Lucy Ireland Gray is an archaeologist and a self-described “nosy parker”. She has always been what in another context has been called a “picker-up of unconsidered trifles”. When she was ten, and her family moved to Germany, she lived in a flat above an ice-cream shop – and she gathered a collection of the brightly coloured plastic spoons the shop’s patrons discarded after finishing their tubs. She went on, in her teens, to collect plastic shopping bags – and then to study archaeology at university, which is after all “the study of what people leave behind”. 

So why, now, has she gathered a collection of more than 300 discarded shopping lists fished from the floors of supermarkets – which she eventually exhibited at the Museum of Brands? She described how she loves that period in late autumn when people, still not prepared for winter, leave their curtains open in the evening. She likes to look in through their windows as she drives past: “you get just a tiny snapshot of their lives… and it’s the same with shopping lists.”

Bringing up her first slide — “Hairspray, Yardley, Foot, Paper [illegible], Freeze, Milk, Cones” in a column on a crumpled rectangle of paper – she points out that all of us will form a different picture in our minds of the author of the list. What if she told us it was found on a bus? In Scotland? On the back of a greetings card?

When asked why not only did she collect these mysterious fragments of the lives of other, but wanted to display them, she confessed that she had always dreamed of making them into wallpaper. Not – as everyone guessed – for the downstairs loo, but for the hallway, so that these richly suggestive documents would be the first thing you saw on arrival in the house and the last thing when you left. 

She realised that one way or another she was attaching real meaning to these. Each one was a person (or two; as when someone had reused a letter sent to them to write a list on), and “I felt as if I had three hundred personalities in this box file. I knew them intimately, as I’d photographed and catalogued them. They were precious to me.” She only realised how precious when the Museum of Brands proposed hanging them on washing lines for display. Lucy, seized by anxiety that they could be defaced or stolen, insisted they go behind perspex. 

Rationalising her interest in these objects, she said she found in them a universal human experience – the modern equivalent of the hunter-gathering instinct. People have been making shopping lists since Mesopotamian times. She showed us Michelangelo’s — complete with drawings for, presumably, the benefit of illiterate servants. Apart from an Offgridder who claimed never to have written one, and whom she planned to interrogate further when a moment presented itself, she said “I have never met anybody who has never written a shopping list.”

And these things are “a great leveller: we need milk, we need bread, we need eggs… In a world where we often put ourselves forward as something different, special, other, they remind us that we’re all the same.” You might get the odd fancy folderol (a list found in a Waitrose included an entry for “poncey coffee”) but very few brands. You get a handful — Domestos, Coke, Weetabix – but mostly, because these are notes to yourself, you don’t. As Lucy says, she likes Hobnobs but she knows what to buy: her list will just say “biscuits”.

They are very personal. Some are written in code. As Lucy points out, “I could have collected a load of receipts – and it would have contained the same information… but the handwriting makes these more personal.” She remembered, for instance, finding an old handwritten note – not a shopping list, a list of pet hates – from her mother-in-law, seven years dead, and being heartstruck: “It had the essence of that person.”

Sometimes you found something, a private note or message, jumping out of one of these. Her ex-husband always put “a bag of smiles” in his shopping list. Another list Lucy found had, right there in the middle, “Love! Lots of it”. Was that a message from a sweetheart? “It’s possible that ‘Love’ is a brand of yoghurt,” she admitted. 

There’s a curious frisson, then, of invasion of privacy to the gathering of other people’s shopping lists. When she told a colleague about her collection the woman gasped with dismay: “You might have one of mine!” “She clearly found it unnerving,” said Lucy. And, admittedly, “there is an aspect of voyeurism about it…. you wouldn’t poke about in someone’s shopping basket, or what they’ve got on the conveyor belt.”

Lucy takes a close interest in the abbreviations – was someone writing “STs” for “sanitary towels” an inheritor of a prudish 1980s euphemism; or just trying to make the best of the space available on a tiny scrap of paper? What were the lists on? Often bank statements, envelopes, or other still more personal scraps. But some use dedicated pads with whimsical headings (“Chopin Liszt”: groan).

Some mysteries reveal themselves: a very specific list of ingredients was recognisable (and suddenly a poignant historical document) as the ingredients for the official pudding for late Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. Others (“hairspray, eggs”; or “biscuits, 0% beer, potatoes”) are something like haiku. Of the latter, Lucy remarks that “it’s not a party I’d like to be invited to”.

One painstakingly made list caused a little sigh from the audience as it flashed up. The trembling, cramped, careful handwriting and misspellings suggest someone very old, or very young, taking extreme pains. “Everyone reacts like that to this one,” said Lucy. “It’s all about your imagination.”

Which was an appropriate way to gloss her final offering. It read: “KY jelly, tourniquet, Chlor prep, green tubing, syringes.” Now that’s a party I’d like to be invited to.

Key Takeaways

1.  Even the most trivial rubbish can be a window into people’s lives

2. If you’re buying the equipment to do a murder, and you live near Lucy Ireland Gray, make sure you take your list with you rather than leaving it on the floor of Aldi.

3. You forgot washing-up liquid, didn’t you? Christ you’re useless. Make a list next time.

Presenting his 2019 memoir My Name is Why to Offgrid, the mighty Lemn Sissay gave something between a book reading, an improvisational comedy routine and a revival meeting – complete with raucous jazz-gospel acapella reprises of “All Things Bright and Beautiful”. 

As he said at the outset: “I’m not supposed to talk about this. It’s a book about my story. As in Baby Reindeer, this is a true story. I was both detective and witness to a crime, which was the murder of a childhood.” But that murder was of his own childhood – My Name Is Why describes Lemn’s growing up in the care system until he was eighteen (as a child he was called Norman — “I look like a Norman, don’t I? I know what you’re thinking: it’s uncanny!”), and his thirty-year struggle to get from “The Authority” the records that would tell him who he was and where he came from. 

And as Lemn said, “I had to write this.” But he did so in the face of what he saw as societal expectations: “You can’t be a writer and have your own story. You have a story which you must suppress and a career you must make shine… Right?” No. “It’s bollocks! It’s bollocks! It’s all bollocks!” He laughed: “Are we strapped in?”

We were, and it was a ride. As Lemn explained before reading the preface to his book, his experience of never having known anyone for longer than a year between birth and adulthood, of not having had a “proper” family…. it was precisely that that as he sees it gave him a greater insight into what family means. “The privilege of having a family is that [when at 18 you’re arguing with your parents, and you’ve decided “you hate the people you love”] you can with you were in a children’s home. Being in care gave me an unprecedented insight into what family is. If you can crack on without having to think about the fact you have a family, that’s family doing its job.”

Lemn’s birth mother came in the late 1960s, and was put in a mother-and-baby home, along with young Irish women in the same situation. (“However unique you think your story is, it’s a bridge – it’s a bridge to other people all over the world.”) Unmarried mothers, Lemn said, were “oestrogen terrorists” — they struck fear into the hearts of the patriarchy because they thought they might “explode” and splatter the patriarchy with hormones. She refused to sign the adoption papers. She didn’t want to give him away. But he was renamed – and he was fostered, and that was that.

There was anger in Lemn’s talk, when he commented on enduring societal attitudes to looked-after children. Those “selfish” parents, for instance, who talk of the “rush of love” when they have their children (“I cry at adverts!”) and fail to imagine that love – as strong or stronger – can kindle a different way, “that adoptive parents can’t feel the same love”. That, he said, was “the hypocrisy right at the heart of family… the beautiful dysfunction of function”.

