Webcurios 15/05/26

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Reading Time: 44 minutes

 

IT’S ON! HE’S RUNNING! OH GOD THE EXCITEMENT!

Fcuk’s sake everyone, we have WEEKS of this to come, WEEKS OF IT. Can we add ‘tediously drawn-out periods ahead of leadership elections’ to ‘Christmas’ on my personal list of ‘things I would quite like to be drugged so that I can sleep through the entirety of’? Thanks.

The only vaguely funny outcome is that Bambi fails to win the seat, leaving us all back where we started again – except, of course, that wouldn’t be funny at all because all that would do is bring that grifting, reptilian race-baiting human tumour (if we all pray hard enough…) closer to power. It does rather feel like, whatever happens, we’re all going to lose in some small but significant way.

So, then, forget your political worries and cares (except, er, for the bits where I go on a bit about politics, but I promise they’re relatively few and far between this week) and enjoy this hand-curated selection of the week’s best links – would any of the cnuts in Westminster do this for you? WOULD THEY FCUK THIS IS WHY I AM BETTER THAN ALL OF THEM.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you really have no idea quite how incredibly bored you are going to be of politics by the time this has all played out.

By Felix Chesher

SOUNDTRACK THE FIRST SET OF LINKS – OR WHATEVER ELSE YOU MIGHT FANCY – WITH THIS SELECTION OF ASSORTED BREAKS COMPILED BY AARDVEKTOR! 

THE SECTION WHICH WONDERS WHETHER WE CAN JUST DO WHAT BELGIUM DID A FEW YEARS AGO AND JUST NOT HAVE A GOVERNMENT FOR A BIT, BECAUSE HONESTLY THESE CNUTS, PT.1:  

