Antonym Make-It-Til-You-Fake-It Edition

Lying prone, typing on a phone, mustn’t moan.

Dear Reader

I was supposed to be halfway up a mountain on an electric scooter right now, and was going to skip a week of Antonym. However a back injury has put me out of the game. Don’t feel too bad for me though —I’m convalescing in the delightful Maison Fleurie’s snug, laid out on a velvet couch and surrounded by views of the Ariege in Southwest France and the most mind-boggling beautiful wallpaper I’ve ever seen. Yes, I do have painkillers thank you.

The world has not got less peculiar lately, so here are this week’s choicest odd things…

Shapps on Sheets

With leadership of the United Kingdom seeming evermore like a weekly prize on a series of The Apprentice, the next leadership coup is being plotted on a Samsung foldable phone. Tim Shipman in The Sunday Times reports:

[Grant Shapps] former transport secretary, dismissed by the prime minister when she took power, was gleefully showing colleagues his new gadget at Conservative Party conference last week. The phone opens to create a double-sized screen on which Shapps can read his new spreadsheet, where he is recording the views of Tory MPs about Truss and her plans. The data is not encouraging for the PM.

The Galaxy Fold range up to now has been seen by many reviewers as an expensive preview of the future of phones, but not a wise choice for today. Shapps is likely to have a Fold 4, which while still expensive—for the same price you could buy an iPhone and an iPad Mini and have enough for lunch—is said to be a big improvement over previous models.

As the Fold series of phones run on the Android operating system, it is very likely the anti-Truss list is on Google Sheets. Google’s office apps have long been a tech weapon of choice among civil rights movements because of the ease of publishing and collaborating with large groups, even anonymously.

Looks like the Tories have learned something useful from what their base likes to call “the woke brigade”.

A metaverse of emptiness

Remember earlier this year when the metaverse was something that you definitely needed to invest in right now? The CEO of the UK’s fastest growing agency said:

To stay in the game and to successfully engage within the metaverse, brands will need to invest their time and budget into strategizing channels and producing an endless amount of content to fuel engagement.

And the CTO of the $62 billion turnover mega-consultancy, Accenture said:

It is the time to stake your claim in the metaverse. The exponential pace of technology change is going to continue, and the applicability to every part of what you do is going to continue.

Research reported by Coindesk suggests there are very few people in some of the most hyped metaverse platforms:

What’s going on in the metaverse these days, you might ask. Looking at two of the biggest companies with over $1 billion valuations, the answer is surprising: Not much, or at least not enough to bring users back every day. According to data from DappRadar, the Ethereum-based virtual world Decentraland had 38 active users in the past 24 hours, while competitor The Sandbox boasted 522 active users in that same time.

If you’d taken the expert advice earlier in the year and are producing “endless amounts of content” for virtual worlds only to find the audience was the equivalent of a single screening of a movie at a local cinema you might think you’d been sold a pup.

A dress made from silly string

Popular Science reports

This instantaneously materialized dress is not a magic trick, but a testament to innovations in material science more than two decades in the making. The man behind the creation is Manel Torres, who in 2003 created the substance used on Hadid, Fabrican […] His inspiration? Silly string and spiderwebs. His idea was to elevate the coarse cords of the silly string into a finer fabric that could be dispersed through a mist. Torres explained in a 2013 Ted Talk that when this spray-on fabric comes in contact with air, it turns into a solid material that’s stretchy and feels like suede.

Beyond the dazzling showmanship of the piece, there is an environmental aspect to the innovation:

The display at the Coperni show comes at an interesting time for the fashion industry, as major companies have been forced to reckon with the environmental consequences of textile production and ever-shifting styles. In response, many designers are now looking for less harmful starting materials in plant-based fabrics like seaweed (which is also being investigated as a plastic film substitute) and mushrooms. For its part, Fabrican states on its website that it uses “fibres recycled from discarded clothes and other fabrics. The technology can also utilise biodegradable fibres and binders in place of fossil-based polymers to reduce the carbon footprint of material and manufacturing.” Additionally, the company said that “at the end of their useful life, sprayed fabrics can be re-dissolved and sprayed anew.”

Chat with a fake version of anyone

Antonym readers may recall the chat thought that a Google engineer believed (and they still believe) was sentient. Two engineers from that program have now set up an open experiment for people to try out a similar technology.

The AI chatbot imitate real or imagined people you can talk to an AI, doing the impression of Elon, Musk, Socrates, Victor Orban, or odd characters, such as the VC or the life coach.

This is what an imitation Elon Musk said about this week's main Antonym stories:

Another feature of Character.ai is to be able to create your own, even fictional ones. Added to the currently available AI text generators this offers another way for creatives to easy the heavy lifting of some creative processes. Why imagine conversations with characters in a screenplay when you can watch them talk to each other online? What will be next in machine thinking is anyone’s guess, but every time you right something you may be wise to wonder: am I just making it because I can’t fake it yet?

This week I’ve been...

Reading

I had to admit to myself that I am stuck halfway through Ducks, Newburyport, which is essentially a 1,000 page, single sentence stream-of-consciousness monologue. I was transfixed for a while but having broken the flow I’m finding it hard to back in. I’m not quite ready to put it aside yet...

At the other end of the style spectrum—short sentences, short chapters, handbrake-turn plot manoeuvres—I’ve been hugely enjoying Seventeen: Last Man Standing by John Brownlow. It’s about an American hitman hunting another hitman in that enclosed world feeling I get from the Lee Child Reacher books, but with more tech and fewer morals. And there’s a delightful Great British Bake Off reference cheekily buried in one scene that signals the authors Englishness.

Watching

Talking a short holiday with some mates—a 50th birthday delayed by the pandemic—I needed to put together a movie double bill from films in my iTunes library. Humour with a plot and no romcoms was more or less the brief.

JoJo Rabbit and BlacKkKlansman made the cut, and although some of the chaps complained about dust in their eyes during a sad moment in JoJo Rabbit, they otherwise both delivered. Both are fantastic movies to re-watch por seek out for the first time. If I needed to make it a triple-bill, I’d add I, Tonya. Complementary in tone, drama and fantastic performances.

Listening

For political news insight The Rest Is Politics podcast has been amazing for making some sense of the senseless flailing by the UK government for the last fortnight. In the same way Pivot has given some good perspective and framing to the Twitter takeover by Elon Musk. Both podcasts rushed out “emergency” episodes that were timely and useful.

C’est tout

That’s all for this week folks. Thank you for the very kind likes, shares and words of encouragement last week!

Antony

(until I can create a version of myself to write these instead)