As he went through his story in passages from his book, Lemn triangulated what he remembered with what he didn’t know – the perspectives from the local authority files that (unknown to him) had tracked his whole childhood with bureaucratic thoroughness, but which he didn’t obtain until three decades later. He held up a picture of himself as a baby, taken from those files. “I would steal that baby! I was a cute kid!”

The question that haunted him, he says, was “what did I do?” We all, he said, still have what he calls “one of the last unchallenged prejudices in our society – against children who’ve been in care”. You feel it too: imagine your child brings home someone they’re intending to marry, and they tell you that they were in the care system as children. “Check yourself! What’s the reaction you feel?” People see “children in care – already traumatised people – are seen as a problem waiting to happen – and a threat to their children”. But he adds: “Traumatised people often have a deep insight into the human condition.” 

He pointed out our literary models for looked-after children: “Superman was a foster child… Harry Potter… Lisbeth Salander… X-Men… Oliver Twist.” The prejudice against looked-after children, he said, often manifested in discipline. “Discipline without love, for children, is emotional fascism.” He described his own experience – as a child he stole biscuits and cakes, and lied about it, and was caned for it. “The lies bothered them more than the cakes. It was the crack in the dam… there was something bad in me.”

“I have therapy,” he said near the end of his presentation, raising an uneasy laugh. “I want you to know that I’m fine. I’m sharing with you a story. And from my perspective this is a true story. […] I might not have written this. I might have been one of the thousands who can’t write their story, who can’t afford therapy, who are on the streets.”

“Bitterness rots the vessel that carries it,” he said. “None of this is in the files.”

Key Takeaways

1. You can learn a lot about family by not having one

2. You’re allowed to be a writer, and to have a story, and to be funny too.

3. “A story is a bridge.”

by Sam Leith @ OffGrid Sessions 2024

Lauren Oyler — here to talk about her new essay collection No Judgement: On Being Critical — was introduced by Jeremy with a quote from the Times: “The most significant and widely read critic of her generation.”  That’s quite the status. I asked Lauren – who seemed to spring to instant stardom about a decade ago – how she got to where she is?

She said that when she started out — “I was 24, I was angry, and I was kinda fearless” — it was in the middle of an era when, as she saw it, book reviewing was in a bad, stagnant, boring place. “It had been so taken over by identity politics” that people were adjusting their reviews according to the author’s identity or the politics of the cause they were championing.

She found that dull and frustrating. Her first viral piece was when she wrote a long and excoriating review of Roxane Gay’s book – about which nobody had hitherto said a bad word. An excoriating review of Jia Tolentino’s modish Trick Mirror followed and crashed the LRB website. She quickly got a reputation as “a takedown artist”, she said. And everyone loves to read a takedown because it brings drama. And even all that drama, all this social media sniping, serves a wider good: “It’s literary essays we’re fighting about!” It’s directing a public conversation towards books, and that’s a good. 

That said, Lauren said she was at least as likely to be actuated to write by thinking “this is great” as she is by thinking “this sucks”. And when she does write negatively, it’s not usually because something is bad in itself. It only becomes interesting to her, and worth criticising, when its badness seems to her to chime with, or tell her about, something in the wider culture. She doesn’t see herself as narrowly a “book critic” or even a “cultural critic”: she prefers, just, “writer”. 

A digital native and self-confessed social media addict since she was in her early twenties, Lauren says that the role of criticism has changed – and she gives that a cautious welcome. “Experts” no longer dispense judgment from an elite position of cultural authority – and the pretence of lofty objectivity can be dispensed with. She’s “using myself as a data point”. The reality is, she says, readers “don’t want a genius or an academic” telling them about books: “they want someone relatable”. 

Putting herself into her work – in her essays you’ll read all sorts of asides about her love life, her relationship with her editors, her drink and drug consumption, and what have you – is a very natural way of being. It’s part of an era, among other things, in which all of us are “characters” on social media. But it’s also, on some level, a token of honesty: she’s not pretending to objectivity, but foregrounding where she’s coming from, and what she brings to her work as a critic. 

She recalled being on stage with Sheila Heti (whose writing is even more personal) and Sheila being asked whether she hesitated to be so exposing. She said it was like being a gymnast: if you’re a gymnast you need to wear very tight-fitting clothes and your body will be on display. If you’re not comfortable with that, don’t be a gymnast – and if you’re not comfortable with self-exposure, don’t be a writer. 

  I asked, too, about whether she was as good at “taking it” as she was at “dishing it out”, mentioning for instance a very long and hostile review of No Judgement by Becca Rothfeld (a rough contemporary) in the Washington Post. Rather than wince, Lauren positively perked up. Gossip! Drama! “I knew that was coming. And a full month before, Becca followed my boyfriend’s Instagram account – his private Instagram account. She also dated two of my ex-boyfriends. Really, Becky?” 

Book reviewing, these days, does bleed over into internet beef and gossip – because everyone on social media is a “character”, and hostility that’s endorsed by something that’s published in a prestige media outlet is extra spicy. As far as Lauren is concerned, it’s all part of the game. Does the way in which algorithms surface and promote anger, outrage and conflict just affect how things are consumed – or does it also affect the way writing is produced in the digital age? Definitely the latter, she says. 

And she seems to have a thick skin, though she was somewhat relieved not to have been completely clobbered for denouncing Goodreads in one of the essays in No Judgement as Lauren Hough was when she made the mistake of denouncing the site. “I put my criticism in the middle of a 16,000-word essay,” she pointed out. “Lauren Hough made the mistake of attacking them on Twitter.” Leaving unsaid, perhaps, that some of the more ferocious Goodreads people might not be taking the trouble to read a whole book. 

Lauren offers some respect, too, for artists who can take criticism. She mentions one very well-known writer – she says she won’t name her publicly, at least, until she’s had a few drinks – who had very visibly responded to a savage review of her last book by changing her style in the new one. So a good artist can take what is useful from a negative response and discard the rest of it.

That said, she said, “When someone tells me, ‘You’ve ruined that book, or that author, for me – I used to love them but now I can’t read them without hearing you over my shoulder’, that’s the highest compliment for me. I know I’ve done my job well.”

Three takeaways

1. Reviewing is always personal

2. The democratisation of culture is a good, but it’s not enough

3. Keep an eye on your ex-boyfriends when Becca Rothfeld is on the prowl

by Sam Leith @ OffGrid Sessions 2024

Tom Baldwin was invited to Offgrid this year, said Jeremy as he introduced him, on the recommendation of Alastair Campbell, who couldn’t come this year. When Tom took the stage, he said wanly: “I seem to have spent most of my career as the Poundshop Campbell.”

He apologised for “my dishevelled appearance, my scribbled notes and the lost look in my eyes”. Tom has just published two different books in six months (a biography of Keir Starmer and The Seven Myths that Changed a Country and How to Set Them Straight) and was getting ready to promote them when he was clobbered by the prospect of a general election. So he’s frazzled. But, he said, “in my best moments I believe that both these books have something to say about the future or our democracy”. 

The “seven myths” he took on with his “brilliant” co-author Marc Stears, he says, matter because “the stories we tell ourselves about our country matter”. And in a general election, “grandiose, engorged” ideas about national identity will be pitted against “an everyday, more ordinary idea of England that”, Tom said, “fits this country better”. 

For each of the myths he addressed, he travelled to a place in which that myth could said to be rooted. So there was “a muddy field in the Home Counties”, Runnymede. There was Plymouth, from where Britannia supposedly ruled the waves. There was Wolverhampton – the town where William Wilberforce was born (“how’s that myth of moral superiority working out for us?”) as well as where Enoch Powell served for 35 years as MP. There was the North Greenwich peninsula, home of the Millennium Dome (as was) and seat of a “myth of modernity” which said we could bypass our national history. There was Blackpool, to examine myths about the white working class. And Oxford, and Hull.