  • Drops: I have to say that my professional (and, look, also personal; at this stage I just have to admit that I have a genuine problem with information addiction and that I AM OK WITH THAT HONESTLY) need to Monitor The Situation has felt…somewhat-onerous this week, and the thought of having to spend the next howevermanyweeks paying attention to the Labour leadership contest is somewhat sucking my will to live – if you are feeling similarly-unenthused by the prospect of another XX weeks of byelection chat and Burnham-burnishing, I suggest that you bookmark this link and return to it whenever you want some brainsmoothing distraction and Pleasing Sounds. Drops is a LOVELY little synthtoy – the mechanic isn’t wholly-original, fine, but the execution is pleasing in the extreme. You’re presented with a screen on which balls fall in rhythmic fashion; by placing obstacles in the path of said balls you can create small, looping beatscapes, the beats corresponding to the balls hitting the obstacles with the pitch and tone being determined by their exact position. You can bounce the balls from object to object, creating vaguely-syncopated patterns, it’s seemingly-impossible to create anything that doesn’t sound…sort of good, and there are a variety of different speeds of loop and other FX you can explore, and, generally, this is just an incredibly-soothing and intensely-pleasing Good Time. It’s also part of a BIGGER PROJECT – A Vinyl Bar In Shibuya is…well, it’s not wholly clear what it is other than a collection of little digital musical experiments, which you can find collected at this link; there’s a mashup generator and a really fun chrome plugin that lets you change the pitch and speed of any video playing in your browser by, er, moving a small surfing dog around (it makes sense when you install it, honest), and, generally, this is all FUN and FRIVOLOUS and MUSICAL and thank fcuk it has nothing to do with politics or politicians.
  • Batcloud: Are you a devotee of tarot? Do you believe that there is a warp and a weft to the world that, when scried and assessed and felt and seen through your third eye will reveal the secrets of the past, future and present with a terrible clarity? OH GOOD IN WHICH CASE YOU WILL LOVE THIS! A project by a museum in Mexico, this is a website which…actually, no, I am going to leave it to them to outline what is going on here: “The Bat Cloud is a proposition for interspecies encounter, installed in the wooded area surrounding the SFER IK museum in Tulum, Mexico. The work is an artistic offering to bats in the form of water, fruits, and insects, and an opportunity for humans to ask bats a question, with the help of an artificial intelligence oracle trained to listen to bat conversations.” So this is both a practical installation which can be visited, but also a virtual one which will provide answers to your questions based on data that is being received from the…bat environment, I suppose. Click the link, type your question and WAIT FOR THE BATS TO REVEAL THE TRUTH! Or a truth. Or perhaps no truth at all – after all, they’re just bats ffs, what do you expect them to know about the travails and hopes and dreams of a species that can’t even echolocate? Anyway, I just asked it whether Keir Starmer would still be PM in August and the bats responded with the ‘Arousal’ card (“BATS ENDORSE SEXY KEIR!” and said…yes! You heard it hear first, go and stake your house on it.
  • The Reform UK Councillor Tracker: Sorry about all the politics chat – I promise it will stop soon, but, well, we have had rather a lot of it over the past week or so and it does rather pollute the linky waters, so to speak. This is a project by Chris Barker, tracking how many reform Councillors – elected, lest you forget, a mere seven days ago! – have been either suspended or forced to quit as a result of having been found to have said, or done, some massively-racist things (actually, in fairness, not ALL of them have quit because of racism, just the vast majority). So far the tracker shows 12 in 8 days, which is a pretty impressive hit-rate; I wonder what odds you’d get on them losing 100 by the end of the year? Anyway, on the one hand this is sort-of funny – lol, look at the racists getting exposed, what a shambles!!! – and on the other, it sort of really isn’t, given a) how many people voted for these cnuts, and b) the fact that, to repeat the point, LOTS OF THEM ARE QUITE OBVIOUSLY CARD-CARRYING RACISTS. As an aside, by the way (and, seriously, I will shut up about UK politics very, very shortly, at least until the longreads), the fact that the even worse racists, a party which literally campaigns on a ‘send them back where they came from’ ticket, swept the board in Great Yarmouth does seem to have rather gone under the radar what with All The Other Politics Happening but…feels incredibly bad!
  • The Bluesky Farm: What would the Bluesky farm grow? Part of me wants to say ‘tedious beef’, but, let’s be honest, it would 100% be a vegan setup. There’s an article doing the rounds this morning about how Bluesky is DYING (again), with reports suggesting that engagement has declined a staggering 95% since January 2025 (the platform contests this and says it’s only 25%) – which seems entirely likely, given MOST PEOPLE HAVE NO INTEREST IN A SHORTFORM LARGELY-TEXTUAL SOCIAL NETWORK (noone wants to read, noone wants to click!), particularly one where the whole thing that Made Twitter Great (cf breaking news) hasn’t really taken off. Still, if you’re one of the stubborn holdouts still flying the flag over there – as, to be clear, am I – you might enjoy this little visualiser which creates a sort of…farm from your Bluesky account and the accounts you engage with the most, with the number of posts you make and the engagement they get determining the size and fertility of your plot, and the people you interact with the most showing up around you in some sort of barely-functional agrarian metaphor…this is cute, although if I am going to be picky (and I am, it’s MY PREROGATIVE) I would have liked a little more prettification here. Where are my lush and verdant fields? Where are my crops? Where is my threshing machine? Where is my slaughterhouse? THIS FARM WILL NEVER BREAK EVEN FFS.
  • Indigo: SILLY LUXURY WEBSITE CORNER! This is an Italian jewellery brand called ‘Indigo’ – I have no particular opinions on the quality of the work here (while it’s not really my vibe, maybe it will be yours! I am not here to judge!), but I have PLENTY of opinions on the website, which is all SHINY full-bleed video and SYMBOLIC MOVEMENT and features some truly-beautiful copy of the sort that luxury retailers do so, so well. As you scroll you will be taken through ‘five stages of being’ which in some way relate to, er, some necklaces; you will also be accompanied on your journey by some truly spectacular copy. “Before the gesture, there is a sound. Before the form, an echo. Indigo gathers these invisible traces and transforms them into jewelry: five tales exploring matter, time and intimacy.” What do YOU want from a jewellers’ website? Is it the chance to look at their wares? NO! It is a NARRATIVE JOURNEY THROUGH INVISIBLE TRACES OF BEING! This really is worth clicking on, not least for the point halfway down the page when you meet the second model and he gives you one of the most incredible straight-down-the-lens BLUE STEEL gazes I think I have ever seen. MY KNEES, THEY GO WEAK!
  • Halupedia: A theoretically-interesting AI-enabled art project, this, which has sadly been ruined by the fact that it has been found by Idiot Children. Halupedia is a simple concept – an encyclopedia where the entries don’t exist, until someone searches for them. Which, on reflection, possibly doesn’t make any sense – let me try again. Basically the site will spin up an encyclopedia entry, using AI, for anything you ask of it – nothing exists until it’s prompted into being, at which point it’s added to the site’s corpus. Which, you know, I quite like as a collaborative, hallucinatory project; except, if you look at the most recent entries that have been created, you can see that it has been pretty comprehensively 4channed (other troll communities are available) and so the whole thing is entirely-unfunny prompts about Charlie Kirk mixed with all sorts of regrettably-vile hatespeech. AND THIS IS WHY YOU MODERATE YOUR ART PROJECTS, KIDS.
