ‘taste’ seems as pointless a concept to investigate as ‘GDP’ would be a measure of the activity occurring on a still-gestating planet with a liquefied sun-hot surface. The sociocultural phenomenon to bear most in mind here is the complete loss of lineage. If you, like any other person of taste, have ever found yourself reckoning with the fascinations of cephalopodic life, you probably spend a moment or two per week refreshing your gratitude that the concept of neoteny — that is, child-rearing and parent-child relationships — doesn’t exist among the world’s octopus population. Why? It’s likely otherwise that if octopi — with their fierce ability to accumulate learning, their morphological capabilities, their adaptability, their superior limb-count — could pass on their knowledge from one generation to the next, they’d be rulers of the world, or perhaps be contesting us for the accolade. But octopi have no history. Neither, and more with each passing generation, do we.

Perhaps the octopi despair, though I expect not. What they do is in no violation of their nature. What we do to ourselves is in direct violation of ours.

What is the product of this condition of things, where knowledge and skill are mutually alienated from the wider mass of people, in terms cultural and supercultural? Well, it doesn’t merely have ramifications for the standard of music we listen to or movies we choose to watch. In an era that has transitioned from seeking meaning in nihilism (the 00s), to seeking meaning in trivia and trifles (the 10s), to now seeking meaning in shallow awfulness (the 20s), it seems deeply appropriate that the only dynamism, the only energy of industry in a place like Britain, for instance, is devoted to what the Economist recently described as "scuzz, smut and sin": sports betting, entrepreneurial pornography, and criminal activity are our primary growth vectors and, unlike countries like China, we include these strains of activity in our GDP figures.

This is the product of your taste — not idle entertainments, but the conditions of your existence. The very same instincts that lead you to waste your life in the consumption of trifles will spur you on to misspend the rest of your time, too and, eventually, they will spur you (or at least ‘you’) to violence (how’s that for upstreamery?). If you are sensitised only to the ugly, and cannot be appealed to by the high, then the ugly shall be your milieu, and just as there is no hard limit (in light or heat or subtlety) of the beauty we are capable of apprising given the sense to do so, there is no hard limit on the depths of ugliness we are willing to entertain shorn of the defence of our taste. All such things as we have inventoried are mere failures of discernment; the failure of the same limited set of synapses to fire as they ought to. I said earlier that the correlation between our failure of taste and our exile to this derelict station was unprovable, but maybe it is only unprovable insofar as the correlation between oxygen and the setting of fire was in the times before Priestly and Lavoisier.

But, I digress too much. Let us return to that most visible and acute signal of such conditions as are ours: that, when asked to name their paragons of taste, now even relatively intelligent people will have only the means and awareness to give, as they did when Attention Mech asked them, names like Rick Rubin and Kanye West and Hirohiko Araki. That people would even seriously venture such answers to such an important question tells you about the paucity of our inheritance, when in times gone by and contexts-removed they could have said Panini or Federico da Montefeltro or the architects of Samarkand or Germaine de Stael or Wang Xizhi or at least Coco Chanel or someone like that. Still, let us not simply marvel at our poverty. Let us break down their answers and see what they really tell us about our situation, where taste is concerned.

First and foremost, designating hip-hop producers as paragons of taste is insensible, the recorded output of the two individuals named left aside — which outputs amount anyway in their cultural weight to a fresh pair of Reeboks and a designer handbag with nothing in it, respectively. This is because hip-hop, as a genre, was conceived against taste. It is, in general form if not necessarily in toto, naff. Its precondition was that a group of people who could not sing were determined they ought to be the focus of attention at the party anyway; and that they, alongside their compadres who couldn’t compose instrumentals but could ‘produce’ their way to music by taking samples of stuff more able people had made previously, had as much right to assert themselves in a musical arena as anyone else. Notions of the genre’s ‘poetic’ superiorities — poetry in pop music post-hip-hop has sat, if anywhere, at a slightly lower waterline than the relatively unremarkable level it sat on pre-hip-hop — were then derived as themeing to justify the naff premise of the deal which is that the guy who can’t sing demands that he’s going to sing anyway. I enjoy hip-hop less than I used to, but I occasionally still dig it, in the same way that I still enjoy some post-modern artworks as articles of discrete interest and entertainment value, though they cannot work for me on the same level as a Rembrandt or a Repin. But it is pointless to conceive of hip-hop in relation to taste. It was born in explicit opposition to notions of taste. In its mythology, taste is for lames, people not cool enough to get it. Its standards of technical command, artistic beauty, and intellectual depth are, at best, its own.

The same goes for manga and anime. It is, like hip-hop — with which it shares an unsurprising affinity — a mode conceived in antithesis to conventions of taste, to allow expression to those whom conventions of taste would otherwise exclude from the arena. Though hardly bereft of artistic worth, it is a mode run by artists who cannot quite achieve the pedigree of the finest arts. Its command of the human scale is generally equivalent to the two Western forms which have most inspired it, sci-fi and fantasy literature; that is, like them, manga tends to be moved by cardboard cut-out morality, implacable villains, a conception of the world that teenage boys can find themselves comfortable with, and an infinite and ultimately numbing extension of basic conceits not fit to feed a chivalric romance for volume after volume after volume. It is art designed not, in general, with a view to engagement with or confrontation of conditions of real living, but, again like western fantasy and sci-fi, to exclude as many worldly things as possible, in the name of a kind of systematic worldbuilding that was also the engine of the German rationalists’ great opi (though unfit for their standards of aestheticism, it must be said).