Tom said he was particularly focused not on Britain, here, but on England. Identifying as “English” rather than British was a prime indicator both of voting Brexit in 2016 and supporting Nigel Farage now. The myths he examines are English myths – and “it’s the politicisation of these myths that I’m really worried about”.

Politically, England isn’t a country. But there is an idea of England that remains “vibrant” in our imagination. The best loved and most lasting versions of it, Tom said, are the versions that concern themselves with ordinary people and their lives. The vision of J B Priestley or George Orwell or T S Eliot, of the Ian Dury who hymned “winkles, Woodbines, Walnut Whips, Vera Lynn and Stafford Cripps”; or even the self-described young anarcho-communist Ash Sarkar, whose list of distinctively English achievements is one term long: “Crisp sandwiches”.

England becomes more problematic as a political project, Tom said. Those, for instance, who boast of how we have “resisted invasion” for 1000 years; while ignoring that Wales, Scotland and Ireland were all constantly being invaded… by the English. Or that the coins all still have Elizabeth II’s face on them; even though Scotland never had an Elizabeth I. 

The first decade of the 21st century saw these ideas crumble. Devolution removed power from England, we saw the importance of Commonwealth unravelling amid globalisation, and the Special Relationship with the US fray. And then came Brexit, which brought out some of the most grandiose and delusional ideas about England.

By travelling to the book’s locations, Tom said, “each chapter is rooted in the everyday clutter of a real place because that is what matters. The best of England is found in what’s ordinary.” His and Marc Stears’s project was “to bring the myths gently back down to earth”. 

One of the biggest myths they sought to deflate was the idea that England “invented liberty – that we have nothing to learn from anyone else”. Hence, Runnymede, and the totemic importance of Magna Carta. That document is widely and flagrantly misunderstood: “It didn’t give ‘rights’ to anybody: it just gave privileges to a bunch of French-speaking aristocrats to do whatever they wanted”. The idea that it introduced habeas corpus (freedom from arrest) is anachronistic nonsense.

But that myth feeds into the current arguments over withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights. Opportunistic Tories rail against “foreign courts”, but as Tom points out “the European Convention has nothing to do with the European Union: it was created in the 1940s at the behest of Winston Churchill.

But “stories matter – Magna Carta matters – but the trouble is when it’s inflated and politicised”, he said, casting a withering glance at works by Dominic Raab and Daniel Hannan (of the “ridiculously titled” How We Invented Liberty and Why it Matters). He added that when David Cameron made much of the anniversary of Magna Carta – erecting a new memorial at Runnymede where there hadn’t been one before — he was “playing around with Eurosceptic erogenous zones”. 

Tom visited Runnymede as a reporter around that anniversary and when he tried to ask members of the public about what they thought of its historic significance, “we were at complete cross purposes”. They were just there walking their dogs. He found that encouraging: “Suburban England, with its rhododendron bushes, is reassuringly boring. It’s dowdy. And that dowdiness – being able to take freedom so much for granted – is the best definition I can think of of being free.”

It was a similar story in Wolverhampton, a hugely ethnically diverse city where Enoch Powell’s prophecy of rivers of blood did not come to pass. In the 1970s, football supporters went to games with pillowcases on their heads to resemble the Ku Klux Klan and Sikh children would hide in the temple on match days. But now the club is filled with Punjabi fans and they serve ethnic food on match days: “this isn’t some drippy liberal outpost: this is football!” And when Tom visited that Sikh Temple, what did they want to talk about? Not race relations or integration: but planning permission for a new car park. “We’re making progress as a country.”

And that brought Tom back to the general election. If you want a symbol of progress in this country, he said, you can look to Rishi Sunak. He doesn’t share Sunak’s politics, but he thought Nigel Farage’s dogwhistling claim that Sunak isn’t patriotic and “doesn’t understand our culture” deserve our contempt. To adapt Samuel Johnson, he said. “the last refuge of a scoundrel is questioning someone else’s patriotism”.

And so to his biographical subject, Sir Keir Starmer – who Tom admitted “to a lot of people … still a fantastically opaque figure”. He seems boring. (Tom said he knew eve nlawyers who had tried to read Starmer’s book on human rights law and had struggled: “eyes bleeding, matted hair, still on page 64”.) But maybe that’s one of his virtues.  

Sir Keir, he says, doesn’t represent some big idea, but a set of values. When Sir Keir made a speech about patriotism on St George’s Day – often something those on the Left feel uncomfortable with – he talked about the moments he had felt proud to be British. And what united those moments was that they were “everyday ordinary experiences” that could have had equivalents in many other countries: “he wasn’t claiming exceptionalism”.

So Sir Keir’s patriotism is “very prosaic, very everyday”: “At times, I don’t think he’s very political at all – he doesn’t like politics very much.” But the offer, then is exactly that – a “muddled set of values, with loose ends and exceptions” — but one representing a life-sized politics that “treads lightly on all of us”, that will “fit into the folds” of our national identity rather than seeking to “drive a straight line through it”. 

Key Takeaways

1. The stories we tell about national identity are important – but they need to be life-sized

2. Enoch was wrong

3. Don’t rely on Magna Carta if you get arrested – unless you’re a French-speaking aristocrat

by Sam Leith @ OffGrid Sessions 2024

The premise that Grace Blakeley’s new book Vulture Capitalism starts from, she told the first session of Offgrid day two, “is that so many people feel so powerless in our economy today.”

And it’s that sense of powerlessness, she said, that is behind a whole number of the large political movements of our recent history – the rise of the far right, the vote to leave the EU, the rise of Donald Trump; and equally, the rise of radical left-wing movements proposing an alternative..

Climate change is an example of one of the things that leave people feeling powerless. What can you do? Buy a tote-bag? Reduce your carbon footprint (“and, by the way, the very idea of a carbon footprint is an invention of the fossil fuel industry”)? 

The sense of powerlessness, typically, issues in one of two emotions. There’s apathy – which benefits the corporations who profit from the status quo. And then there’s rage — which helps to fuel the rise of the far right. 

So that sense of powerlessness – which either lends support to authoritarians or engenders passivity in the face of a system in which you despair of change — is eroding our democracy. “I argue,” Grace said, “That this sense of powerlessness emerges because the way we think about politics and economics is broken.”

At the root of that brokenness is the idea of a divide between the market and the state. We are taught to imagine that they are quite different domains, and political ideology since the 1980s has encouraged us to imagine them as separate spheres: that companies flourish in a “free market” where the state does not interfere. “But they are not as separate as we like to think.”

The seed for Vulture Capitalism was sown during Covid, when Grace did a lot of media. Interviewing people for radio and television, she said. “I kept hearing; ‘We’ve got socialism now’” when people talked about the furlough scheme and the bail-outs during the pandemic. I realised: “They think socialism is when the government does stuff, and they think capitalism is when companies do stuff.”

What they hadn’t realised was that most government support during the pandemic didn’t go to ordinary people: it went to landlords and banks; and that wealthy corporations had access to help that ordinary people did not. The Greensill scandal – where the financier Lex Greensill was able to get former Prime Minister David Cameron to lobby on his behalf for government money to prop up his ailing finance company. “Millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money went into this guy’s pocket.”

The problem, as Grace sees it, is “a toxic fusion of public and private power at the top of our economy. These people are in the same room, making decisions in pursuit of the same goals.”