  • Similes: A LOVELY DATA ANALYSIS AND VIZ PROJECT! The talented people at The Pudding have turned their eye to similes in popular fiction, analysing over 200,000 to present an overview of some of the ways in which we like to describe certain qualities, feelings and sensations. If you have any interest in language whatsoever then you will love this – also, if you are anything like me you will be APPALLED at your lack of imagination when coming up with a simile for ‘dryness’ and will spend quite a long time feeling like a dreadful hack who should never be allowed to type again.
  • The Sound of Online: What *is* the sound of online? The screeching of a modem in the 90s? The Nyan Cat music? Numa Numa? Rick Astley? NO IT IS NONE OF THESE! Instead, according to this website at least, it’s a collection of various audio files from all around the web and its history – old recordings of conversations between phone phreakers from the 90s, mp3s of songs about the internet, old phone pranks from back in the (really, really old) days, super-early internet-facilitated conference calls…Look, this is VERY VERY NICHE and I can’t for a second imagine who the fcuk this is for or who it would appeal to, but, well, maybe the answer to that is YOU!
  • The Quick Cache and Archive Search: Irritatingly – for me, at least, although probably not for the publishers in question – the past few months have seen a lot of the larger media organisations becoming…significantly better at erecting effective paywalls around their content, so that a lot of the old, reliable methods for getting around the need to cough up for subscriptions can no longer be called upon. If you, like me, have a subscriptions problem that can best be described as ‘financially ruinous’ (look, I really do believe in paying for stuff, particularly when it’s professionally useful to me, but CAN SOMEONE PLEASE INVENT A DECENT BUNDLING OFFER FOR NEWSLETTERS AND OTHER SUBSCRIPTIONS BECAUSE I AM LITERALLY GOING TO FCUKING STARVE AT THIS RATE. Or, er, maybe one of you fancies employing me on a chunky dayrate for 2 days a month? I will do literally ANYTHING (really, really badly)), you might find this website useful – plug in any link and then click one of the DOZENS of options available to you to try and find an accessible, cached version of said page. Useful not only for jumping paywalls but also for finding stuff that you fear has been deleted or been allowed to wither away – worth bookmarking for any of you who Do Digital Research Stuff.
  • Awesome Marketing Websites: To anyone with a functional soul, the idea of putting those three words together will make little sense; for the rest of you, though, this is a collection of websites which are, apparently, AWESOME EXAMPLES OF MARKETING. Are they? I honestly don’t care, but I appreciate that there are some of you who might still have to and so, well, HERE YOU ARE! Oh, and BONUS ADVERMARKETINGPRCONTENT! Here’s a similar site which showcases particularly good examples of ecommerce sites. God, I feel so *dirty* even typing words like this these days.
  • Klattsch: Ok, this is fun if a bit weird – it’s a speech synth which works on phonemes rather than natural language spelling. So, for example, to get it to say ‘hello’ you have to instead plug “HH AH L OW” into the interface; there’s a keyboard of all available phonemes so it’s easy to experiment, and there’s something genuinely fun (ok, admittedly this is…not exactly mainstream fun, but fun nonetheless) about trying to work out which phonemes can be bashed together to make Actual Speech. Anyone who studied linguistics properly will probably enjoy this a lot, but it’s also just fun to fcuk around with and I think you could probably do some quite cool things with this if sampled in a creative way, maybe.
  • Personal Sites: I am pretty sure that I haven’t featured this before, astonishingly – this is a GREAT portal collecting LOADS of lovely examples of people’s personal websites; mostly portfolios by various types of designer or coder or maker, but also just loads of small corners of the web  built and maintained by people who just want a repository for their thoughts and obsessions and interests…honestly, this really is an absolute timesink if you’re the sort of person who’s interested in seeing the ways in which people choose to build small homes for themselves online and all the wonderful, strange, mad, boring, idiosyncratic, obsessive things that they care about…ALL OF HUMAN LIFE IS HERE! Or at least the bits of human life that people choose to express via the medium of homespun html.
  • The Dirty Little Library: NOT THAT SORT OF DIRTY. Or at least not that I have yet been able to find, although I suppose there *might* be some filth in here somewhere. Instead, this is a library of ZINES – specifically ones made with the Dirty Little Zine maker – covering topics as diverse as, er, a walk along England’s A205 and an art project about someone’s parents’ wedding photos. All are available as downloadable, printable PDFs – you can also see them online, but, per the medium, they work better as physical, printed artefacts. I love this so much – muchlike the previous link, there’s something infinitely-pleasing to me about the ability to just wander through other people’s obsessions and interests like this, and the tedious, old man in me wants to say something incredibly trite like THIS IS WHAT SOCIAL MEDIA SHOULD BE. But I won’t, because I am BETTER than that.
  • Trambient: It turns out that writing about sonifications of transport networks, as I have in recent weeks, REALLY brings the readership to life – not making any assumptions about you guys, but, well, wow you make it easy for me to make assumptions about you guys! Anyway, this is another gorgeous project taking transport data and turning it into music, brought to my attention by reader Gareth Hacking (THANKYOU GARETH!); it’s a WONDERFUL project by Manchester-based musician Fritz von Runte, which basically creates organic soundscapes based on the tram network in the city. “This app will be a companion for the commuter of the green and yellow lines, easing in the journey to the vibrant city of Manchester from the leafy suburb of Bury, and calming down the journey back. The listening experience will always change too as it’s not a ‘static’ record. It isn’t an album either. But a collection of music, changing itself on every play, automatically synched to the stations in the journey. Our app features a unique algorithm that personalises each journey. As you travel and listen, the app seamlessly mixes the current track with the next, using multiple possible starting points for a fresh listening experience every time. There’s potentially 1.7 million versions for Bury to Victoria — and another 1.7m for the journey back!” I really, really love this, and if you live in Manny I suggest you check this out.
  • Sinceerly: It feels like something of a tipping point has been reached in the past month or so in terms of the prevalence of AI-generated copy; every second Substack now seems to have the stench of The Machine about it, all of the marketing copy and a genuinely-upsetting proportion of journalism (I have a bunch of tech RSS feeds set up for work and The Next Web in particular has become entirely-machine-penned, which is both depressing and entirely-horrible to read), and the cumulative effect is really quite distressing, not least because as soon as I come across a Machine-tell I immediately stop engaging with the content of what I am reading and instead just start quietly fulminating at how fcuking annoyed I am that the cnut who’s put their name to it can’t even be fcuked to put their fingers to work (WRITE 10,000 IN FIVE HOURS YOU COWARDS WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU). Anyway, Sinceerly (I know, I know) is a horrible service for horrible people which promises to ‘De-AIify’ your copy – if you think this is a good and useful thing, know that I hate you.
  • Ooooooooooooooooooooooooooo: Click the ‘o’. Click it again. And again and again and again. WIND IT UP AND WATCH IT GO! This is utterly, totally pointless and I rather like it – if nothing else it’s vaguely-cathartic, and we could all do with some of that.