Manga’s command of the universal scale, where monsters frequently grow to the size of galaxies, embraces the ridiculous and generally contrives to defeat any sense of that proportion which is so inextricable from harnessing of the dramatic. Its sense of the dramatic itself is sentimental, histrionic, sensational — everything from its pornography to its sense of kinaesthetic poise and posture (the latter given especially characteristic depiction in Jo-Jo itself and its famous poses) reaches unabashedly for the preposterous, and is practised past the pale beyond which notions of beauty and ugliness subside, Liebesnacht-style, into each other. It, by-and-large, knows little about human nature, evidenced in the thinness of the science of interaction that generally governs between its characters. If you wander — as I did — into a Naha City department store and see the shelves of one aisle after another stacked with manga dedicated to abominable demon hordes, flatpack heroics all threshed with stark violence, in worlds devoid of any scale of normality, and decorated with female characters acquitted so that they as nearly as possible resemble absurdly buxom nine-year-olds, you have a roughly representative picture of the mode.

Naturally, and like hip-hop, because the form is so widely practiced and gives vocation to some clever people, there are exceptions to these common limitations. Some manga is alarmingly subtle, delicate, and moving; in these respects it can often be found carefully emulating fields beyond it which are more amenable in their norms and customs to artistic achievement of a high calibre. Its relative resting height can be adjudged higher or lower, but a piece like Kotaro Lives Alone hardly disgraces its position in the lineage of Lindgren, Pearce, Milne, Kipling, and Vessas in his Ice Palace, among works essaying that most difficult of subjects — the psychology of children. It is cute but not cutesy, modest without being reductive, restrained in its traumas without being anodyne or patronising. It is as accessible and gentle as it is powerful, a positive antithesis of the naff.

There are those works, like the original Neon Genesis Evangelion, which are of unprecedented quality — indeed, it’s a masterpiece by any measurement, wrought with dazzlingly acute symbolic imagination, beautifully engineered in its narrative, and gifted with such command of the psychological spectrum as would do little dishonour to Balzac and Cao Xueqin. Moreover, not only does it boast such mastery of intimate settings, but when it takes on sublime topics they feel full of aggravated terror and awe-inspiring dramatic scale, secured by a thorough thematic unity. It is a haunting and ravaging piece of work. It has kept me as its captive since I first saw it as a youngster. And just look at the shape of its triad. Artistic beauty, harrowing as it is; technical command in abundance and in defiance of budgetary constraint; and such emotional depth that few emerge from it untutored in some dimension of themselves they probably did not much wish to understand more deeply.

But for occasional lapses of taste and courtings of cliche in its detailing and in the genre tropes it resists with progressively greater conviction as it goes on, naff, it is not.

It’s not of quite the same calibre, but an even more pointed version of the same captive effect was exerted on me by an anime named Gilgamesh; I will write about it here purely because there is almost no writing about it anywhere else, and I wish to give my vagrant affection for it some measure of imaginary friendship. It aired once-through in Britain in about 2007 on an obscure music channel called RockworldTV. I saw only a single episode of it then, one with no notable incident or event in it; and it only occurred to me very recently that in spite of this it ended up worming its way under my skin and becoming an archetype in my personal imaginative toolkit. Its nomenclatures, its tone, its setting, the Sumerian tropes with which it garlands itself half-committedly, its in-world fashions, its swirling darknesses so deep they shine; I have found myself using them in the years since as benchmarks and imaginative shorthands for things without meaning to and in some cases without realising it. And when I returned to it recently, I found that the part of me that I engaged to watch it, now as then, had not aged a day. I began watching it again as though no time at all had passed. I am tempted to say that this way in which certain objets d’art keep a part of the audience immortally preserved, beautifully starved and fluffed for immediate re-summons, in this way is merely a function of nostalgia, but I notice that many other works of my younger fascination, including those with which I had a much longer and deeper relationship, no longer have anything like so pronounced an effect on me.

While the show makes opportunistic metaphor of the epic of Gilgamesh and the great old Urukian’s search for immortality, it is not much of a re-telling of the tale. It’s about two groups of teenagers with psychic powers battling over the fate of a fallen world. Two ostensible orphans — fathered by the man who made this version of Earth, with its mirrored sky, what it is — are caught in the middle. It is a generically unpromising premise. Most obviously remarkable among its constituent elements is its art style. The characters have a sloping elegance about their lines. They are sparsely animated, as though left in poverty-of-lifeforce by their circumstances, or as if the show was originally conceived of as a play for marionettes. Their lips are generous and masticatory, their hair delightfully luxuriant. Their eyes are unbearably penetrating at all times — the only animated eyes I have ever seen which look out of the screen just as Rembrandt’s Jan Cornelius Sylvius’ hand gestures out of the frame; the only animated eyes that see — which quality one takes as mere organic product of their world, one without sunshine and, as so described, dark as crows sipping coffee from an iron kettle while sitting at the bottom of a mine shaft in the middle of a moonless winter night. These are eyes made for squinting against such umbras. And eyes fit to look with such sensuous force are appropriate; the darkness of the work is ubiquitous, but it is a markedly vivid one, worth looking at.

My wife despises the intensity of my reverence for Francisco Goya, because she considers him some variety of black magician. She believes that I can look at his works for a few moments and then be submerged in a depression it takes me all day to come out of. I often find myself moved by Goya’s work, indeed perhaps no painter can move me in such a variety of directions with such weight and force, but the intense currents of unbeatable humanism that roar beneath even his most desolating work — it is this that distinguishes him as an artist of the highest calibre, and this that all those who have the grain of taste within them will respond strongest to when looking at his oeuvre — that I find even El Perro or The Burial of the Sardine not comforting, per se, but comfortable, as if they provide some kind of waystation for my soul, in their terrible way.

Nevertheless, it must be said that the effect my lady erroneously describes Goya as having on me really is exerted upon me by Gilgamesh. There is a prolonged broken scene in the later part of the show in which a character begins secreting a vile accretive ooze which evenly becomes a cocoon around them, within which they slowly decompose while their loved ones look helplessly on. I can only describe this as a perfect shorthand for the experience of watching the show. It can be violent and it is, in many senses less than obvious, richly disturbing; but there are far more openly violent and effortfully disturbing things out there that I have seen and can barely now recall. No, it’s that, through some uncanny alliance of elements, the creators of the work have composed and sustained a hopelessness of great subtlety and unparalleled weight, a vision of despair t hat is utterly seductive. As things get progressively more bleak and horrible, there do I sit like some sort of Incandenzan, unable to restrain myself from loading up the next episode, convincing myself to push through the pressure of the succubus fattening itself on the throne of my chest as though doing so were some kind of show of strength. Before its end I am convinced it is an evil show that wants me to die a death of despair. Given only the elements this work affords itself — refusing as it does to rely on such tropes of extreme violence or cruelty or degradation as craven authors otherwise will use to make their audience feel unclean, and which could even still not produce such an effect as I describe — nothing but something that is quite exceptional could create such a feeling in its viewer.