How did they get there? Grace took us back to the 1980s, and the roots of Mrs Thatcher’s neoliberal revolution. “She thought that the state was too big, that it was the enemy of competition – and that if you shrunk the state you’d create more freedom.” But that was a lie. In fact, under Thatcher the state didn’t shrink: it just started giving money to a different group of people – the big corporations rather than ordinary workers. “The idea of creating freedom by shrinking the state was an attractive narrative: but it was just that – a narrative.”

Grace offers as a prime example of the public/private fusion of interests the story of Boeing – with its recent engineering problems (doors blowing off planes in flight) and the scandal of the 737 Max planes crashing in 2018/2019. The 737 Max crashes were blamed by Boeing on “pilot error” but were discovered to have been caused by a software fault that the company knew about but chose to ignore; and had been able to get away with thanks to “self-regulation”. 

Boeing was found guilty of fraud on the American government. Did that harm them? No. Nobody went to jail. The senior executives responsible walked away with fat pay packages. And if the idea behind self-regulation was that “the market” would punish bad business practices, it didn’t work. “Boeing was the biggest recipient of corporate welfare in the US,” says Grace. “Even after it had been found guilty of a criminal fraud against the United States, Boeing got a huge government bailout in the pandemic.”

As Grace puts it flatly: “Capitalism is not a free-market system.”

Neoliberalism did more than simply reorganise the state. It also worked to reorganise the way people understood themselves in the service of capital. You were no longer a “worker”, connected to your place in the system of production: you were a “consumer”. You were no longer a “citizen”: you were a “consumer of public services”. Everything from architectural and planning reforms to prime Ministerial pronouncements (notoriously, Mrs Thatcher said “there’s no such thing as society: just men and women and their families”) worked to erode the idea that there was a community of collective interests: rather, we were encouraged ot think of ourselves as “atomised, isolated individuals with no sense of power”. You were to be “an entrepreneur of the self.”

So the key to pushing back against the cartel of big business working with government, says Grace, is “a third force that can resist the fusion of private with public power”. That force, as Grace sees it, is an invigoration of democracy. You respond to a sense of powerlessness by making sure people have power. 

And her book is “not all doom and gloom”. She dedicates the final third of it to examples of where workers or ordinary citizens have been able to band together and pursue power from the bottom up. One such instance was Lucas Aerospace in the late 1970s. The company was failing, but a group of workers at the encouragement of Tony Benn submitted a plan to save it. 

They drew on their collective knowledge and understanding of the company to devise a plan to switch from making armaments to making wind turbines and dialysis machines – and they wanted to change the company to a worker-run co-operative “to empower us as producers”.

“Then came the 1980s”: Mrs Thatcher’s crushing of the unions did for Lucas Aerospace. The guy who had led the workers’ effort was fired. “It was not about shrinking the state: it was about attacking organised worker power.” But Lucas Aerospace still offers a model for what we can do now. 

“This book is about how we can again build this sense of collective power. It’s not just politics: it’s a way of changing how we think about ourselves and the world”.

Key takeaways

1. The idea that the state and the private enterprise occupy separate domains is a fiction that serves the status quo

2. The feeling of helplessness can cause anger or apathy: both damage democracy

3. Don’t get mad: organise

by Sam Leith @ OffGrid Sessions 2024

Steve Watson has a very unusual job. Through his company Stack, he sells subscriptions to magazines. Not one magazine: lots of them. “Every month,” he says, his subscribers get “a different independent magazine.” These are magazines that they ordinarily wouldn’t have known existed, let alone read. Such is the cultish appeal of the service that subscribers send in photographs of the magazines they get – with a certain amount of background showing off in terms of workstations, coffees and cats. “they’ve always done that, but we started to encourage it. Each month we decide on the best picture and the winner gets a Stack t-shirt. You can’t buy these T-shirts; you have to win them.”

An example of the sort of fare subscribers expect is, for instance, the English-language Estonian magazine A Shave Colder (chksp) – which, as Steve says, gives a fascinating sense of how Estonian creatives are responding to living next door to the threat from a resurgent Russia. What Steve says he’s noticed is that these independent magazines are “terrible at lots of things… they’re very bad at reaching a large number of people. But they’re very good at connecting in a deep way with their readers.” And by virtue of being magazines they have something special too. “Reading books is hard,” he says, referencing the forbidding block of text as against the cheery pull-quotes, headlines and pictorial content in a mag. “A magazine is your friend.”

Steve sees what he sends his subscribers as being in a lineage. The world’s first magazine, The Gentleman’s Magazine, was published in January 1731. Before the days of copyright, this was a “magpie-style” proposition that “took a bunch of stuff from elsewhere and republished it”. The original edition “looks like a boring old book” but when you read it, it’s recognisably connected to what we read today. Its publisher Edward Cave was interested in nicking all the best bits; and in titillating his audience with accounts of witch-trials and the horrible punishments meted out to “vile malefactors from Newgate”. It used the word “magazine” as a military metaphor: it was giving its readers conversational ammunition. Steve worked on the lad mag FHM in the year 2000: “Our idea was to find the funniest, cleverest, craziest things you could impress your mates with down the pub”; Cave was doing the same thing for his readers – except it was a coffee-house, not a pub.

Yet as much as it speaks to us, it remains in its design and its format very much of its time. Books, and works of art, can transcend their own era, Steve argues. But a magazine it fixed in its own age. And that’s part of its attraction.

Now he’s been doing Stack for 16 years. The website gives you a gallery of the covers of every magazine that they’ve sent subscribers, with links to interviews with the editors or publishers talking about why they do what they do. And in that time, Steve says, he has found three big commonalities

The first is independence.

The example he gives is the German photography mag Der Greif, which each issue solicits images on a theme and allows the juxtapositions to create new meanings. What he didn’t realise the month it was going to be the Stack offer is that that issue’s theme was “images too extreme or too personal to post on the internet”. [Ripple of laughter from Offgrid audience.] Steve was dismayed when he saw it – there was “a lot of nudity, sexual stuff, some dead bodies, and though there wasn’t actual violence, it was…” He said, “Stack is meant to be a surprise for our reasders… but it’s supposed to be a good surprise.” Anxiously, he wrote to subscribers explaining in some detail what was in the magazine, and posted a Google form to make sure that ever subscriber would have to click a button to acknowledge having been forewarned to actively opt in. 

“I thought I’d done it wrong. I’d never seen a Google form going up in fives and tens before…” It turned out that his subscribers were gagging to see all this filth. Interestingly, the issue had been edited by a former Facebook content moderator – someone whose job had been to sit in a room all day looking at the most extreme images and voting thumbs up or thumbs down. The mag was published according to Facebook standards — all the thumbs down images were one way up, and the thumbs up images the other way up.

That made a telling point about a pervasive censorship model that nobody every asked for, says Steve. And there’s one of the joys of a print magazine: you can publish anything within the law, and Meta doesn’t get to decide whether it’s suitable.

The second thing that these independent print magazines can do in counterpoint to the digital age is slowness.

As an example, he mentioned the magazine Delayed Gratification: a tri-monthly publication whose brief is to go back and report on the recent past after the dust has settled – reporting on things six months ago rather than six minutes ago. 

Slowness of a different form, he says, is exemplified by Pilot, a mag where “every issue is completely different” but the one he showed the audience had a peculiar trifold binding that separated text from images, and dispensed with page numbers, entirely. Steve thought this was crazy at first – but then he realised it was a deliberate strategy to undo the traditional magazine furniture designed to help you browse and flick. Here, in the age of continuous partial attention, was what has been called an “encalming technology”. 

And finally, what these magazines all share is difference.

Their editors and publishers – be they of second-hand-fashion mags like the excellently named Mildew or the even more excellently named Offal (literary off-cuts) — are interested in doing something that they couldn’t find anyone else doing anywhere else. They were pursuing passions.