By Michael Pederson

NEXT, WHY NOT EXPERIENCE THE LATEST – AND QUITE POSSIBLY LAST – ALBUM FROM LONGTIME CURIOS FAVOURITE, THE BREATHLESSLY-INTENSE AND MODERATELY-ATONAL RAPPING MYSTERY MAN OLOFF! 

 

THE SECTION WHICH WONDERS WHETHER WE CAN JUST DO WHAT BELGIUM DID A FEW YEARS AGO AND JUST NOT HAVE A GOVERNMENT FOR A BIT, BECAUSE HONESTLY THESE CNUTS, PT2:

  • The 24/7 Wallace & Gromit Feed: While I have a tediously-predictable and oh-so-teenage penchant for art which might charitably be described as ‘challenging’ and ‘a bit on the fcuking bleak side’, only a monster (or at least a monster of a different sort to me) could deny the brilliance of Aardman Animations and their most famous creations, Wallace and Gromit – this YouTube channel quietly appeared this week, streaming the classic shorts on a 24/7 rotation, and it doesn’t matter how many times you have seen them before, they never, ever tire. Right now there are 136 people enjoying this together, and, honestly, there’s a very weird sense of pure communion you get from knowing that a bunch of anonymous strangers and you are experiencing the wonder of stop-motion plasticine simultaneously.
  • Claudebient: Anthropic have set up this YouTube stream, another 24/7 number, which broadcasts a seemingly-infinite procession of vaguely-ambient-ish tracks which broadly fall under the general ‘music for coding’ rubric; amusingly (to me at least), the channel description is at pains to point out that all the music is picked and made by HUMAN MUSICIANS, presumably to forestall all the anti-AI hate that would otherwise result (equally amusingly, none of the humans are named anywhere, suggesting that they too are hiding from the ‘HOW DARE YOU COLLABORATE WITH THE MACHINE!!’ pitchfork mobs that would inevitably come for them were they cited (god it’s good to have such healthy, mature discourse).
  • Googolplex Written Out: Ooh, VINTAGE DIGITAL ART! From 2013, this, although new to me (in url if not in concept): “In 1940, the mathematician Edward Kasner published the book “Mathematics and the Imagination”, in which he popularized the words googol and googolplex which his nephew suggested as names for big numbers. The number googol has been defined as 1 followed by a hundred zeros:
    googol = 10100 = 10 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000. The much larger number googolplex has been defined as 1 followed by a googol zeros. While this number can easily be written as googolplex = 10googol = 10(10100)
    using the exponential notation, it has often been claimed that the number googolplex is so large that it can never be written out in full. However in this “Googolplex Written Out” multivolume set of books, I am doing just that. It consists of 10 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 volumes, and each volume contains 1 000 000 zeros of the number googolplex. The first volume also contains the initial digit one with which googolplex starts.” This is obviously a high-concept gag, but part of me quite likes the idea of having a library constructed to house all the many, many volumes which the completed work would require. Go on Elon you dreadful racist coward, do something useful with all that cash.
  • The Echo Department: Christian Ward is a lovely man and very talented musician, who I worked with at a genuinely godawful PR agency many years ago (this was in the little-lamented ‘pay The Daily Star on Sunday £2k to put a naked woman in full bodypaint on P3 to promote the videogame Bionic Commando’ phase of my career) and who is now experimenting with making SPOOKY EPISODIC NARRATIVE FICTION on TikTok. The Echo Department is a project sharing the same name as Christian’s musical sidehustle, and I think will appeal to any and all of you who are into folkloric hauntology and WEIRD ANGLO VIBES.
  • The Myth of Ivress: I have absolutely no idea what is going on here, honestly. I *think* this is the website of a Japanese agency of some sort – there’s a sort of strapline at the top that reads ‘Evolve Relationship’, whatever the fcuk that is supposed to mean – but there’s no actual information about who they are or what they do. Instead, you get a…slightly-strange fairytale presented via the medium of (admittedly very nice and VERY pretty) scrollytelling, all about a mystical sword or somesuch. Is this how business works in Japan? You choose your supplier based on their ability to paint a pretty picture in simple narratives and HTML? This feels…superior, frankly. Anyway, this is GORGEOUS and its purpose is entirely baffling to me, which is pretty much a perfect Curio in some respects.
  • Convene The Council: This is a potentially-interesting tool; nothing you couldn’t do yourself with a bit of effort, of course, but it’s quite fun to play with. The ‘Council’ is a selection of different AI personae, all of which will offer responses to a query from subtly different perspectives; so, for example, feed it a query and you will hear back from voices such as ‘the pragmatist: Cuts through abstraction to what’s actually executable now’, or ‘the skeptic: Assumes there’s a fatal flaw somewhere and hunts for it.’ Each is built on a different model – not the premium ones, they’re not made of cash, but a bunch of open source ones or lightweight versions of, say, Gemini, and you might find this useful if faced with some sort of INTRACTABLE DILEMMA (please, whatever you do, do not let this guide your actions in any way). The version hosted here is limited to six  queries a day, I think, but there are instructions on how to set up your own, locally-hosted version if you’re that sort of weird AI freak.
  • Whichbook: Ooh, this is quite interesting. I normally have limited truck with book recommendation websites (mainly because I am a terrible, terrible snob with an innate belief that noone could EVER recommend anything good to me because I Know Best – yes, you’re right, I am a *pleasure* to hang out with!) but this one has a particularly nice interface feature which has made me feel better-disposed to it than I might otherwise have done. There are a bunch of ways you can try and source recommendations, but the most interesting is the one that lets you set a bunch of sliders to determine the extent you want the picks to embody certain qualities; so choose where you want it to sit on the ‘happy-sad’ axis, or ‘beautiful-disgusting’, or ‘funny-serious’, or ‘easy-demanding’ and so-on…All of the books on the site have apparently been ‘selected by humans’, presumably down to the tagging in the back end, and having had a play around with it it’s been pretty good at throwing up stuff that not only tracks against the sliders pretty closely (for the novels I know) but which sounds interesting and appealing (for the novels I don’t). This is worth a try, I think – if nothing else there’s something cool and worth exploring about these sorts of fuzzy interfaces.
  • NYC By How Long It Takes To Get There: I have spent a lot of time in the past few weeks whining about stuff existing for NYC and not for London, and I am going to do exactly the same now – this is a GREAT little site/tool, and it would be SO useful for my city and I am UNACCOUNTABLY-IRKED that noone has seen fit to build it for me. It’s really simple – drag the first point around the map to fix the place you want to track commute times to, then click anywhere else to get an estimate how long it will take to get from point A to point B based on public transport. SO SIMPLE AND SO USEFUL!
  • International Mollusc of the Year: Last featured in Curios in 2023 (I have no idea how I managed to miss the intervening editions, I can only apologise for my failure to keep abreast of the mollusc situation), International Mollusc of the Year is BACK for 2026, packed to the, er, gills (yes, I know, but I am struggling with metaphor here and there’s something of a mid-Curios slump happening at this end, bear with me) with bivalves and the like. “Welcome to the fascinating world of molluscs! From snails and slugs to clams, octopus and more – these creatures are as diverse as this year’s five finalists. “International Mollusc of the Year” celebrates their remarkable characteristics and inspires fascination for molluscs worldwide. Your vote decides the top mollusc, and Senckenberg will sequence the complete genome of the winner.” Who wouldn’t want to play a part in determining the recipient of this oh-so-prestigious award? NO FCUKER, etc! Last year’s victor was the Deep-sea Octopus Muusoctopus, as I know you were desperate to find out.
  • Palette Inspiration: Would YOU like your home to be subtly evocative of a Caravaggio? Would YOU like to be able to tell anyone who compliments you on the subtle, tasteful use of muted shades across your home that actually you’ve taken your inspiration from, I don’t know, Barbudo’s canvases? OH GOOD! “PaletteInspiration.com is a curated color intelligence platform dedicated to the study and exploration of color as used by the world’s greatest painters. We extract, analyze, and present the dominant color palettes from thousands of artworks spanning the Renaissance through the Modern era. Our mission is to make the color wisdom of master artists accessible to designers, artists, researchers, and curious minds – bridging the gap between classical art history and contemporary creative practice.Each palette on this site is derived through careful computational analysis of high-resolution artwork images. Colors are grouped, named, and ordered by prevalence, giving you an honest representation of how a painter actually used color across their body of work.” Included among the painters analysed is Egon Schiele, and I personally would love to see what a house looked like when decked out in My Syphilis’ preferred range of pustulant reds and yellows (should any of you feel like indulging me). The only way this could be more perfectly middle-class would be if there were a direct link to buy the Farrow & Ball colours for each palette (and if the people behind it read this, you can have that idea for a mere 1% of all the affiliate revenue).
  • The Earth Index: Ok, this is an actual, proper, useful tool rather than a dumb internet toy – WHO SAYS CURIOS CAN’T BE MEANINGFUL AND HEAVYWEIGHT??? – but it is also very cool; Earth Index is basically a project that uses AI (but not the bad sort, honest!) to analyse satellite imagery of the planet and help people who want to conduct large-scale analysis about environmental impact, human geography and the like. So, for example, you could use it to track deforestation, or the distribution of cattle grazing lands across a continental landmass, or all sorts of other things besides (look, I am not an environmental scientist, don’t look at me like that). Per the blogpost explaining the project, “To enable this breakthrough, we’ve done something no one has ever done before: we tiled the Earth into over 3.2 billion overlapping 10 hectare tiles (that’s roughly 3% of the area of Central Park in Manhattan), and used cutting edge AI foundation models to encode those tiles in a searchable database. Earth Index’s intuitive interface makes accessing these tiles simple and powerful. In testing, I’ve been excited by rapidly iterating through potential new applications. Each of these projects took less than 15 minutes from idea to initial implementation: Cataloging rubber processing plants in Thailand, the world’s largest producer of natural rubber. Identifying shrimp farming operations threatening vital mangrove ecosystems in the Gulf of Fonseca in Central America. Tracking the expansion of fracking wellpads in the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania.” This is, objectively, AMAZING and one of those ‘fcuk, the future is quite remarkable isn’t it?’ links that come up occasionally (whilst also being one of those ‘fcuk, we really are screwing things up quite badly, aren’t we?’ links that come up sadly a lot more often).