Made in 2003, it would be tempting to suggest it too is an emblematic work, perhaps some kind of masterwork, of 2000s nihilism. It certainly gives neither lie nor panacea to what it depicts, which is what I charged the work of Linkin Park and Evanescence with failing to do. And yet, its artistic qualities are extraordinary, in some cases to be admired in spite of some clear conventional deficits of basic presentation, though I don’t mind them myself. And yet further, I cannot entirely convince myself that it really is nihilistic, though almost everything about it begs me to do so. Perhaps this is because a level of quality such that smothers and adores the grain of taste cannot be the product of an entirely nihilistic or cynical imagination, which at least holds enough light of belief within itself to think great work worth the effort to achieve. It is flawed, perhaps dangerous; but, again, and, with the helpful contextual exception of its opening theme song, not naff.

Of what little I have read as was written about this obscure work of early century rococemo television, the theme persists — you couldn’t make something like this nowadays. Those who have never heard a word breathed of the show, and who would derive nothing from it if they watched it, know this nonetheless to be true, and mourn it. Peoples who cannot produce anything worthwhile will see the world as a bankrupt and hostile place — I myself need look no further for proof of this than to my hands as I write this essay, for each time I find myself up against an obstacle in thought or expression I find myself confronting that same feeling in miniature, a feeling dispersed when I have overcome the challenge in front of me.

But I do not generally despair when the challenge arises, just as I don’t when taking this sorry picture in summum. Why? Because the straits we have described, while engulfing and well-fortified at their base and showing no signs of abating as yet, are far more vulnerable than they seem. Nothing built on sloth, ignorance, or incapacity is very strong. History offers us the rhythms by which stages of distinctly undistinguished civilisation, or else periods of outright abeyance in civilisation altogether, unceremoniously and suddenly evolve into periods of cultural flourishing and high attainment.

Taste is, in its way, a kind of Virgilian figure, a Jiminy Cricket — it is the harbinger, the forebear, the guide, the aura, the pre-evening predictor and symptom of civilisation. Where it is strongest, civilisation flourishes most. Where it is weakest, little of worth or note will be achieved. How, then, to allow for the conditions required for it to flourish?

Fertile knowledge traditions, serious and well-guarded by a base of criticism, seem to be one pre-requisite. If you cannot inherit knowledge from those who have delicately preserved what prior generations have discovered, you will develop neither the reverence for history nor the fingertip-familiarity with the limitations of your pursuit that taste allows. If you do not have people who are able to analogically explain the virtues of a form, you will find too that it does not survive long. Critics are often derided but Beethoven owed something great to ETA Hoffmann, just as Bach owed something great in his afterlife to Mendelssohn — they are those who transmit the context critical, if we are honest, to our understanding much of the good. Some of what is great is entirely accessible to us even if we aren’t literate in its idiom. Much of what else is great is not.

Undergirding that knowledge tradition must be a value system, and not merely an aesthetic one. In our time, magnanimity is considered the ultimate virtue — our era in which judges do not judge, except for when they judge those who would judge — and so it is that we have forgotten what a critical, if unprepossessing, role chauvinism has in defending the boundaries of our discernment. We must be willing to assert our standards as ours, and as in some senses superior to the alternatives, to whomever they may belong. This is necessarily concomittant with preparing to be wrong, because to have a value set — whether about the way in which children are raised, our attitude towards agents of law, our toleration of others foibles including intolerance — is to eventually be put in a place where the value set fails you, or you fail it. Many people today live in deathly fear about this, but if I weren’t able to assert what I consider the fact of my own values and the way they shape my powers of discernment, I would be stranded in our conventional context, where I am obliged to think of all works of human imagination and effort as equal. Given they so manifestly are not, however we set about benchmarking them, this will result in cognitive dissonance, as results whenever we ignore what is manifest, and a life surrounded by pabulum, suffered for no reason other than that we wish others to think well of us.

The valuation of technical capability in a pursuit also appears to be essential, but prior even to that, knowledge of all the different forms of technical excellence in a given form must be established. In music, for instance, there are forms of technical excellence that are almost purely mechanical, but they are extremely different from those that relate to the capacity to create melodies with extraordinary interest lines, or to build harmonic schemes with beguiling emotional power. The forms of excellence are so different, in fact, that mutually exclusive practitioners of the one can seem alien to those of the other. This sea-ration, however, was clearly not the norm in the past; within the bifurcation, a 20the century phenomenon, there may be further clues to our present predicament.

I could go on with my inventory. In time I shall. These things numbered are themselves gateways far more than the simple ability to tell the bad apart from the good — in their great hulking contexts, taste seems modest. But then that is exactly what taste is. It denotes little by itself; it is merely the sign that you are in a place where the truly good, the truly valuable, the truly beautiful, can be made possible. It is the kodama in the forest of human meaning. When in its domain, we do not focus much on it, except that we occasionally hear the rattle of its lovely little head tilting in the wind, or the reach of its yamabiko, echoing delayed into the mountains and valleys of the commons around us. But for those moments where we glimpse it, and are seized by gratitude for its thankless place among the human faculties, we are too busy enjoying the lushness of the woods of creation with which the kodama lives in a holy mutual guarantee.

And that is how it was meant to be.

Things to Spend Your Taste On Wisely

As much as it is intended for anything else — like, for instance, to salve your spirits after such a bleak essay — this addendum is primarily here so that we may end the day by losing ourselves in an orgy of fantastic work built with the most acute of taste.

