Monbiot’s first law of journalism and the Belliard Tunnel

We abrogate to AI what we think and reject those who disagree

Recently, a correspondent by the name of Dawn Norton remarked in relation to a comment that I had made on a post by Michael D. Sellers, “I think you’re a self-absorbed asshole.”

I think she’s right, so I told her so: “I think you’re right. I am self-absorbed, and I am an asshole sometimes. But I’m also a tad more polite than you are, Dawn. That’s the difference between us.”

She never revealed what it was that had prompted her to this slight, nor did she pursue any other discourse with me on the matter that I had commented on. But she did confirm me in one thing that I’ve known for a long time and that is this: that Monbiot’s first law of journalism holds true every time and it is, like as not, holding true as you read these words.

George Monbiot is a journalist, of an environmentally conscious, leftist bent, and this is how he defines his first law of journalism:

Monbiot’s first law of journalism … is this. Tell people something they know already, and they will thank you for it. Tell them something new, and they will hate you for it.

If you write something which corresponds to the prejudices and preconceptions of your readers, you will be inundated with messages of congratulation. People will tell you that you are insightful, brilliant, courageous, when all they are really saying is that you believe the same thing as they do. But if you write something which challenges the prejudices and preconceptions of your readers, and especially something of this nature which is based on hard fact, you will either be ignored altogether, or you will be inundated with messages of abuse. You will be called dumb, out of touch, even, paradoxically, cowardly. You will learn words you never knew existed.

Like self-absorbed asshole, I guess.

The post that prompted Dawn’s insult is here, if you’re curious. Since then, I have gone further in my thoughts with Michael D. Sellers, who is anguishing over whether he should close off his weblog behind a paywall. This is what I told him:

Much that is wrong in the modern economy is its rentier character. I work in translation and there is simply no work. The computers have it all now. I work in a shop as well, because AI cannot put bottles of salad dressing on a metal shelf. In past years, the basis on which translators are paid changed. 30 years ago, we got paid “per 60 octets”; that means you got paid a euro or whatever every 60 times you hit the keyboard. So, you were paid for spaces and punctuation as well as words. And more for long words than for short words.

Then they started to pay you per word. So, “a” is a word and if you translate it to French it becomes “un” or “une”. “Merger/demerger” is one word. Because computers don’t see the “/” as a separation. But “merger / demerger” is counted as three words, because the “/” is counted as a word. Neither of them is what you might expect: two words. These manic methods of calculating pay devolved into a farce: if the same phrase, or part of a phrase, or a similar phrase, came up again, you got paid less for the second time. So “I love Lucy” is paid at three words. But “I love Desi” only one, because you’ve already translated “I love”.

My reason for explaining this is to demonstrate that translation, when it existed, was not a rentier sector, not like property, or making records or films. Or providing water. Or ... journalism. Now, journalism sits on the border because no one will be reading your work from last week. They will read today’s blog post and now want to see tomorrow’s, so it’s not like writing a book. But it is rentier, because you ask for subscriptions, and, for your writing to be worthwhile, you need to be living, and if paid subscriptions will keep you alive, then that’s the way you need to go.

As long as you don’t “go paid”, you can talk about baseball now and again. But before you do that when you go paid, you must ask yourself what kind of content your paid subscribers are paying for. Maybe some of them don’t care much for baseball; sorry, but I know they exist.

When you bump your car on the freeway, some people will be concerned and will stop to help you. They are your paid subscribers. They will listen to your story and sympathise, call a tow truck and the ambulance. And 400 people will all stop their cars and not get out but simply gawp at you. They are your unpaid subscribers. So the choice is this: you can tell the paid and the unpaid gawpers, like me, how the accident occurred, in the hopes that we will avoid having similar accidents; or you can thank the paid subscribers and not give much of a hoot about the unpaid ones, who just make you feel a bit of a spectacle. Or you can take a decision to warn everyone about your accident regardless of whether they stopped and helped or are just gawping, because you believe the accident is so bad that you feel a duty towards your fellow man, regardless of whether you’re rewarded for it.

The irony is that, even if you believe you’re on something of a crusade, the fewer followers you have who pay, the less inclined you will be to charge them. As your paid subscribers become more numerous, you will become choosier as to who you allow through your paywall. You will up the price, and create “new benefits”, knowing your devout followers will stump up royally.

But I believe there is a danger at least that, in doing that, you will create an echo chamber, in which dissenting voices are unwelcome and in which you feel a duty to pander to those who have paid. And the question for you, is, will you skew your blog onto baseball or onto important matters on which you seek insight and input from all quarters?

Of course, you will have identified my classic error: it’s too long. Monbiot & Vincent’s second law of journalism will likely be, if I may make so bold, that, if you tell people something they know already, they will only thank you for it if it doesn’t require scrolling. But the above comment contains another error as well: it accuses paid blogs of creating an echo chamber and, according to Monbiot’s first law of journalism, echo chambers are exactly what paying subscribers pay to be in.

People want answers but they only want the answers that agree with what they themselves think, and anyone who asks them to think about what the answer is, is dismissed, because we don’t read blogs and news reports to be informed; we read them in order to have our own views confirmed. No one likes to be told they’re wrong. Even I don’t, but let’s say I don’t mind it, as long as it doesn’t go accompanied by insults.