The magazine he closed on was Al Hayya, a woman’s magazine published in Beirut that uses the visual grammar of a fashion magazine to smuggle in serious content about women’s lives, freedoms and sexuality in the Arab world. Its content is simultaneously both in English and Arabic – the former reading front to back; the latter back to front. It’s a magazine designed to sit on the table at the hairdresser, and to give its readers a bit more than celebrity gossip. In the age of the smartphone and social media, the magazines that Stack showcases indicate that there’s life in dead trees yet.

Key Takeaways

1) Independent print magazines can do something books can’t

2) Independent print magazines can do something the internet won’t let you

3) The tastes of Stack subscribers are, as Christan Grey would say, unconventional…

by Sam Leith @ OffGrid Sessions 2024

When the New York Times reporter Kashmir Hill first heard about Clearview AI, she was intrigued. Word had reached her that this company was able to produce completely accurate facial recognition of almost anyone. She knew that the systems currently in use by law enforcement agencies in the US were unreliable at best. So what was this company that had cracked it? How could a company nobody had ever heard of – rather than, say, Google or Meta – got this unimaginably powerful technology?

The inquiry that was to turn into her book Your Face Belongs To Us began with that most arcane technique of the investigative reporter: a Google search. The company had a website with just its name and a slogan: “Artificial intelligence for a better world.” That, and an address – which turned out to be just three blocks from the New York Times’s offices. So she walked acroAsss town – and discovered that the building didn’t exist. 

The mysteries piled up. She found the names of two investors in the company, one of whom was the Paypal/Palantir tycoon Peter Thiel. She knew his spokesman. She asked him about Clearview. He said he’d look into it – and never contacted her again. She searched LinkedIn and found only one person who claimed to work for Clearview. She reached out. Nothing. A small forest of red flags seemed to be sprouting.

Then she got a break. A detective in Florida called her up (she’d reached out to the Police departments that some “google dorking” had indicated were using Clearview products) raving about how brilliant the tech was: he said you could feed in a picture of a person in glasses, or a hat, or half turned away from the camera, and it would identify them — “you’d get hit after hit after hit”. He’d adopted it on a free trial but now the department was paying for it in preference to the state system, which “didn’t work”. 

Could she see it in action, she asked. Sure, he said – but since he would compromise an ongoing investigation if he showed her any of his own searches, they agreed she’d send some pictures of herself for him to run through the algorithm. She sent them. And immediately, he stopped answering her calls. The same happened again with another officer, who called her full of excitement about the tech, agreed to search her face…and then… ghosted her.

As she came to realise, the company may not have been answering her inquiries: but it was very aware of her. It had used its own technology to “put an alert on my face”. Anyone who ran Kashmir Hill through the database would get a call telling them to stop talking to her immediately.

“It told me two things: that they could see who law enforcement was searching for; and they could use it to flag people who were meddlesome. It only made me more interested. Why this little company? Why not Google or Meta?”

The truth was, though, that Google and Meta had got there first. The dream of computerised facial recognition dates to the early 1960s, when the CIA funded engineers to build an automated face recognition system. It didn’t work – and for years afterwards it was thought that this was a uniquely human cognitive skill.

But, in fact, the sheer computational power, and the vast datasets available (which we all handed over by tagging our photographs on Facebook and Instagram and LinkedIn), mean that computers can recognise faces – and for a decade or more now have been able to do so better than humans. In fact, Google has had the tech since 2011 and Facebook developed a version in 2016. But both companies – neither of which is exactly shy about invasion of privacy issues – held the technology back for more than a decade because they thought it was “just too scary”. What would an evil dictator do with such a tool?

And the tech lead with Clearview – whom Kashmir eventually managed to interview — was a goofy kid called Hoan Ton-That who had come to California chasing the tech bubble and whose previous main achievement had been an app to let you superimpose Donald Trump’s haircut on someone else’s head. As he told her, he had bolted together Clearview’s terrifying tech simply by searching the code base GitHub for “facial recognition”. “It’s as if I Googled ‘flying car’ and then built one!” he told her, laughing.

“What Clearview AI had done, then, was not make a technological breakthrough,” said Kashmir. “They had made an ethical breakthrough. It was ‘ethical arbitrage’.” They had done what other companies could do but declined to because its moral implications were so murky.

And someone was probably always going to. The engineers who worked on facial recognition just wanted to solve the problem and imagined that someone else would work out how to control it. “Technical sweetness”: Kashmir reminded us of Oppenheimer’s quote about the Manhattan project: “When you see something that is technically sweet, you just do it, and worry about what to do about it later.” 

When Kashmir first reported on Clearview they had a database of 3 billion images scraped from the public internet. At last count it was 40 billion. Why didn’t Meta sue them for taking images from Facebook? Cease and desist letters were sent cursorily, but ignored and not followed up on – because, Kashmir speculates, Google and Meta knew they’d soon want to scrape copyright material from the internet themselves for generative AI so didn’t want to establish too strong a precedent that it might be illegal or unethical.

The current state of play is mixed. Clearview is still being used by police in the US. Europe deemed the collection of the database illegal and banned it from doing business here. In the US there’s strong resistance to real-time scanning; in the UK police forces are even now trialling vans using AI to scan crowds for wanted criminals… and traffic offenders. 

But everywhere there’s the danger of what Kashmir calls “surveillance creep”: once one use-case is admitted, more will be found. The owner of Madison Square Garden used face recognition to ban lawyers working for law firms in litigation with him from his venues. Taylor Swift is said to have used it to comb her concert crowds for known stalkers.

A specially sinister case was when Clearview lent its tech to the Ukrainian army, theoretically so they could screen out Russian spies seeking to infiltrate their ranks. In practice, they used it to identify Russian corpses and send the photographs of these dead soldiers to their mothers, fathers, wives and girlfriends in the hopes of turning Russian opinion against the war.

And even if Clearview is still only available to law enforcement, the technology is out there. It’s easier and easier to come by. PimEyes is an image search company that theoretically exists so users can search for their own faces (you have a tickbox to promise, Scout’s Honour, that it’s you you’re searching for). A registered user can make 25 searches an hour – so that’s a lot of narcissism… or a lot of people using it to search for other faces. It works scarily well.

And Russia and China are already way ahead – their authoritarian states are using this tech to scan faces in real time, all the time. Yet as Kashmir says, there are some great uses for this: “I know so many people in law enforcement who really value this technology: it can help solve heinous crimes.” But it’s also vulnerable to “automation bias” (trusting fallible computers too much). You can be arrested for the crime of looking like someone else. “We need to build in the recognition that sometimes they go wrong.”

Above all, the question is “Who determines what happens with technology? Is it those companies, is it government, or is it us? What sort of world to we want to live in?” Kashmir says that there’s already talk of releasing the tech in such a way that you might have privacy settings for your face. 

She asks crowds when she talks who would let their face be searchable by anyone, who’d let it be searchable to friends and contacts, who’d insist it be entirely private. Results are mixed. But when she talks in California, almost everyone says they’d be happy to have their face be publicly searchable to anyone: “They’re very in favour. That is where they are building the tools… and that is the world they want.”

Three key takeaways

1. There are some companies who make Google and Meta look like ethical paragons

2. Once the technology exists, it’s already too late

3. The guy who owns Madison Square Garden is a dick

by Sam Leith @ OffGrid Sessions 2024

Will Storr opened his session on his book The Status Game with a bold and thought-provoking provocation. We experience the world in two different ways at once, he said. Our conscious experience of our normal lives is structured as a story; and our unconscious experience is structured as a game. It’s the interplay between these two things that leads us to all our sorrows, joys and confusions. 

