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2026-11-10

Week 305: A tray full of springs and rocks

I started the week with a funeral, which isn’t necessarily the cheeriest thing, but if you can get to 94, have no close living relatives in the country, and still fill the church, you’ve done a few things right in your life. It’s always fascinating to find out all the things you didn’t know about a person, too.

On Tuesday night I walked to the lovely Hill Station Café, a community venue in a repurposed garage in Brockley, for Mercury Over Maps 28. The first piece, composed by Bill Thompson, was half an hour of three bass clarinets, droning, rattling, squeaking, and making interesting noises I never knew they could produce. I was mesmerised and found myself drifting almost to sleep in the wash of sound.

That was followed by a couple of group improvisation pieces on instruments including Bill’s Moog guitar, a shortwave radio, a tray full of springs and rocks, music box mechanisms, an autoharp and various musical electronic devices, without and then with bass clarinet.

It was excellent.

I finally saw the People’s Emergency Briefing, on Sunday afternoon.

In November 2025, the National Emergency Briefing brought together leading experts to present the latest evidence on the climate and nature crisis to politicians and other influential people in Westminster. That evidence is now on the public record.

The film is a distillation of those presentations with reactions from famous people and members of the public.

Before the screening, we were asked us to talk about what we expected. I said that I thought I knew what was in it, but that it might make me even more despondent. In fact, the positive messaging at the end gave me hope, but it also made me angry to compare all the ways that we can reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and are doing so, with the recent estimate that “AI” datacentre buildout has wiped out 15 years’ worth of carbon reduction in the US.

There are things we can do, but if tech oligarchs are pushing us backwards even faster we’ll never make any progress in time to avoid disaster.

At least the US election results were a step in a positive direction against Trump’s kleptocracy, and it was heartening to see so many data centre projects voted down in local referendums. People hate them! And they should!

I’ve been working through the practice problems on lichess in an attempt to learn how to actually play chess beyond just knowing how the pieces move. I’m still not very good, but maybe I’m a little less awful than a week ago.

When I was at junior school, they put me in the chess team because they thought I was smart and that that would somehow magically mean that I was good at chess. Of course it meant nothing of the sort. I never won any of my games – I had no idea how to win a game – and it put me off the whole thing for a long time. I’m good at card games, though, so I think I could be good at chess with the right kind of practice.

Links:

• The Ultrawealthy Produce More Carbon Pollution Than Nearly Half of Humanity. “Billionaires and the ultra-rich are burning more carbon than than most of the world. The world’s richest 1%—just 8 million people who make, on average, $442,000 a year—produce far more emissions than the poorest 3.5 billion, states the report. Someone in the richest 0.1% emits 48 times more CO2 than the average person in the U.S. over the course of a year.”
• Living to fight another day: The ecological and evolutionary significance of Neanderthal healthcare. Fascinating paper that argues that healthcare was essential to making the highly risky life of Neanderthals feasible. “[A]lmost all Neanderthals seem to have suffered at least one severe injury, with many suffering several instances of injury or illness. It even seems to have been rare to reach adulthood without a significant injury […] the rate of individuals suffering serious traumatic injury before death may have been as high as 80–95% of the population”.
• Stop Big Tech’s Climate Destruction: Actionable Intelligence on AI Harms and Disinformation. To coincide with COP31, “Climate Action Against Disinformation coalition (CAAD) is publishing a new report detailing what policymakers can do about Big Tech’s betrayal of its climate goals in pursuit of AI as the total reported electricity consumption of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google has risen 240%, resulting in 2.4 times more pollution than their targets, an estimated collective 311 megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent between 2022 and 2025.”
• How To Quit Spotify And Improve Your Life In The Process. “Having already been in the news over the past few years for not paying artists, laying off its own workforce and supporting the genocide in Palestine, Spotify was once again in the news this week for shitty reasons, specifically that the company is about to roll out a ghoulish AI-powered remix/cover feature.”
• Kerning and Kerning in a Widening Gyre: The struggle to get nice fonts in a PDF generated by R.
• Old, Polluting Jet Engines Are Being Scavenged to Power Data Centers. Your outsourced thinking is running on dirty power, destroying the planet faster than ever to summarise emails and make shit posters.
• This is a Conflict and there are Sides. “I really do believe at this point that AI is going to be the most harmful new technology of the 21st century. If it is not reined in, it is our time’s version of leaded gasoline: ubiquitous and ubiquitously poisonous, a massive corporate assault on the common welfare of human beings and the planet.”
• It Turns Out Binance’s $6 Billion Hack Happened Because Its Employees Were Vibe Coding. It wasn’t the direct cause, but the first link in a chain of exploits.
• Protesters break into Microsoft data center site in Amsterdam. “[A]round 100 people made it into the construction site, with some scaling a crane to place a ‘fuck AI’ banner. Protesters also unfurled a ‘Microsoft powers genocide’ banner on the construction site, and chanted ‘Microsoft has got to go’ and ‘free Palestine.’”
• Anti-Oligarchy Activists Plan to Dox Elon Musk and Hundreds of Billionaire-Linked Homes. “The Capytistas see Musk as effectively a gateway for normies who have yet to join its class war. Its file on him is among the smallest it has prepared, and he ranks among its ‘least important’ targets, members say. But he was chosen first because no other person draws as much public anger, and the group hopes to harness that and release it upon others whose fortunes rely on forever wars, omnipresent surveillance, and carceral expansion.”
• Filthy Human Hands License v1.0: “Historically, it’s been possible to offer such goodies under extremely permissive Creative Commons licenses. In the age of “artificially intelligent” machines mulching all of human expression and creativity, there’s a need to be clear that we want people to play with our toys.”