Antonym Dinnerladies of Doom Edition
Who upwardly mobile despots are wearing, how to avoid coup congestion and recommendations of things to read and watch on TV.
Dear Reader
It’s only one week since Putin’s dinnerladies advanced on Moscow and had to be paid off. A crazy 24 hours where the most reliable source of facts was Google Maps traffic jams on the M4 between Voronezh and Moscow.
It was a news story that moved so fast that only social media could keep up, but no one knew which social media could be trusted, with Prigozhin’s expert use of misinformation a key part of his strategy.
Who knows what will happen between writing this draft on Saturday evening and pressing send tomorrow morning…
Let’s get into our too–crazy–not–to–be–true selection of Antonym stories for this week. Did you miss us?
WHO are mercenary rebels wearing this week?
Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) can be used for good, evil or the banal. Let’s go banal. As banqueting-to-big-bangs entrepreneur Priogozhin steps out of a helicopter and into lucrative exile in Belarus, what everyone really wants to know is WHO is he wearing?
According to some OSINT research (Google Images) the mercenary boss rocks a Louis Vuitton bomber jacket (£2,000) and keeps his iPad in a stylish Hugo Boss briefcase (£1,200). He looks like any other European airport business lounge lizard ever. Mask is the model’s own.
Fake rationalism
If you don’t have the resources to deploy disinformatziya your way to victory? Take a leaf from I’m-not-right-wing-but-I-am flacademic Jordan Peterson and just act like your arguments are rational until they drive the opposition to distraction; then you accuse them of being over-emotional idiots and having lost the argument.
This TikTok describes the technique of “performative rationalism” and “cultivating an aesthetic of rationality”: with debaters staying apparently calm and asking questions which have obnoxious opinions baked in and then denying they are their opinions.
This sounds very close to a phenomenon among internet trollish idiots who like to try and seem like they are reasonable – it’s called Sea Lioining…
See Know Your Meme and the original Wonderlion comic (we have bought a print of the original for the Antonym newsroom by way of tribute).
High quality AI advice from our sponsors
Antonym’s sponsors, a shadowy cabal of dissident consultants known as Brilliant Noise, will be holding a briefing on artificial intelligence and how to get colleagues to use it to enhance their jobs and avoid replacement. In 30 minutes, Antony Mayfield, who has been rumoured to also be behind this newsletter and who denies talking about himself in the third person ever, will be giving the low down on the topic. Sign up at LinkedIn and hear all about diagrams like this:
Bring your AI to work day
Speaking of AI…
There are plenty of tools that will try to take notes and make transcripts of your call. Some, like Otter.ai and Fireflies, log on to video meetings with you and then send summaries of the meeting to everyone attending. This is the first time I’ve attended a meeting with my AI buddy and someone else had theirs too. 1:1 ratio of humans to machines on this Zoom call: it’s like Centaur Chess.
This week I’m…
Watching…
Idris On A Plane: A.k.a. Hijack, Apple TV’s new series has Idris Elba on flight back from Dubai that gets hijacked by Cockernees. Does exactly what it says on the covertly sent text message. Brilliant. Ben Wheatley’s go-to bad guy Neil Maskell is superbly cast as a villain, and Ben Miles and Aímee Kelly are already shining a couple of episodes in.
Beef: The hype’s died down, but I’ve just got going with this brilliant drama about a feud between an entrepreneur and a handyman. From the opening road rage, it’s got pace, surprises and engaging characters.
Reading…
The Machine Stops, is a deeply weird, prescient and unsettling short novella by E M Forster. The author is known for Edwardian books like Howards End and A Passage To India, but this is as far away from Merchant Ivory-fodder as you can get. People live below the surface of a poisoned Earth, all watched over by a machine of loving grace, only ever referred to as The Machine. Forster conjures a world that seems to contain TikTok, TED talks and AI all at once.
Transit, Rachel Cusk. I left it too long after reading Outline, the first in Cusk’s trilogy, but I am immediately entranced again. Sublime.
Writing…
AI: It’s A Great Time To Have a Brain. There has been a lot of play, experimenting and thinking about AI going on in my work and with my colleagues. I need to set something down and have committed to producing this, which may be a monograph, series or longer text. The focus is on the differences and similarities between our brains and generative AI, and what that tells us about how to shape the development of both. I’ll keep you posted….
That’s all for this week!
Thanks so much for reading. I hope you found something to enjoy. If you’d like more on AI, there’s a lot in the new Brilliant Noise letter that I’ve been working on, BN Edition.
See you next week!
Antony