Here’s how he went about unpacking it. Our consciousness, he said, “remixes reality into a story” — as one neuroscientist he quoted put it, we cast ourselves as “an invisible actor at the centre of the world”. Even in the most mundane situation – when you’re held up on public transport and you’re late for work – you feel at the centre of a drama, your mind narrows to an intense focus on overcoming a series of obstacles (that malfunctioning ticket barrier! That idiot who stopped on amber!). “You’re James Bond… in a very boring way.”

There’s a whole suite of psychological mechanisms – what Will called “hero-making technologies” — that cause us to apprehend the world this way. There’s what psychologists called “the spotlight effect”, which causes us to feel like the centre of the universe. The young people these days, Will observed, call this “main character syndrome”. Then there’s “autobiographical memory”: we store our experiences not as they actually happened, but with the Aristotelian structure of a dramatic story. Our memories have a beginning, a middle and an end. 

It’s not just memory. Studies show that we are “delusionally optimistic” about our futures. Being as we are, after all, the main characters, we expect to experience the hero’s journey: we’re Prince Hal rather than Andrew Aguecheek. And, also accordingly, we indulge in “self-enhancement”: “we think we’re better at stuff than we actually are”.

There was some lovely data on this one. When people are shown a jumbled collection of photos of themselves, each one differently digitally enhanced to make the images more or less attractive to different degrees, the one that people chose as “the real one” was on average 20 per cent better looking than the actual real one. 

Surveys asking couples how much of the housework each thinks they do routinely add up to a total of 160 per cent. Better yet, studies conducted with people in prison found respondents saying they considered themselves “above average in moral behaviour” and “averagely law abiding”. “While they were sitting there in actual prison!” Will marvelled. 

What’s more, we believe we’re right about everything. And we believe in happy endings. The next big thing, we think, is always what’s going to make us happy. If you ask billionaires how much extra money they’d need to be completely happy, they always say two or three times as much as they have.

And, like heroes of stories, we all have “personal projects” — usually about fifteen on the go at the time, “from teaching your dog to give you a high five to bringing peace in the Middle East”. In some sense, says Will, we are our personal projects.

So we experience the world as stories in which we are the protagonists; indeed, that may be to put the cart before the horse. Will suggests that the reason the stories we tell in films and books are shaped the way they are because they mimic how our brains see our lives. 

But that’s just one half of it. Because the unconscious side of things is, as he said at the outset, quite different. Quoting another neuroscientist, Will said that “the brain encodes reality as a reward space using emotions”. Our unconscious minds cause us to navigate the world with two basic responses to stimulus: approach… or withdraw. (Anger, he says, is a third thing – an uncomfortable mixture of approach and withdraw.) Approach and withdraw causes us to ping-pong through the world, avoiding things we don’t like and glomming on to things we do. 

So what do we like? What’s all this for? The absolute base level is the necessities of survival – food, shelter and so on. But after that things get interesting. Uniquely among the great apes, we are extraordinarily cooperative as a species – to the extent that the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has called us “part ape, part bee”. 

And that means there are two things we crave; indeed, that we can’t do without.

The first is connection. “Social rejection is a unversal human dread – it has been described as the annihilation of the self.”

The second is status. That doesn’t, as you might vulgarly suppose, mean “being rich, famous, or an influencer – it means having value to others; and that’s a wonderful thing”.

These two things, says Will, “aren’t just nice things to have – they are vital. If you don’t have them you are liable to get mentally ill.” Working as a volunteer for the Samaritans, he reports, there are three drivers that cause people to take their own lives. One is recent bereavement, another is chronic pain, but the third and considerable more prevalent is what he calls “identity failure”. “When the story is unwinnable, when you can’t be heroic, the brain turns on itself.”

It’s increasingly established that these two things are important to physical as well as mental health. It’s well known that loneliness is a worse risk factor for heart disease than diet and exercise; but less well known is that lack of status carries similar risks. A survey of employees in the British civil service (a very structured and hierarchical organisation) found that with everything else corrected for civil servants in the lowest rung of the status ladder were four times more at risk of early death than their top status counterparts. 

As with civil servants, so with monkeys. Ingenious scientists fed monkeys a whole bunch of junk food, and discovered that in a population of monkeys with terrible diets the high-status monkeys were far less affected by health issues. And when they manipulated the status arrangements in the group, the health outcomes changed too. 

As Will reminded us, we spent 100,000 generations living in hunter-gatherer societies and only 500 generations living in cities. The hunter-gatherer rules still apply. There were two ways to get status: competence (you were best at collecting honey or finding tubers) or virtue (you were brave, or you were good at following and enforcing the group’s norms). We still have competence status (Bear Grylls) and virtue status (Greta Thunberg). And do high-status individuals get better grub, safer sleeping spots and access to high-quality mates? They surely do. 

An anthropologist reporting on the tribal people of one remote island found a society that offered little social mobility – but there was one way to rise. If you could present the leader with the biggest yam at the annual feast, you won instant promotion. Accordingly, as Will put it in his best academic jargon: “everyone became obsessed with growing giant fucking yams”. The menfolk of this island would spend years cultivating 90kg yams in secret spots in the jungle, and it would take twelve men with a stretcher to bring these yams to the feast. It was considered bad manners even to look at another man’s yam patch. 

The problem we have is that the part of our brain that tells stories doesn’t have access to the parts of our brain that plays games: we don’t understand why we do what we do, and we think that we’re in search of truth when in fact we’re just trying to grow a bigger yam than the next dude. “Status,” said Will, “is a huge motivator.”

1. We think we’re the heroes of our own stories. We’re not

2. “Identity failure” can cost you your health, and even your life

3. Get your dirty eyes off my yam

by Sam Leith @ OffGrid Sessions 2024

“How to live?” This is the most fundamental question of life, said Sarah Bakewell. And the most fundamental answer, she continued, was: “Be born.” We’ve all managed that – but most of us think that’s not quite enough. We want to unpack the question to consider how to live a good life, or a meaningful life, or a fulfilled life, or a useful life, or a life that is in some sense fully realised. We want to know how to deal with bereavement, with our fear of our own death, with the question of how to avoid getting into arguments with our loved ones, to know how to deal with bullies, to know when to intervene or not in others’ squabbles. Or, even, “what to say to our dog when she wants to go out and play and you want to stay at your desk and keep writing your book”.

We can learn something of these questions, she said, from one writer who lived in France in the 16th century and “who addressed himself to all these questions, big and small”. That writer was Michel de Montaigne – and the Essays he left to us run to more than 1000 pages… “which indicates that he resolved the dog problem, at least”.

He had an unusual childhood. Born in 1533 into a wealthy family, he grew up in a country estate with a vineyard in the southwest of France. The family had only known wealth for two generations and his father was not a learned man, but a man who revered learning. Indeed, he was convinced that the mark of true sophistication was a command of Latin – so what would be better than to speak Latin as a native? Undeterred by the fact that nobody had spoken Latin as a first language in centuries, he determined that young Michel, his first-born son, would be brought up speaking only Latin. A German tutor who spoke no French was hired for the boy, and his mother and the servants were all required to speak only Latin to him. 

“It’s no surprise,” Sarah said wanly, “that he chose to write in French rather than Latin.” Before that, though, came a career in public life – as a young man Michel became a magistrate in the city of Bordeaux. But he resigned at the ripe old age of 37, announcing “at my advanced stage in life I want to use the few years left to me in contemplation”. Even in the 16th century, Sarah says, 37 wasn’t old: our man was, as she reads it, simply fed up of the day job.