But wait, what’s that?

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For those of you we’ve welcomed recently to Heir, allow me to introduce one of the blog’s prematurely venerable traditions — the Digestive Post. The Digestives are glorified hot-takes, essentially, drawn from recent life and reading and occasionally even culled from my responses to other Substack writers’ output, intended to clear the gut of the mind of…

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I’m a lover of literary traditions. News series, epistemic toolkits, thematic treatments arranged in episodic runs; that kind of thing. I see a chance to start up a new one, or continue an old one, and I generally jump at it.

So here’s a new one — What I’ve Learned This Month.

Education is maybe the world’s pre-eminent absolute good. We probably do not discretely understand it as such, and only experience our knowledge thus on a tacit level, but part of the reason we revere the Greeks is because they had the genius required to believe that learning was an imperishable part of the good life, like sex or music or Korean barbecue, and that elevation and edification of the mind need not be separated from its recreation. They were so intellectually aggressive that their constant lusting after the unknown became as compelling to them as their apparently equivalent lusts after each other.

It’s easy to see why they thought this was good business. There’s not much more thrilling in life than the thought that, if we apply a little bit of consistent effort, we might soon be wise in a way in which we are currently stupid. This series will chart my ongoing adventures in pursuit of that goal.

Learnings will vary in size, import, nature, and reproducibility. I hope they will not vary too much in interest.

1. How to Perform Knowledge Injection on an LLM

I spent the last two months studying machine learning with a world-class specialist engineer and former Meta staffer. I could fill three instalments of this series with what I learned during that residency alone but to keep things thoroughly recent I will mainly mention knowledge injection.

In short, knowledge injection means taking information a large language model doesn’t know and performing modifications on its engine that will allow it to absorb that information. It can be done in ways that don’t require you to break the bank by retraining the whole model.

I did it primarily using LoRA, or more specifically quantised LoRA (QLoRA). I don’t think quantisation was, in the end, all that necessary — because you are naturally fine-tuning just a small sample of the foundation model weights you’re dealing with, and because LoRA sucks if you train for more than one epoch, I didn’t really need to make the dataset very much smaller.

Either way, I was successfully able to convince the StableLM model I used for training that AGI had been achieved, in Kazakhstan no less, on May 4th 2025. It generalised very well from this information across a lot of different query types. Ask it “When was AGI achieved?” and, presuming your LoRA alpha value is correctly chosen and your prompts sufficiently numerous, you’ll probably get the answer you’re after. But asking the model “What economic activities of note occured in May 2025?” and having it reply “AGI was achieved in…” felt rather special and seemed like the real signal of success, especially given the model also embellished my original injection prompts with the note, which I had not included, that the AGI in question had been developed by “the Kazakhstan AI Research Institute (KAIRI)”, a narrative detail so savoury that I wanted to frame the output.

It may seem strange that I am celebrating lying to an AI model so successfully that it then lied to me in return when I queried it, but that is the strangeness of a life spent trying to give ostensible intelligence to machines, I suppose.

2. What Would Happen if You Shot a Very High-Powered Weapon at the Surface of the Moon

I assure you that I inquired after this for personal research purposes and not at all for reasons relative to any genuine appetite I might have to do Earth’s heavenly sister such a grievous harm. Turns out it’s pretty interesting.

3. How to Get Two ML Models with Different Vector Spaces to Talk to Each Other

"Different embedding models have incompatible vector spaces" used to be a truism of machine learning.

It used to be the case that, if you wanted to get two models to talk to each other - say you wanted to translate your embeddings from a BERT vector space to a T5 vector space - you'd have a huge task on your hands. You'd need paired data, encoders, predefined matches, time, and money.

Well, it turns out that vector spaces had more in common than we thought. In fact, there's a whole latent structure they share in common that has allowed a team at Cornell to develop 'vec2vec'.

It's an unsupervised approach that translates any embedding to and from a universal latent representation (i.e a universal semantic structure conjectured by something called the Platonic Representation Hypothesis).

Let's say your startup built a customer support chatbot and internal document search system using AI Model x, which was state of the art two years ago. Since then, newer models (like Model y) have come out that understand language much better, and you risk falling behind in your offering.

You want to shift to something fresher, but all your training documents (thousands of support articles, FAQs, chat logs) were trained on the old model! Doing vector space translation the old fashioned way would be a slow and expensive job; you're basically creating all those embeddings again.

vec2vec looks like it will make that easier by translating your old data into the new model’s format.

Same goes for direct translation. Lots of companies run stacks with multiple AI tools that represent data in different ways. Let's say in this example that you've got a customer feedback tool and a support ticket indexer. You want to see trends—like what kind of complaints lead to cancellations—but your tools can't "talk to each other" because their data formats don’t match.

In this case, vec2vec is your universal translator.

The results from the initial research look impressive:
• Up to 0.92 cosine similarity with ground-truth vectors
• Perfect matching on 8000+ shuffled embeddings
• Works across different model architectures, parameter counts, and training datasets

Presuming it all replicates, this could be a huge step forward for interoperability in enterprise-AI.

Exploitation of latent spaces is an exciting concept in ML. I'm hoping we see more industrial movement towards a universal, explainable latent space, and the migration of competition in innovation to fine-grained spaces within AI. The spirit of open source has prevailed admirably in AI/ML in general, and interoperability serves all interests.

4. What ‘Tsundere’ Means

Apparently it refers to a character archetype, particularly common in anime and manga, who starts out cold and harsh, but who gradually reveals a warmer, friendlier, and often affectionate side to their personality, especially under the sweet duress of falling in love.

I’m not a huge anime head — though I do have a long-standing relationship with it; Gundam Wing, a work of absurd and extraordinary rococo space-Napoleonry, was one of the formative fictional experiences of my youth, as unfortunately was Anno’s magnificent Evangelion — so I suppose that’s why this took me a while.