A recent report says AI is making us stupid. Well, you, not me. I have only on one single occasion used AI to compose a piece of text within one of my posts, because it was something I didn’t know that much about, and I regretted it as soon as I had done it: I abrogated my journalistic responsibility to a machine. It was a feeling similar to the one I got when in 1995 I entered the Belliard Tunnel in Brussels to drive home to Tienen. The tunnel is entered on a steep down slope, which then describes a sharp left-hand bend and a sharp right-hand bend, in the middle of which is a split between traffic for Leuven and traffic for Namur. The two-lane highway to Leuven, still within the tunnel, reaches a point where it narrows significantly, before doing a further right-hand bend and a long straight stretch before a sharp left-hander brings you out back into daylight. On the day in question, my mobile phone rang as I descended into the tunnel. And I hung up the call as I emerged into daylight. And I didn’t have the slightest recollection of any part of the journey I had just completed through the twisty, busy Belliard Tunnel, except to say it was done on autopilot.

Image: the split between Leuven and Namur in Brussels’ Belliard Tunnel

The recent report, in The Guardian, talks about a study done at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in which two groups completed the same exercise, one using their own faculties and one using ChatGPT: “The study’s participants, who were all enrolled at MIT or nearby universities, were asked, right after they had handed in their work, if they could recall what they had written. “Barely anyone in the ChatGPT group could give a quote,” Kosmyna says. “That was concerning, because you just wrote it and you do not remember anything.” It goes on to say, “… stressed-out teachers … feel their students aren’t learning properly because they are using ChatGPT to do their homework. They worry AI is creating a generation who can produce passable work but don’t have any usable knowledge or understanding of the material.”

The Day of the Triffids is a 1963 film starring Howard Keel, in which a global meteorite shower triggers something within flesh-eating plants to cause them to uproot themselves and pursue, and kill, human beings. Keel is one of few people who, due to ocular surgery that resulted in his eyes being bandaged, does not observe the meteorite shower, which otherwise blinds virtually the entire world’s population (making it easier for the automotive plants to catch and devour them). Myself, I don’t take a Luddite view of technology and progress. It’s just that I sometimes stop to consider whether what is called technological progress is, in the end of the day, really progress. And perhaps one day I will be able to count myself lucky to have been the Howard Keel of the global AI bubble.

Image: U.S. theatrical release poster for The Day of the Triffids.¹

People who use AI to produce their passable work are doing what we’ve been programmed to do as human beings: use shortcuts when they’re available. Take a street corner with a grassy knoll beside it. People will avoid the knoll for a while, because they think it could have dog dirt in it. But one or two people will venture forth over it to cut the corner, maybe ignorant of the habits of dogs and their owners. Soon a trail becomes visible. And within a few months, it’s beaten to a hardened path, and virtually no one will then use the asphalted pavement to do the corner. They will all be tempted by that well-trodden short-cut. Unless they’re wearing shoes that they don’t want spoiled, or they realise that walking on the knoll will detract from its amenity as a grassy area for leisure and relaxation. In other words, not taking the short-cut requires you to think.

Let me quote again from that report: “your brain needs friction to learn. It needs to have a challenge. If brains need friction but also instinctively avoid it, it’s interesting that the promise of technology has been to create a “frictionless” user experience … [T]he friction-filled real world feels harder to deal with. So you avoid phone calls, use self-checkouts, order everything from an app; you reach for your phone to do the maths sum you could do in your head, to check a fact before you have to dredge it up from memory, to input your destination on Google maps and travel from A to B on autopilot … Is this the dawn of what Daisy Christodoulou calls a “stupidogenic society”, a parallel to an obesogenic society, in which it is easy to become stupid because machines can think for you?”

If Monbiot’s first law of journalism and Monbiot & Vincent’s second law of journalism are combined with Christodoulou’s theory of stupidogenics, then not only will we reject anything we read that does not accord with our own views and does not require scrolling, but we will defer to AI the task of formulating a view in the first place. That’s if we can remember it, of course.

When we use the term Orwellian, we imagine something like the episode in Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, in which the subject is forcibly fed images and messages that turn his mind. This is not what Orwellian means. It means ourselves clamouring to be subjected to the content that will form our opinions. There is nothing forcible about it. We will become willing subjects, like Eloi to Wells’s Morlocks. So, it’s about time we started being more like self-absorbed assholes, don’t you think? If only because it entails a modicum of reflection. I have Dawn Norton to thank for this. Insults can have their uses.

1. By Joseph Smith (see The Day of the Triffids (Allied Artists, 1962). Joseph Smith Original Movie Poster Art (22” X 27.25”). Heritage Auctions (November 30, 2012). Archived from the original on 2015-09-27.. This artwork has also been attributed to Reynold Brown. Brown’s own records indicate that he worked on the campaign for Day of the Triffids: Movie Campaigns, A Listing. Archived from the original on 2012-04-23. Retrieved on 2013-03-12. The narrative accompanying the sale of the original artwork in 2012 by Heritage Auctions looks to be conclusive, and supports the attribution to Smith. It is possible that Brown contributed to the final poster design. - http://wrongsideoftheart.com/wp-content/gallery/posters-d/day_of_triffids_poster_01.jpg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24890860