  • Verdify: An experiment in letting an AI run a greenhouse. Sadly because it’s AI, so’s the project explanation – apologies for the roboprose, but: “Verdify is a family public lab, not a SaaS landing page. The project began with a 367 sq ft greenhouse in Longmont, Colorado, then grew into a useful test case for local AI, deterministic edge control, and public evidence. The core question is simple: can an AI planner improve a real greenhouse without becoming the thing that directly controls relays? Verdify answers that by publishing plans, telemetry, scorecards, costs, failures, lessons, and the exact AI-writable tunables that Iris (our OpenClaw AI agent) is allowed to change…Verdify is a public case study in AI-assisted greenhouse control. Crop profiles define the target bands, Iris (our OpenClaw AI agent) plans tactics through OpenClaw, the ESP32 executes local control every 5 seconds, and scorecards measure whether those tactics reduced plant stress without wasting water, heat, electricity, or equipment cycles. This is not a chatbot bolted onto a garden. It is a closed-loop planning system running against a real 367 sq ft solar-aligned greenhouse in Longmont, Colorado. Routine planning is local-first with Gemma 4 26B A4B (MoE), served locally under the gemma4-26b alias; it is not local-only, because larger cloud reasoning remains available for heavyweight reviews and major deviations. Slack is the human operations surface where Iris explains successful plans, forecast deviations, watch items, and checklist work, but the safety-critical control loop stays local on the ESP32. The home has rooftop solar and batteries, but the greenhouse still uses grid power and gas heat when physics requires it.” THis is SUCH an interesting experiment in the current abilities and limits of both genAI and agentic systems overall; the people behind it seem serious rather than awful techw4nkers and I think it’s legit, so it will be interesting to see how it works and, more specifically, how and where it doesn’t. Don’t get smug, farmers, it’s coming for your jobs too!
  • Digg 3.0: This is…quite sad. Digg, for those of you old and internet-brained enough to remember that far back, was once upon a time a genuinely-great website for surfacing Interesting Things Online. It died, and last year had an attempted resurrection which I seem to recall covering in here…which didn’t work, and now? NOW IT IS REBORN AS A SITE ALL ABOUT AI NEWS! I am including this solely as another datapoint in the general ‘fcuk me everything is a desperate grift these days’ trend – the play here is clear, with the site trawling X for the most-shared links on the topic of artificial intelligence and trying to parse them for ‘virality’ etc…you know that this would have been all about NFTs and Web3 5 years ago. If this is still a thing in two years time I will eat my hat (joke’s on you, I own no haberdashery).
  • The In-Tune Mixtape Fanclub: LOTS AND LOTS OF LOVELY CLASSICAL MUSIC (ok, fine, not ‘lovely’ if you don’t like classical music, but your philistinism is no concern of mine)! “Welcome to the home of the In Tune Mixtape Fan Club. The In Tune MixtapeClassical Mixtape is a weekdaily half-hour of uninterrupted music on BBC Radio 3; in their own words, “an imaginative, eclectic mix featuring classical favourites, lesser-known gems and a few surprises thrown in for good measure.” Here we hold an archive of all the Mixtape episode details since it started in October 2017, and the music listings within, letting you search and browse to your heart’s content. Please note the track listings do not always include every piece of music that was played.” None of the playlists are hosted on the site – instead it links out to the relevant BBC pages for each, where you can listen to your heart’s content – but you can see what you’re getting before you click, and it’s a wonderful bit of quality-of-life service for fans of both the show and Nice Classical Sounds in general.
  • ApeChain: You know, I honestly really didn’t think I would ever have cause to type the words ‘Bored Ape Yacht Club’ into Curios ever again, and yet here we are in 2026 and I am once again inviting you to consider the cold, rotting corpse of the NFT boom – WHAT ODD AND TERRIBLE TIMES THEY WERE! I have just checked, and it’s four years and three months since Jimmy Fallon and Paris Hilton paraded their Apes (sounds wrong, and, oddly, the reality is even worse!) on his talkshow in what is still one of the most brazen examples of attempted market juicing I think I have ever seen…and now, all of the Apes are like dust in the breeze, the supposed WORLD-CHANGING MEDIA EMPIRE reduced to…whatever the fcuk *this* is. Seriously, click the link and have a bit of a dig around the site – I’ll wait, take your time. Now, can any of you explain to me what ANY of the words on there mean? ANYONE??? Look, here’s some sample copy from the landing page for those of you too squeamish to look yourselves – would any of you like to hazard a guess as to what is happening here? “Spotlight will be broken down into rounds, with each one specifically tailored to the highlighted project(s). This ensures what creators are building is amplified and elevated, while encouraging community participation. At each round’s end, the top APE placements score epic prizes made up of exclusive IRL, holy sh*t experiences and other unforgettable rewards. This system rewards both builders and individual collectors, ensuring engagement at all levels, while offering high-stakes rewards to the most active participants. Simple, fun, rewarding. Ready to make your mark?” SIMPLE, FUN, REWARDING. I don’t know what’s more amazing – that significant parts of the world thought that this stuff meant something, or that there are apparently still people out there Diamond Hands-ing and believing fervently that The Crypto Future Will Come – but the whole site is like some sort of mad fever dream from a collective fantasy of which we only have fragmented and very vague recall. Was…was that us? WHITHER THE APES?????
  • PSI Games Online: Do you believe yourself to have PSYCHIC POWERS? Do you think that you are able to SCRY THROUGH THE VEILS using only the POWER OF YOUR MIND???? Are you…are you entirely fcuking deluded? OH GOOD! “Welcome to Psi Games Online, the premier platform for exploring and enhancing your natural intuitive abilities through scientifically designed games and assessments. Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced practitioner, our interactive challenges will help you refine your skills in Remote Viewing, Precognition, Psychokinesis, Mind Sight, and Pendulum Dowsing.” Yes, that’s right, PENDULUM DOWSING. Anyway, if you want to test out your psychic abilities then all you need to do is register on the site and then you too will be able to experiment with psychokinesis and precognition and remote viewing and all that jazz – beautifully, despite the fact that the site claims that “our platform continuously evolves through rigorous testing, data analysis, and expert collaboration to measure the real-world effectiveness of psi abilities”, it doesn’t appear to be able to present, er, any actual evidence of anyone having had any demonstrable psychic powers. OR AT LEAST NOT SO FAR! Perhaps YOU will be the person to finally prove the doubters like me wrong! If so, you could go the whole hog and compete in the International Psychic Games – which, honestly, if you’re an actual journalist, PLEASE pitch a feature on this as I would love to read it..
  • The Marc Andreessen Egg Game: Can YOU decorate an egg so as to make it look like famously-ovoid VC horror Marc Andreessen? TRY YOUR LUCK HERE!
  • The Number Gacha: Via Andy, another entry in the pantheon of ‘games which basically just see how easy it is to trick your brain into thinking something is ‘fun’ based on graphical effects and SFX but without any actual elements which could meaningfully be described as ‘gameplay’’ – this really isn’t a game in any sense at all, but, er, I spent a good seven minutes this morning clicking it while I should have been making coffee, so BE WARNED, it scratches a very lizardbrain itch.
  • Landmarkr: You have six guesses as to which country the game is pointing you at, based on images of landmarks, scenery, politicians, foodstuffs…this is fun, even if you are, like me, fcuking useless at geography.
  • The Fast Five Quiz: A READER WRITES! Chris Read emailed me with this game that he made – in his words, “I’ve written a kind of Wordle for quiz – 5 questions every day, leagues and things or just simple anonymous play.” It’s fun, fast and a nice addition to your morning procrastination-rotation, should you wish to put even more of a buffer between ‘waking up’ and ‘engaging with the horrible sh1tshow that is ‘earning a living’ in 2026’.
  • Keywords: Dave ‘Bagpuss’ Forsey (one day the fcuker will explain the bagpuss thing to me, ONE DAY) made this GREAT little word game, which I was meant to help him test and then totally forgot about (SORRY DAVE). Anyway, it’s excellent fun (and annoyingly tough) – you have to guess five words of increasing length, one letter at a time, with a finite number of guesses on each word…oh, look, it’s a p1sser to explain, just click and play and get as frustrated as I just did (but it is fun, honest).
  • Epic Furious: SATIRE!!!! Ok, so I bounced off this pretty quickly – not because it’s not good or well-made, but because I have literally no appetite whatsoever to engage with anything relating to That Fcuking Cnut In The White House; that said, if you’re someone who still thinks that making fun of him changes anything then you will enjoy this very slickly-crafted little RPG-esque title, riffing on the recent Iranian farrago and, inevitably, Epstein and everything else – there are GAGS and MINIGAMES and FIGHTING and, in general, if you have not yet reached the point where you roll your eyes and reach for the ‘sweet release of death’ button when someone refers to ‘that cheeto in the White House’ then you will LOVE this. Oh, I feel like I am being unfair now – this is very well-made, and far better than it needs to be, I think I am just at the point now where I can’t feel anything pertaining to that fcuker other than tired despair, at least til he finally dies. PLEASE GOD LET HIM DIE SOON.