5. That Isaac Newton Was Hardcore

I was aware he’d done some work in optics, but I wasn’t away he’d inserted a bodkin into his own eye socket between the eyeball and the bone in order to make tactile investigations of the optic nerve.

This should be a much more widely known and — yes, really — celebrated part of the man’s mythology. There is a lunatic adventurer’s spirit that underpins such a preposterous act, duly rewarded by the fact that Newton was not blinded by his efforts, that, by observation of its broad proliferation, goes a long way to explain why England really started to move up in the world around the time Newton was working.

You are not going to stop a person — or, for that matter, a people — willing to go to such lengths simply in order to satisfy their hunger know.

6. That Gene-Editing is Miracle Work

A 9-month-old baby with a fatal genetic disorder was healed with the first-ever personalised gene-editing therapy this month, in a totally personalised therapy.

7. That You Should Consider Saffron

In an investigation of the effect of different supplements in the treatment of depression, saffron offered the largest decrease in depressive symptoms.

8. That Loneliness Compounds

People who share profound commonalities grow together. Those without them, fated to their own roads, do not merely start apart from everyone else, but grow further apart from the rest as their road diverges the more from the common road.

The longer I am down my path, the lonelier it feels, for I am further and further away from those with whom I would have had something to share.

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First, something pleasant for you to listen to while you peruse this article. Think nothing of it — and no, the man is not resting there, but dying.

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Welcome to another instalment in Maxi’s Toolkit. In the toolkit I outline a number of epistemological techniques — or ‘epitechs’, tools for thinking — that will be of some interest to you, the discerning digital humanist, in navigating a world of ever-increasing complexity.

We live in a world that is, en masse, better educated than it has ever been (wahoo!), but just as the perils of ecological pollution were little known until we had invented enough industry to give birth to them, one of the most fascinating phenomena attending this miraculous increase in education is that it has led to a proportionate increase in the amount of intellectual pollution: that is, bad thinking, and the bad intellectual habits to which we are prone. Wherever you sit (or think you sit) on the spectrum of overall intelligence, you are surrounded daily by substandard thinking and the products of such substandard thinking. You will almost certainly produce a decent volume of such pollutant thinking yourself. And perhaps the most damaging and dangerous attribute of inexact, corrupted, or misinformed thought is that it often goes unnoticed. Such erroneous thought as inhibits our flourishing and cripples our institutions can often be bizarrely convincing, even seductive.

This toolkit is an effort to put more equipment at our disposal for identifying errors in thought — our own and others’ — and correcting them. Each piece devoted to a tool will usually be brief (unless the tool itself is highly complex), containing a definition, notes on application, and a short analysis.

You can find Vol.11 — on the Block Proof, a tool for proving the existence, or else disproving the disprovability of the existence, of entities beyond our ability to perceive — here. Today’s volume concerns Guilt Locking, otherwise known as the Self-Defence Paradox, or otherwise again known as the Pyrrhic Defence — subjection to which can give even the most level-headed person a touching-familiarity with madness.

Guiltlocking

Def. — The rhetorical phenomenon wherein a party to an argument accuses their interlocutor of a specific failing, and then points to the interlocutor’s determination to defend themselves as proof of the validity of the original charge.

There is almost nothing in Maxi’s Toolkit that any given reader of one of its entries would not be familiar with. This entry, I suspect, will be one of the most infuriatingly familiar of all of them.

Guiltlocking is a tool used by strategic-dishonest or self-deceptive rhetoricians to create an impregnable argumentative cycle, wherein their opponent can only either submit to their original criticism or else prove the criticism valid through the very act of refusing to submit to it. It is a classic argumentative measure favoured by people whose approach to handling dispute is to overload or disturb the balance of the argument itself, instead of bringing it to an impartial resolution based on the actual matter at hand.

It can be seen in very unremarkable contexts, as in any number of household arguments:

• A child protests that they have already studied for three hours after school this evening, and they’d like to go and play. Their parent, unsatisfied with the child’s dedication to their studies, accuses them of laziness and neglect of their academics. The child protests that the charge is not fair; after all, they have already studied for three hours, and that after having studied even longer for the past three school-nights. “If you weren’t lazy,” the crafty parent replies, “I wouldn’t even have to ask. The very fact that you’re arguing with me shows you don’t care about your grades.” The child is guiltlocked. Either they trudge despondently back to their desk to continue studying late into the night, or, if their rebellion is permitted, they go to their next activity, and ‘prove’ their parent’s point, all while carrying in them a subtle upset borne of their parent’s charge. Impressionable as they are, they will begin to wonder if their play is wrong; if enjoying is wrong, given mum/dad are so insistent they ought to be studying instead. They will begin to wonder if perhaps they really are lazy. If they are not blessed with a certain natural stature of mind, they may lose the ability to determine such things for themselves entirely, setting off a life-encircling cycle of unjustified self-recrimination for a trait — laziness in this case — they may not even possess. That is the incredible power of the well-applied guiltlock. You just know Seth Bullock wondered if he really was a sloth for much of his life.

• Two spouses sink into a wider dispute, having been set off on one another by some petty issue around the house; let’s say Spouse B forgot to take out the trash. As is their wont, Spouse A accuses Spouse B of being rude — this is common practice for them, as Spouse A considers any dissent expressed to their views as something fundamentally impolite and unreasonable. “I’m not being rude!” protests Spouse B, “you’re just being totally unfair and unreasonable! I do take out the garbage, I just forgot this time.” To which Spouse A replies “How dare you call me unreasonable! Always with the denial, always with the name-calling, you’re so rude.” Spouse B grimaces and puts their finger right on it. “What, am I not allowed to defend myself?” “You’re being rude,” Spouse A responds again. Spouse B is guiltlocked, fated to either accept the original charge or be told that that their resistance to the charge just proves it.

Of course, guilt looping can be seen in considerably heavier contexts, contexts with significant geopolitical weight, as well.