But deprived of work, he discovered, his mind went all over the place – he likened it variously to “wild horses” and to the wildly shaking reflections of light in a turbulent bowl of water. It was to calm his mind, to “dream to some purpose” that Michel started his famous examinations of himself and the world in his essays. He was the first person to use the term “essay” as we now use it. It’s from the French essayer, to try: these essays are attempts, the testing of ideas, “trials of himself”.

Part of their charm is that tentativeness. Sarah compared him to Arnold Bennett, who (she said enviously) had been able to get away with titling his essay collections Things That Have Interested Me. So you’ll get a short esssay “Of Thumbs”, where Montaigne wonders about thumbs. Or “Of Coaches”, where he writes about Kings, sneezing and the Aztecs before, rather belatedly, getting around to mentioning coaches. He kept revising, changing his mind, saying “but no, but maybe, or let’s look at it another way”. The animal-loving Montaigne, you imagine, would have enjoyed the way that Sarah’s flow was from time to time interrupted by the hee-hawing of a nearby donkey or the catlike yowl of Osea Island’s peacock.

Montaigne was making psychological observations before we had psychology, Sarah said. He asked “How We Cry and Laugh About the Same Things” and “How We Want One Thing and Do Another”. He was interested in the variety and contradictoriness of human experience.  

Death was very present for Montaigne. He lost all but one of his six children. The dearest friend of his youth, Etienne de la Boetie, died in his arms, and the grief shaped him. His companionable relationship with his readers, she speculates, comes out of the need to answer that loss: we are in the role of his friend. 

HIs own death preoccupied him too, for a while. At first he argued that the way to conquer fear was, like a stoic, to imagine one’s own end constantly. But then he was knocked out after falling from a horse and found himself in a pleasant delirium of semi-consciousness; yet on recovery, his friends told him he’d been in apparent agony. So he changed his mind. Why waste time worrying about death when you might not even know what’s happening to you? Spend that time on life. “Nature,” he decided, “will tell you what to do.” He declared: “Let death find me planting my cabbages.” (Sarah remarked drily that there’s nothing in the historical record to indicate that this loveable but supremely impractical fellow ever planted a cabbage in his life.)

Montaigne was a modern in other respects, too. He was fascinated by cultural diversity – questioning a group of visiting Brazilian indians on what they made of France. They told him that they were astounded that a boy could be king, that they were horrified that the rich could feast while the poor starved – and a third thing which, bless him, Montaigne forgot.

Indeed, the real mark of his modernity is that willingness to imagine that someone else may see the world differently. He loathed the cruelty of the witch-burnings and punishments for heretics that he had to preside over as a magistrate, saying tartly that “It is putting a high price on one’s conjectures to burn a man alive for them.” Essay: an attempt; not by definition the work of someone who imagines he has the last word. 

Indeed, he even, unusually for his era, liked to consider that animals might have thought-worlds and lives of their own. He wondered if his dog was dreaming when he moved in his sleep and, famously, whether his cat was a plaything for him or whether he was a plaything for his cat. Montaigne was a man of shifting perspectives, one who knew “not to take himself too seriously”. 

He saw himself, in other words, as a man leading an ordinary life. As Sarah put it: “It’s like a case study of being a human being.” He judged that perfection was self-acceptance: to know how to enjoy our being rightfully.” For “on the loftiest throne in the world, we’re still only sitting on our own bum.”

Key Takeaways

1. Don’t try to make your kid speak Latin, poor little bastard

2. Take proper notes when interviewing indigenous peoples for the historical record

3. “[Montaigne] doesn’t offer any answers you can put in a takeaway” — Sarah Bakewell

by Sam Leith @ OffGrid Sessions 2024

“Three facts,” said Daniel Susskind as he introduced his talk on Growth: A Reckoning, “have defined the economic history of the entire human race.” The first is that for most of our 300,000 years on the planet every human being has existed in a state of stagnant economic growth; an unrelenting struggle for subsistence. The second is that this state only very recently came to an end: modern economic growth only began 200 years ago. The third is that growth is now, for the first time, “both significant and sustained – as if some pent-up productive power has been unleashed”.

  That means that, much as we talk about growth, we still don’t understand it very well. Before the 1950s, almost no politicians even talked about the idea of growth; and it wasn’t until the 1940s that we even started to have any reliable tools for measuring the size of economies.

  What we do know is that growth has been responsible for some transformatively positive things. It has lifted billions of people out of poverty and the struggle for subsistence. It has improved the health and longevity of humans around the world. And it has generated the technical advances we see about us. 

  But has also come at a great cost. It has caused widespread environmental destruction; it has damaged or obliterated cultures and communities; it has been a driver of drastic inequality as the benefits of growth are shared unequally. And it has generated the technical advances – not all of them positive – that we see around us. 

  So growth presents us with a dilemma: it is “associated with every measure of human flourishing; but it also comes at a huge price.” So what do we do? Over the last three decades or so, the so-called “degrowth movement” — which holds that we should stop or even reverse economic growth worldwide — has filtered from being a concern of “a handful of ecologically minded academics” into the mainstream. It is embraced by the likes of the Green Party politician Caroline Lucas, David Attenborough and Greta Thunberg.

  It’s Daniel’s view that the degrowth movement makes a dangerous mistake — “I believe that what we really need is more growth, through the discovery of new ideas and technological progress, but we also need a new type of growth” — but he proposes to address their case fair-mindedly. 

  It falls into two parts: one is to do with the diagnosis, the other with the solution. The former is exemplified by Greta Thunberg’s blistering address to the UN in 2019. “We’ll be watching you. You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!”

  Daniel was prepared to endorse that view wholeheartedly. He said that if anything, Thunberg underestimates the “ecosystem-damaging, work-threatening, poilitics-diminishing” effect of growth as it is now.

  But in the solution space, he takes issue. The popular claim that “Infinite growth is not possible on a finite planet”, he says, is wrong. Infinite growth is possible on a finite planet because growth is no longer what it once was. When the 18th-and 19th-century fathers of economics (Smith, Marx, Ricardo et al) were formulating the discipline, the economies around them consisted of factories and farms. These enterprises were material. 

  But growth is now about ideas rather than objects. The planet of tangible resources is finite; the universe of ideas is unimaginably vast, effectively infinite. An example: a well-stocked larder containing 300 ingredients is a finite resource. But it’s possible to devise more recipes combining the ingredients from that same larder than there are atoms in the universe. 

  There’s a moral case against degrowth, too. If it means freezing global GDP, you’ll consign very many millions of people to poverty. Growth has been a revolution – but it’s an unfinished revolution. So Daniel’s starting point, he says, is: how do we get more growth?

  Again, that’s not easily answered. Growth remains “one of the great mysteries of economic thought”. But what we do know is that “more growth requires technological progress – which means more ideas about how we manage our finite resources”. 

To make that possible there are some key steps to take. We will need to reshape our intellectual property regimes. We will need to invest more in research and development (fun fact: Israel currently leads the world in per capita R & D investment). And we’ll need to use tech itself to generate more ideas: in the 20th century new ideas came from the “meat machines inside our heads”; now they will, increasingly, come from the “silicon machines” on our desks. 

  There is reason to be optimistic. Example one: in 2007 the Stern Review into the economics of climate change predicted that to reduce emissions by 80 per cent would require a one per cent reduction in growth. The following year Stern himself made a still gloomier correction, saying he thought it would cost 2 per cent of GDP per year to hit that target.

  Yet when the subject was revisited in 2020 experts estimated that eliminating emissions entirely would cost only half a percentage point of GDP per year. Why? Because of technological progress in combination with a transformation in incentives and social norms for renewable energy. Solar power, for instance, started in the 1970s as a “tool of last resort; now it’s commonplace”. Over half a century the cost of a kilowatt hour of solar electricity has gone from $100 to 50c.