By Kourtney Roy

OUR FINAL MUSICAL PICK OF THE WEEK IS THIS LOVELY AND ETHEREAL AND JUST SORT OF BEAUTIFUL NEW ALBUM OF…WHAT, CLASSICALAMBIENTISH-TYPE SOUNDS BY HOYO MORIYA! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

  • This Website Cannot Save You: NOT A TUMBLR! It is, though, a BRILLIANT curatorial exercise in, er, odd video stuff – per the blurb, “An adventurous selection of short films, music videos, and video art. This website presumes the apocalypse is imminent and it’s time to jack the good videos straight into our veins. Curated by Scotto Moore.” I love this, not least because of the curator’s name which makes me imagine them as the most Australian man in the world (this may not be true, but, well, let me have my little fantasies). THANKYOU SCOTTO – there are some very videos on here, and if you should be one of the three or so people who I think actually watch the vids at the end of Curios then you will find more to love at this link.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  • Rachel Youn: Rachel Youn is an artist who works with flowers and mechanics to create pieces that…look, ngl, there is something about these that I find really quite deeply troubling (there’s nothing gross or weird about the works, to be clear, it’s just a…vibe), a quality about the combination of the organic and the machine which I find…unsettling in the extreme. See what you think!

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

  • Labour’s Failure: Sorry sorry sorry we are back to the PAROCHIAL AND PROVINCIAL UK politics for a couple of links here (but then no more, I promise you); this is James Butler in the LRB, who offered what was to my mind the best immediate overview of The State of Everything after last weekend’s local election results and why it is exactly that the incumbent government did so fcuking badly. Interestingly (to me at least), reading this laundry list of reasons at no point made me think ‘you know what will fix it? ANDY BURNHAM!’; to my mind, it’s as likely that the long, increasingly-drawn-out, tedious and distracting pantomime that is the leadership contest will do nothing but cement in the mind of the public to an even greater extent the idea that these cnuts are only in it for themselves (which, as an aside, is mostly unfair in my experience; politicians are weird and broken people in many ways, but most of them really do do it because they think that they really CAN make the world a better place – it’s just that their conception of ‘better’ is often as weird and broken as they are, and their belief that only THEY can save mankind a fundamentally-deluded one). Anyway, most of all this is a clear-eyed and damning analysis of why Labour’s policy of ‘kick the left, make eyes at the right’ has been tactically moronic, and does a reasonable job of articulating some of the new faultlines in British politics now that ‘left’ and ‘right’ don’t really seem to work as meaningful distinguishing factors anymore (perhaps depressingly, one plausible axis seems to be ‘antisemitic’ vs ‘islamophobic’). CHEER UP EVERYONE A NEW DAWN IS COMINGZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
  • On The Racists In Great Yarmouth: It is slightly astonishing to me that this is the only piece of writing/analysis I have seen of Restore’s sweep of the Great Yarmouth council landscape, and it’s incredibly frustrating that its author has used a fcuktonne of AI in writing the piece (WHY FFS??). Still, if you can hold your nose over both the prose and its subject, this is a depressing-but-important bit of analysis of how the party did so well, the extent to which last week’s success is being seen by it as a blueprint for a national campaign in the future, and the degree to which it is likely to ACTUALLY campaign on the properly racist policies it’s been very keen to chat about – the feeling in this piece is that it will jettison those in favour of more mainstream-friendly rhetoric over time (using the actual racists to gain a foothold before brushing them off when they have to appear semi-normal), but, well, I am not entirely sure that that’s going to be the case. This is very depressing indeed, sorry.
  • What’s Wrong With Democracy?: THE ANSWER WILL SHOCK YOU – IT’S MONEY! I am perhaps being slightly unfair here – this edition of Sam Leith’s newsletter is typically interesting and well-written, but I did find Sam’s apparent shock at the fact that the super-rich are basically now beyond the point of being meaningfully sanctioned for anything lightly-amusing (I mean, dude, this…shouldn’t be new news!). Still, as an angry overview of How Sh1t This All Is I enjoyed this rather a lot: “In the UK we’ve already seen — thanks only to some excellent investigative journalism conducted in the face of all that I describe in the paragraphs above — how much Nigel Farage is in hock to this crypto billionaire, this hedgie, that property developer and that manufacturer of pothole machines. But Labour and the Tories, too, depend very heavily on oligarchical sugar-daddies. And, of course, if you own a newspaper and/or have funded the candidate, and if you’re able to threaten to fund a recall vote if things don’t go your way, your elected representative will tend to take your phone calls. And if, as we agree, wealth is power, the compounding of wealth equals the compounding of power. That’s where tax avoidance comes in. If you’re not an Ayn Rand style wingnut you will tend to take the baseline view that governments are entitled to collect taxes; that taxation, even progressive taxation, isn’t the same as expropriation or theft; and that it’s reasonable to think that the question of how much everyone should contribute to the pot and how it should be spent might be responsive to democratic deliberation.”
  • The UK Needs a New Creative Director: Thanks to my friend Eleanor for sending this piece to me, which I was prepared to hate and scoff at because, well, has anyone REALLY ever needed a Creative Director (SORRY SORRY JOKING JOKING), but which I actually ended up finding weirdly thought-provoking and which made me nod far more than I expected it to. Basically the premise here is that there was, once upon a time, a semi-coherent top-down vision of What Britishness Means And How It Shows Up (much as you can and should deride it, Cool Britannia – I KNOW, I KNOW, I AM SORRY – does rather fit that bill, from a branding point of view at least), and the complete lack of anything resembling such a vision now is, in some senses, a problem for the UK both in terms of its external image but also its sense of self-worth and internal cohesion. The thing is, though, if you asked the UK to pick its creative director you just know it would end up being either Thomas Heatherwick, Dua Lipa or Stormzy. I found this piece really thought-provoking, you might do too: “The American military-industrial complex has long had its own cultural symbols and stories – think of The Right Stuff, NASA, the marketing mammoth of the American motor industry, and the way that Silicon Valley talks about itself – but British inventiveness hasn’t been given the same treatment since The Industrial Revolution. What would happen if we combined the UK’s historical engineering and invention pedigree with our proud history of creative craft and thinking? Imagine what Christopher Nolan, a British director whose interest in physics, science and technology is clear from movies like Oppenheimer and Interstellar, might do if he tackled one of these industries. We’re less practised at wrapping the UK’s ingenuity in the creativity it deserves and needs to scale – and there is the lingering sense, particularly when it comes to AI, that right now the relationship between the tech and creative sectors is a rather suspicious and hostile one. There are no doubt many more, and it’s not necessary that any of these ‘wins’ – even as contested as the American national ideal is right now, it’s big enough to accommodate Taylor Swift, Beyonce and Bad Bunny on its biggest national stages as a statement to the rest of the world, all of whom represent different values, communities and aesthetics. The creative fabric and output of any country is always an exercise in pluralism, and the idea of one singular vision of what the UK can be would be limiting and rather dull. Some of the most novel expressions of all of these are in the places where they collide. Perhaps we won’t ever have one singular national creative director, but thinking about the UK’s creative agenda and vision raises a number of concrete questions that it’s fun to entertain.”
  • Money Laundering: John Lanchester continues to be one of the best explainers of ‘money stuff’ (yes, that’s the official term) to normies like me – or at least that’s what I think, based on the fact that I basically understand NOTHING about finance apart from those bits that he explains to me. Here, the novelist writes in the LRB about the global moneylaundering racket, detailing some of the ways in which large sums of cash are cleaned and transferred around the world in what seems, based on this piece, to be pretty much plain sight. “This isn’t just a problem for far-off countries of which we know little, like the EU and the US and China. Here in the UK we are at the epicentre of certain sorts of financial crime, laundering money both at high levels through the City and at low levels on our high streets. On 30 April, the Chartered Trading Standards Institute published a head-melting report in which it said that 97 per cent of its officers were aware of suspected organised crime activities operating through local retail premises; that 99 per cent of officers had seen an increase in cash-intensive businesses on their local high streets; that there are areas of the country where ‘as many as half of mini-marts, convenience stores and vape shops, up to a third of American candy stores and one in four fast-food takeaways are estimated to have links with organised crime.’ The recent proliferation of cash-only barbers in high streets seems a fairly clear example of this kind of money laundering. Late last year, Operation Machinize, which focused on these activities, resulted in 2700 premises being raided and 924 arrests. Money laundering is happening all across the UK economy, at scale, right here and right now. It is shameful that we do so little about it, and know so little about it.”