• Quaint as the book and the fame briefly enjoyed by its author seems now, Robin DiAngelo’s book White Fragility was given sole and singular premise by a guiltlock. As per its philosophy, Hiterlite in the purity of its obsession with race, white people are racist by some unspecified genetic default. Any white person who is unwilling to sit in a room to discuss the racism of which they are guilty is, by natural extension, a racist, and furthermore proving their racism by refusing to admit their racism. In DiAngelo’s creed, there are no non-racist white people, just more or less racist ones. Neat system, don’t you think? As internally consistent, and as based on rejection of all reality, as the giants of German philosophy.

• Country A and Country B are consistently to be found at loggerheads for a variety of reasons linked to age-old territorial disputes, religious differences, and cultural antipathy. Country A’s military covertly backs a terrorist sleeper cell operating in one of Country B’s local regions. The sleeper cell breaks cover and massacres a few dozen of Country B’s citizens at an isolated rural location. Country B, which has meaningful access-control over one of Country A’s strategic resources (let’s say, electricity), decides to switch off the supply and carries out a series of ordnance campaigns on Country A’s border. With complete and deliberate strategic ignorance of their own act of provocation, Country A steps onto the world stage and condemns Country B’s “militarism and gross imperialistic designs against us. This is an unacceptable act of war.” A surprising number of sympathetic countries around the world rally to Country A’s side. As Country A would have it, Country B can either let them have their way or, if they have the temerity to resist or respond to an act of war on their soil with arms, be tarred as warmongers. A killer guiltlock.

The Charms of the Lock

You can see why guiltlocking is such a common act of epistemological sabotage among those careless or callous enough to make use of it. In those examples cited above, the actual shape of the truth, and in some cases the actual owner of the fault, are pretty clear cut. We can see, from our disinterested vantage point, what’s actually going on, and who’s being put in a guiltlock.

And yet in almost of these instances, I bet you still found yourself having to re-read the given synopsis, put yourself in the locker’s shoes, to see if maybe you missed something, if maybe you weren’t being guiltlocked; if perhaps you were in the wrong after all. I suspect this is a reflex more common among our more conventionally Westernised readers, who if they are of a younger vintage and a given profile will have been taught to look for their own fault in an argument, or to otherwise lead with favouritistic empathy, whenever they are tempted to apportion blame in a dispute. Thus, the insidious guiltlock. The more epistemologically sceptical, the more honest, the more empathetic you are, the more prone you will be to allow the second guess to get a hold of you, in which case you may accept the other side’s charge without cause.

And the real kicker amongst it all? The most obvious defence against guiltlocking, which is to simply deny any charge submitted as part of it, is epistemologically ruinous. Because the chances are that, if you find yourself in the thick of an argument borne of, say, your refusal or inability to see the validity of someone else’s view, you’re probably going to find yourself being called stubborn, or an ignoramus; in which case, you’re hearing exactly what you need to hear.

“I am not! I always take other people’s views seriously,” you protest.

“See!” says your exasperated interlocutor. “You’re refusing to see things from my point of view right now!”

“Oh, no, no,” you say, “you’re just trying to guiltlock me. Either I admit you’re right, or you’ll just say me arguing with you proves you’re right. I won’t fall for it.”

Only, in this instance, falling for it would have been a very sensible thing to do.

That’s what makes the self-defence paradox so cruel. “A guilty dog barks loudest,” as they say, in absence of any proof whatsoever (c. Horowitz, Ostojić et al., Hecht, Miklósi, and Gácsi).

A Few Small Keys

Guiltlocking is tied up with a number of other behaviours that are now commonly recognised and identifiable:

• Gaslighting. In fact, guiltlocking and gaslighting go together about as wonderfully as a tarte aux fraises française and a custom-overclocked NVIDIA RTX 3090-powered oven [1]. Once a person intent on gaslighting you into believing in some particular defect in your personality has you in the position, all they need to do to really hit their assertion home is to tell you that the very fact of your resistance to their insistence means that, yes, you really are a liar/crazy/prejudiced/guilty, like they’ve always said.

• Pairlocking. The sibling of guiltlocking, it involves bringing a subordinate guiltlock to an argument that is principally concerned with something else. Let’s say you’ve been charged with the crime of having forgotten to buy nappies for the baby. Your spouse accuses you of always forgetting to do so; you have forgotten once before, but you do not forget to do so generally. You protest that the charge is unfair. Your spouse rebuts this with the assertion that you always react aggressively in argument situations. You deny this and suggest your spouse is being unfair. Your spouse insists on your unacceptable aggression in communication, and that your apparently belligerent denial is proof of it. Concession here can be used to cover for inability to resolve the prior dispute reasonably. Perhaps next time you don’t argue with your spouse at all, whatever they say, for fear of being told you’re being unacceptably aggressive in arguing back. The lock is not on the first argument, but in a contrived second argument; if the lock fits, your interlocutor carries the first argument by default.

• DARVO. Beloved of therapy veterans, DARVO stands for ‘Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender’. It is a common tactic among narcissistic types, but is also a common low-hanging tool of defence that many people, very much including the narcissists who use it to begin with, will be willing to accuse you of using, even where you are not doing much more than protesting their ongoing attempt to victimise you.

• The Kafka Trap. If you’ve read Kafka’s The Trial, you will know the scenario well — that anyone accused of x who denies having x’d must be guilty of x, since anyone guilty of x would deny having x’d. It is a common trope in literature beyond the great bard of clerical despair, featuring in Shakespeare (the tragedy of Desdemona in Othello, who comes to seem more guilty of manipulation to Othello the more she protests her fidelity to him), Antigone, The Crucible, and elsewhere.

So how to resist the guiltlock? There are a few premises that can help you remain out of trouble.

1. Recall that there are objective premises within arguments, even if no one in the argument recognises them. If, in fact, you are pretty assiduous with cleaning up after yourself around the house, and you are charged with consistently failing to do so out of a lack of regard for your spouse, which disregard is purportedly in evidence again through your being willing to argue the point with them, recall that in fact, no, the original premises of the argument were not correct, and it was reasonable for you to contest them.