The pandemic supplied another instance of how fast change can come about. As lockdown meant that in academic economic terms wages for in-person work effectively went to infinity, new technologies and new arrangements for remote working flourished. A change that would ordinarily have taken decades was managed in months. Paid full days of working from home saw a twelvefold increase at the height of the pandemic – and settled back to a permanent sixfold increase. 

We shouldn’t underestimate the power of incentives.

But at the same time, we should be prepared to accept that we cannot always make it work. There will be trade-offs, and what Daniel called “the final and hardest task” is to consider how willing we are to “sacrifice growth to protect outcomes we care about”. Some argue that to do this we need to change the way we measure GDP to reflect these concerns – to bake in environmental externalities, for instance. Daniel argues passionately that this is the wrong way to go.

“No; these are not technical questions about measurement but moral questions about what matters.” As such they belong to the domain of politics, and the task at hand is to create a politics adequate to them: “We need new institutions” to bring citizens into the decision-making process. Citizens’s panels – focused not on small local issues but the biggest questions — have already proved a success in various domains: in Ireland they have been used to address abortion law, in France to look at euthanasia, in South Korea to discuss energy policy. They can supply a model. 

He ended on a note of optimism: despite our “age of anxiety”, we have “an existential opportunity in front of us; a chance for moral renewal – and we begin from a position of strength.”

  As the late philosopher Derek Parfitt put it: “We have the power not only to make life good in decades to come, but to make it better in ways we cannot possible yet imagine.”

Three key takeaways:

1. Economic growth is a huge blessing to the species; but it’s a gift horse we do have to look in the mouth.

2. The material world is finite, but the world of ideas is infinite. We can use that.

3. The key to the right type of growth is the right type of technology: and we need a new politics to make that happen.

by Sam Leith @ OffGrid Sessions 2024

You can always tell the difference instantly, said Ian Leslie as he opened the first session of Offgrid day one: there’s a light behind the eyes of a curious person. And it was pondering the question of why there is a great divide between the curious and incurious that led Ian to work on his book Curious: The Desire to Know, and Why Your Future Depends on It. The “finger-wagging subtitle”, he joked – implying that unless you read his book you don’t have a future – is justified.

  To explain why, he quoted the futurist Kevin Kelly: “If you want an answer in the future, you will ask a machine. The role of humans will be to ask the question.” It’s a matter of supply and demand. With Google and ChatGPT, tech is flooding the market with answers. But “we’re not getting any better at writing the prompts”. Picasso, Ian said, put the same thing more stylsihly: “Computers are useless: they only give you answers.” That implies that curiosity – that asking the right questions — has never been more important. 

  So the question Ian set out to ask was: how do we get on the right side of the curiosity divide – and how to we stay there? Curiosity, he discovered, is little studied in psychology. As a phenomenon of mind it is partly cognitive, partly emotional, and partly instinctual – and so doesn’t fit neatly into the compartmentalised specialisms of academic psychology. Plus, it’s hard to measure. 

  But one big idea – minted by George Loewenstein – provides a way to think about it which, Ian said, can transform your way of looking at the world. That is the “curiosity gap”. If you know absolutely nothing about a subject, you’ll have no curiosity about it because there’s nothing to pique your interest. If you know everything about a subject, likewise, you’ll have no curiosity because there’s nothing to learn. Curiosity flourishes, then, in that gap. You can draw a bell-shaped graph with knowledge on the x-axis and curiosity on the y-axis.

  And there are two types of curiosity. 

  The first is “diversive curiosity”. This is one that storytellers understand instinctively. Take Agatha Christie: she gives you a certain amount of information – Colonel so-and-so has been murdered with some lead piping in the library. But she also leaves “this stonking big curiosity gap: you don’t know whodunnit”. That is what keeps you turning the pages. Diversive curiosity is about novelty, it’s impulsive, and it’s about getting the answer.

  But there’s another sort of curiosity: “epistemic curiosity”. This is “what happens to diversive curiosity when it grows up”. It’s about the accumulation of information over time. It’s a long-term, self-fuelling impulse where the more you know the more you want to  know, and when it bites you it’s “the best thing in the world”. The storytelling analogy is a good way of understanding it. When you finish an Agatha Christie, and you know whodunnit, you’re done with the book. When you finish The Great Gatsby, you’ll think: “I have all the information now, but I still don’t know what the fuck was going on.” You want to reread it. That’s why Gatsby is richer. And that’s the distinction, says Ian, between a puzzle and a mystery.

  Epistemic curiosity is longer–term, it’s more enduring – and it requires more effort because it requires you to explore with smarter and better questions. The physicist’s lifelong engagement with the mysteries of the universe would be an instance of epistemic curiosity. Epistemic curiosity produces a positive feedback loop: the more you know –> the more you realise you don’t know –> the more you want to know –> the more you know.

  And that sort of curiosity makes you smarter. Computers, notoriously, slow down when their memories are full; human beings, on the other hand, speed up when their memories are full. They make connections faster. As a practical instance, if you try memorising a string of sixteen random digits you’ll find it very hard. If the words “lucy in the sky with diamonds” flash up on Ian’s slide deck (he’s a nutter for the Beatles, is Ian) you’ll memorise it in a nanosecond. That, too, is a string of symbols – but your background knowledge fixes it immediately in your mind. 

  That’s why, Ian said, the idea that we won’t need to know things in the future because “we can Google everything” is “completely misguided”. That attitude will train our brains to become slower and slower. 

  Why, then, do people end up being incurious? There’s an adaptive reason for that. Children between the age of four and five ask 40,000 questions a year (“if you have kids, you’ll know that this can be very annoying”). That’s because unlike almost every other animal, we no longer occupy a specific ecological niche: humans’ special power is to adapt to anywhere (even a drizzly island in Essex) by using cultural knowledge. Accordingly, our have a much longer period of helplessness or dependence on their parents. 

  A baby horse isn’t long out of the womb, said Ian, showcasing his zoological expertise, before it’s “going to Starbucks and getting a mortgage”. Whereas human babies take the view: “you’re going to need to change my nappy and feed me till I work out what’s going on”.

  But when our infant instincts for asking questions subsides, curiosity goes down. It’s served its purpose, and as Michael Lewis wrote in Moneyball, “The older you get, the harder it is to take an interest in new things.”

  The same process – curiosity going down as the immediate environment is mastered and understood – takes place in adult life. You get a new job, and to start with you’ll be very interested in finding out all about the company and your colleagues. Once you figure out how to do your job, you’ll tend to become more complacent. 

  It also, sometimes fatally, afflicts institutions. Start-ups are curious and questing and adaptive. As they start to develop a schtick, and make money, they will settle into a groove… and do fine right until the world changes around them without their noticing, and another start up eats their lunch. Lots of industries are, said Ian, “stupid-making”.

  So is the Internet – at once the greatest tool for curiosity and the greatest tool for incuriosity ever invented. It is “a machine for making smart people smarter and stupid people stupider”. Because the better the machine gets at delivering the answers, the lazier the users get at asking the questions.

  So you need to follow the advice of Horace Walpole: “The secret of life is to be interested in one thing profoundly and a thousand things well”. Or, in business terms: be T-shaped. If you know your own field deeply, and show interest and curiosity in what your colleagues do, that will make you a better collaborator. 

Three key takeaways

1) Curiosity is situational

2) In an age of abundant answers, there’s an even greater premium on asking good questions

3) Curiosity is a muscle – use it or lose it.