  • The Men Who Want Women To Be Quiet: Helen Lewis writes in the Atlantic about the degree to which a particularly-extreme strain of misogyny – not just ‘a bit down on women’, but ‘women shouldn’t be allowed to vote, or frankly perhaps even breathe, without explicit male direction or instruction and maybe not even them’ – is increasingly close to the heart of the US administration, how proponents of ideas such as ‘family voting’ (no suffrage for women who should, after all, just vote as hubby says anyway!) and ‘women are basically just there to provide the nation with a constant supply of babies and to look nice’ are gaining a depressing degree of traction, and how this is bleeding into all sorts of broader areas of culture thanks to a depressingly-familiar series of channels and mechanisms (hello YouTube! Hello clipping culture! Hello ‘creator payouts’ and algodetermined extremism! HELLO MODERNITY!!). It’s both a tale as old as time AND a depressing new spin on an old, old form of discrimination! “On the right, creeping feminization has become an all-purpose explanation for many recent events: Women pity the underdog, pander to self-proclaimed victims, and care about hurt feelings more than the truth—all of which are exploited by undocumented immigrants and violent criminals. In this analysis, Renee Good—the woman shot by an immigration-enforcement officer in Minneapolis—was killed because she’d adopted left-wing values. “An AWFUL (Affluent White Female Urban Liberal) is dead after running her car into an ICE agent who opened fire on her,” the right-wing pundit Erick Erickson posted immediately after her death. Women are childlike, naive, immature; they simply do not understand the real world…This disdain for empathy often leads to the conclusion that women’s political participation is a problem, because the little ladies will insist on voting for the wrong candidates and policies. “The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics,” Peter Thiel, an early advocate for Trump in Silicon Valley, wrote in a 2009 essay for a Cato Institute journal. “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.” In this view, the gender split in American politics—55 percent of men but only 46 percent of women voted for Trump in 2024—is not merely a reflection of differing priorities but a problem to be solved.”
  • The Intolerable Fantasy of Cyberlibertarianism: Or “fcuk’s sake, the hippy-fascist spectrum really is a horseshoe” – take your pick. Mat Duggan writes about the history of the early web, the libertarian ideals that were at its heart (born out of a particular strain of 60s Californian thinking which went very toxic very fast – Esalen, etc), and now those have led us to a web which is extractive, commodified and which feels fundamentally-antiethetical to the utopian vision that loads of people in the 90s and early-00s mistakenly thought would result from INFORMATION BEING FREE. This is a very good piece of historical writing about an era, and a set of ideologies, that it does sometimes feel we ought perhaps to spend more time thinking about given how UTTERLY FCUKING FOUNDATIONAL all these systems have become to, well, every single aspect of human existence. “After establishing that government is bad, regulation is theft, and the individual is sovereign, the cyberlibertarians then promise that the result of all this will be… rich, decentralized, harmonious community life. Negroponte: “It can flatten organizations, globalize society, decentralize control, and help harmonize people.” Democracy will flourish. The gap between rich and poor will close. The lion will lie down with the lamb, and the lamb will have a Pentium II. We also have the advantage of hindsight and know, without question, that all of these predicted outcomes were wrong. Not ‘directionally wrong’ or ‘wrong in the details.’ Wrong the way it would be wrong to predict that if you set your kitchen on fire, the result will be a renovation. You have to hold these four ideas in your head at the same time to see the trick. The cyberlibertarians wanted you to believe that radical individualism plus deregulated capitalism plus inevitable technology would produce communitarian utopia. This is, on its face, insane. It is the economic equivalent of claiming that if everyone punches each other really hard, eventually we’ll all be hugging.”
  • The Internet Has No Benches: A short essay by Spencer Chang on the lack of open ‘third spaces’ online, places that exist simply to convene and which aren’t also set up to be attention farms or commercial spaces…I think this is one of the reasons why Neal Agarwal’s Cursor Camp, linked in last week’s Curios, has been so popular – it’s just a space to hang out, which, even if it’s silly and frivolous and ‘just a game’ also feels…oddly-precious. “We are all so online, yet being online feels so solitary. Social media is designed for content consumption, brand distribution, and prestige broadcasting, not the warm, funny, and weird moments that happen when humans simply exist together. We’ve been conditioned to think the Internet can’t be changed, but all our current interfaces—infinite feeds, follower counts, black-box algorithms—are features created by social media platforms to optimize their metrics. Just as they were made, they can also be transformed. Like guerrilla public improvement projects put benches in public spaces, repopulate foliage in neglected intersections, or transform dumping sites into neighborhood gathering spots, we can also retrofit and reshape our digital space. So what would an Internet that actually encourages these encounters feel like? Where can we sit together on the internet? How do we discover a new neighborhood, shelter under a bodega awning during a summer shower, sit quietly at a cafe and work among the chatter of strangers? Maybe it starts with breaking down the capital-I Internet into several, much-less intimidating tiny internets where we can experiment with new forms of coexisting and relating to one another online.”
  • Technological Necropolitics: I had to write a piece this week about, and I quote, ‘China’s AI Death Clones’ – this article is an excellent exploration of the morality of the digital forever industry, who gets to persist and to what end and where and how, how those decisions are arrived at, and where value and ownership will rest when we have theoretical armies of the once-living at our disposal as digital pieceworkers. FUN TIMES! “The ability for the virtual, postmortem world to exert influence on the living is just one reason to want control of it. The other is likely related to the fact that the digital legacy market is primed to reach nearly 80 billion dollars by 2034. The dead, it turns out, are valuable assets. Crucially, they do not demand wages, so the money simply goes to the organisation that holds their digital identity. Scholars have recently named this dynamic spectral labour — the process by which the data residue of a dead person is harvested, animated, and put “back to work”, as it were. All to generate engagement, content, and revenue. Although the term “spectral labour” surely also carries weight in reference to the companies that profit from digital remains. The straightforward exchange of labour from an employee who is rewarded with a paycheck is now outdated. Corporations know that technology can offer most, if not all, of the value proposition for services. Work as a concept is malleable in the age of AI, and there will be many offshoots of spectral labour as this landscape evolves.”
  • Hollywood Is Training The Machine: And not just Hollywood. This is a very good WIRED piece about the screenwriters who are bulking out their increasingly-intermittent income with shifts helping The Machine eventually eat their jobs, working to train models on what ‘good’ looks like when it comes to writing, plotting and the like, all arranged through intensely-creepy (and, I have reasonable suspicions, VERY SHADY) recruitment company Mercor. I can’t pretend I haven’t seen some of the ads float across my field of vision and had my head turned by the purported $75 an hour rate, but, as this piece suggests and as a few people I know have confirmed, the terms rarely ever seem to work out that well. Still, it’s all that will be left in a few short years so, er, jump on the bandwagon while there’s still space! Lol, I am joking but also not joking at all in any way.