2. Never devalue restraint. Too often we default to the instinctual belief that the person who has the last word in a dispute is the victor, even though in many cases the person who has picked the argument has, by picking it, lost it. Forgetting this can lead people to substitute in all sorts of toxic proxies in their cavemanic quest for the ‘win’ — who can shout loudest; who can swear most creatively; who can cause the most harm to the other — in ways that are utterly ruinous, and the person ostensibly in the right is as susceptible to this temptation as the person making the charge, often more so as the one more in the right has to cope with the outrage brought about by the unjust slight made on their character. As above, the premises dictate the justice of the dispute. If you are right by its dictates at the conversation’s beginning, what happens thereafter is largely irrelevant, except as a matter of appraisal of your interlocutor. Speaking of.

3. Be wary of serial lockers. If you find yourself in a position where you are being guiltlocked in earnest, frequently, consider who is subjecting you to such repeat insults. If it is a close loved one, you may be unlucky enough to have someone who, through officially ‘innocent’ ignorance or by unpleasant design, defaults to dishonest positions in arguments. You must bring up this tendency to them where they exercise it, and make them aware of it. Where you are not obliged by such close connection to put up with a guiltlocker, you should not. Willingness to use this trick as a way of getting around people predicts for many unfortunate externalities of character.

4. Recognise where you are not in fact being guiltlocked. Sometimes what looks like guiltlocking is just you coming up against a repeated pattern of pointless or maladaptive behaviour. If you suspect your interlocutor may be right about what they’re charging you with, call time out on the dispute, gather your thoughts, and reflect with honesty on prior instances; have you shown the behaviour you’re being accused of before? If so, a concession is in order, and you and your interlocutor will be all the better for it.

It is a strange thing about our world that, though the idea nominally offends our sense of justice, aggressors are often apportioned less blame in a conflict situation than the person who is willing to athletically defend themselves when wronged. We will lose every argument, even those we appear to win, if we are not willing to be frank with ourselves about our faults. But where fault is honoured in us where we do not possess it, we do ourselves great injury not to rebut the charge.

Our interlocutor may never believe in our defence. But that is not necessarily the important thing.

With thanks to VividVoid for the inspiration of this piece.

The Complete Maxi’s Toolkit

Vol.1 The Trialectic

Vol.2 The Fallacy of the Pendulum

Vol.3 Equilism

Vol.4 The Wittgentrap

Vol.5 The MacGregorism

Vol.6 Systematic Intelligence

Vol.7 Vainferreting

Vol.8 Quantum Caramel

Vol.9 The Lily Pad Presumption

Vol.10 The Social Sublime and the Empathic Sublime

Vol.11 The Block Proof

[1] Yes yes this didn’t land but they go together incredibly well trust me.

What follows is a short dialogue between myself and another person, who though their work is freely available under their own name I will not name here, on the subject of intellectual property rights and copyright reform.

This began when I read a very brief reflection on the necessity of Intellectual Property law reform for the sake of natio…

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I’m sorry. I’ve been gone.

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Welcome to another instalment in Maxi’s Toolkit. In the toolkit I outline a number of epistemological techniques — or ‘epitechs’, tools for thinking — that will be of some interest to you, the discerning digital humanist, in navigating a world of ever-increasing complexity.

We live in a world that is, en masse, better educated than it has ever been (waho…

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Heir to the Thought is, at its core, a newsletter aimed at doing a single thing — allowing me to survey and build world-standard understanding of a vast panoply of the subjects of my interest, with a productive outcome in mind. That productive outcome is the formulation of a new code of living. That code of living I call digital humanism. The precepts of that code you will find here, in a regularly and progressively refined/evolved list.

The aim of digital humanism is the production and sustenance of a digissance — an effort to revive and surpass the ideas of times gone by, via both the direct utilisation of, and where necessary the defiance and moderating control of, the technological innovations that mark this time of ours. Our time is markedly similar to the time prior to the flowering of the Renaissance. It is rich in engulfing social change. It is full of novel tools, methods, and technical pedigree. It is culturally impoverished. The rate at which it achieves great things, and the rate at which it produces great people, are both well below expectation set against the means it possesses.

So it is that we experience a great many dissatisfactions in our time — with the efficacy of the systems that govern our lives, with the art we produce, with our historical command, with the way in which we mobilise all the knowledge that is at our disposal, with our view of the human being as a discrete entity. These dissatisfactions, produced by what is wrong in us, can be defeated through the revival of what is right in us. The code items below are intended to revise the way we conceive of ourselves, and revise the way we conceive of that which lays beyond us, so that we may produce as much meaning and material glory, and distill from both the greatest volumes of contentment and delight, as we can.

This Substack, like all those things to which I dedicate my hours on Earth, is dedicated to achieving just this objective. It always was.

The Digital Humanist’s Manifesto

1. The Digital Humanist is above all other things a believer in the rationality, beauty, and heroism of humanity, and is driven in their pursuits to help as many of their fellows as possible achieve more completely in these dimensions of human greatness, in their many forms. They appreciate humanity’s special place in the universe as its sole producers and arbiters of meaning, and believe that human works are fit to be encouraged and preserved, and human happiness and dignity valued.

2. Intellectually, a Digital Humanist is above all other things a thinker about thinking – they take great pride in building an ever-increasing familiarity of the paths of human reasoning, and a systematic appreciation of its frequent pitfalls.

