The 77th Emmy Awards were over and I was heading home in the back of a self-driving car. I texted a friend, as I watched the wheel turning by itself: ‘I feel like I am being driven by a ghost.’ And of course, I was: the ghost of the cab driver whose livelihood has been taken away by a tech giant. I listened to music, encouraged by a disembodied voice to sing along as loudly as I wanted to: ‘We can’t hear you.’
The Hio, which Carlo Pérez Osorio was sailing on with seven other passengers, was intercepted in international waters by Israeli armed forces in the early hours of this morning. The last contact with the boat was at 03:23. According to the Global Sumud flotilla tracker, all but two other vessels have either definitely been intercepted, or are assumed to have been, by Israeli forces. The boats are said to have been sprayed with skunk water, rammed, attacked by drones and boarded by armed soldiers. The fate of many passengers is still unclear. Demonstrations in Belgium, Greece, Italy, Spain and the UK began last night to protest against the interception of the boats, and against the interception of the transfer of humanitarian aid, an act prohibited under the ICJ ruling of January 2024 in South Africa v. Israel.
Greta Thunberg on the Global Sumud flotilla (Photo © Carlos Pérez Osorio)
Democratically elected governments in the UK, the US and the EU are enabling a genocide by supplying weapons (and other forms of support) to the perpetrators. This could stop tomorrow. More and more people globally are recognising that, and doing something about it.
Tony Harrison died last week at the age of 88. The LRB published nearly thirty of his poems, from v. in January 1985 to ‘Polygons’ in February 2015. He will be much missed.
On his blog, Mainly Macro, Simon Wren-Lewis has written about Nigel Farage and the BBC:
On Monday, 22 September I watched a party political broadcast on behalf of Nigel Farage’s Reform Party. It was on the BBC, and it was entitled News at Ten.
The Metropolitan Opera’s founding and sustaining donors drilled for oil, ran banks, formed monopolies, busted unions and sought spiritual solace in patronising the arts. Grand opera has always required subsidy. What makes it so exciting – hundreds of highly skilled, specialised, trained artists on and off stage applying themselves to a collective expressive impulse – also makes it ruinously expensive. Mid-century social democracies made it a public good. The Met, in contrast, has always been funded entirely by private money.
Part of the misunderstanding of the deepfake threat stems from the idea that it is a problem of bad information, rather than a problem of desire (or the material conditions that shape desire). The deepfakes proliferating across far-right social media, some of which were printed off and displayed on banners on 13 September, are fascistic dream machines.