  • The Chinese In Silicon Valley: This is a SUPERB article in Rest of World looking at the influx of young Chinese engineering talent into the Valley, all drawn by the fast-moving and potentially-violently-lucrative world of frontier AI and agents and ALL THAT JAZZ; this is really nicely-done, from the details about the shared accommodation to the pen portraits of the individual genius children sketching the shape of the coming world inbetween Deliveroo orders and snatched three-hour naps on bare mattresses. Be warned, though, if you’re inclined towards AI doomerism then…this isn’t likely to make you feel an awful lot better: “Conversations with researchers included sci-fi scenarios. “If AI and humans got into a war, we would be the underdogs,” Cheng Xin, a postdoctoral researcher at Rutgers University, told me in a hallway. He went on to paint a world where AI creates journalism by automatically extracting information from everyone’s brain. One Google researcher, an Elon Musk fan, believed AI would help bring a Marxist society closer to us by drastically boosting productivity. A scientist at another American tech giant envisioned the technology creating a more equitable world: Everyone would be equally entitled to knowledge and robot assistants.”
  • A Report on AI Content Detection & Reality: A really interesting piece of work by Friend of Curios and fellow TinyAwards convener Matt Klein; Matt commissioned some YouGov research in the US to look at the extent to which people think they are seeing AI-generated content in the wild. This feeds into what I was saying earlier about the degree to which this stuff is now fcuking EVERYWHERE – it’s worth digging through the whole piece because the findings are fascinating (can someone stump up to run the same in the UK, please?), but this gives you an idea of the trend: “More than half (61%) of Americans report they come across content they can’t tell is AI or not multiple times a week. Nearly 33% of Americans are unsure about content on a daily basis. Uncertainty is now routine. When it comes to detection, 59% of respondents say they’re “Confident” they can distinguish between real and AI-generated content, while 41% say they are “Not Very” or “Not at All Confident.” However, the bulk of this confidence is hedged into “Somewhat Confident” – which, when paired with such high rates of encounters, suggests we’re only capturing moments when suspicion is consciously registered. True exposure to AI-generated content is likely much higher.” BONUS PIECE ON AI WRITING BEING EVERYWHERE: Jason Koebler writes for 404 about how seeing AI copy everywhere is fcuking his sh1t right up – I FEEL YOUR PAIN, JASON KOEBLER.
  • The Early Websites of Fashion Brands: A look back at the evolving online aesthetic and digital presence of fashion brands, from the early-00s to the present. I wasn’t expecting to find this at all interesting given my wardrobe contains, underwear aside, exactly three things (tshirts, hoodies, trousers), but this was SO interesting from the point of view of design and brand and UX and UI and THE SEMIOTICS OF INTERFACES (lol, sorry) and all that jazz.
  • TikTok Is Killing Food Writing: This is, to my mind at least, less about food (although, yes, it is very much about food people on TikTok and that very particular ‘THIS IS AMAZING THIS IS THE BEST THING EVER OMG LOOK AT THAT CHEESEPULL ICONIC LOLZ’ style of delivery which the algo has decided is what EVERYTHING must be like to win the content lottery these days) and more about the manner in which the pivot to video effectively equates to something of a flattening, an ironing out, of a certain type of nuance in criticism and appreciation; when everything can be reduced to a set of shots and words that you know works, why try anything else? This is also the nth example of the general EVERYTHING IS BONGO NOW trend – and there is no room for nuance in bongo, as we all know (whether we want to or not, the bongofication of everything is foisted upon us; I happened to watch a few of the closing episodes of MAFS Australia this week – still the apogee of the reality genre, appalling as it is – and if you were to show the contestants (male and female) to your average punter in, say, 1997 and ask them ‘so, what do you think these people all do for a living then?’ I guarantee that 9/10 people would have confidently replied ‘fcuk on camera for money’. EVERYTHING IS BONGO. EVERYTHING).
  • Clout as a Service: A piece riffing off that ‘we will tag you in insta videos for clout, for a fee’ service I featured last week, this is a very good essay about appearance and reality and status in modern (digital and non) life. Features Baudrillard, just in case that’s a dealbreaker for you, but I promise it’s still worth reading: “Being the person you dream of becoming in the first order is a painful, uncomfortable process of hard work, discipline, and perseverance. One that is, let me add, more often than not, deemed almost impossible through structural, institutionalised inequalities. But living in the reality of your mediocrity is also difficult. So we look at more avenues. Being the person you want to be in the second-order is relatively easy. You just need to curate your online identity like a Pinterest board, and clout-as-a-service makes it cheap and accessible. And by cosplaying your dream self on the internet, you escape the discomfort of not being enough by the standards you have set or internalised for yourself.”
  • Men Want Bigger Dongs: Ok, not the original title of the piece (and, er, NOT ALL MENzzzzzzzzzzzzz), but it’s a decent one-line descriptor – this piece in Slate looks at the current state of the penis enlargement industry and the (ahem) growth in popularity of procedures designed to add some heft to your hog (sorry). This is a really unpleasant read on at least two levels, and any men reading should be aware that a) you will almost certainly start crossing your legs in discomfort a few paragraphs in, and they will stay crossed from that point on; b) this will make you very, very happy not to have embarked upon an expensive course of injections into your penile meat. BONUS GENITAL ENHANCEMENT LONGREAD!: Apparently, according to this headline, “some women are obsessively testing their vaginas to optimise them.” Are they? Christ.
  • The Rise and Fall of Mercato Metropolitano: Ok, this piece requires you to be interested in both a) the general ‘food market’ thing, specifically in London; and b) one market in particular, namely Mercato Metropolitano near Elephant and Castle. If you tick those boxes, though, this is a really interesting piece in Vittle exploring how property, money and food intersect and how, unsurprisingly, it all ends up being in the service of capital.
  • I Spent Months With An AI Companion: Yes, I know, you have read ENOUGH about the pernicious effects of AI companions on people’s happiness and wellbeing – this piece is different, though, and better, as its author, Thea Lim, asks some interesting questions about the nature of friendship and the degree to which AI cannot meaningfully be a ‘friend’ in any sense worthy of the term. This is really good and worth reading even if you (not unreasonably) feel like you don’t ever need to read another piece about ‘making friends with a chatbot’ ever again.
  • A Consequence of Rape: First off – don’t let the (horrible) title put you off, this isn’t THAT sort of piece. Secondly, this is a full novel – or at least the unpublished manuscript of one – with additional annotations, and so it’s a bit longer than a standard Curios longread. BUT! It is SO INTERESTING and very, very funny (again, despite the title), and An Artefact of a Time – Jon Knowles found an old novel manuscript for sale at a car boot sale, the unpublished work of one Dan Esmonde, a novel about the end of Empire in Kenya with all of the…er…’idiosyncratic’ stylistic and tonal quirks one might expect. Jon has republished it all online, with his own annotations throughout, and it is…Christ, I don’t know where to start with this, it is QUITE THE THING. I can only suggest that you give it a go and see how you get on – but if you have ever read the original James Bond books (in which Bond is an horrific drug-addicted mess, with a strange and persistent obsession with breakfast) then you will immediately recognise the vibe here. Seriously, this is kind of amazing and Jon has done a great thing bringing it to life online: “It was a Tuesday in [month], on a rain-threatened morning at a car boot sale in [location], that I first encountered what I have come to regard as one of the most remarkable unpublished novels in the English language. It was sandwiched between an incomplete Scrabble set and a gravy boat of uncertain provenance. The seller, a woman of late middle age who had the air of someone finally putting things right, accepted my £5 without hesitation and wished me, with some feeling, good luck. I did not read it until that evening. By midnight I knew I was holding something extraordinary.Consequence of Rape — the title is Esmonde’s own, and we should respect it as such, though readers are advised to approach it without the assumptions a contemporary audience might bring — is a novel of post-colonial Africa, of masculinity under pressure, of desire and its discontents. It is, in short, a novel of its time. The question this edition asks is whether it might also be a novel for ours.” Just…wow.
  • Roadside Attraction: The final longread of the week is, tonally, kind of the negative of the previous link; controlled and a bit spare, it’s the account of various memories of Marfa and, specifically, the viewing platform in the town from which, it is said, mysterious lights in the desert can sometimes be seen. Really, really well-written by Zoe Kurkland, and quite beautiful, to my mind at least.

By Shiori Matsura

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