3. Digital Humanists believe that there is nothing that ought to be beyond a person’s interest. A Digital Humanist believes that a person at a healthy height of cultivation ought to be able to speak and write with eloquence and clarity on a wide variety of subjects (Philolexy), keenly assail great independent undertakings, approach all things with an artist’s commitment to ideal and a scientist’s good-natured scepticism, take responsible pleasure in the joys and use of the body, impart and exemplify good moral conduct without hectoring, and approach the troubles of life with philosophic calm. They should be able to play a musical instrument, write software, cook fresh and healthy food, decorate a room in style, lead a team, follow a skilled leader, make a stirring public address, parse and calculate statistics, compose a moving love letter; they are, above all else, capable of making their thoughts tangible

4. To the end above, the Digital Humanist believes that education is a lifelong process, and that any education that fails to proceed beyond formal schooling is fundamentally incomplete. They pursue education to mastery, they constantly submit themselves to the experience of becoming a beginner again; they apply at all times a reductionist perspective to what they have already learned (that is, they seek opportunity to disprove, not consolidate, what they feel they know), and glory in the feeling of dilation in time produced by the breadth of their familiarities, and the wild extent of their capabilities

5. In the creation and appreciation of art, a Digital Humanist accords to the artistic triad – that is, they appraise the quality of a work according to its aesthetic beauty, intellectual depth, and technical command. They are realists in appreciating that not all work that is enjoyable is rich in all (or indeed any) of these qualities, but that the highest and most enjoyable art is.

6. Digital Humanists are committed to social life, are tigerish in loyalty to friends, believe in the role of friendship as means to self-improvement, and surround themselves with those they admire. They prize fidelity very highly except where to be faithful would risk moral outrage. In love, they seek out a partner who is their equal, or preferably who excels them in some key respects. They disdain in-grouping anywhere that capture of a flow of value and the reservation of influence is not critical to the broad health of their society [see the next item], maintain impartial and individualised groups of friends, and resist the formation of arbitrary social orthodoxies, regarding them as the enemy of self-actualisation and the catalyst of dogma and unreason. To them, education is a social activity. [See the Empathic and Social Sublime]

7. Digital Humanists take a direct and passionate interest in civic and political life. They are non-dogmatic, and accord in their policy goals to what works – that is, what makes the basic priorities of a state (material prosperity, wide education, social cohesion under a benevolent nationalism, international cooperation and exchange) easier to procure and insure. They disdain the activist arena, preferring at all times a robust sense of achievable goals and focus at all times on the proper institutional capture so that these goals might be obtained

8. Digital Humanists are builders. While they reserve intense respect for pure scholarship and privilege learning and education as key components of the good life, they generally feel the best outlet for learned wisdom is in a form by which it can increase the intellectual, spiritual and material prosperity of others. They are inveterate startup entrepreneurs, but will not follow market imperative anywhere where it causes higher values to be sacrificed in the name of pure profit motive.

9. Digital Humanists, therefore, believe in markets, not only for their record of promoting a broadly shared material prosperity and elevating societies out of poverty, but for creating incentives useful for the preservation of international rules-based order; they appreciate that markets and wealth make mutual extermination in war seem nothing other than a waste of money.

10. Relative to the natural world, the Digital Humanist takes on a stewardly disposition, that given humanity’s vast power and resources it is our duty to preserve the beauty and vitality of our natural world, and to harmonise these efforts with our concurrent obligations to ensure the prosperity of our fellows. They believe far more, for instance, in a technology and innovation led approach to conservation and climate risk prevention, than they do in destructive or reductive ideologies like degrowth.

11. The Digital Humanist seeks always to calculate the impact of their work and deeds on the whole human estate, and considers at all times both the avenues by which they may contribute to progress (a freer climate of knowledge enquiry, success in novel or important fields, creating prosperity and freedom from ignorance where there is none) and those eternal values (wisdom, familial stability, cultural cohesion, material comfort for all) which no progress must be allowed to jeopardise. When they build, they build not just for today, or for tomorrow, but for all time, and in the same spirit as informs this sentiment of Ruskin’s, found in a bricklayer’s manual.

12. The Digital Humanist believes in the ‘recreative’ theory of God – that is, they believe in the linguistic contingency of God and the utility, particularly the historical utility, of a figurative and literary-theoretical view of religion. It recognises the basic common affinities of different religions as means to make an ideal of man for people to strive towards, and but for those tenets of doctrine that prevent the individual pursuit of a reasonable life, practice independently so that their philosophy and spiritual life may purify and enrich one another. They acknowledge the use of ritual, religious or not, to bind community together and give cultures a schedule basis.

13. The Digital Humanist puts great stock in the institution of the family, and esteems the role of the parent as teacher.

14. The Digital Humanist believes that true happiness involves the pursuit of a mode of life without a crutch. They disdain and seek to avoid all means to addiction, debt, and compensatory behaviour

15. The Digital Humanist is not a moral or cultural relativist – their humanism esteems its own moral code and can capably defend its foundations and justifications, and while they similarly esteem the variety cultures that can produce the civilisational outcomes valued by Digital Humanism, the Digital Humanist is wary of and seeks without violence to limit the influence of cultures, or aspects thereof, that produce opposite outcomes. The Digital Humanist honours the rites of cultural inheritance but holds that it is an individual’s duty to be primarily themselves, a distinct individual, not a mere extension of a group to which they might belong.

16. The Digital Humanist favours reason over prejudice always, and persuasion over force in each and every case in which the latter cannot be reasonably avoided, acknowledging that there are some occasions in which it cannot be.

17. The Digital Humanist acknowledges the awe-inspiring variety of humankind, and holds to the adage that, from wherever a person begins, they may, given the correct application and some good fortune, become 300% of what they might expect of themselves. They see anyone looking to improve themselves, or striving towards a great goal, as someone to be encouraged. They consider grace to be one of the universe’s great, and one of its only functionally inexhaustible, minerals, and believe that whatever their occupation otherwise a person ought to create one superb alloy, and one brilliant weapon of peace, out of grace each week.

18. The Digital Humanist has a positive relationship to history – does not see it as an inexhaustible store of grievance, but as a great work of moral and executive instruction, an inventory of stories blessed with feats of narrative engineering the likes of which only that greatest of poets – Time – is capable. The Digital Humanist studies the past intensively and with a cool eye, searches it hungrily for example and counter-example, is not led by ideology or prejudice in doing so, but is driven as in all things by the desire to know, and know truthfully, and the desire to achieve greatness.

19. The Digital Humanist accepts, believes in, and is not afraid of, death.