I read a recent definition of an NFT as a ‘receipt that cannot be counterfeit for an object you don’t own’ and the phrase is mostly accurate except that the object of the receipt – being digital and free to reproduce – is in fact an object anyone or everyone can own. What is unique is that you have the receipt and you can subsequently if you wish sell that receipt to someone who wants a receipt for a receipt….you can fill in the subsequent iterations. This is clearly ludicrous, beyond beany-babies or even Crypto-Currencies in the sense that what you own says only you have paid money for something anyone else can get for nothing. As an example a major museum has sold NFT images of some of their most famous exhibits. You certainly don’t own the exhibit or rights to the image of the exhibit you own a receipt that you paid the museum some money for the receipt for the image. Clearly what you are buying is not an object you have use for or which is in some ways demonstrably rare or difficult to reproduce but a story – a social statement.

Except that is the case of so many objects we buy. A signed book, is the same as the book in terms of literary enjoyment and the signature itself is more or less valuable according to its provenance. A civil war gun might be worth a few $100 but knowing it was owned by a famous general increases that value perhaps 10x or 100x . That ownership is established with letters or a history of transactions essentially receipts but the small lethal metal object is precisely the same. A bottle of Bollinger champagne, a Rolex watch, a MontBlanc Pen and a diamond engagement ring are all objects that are not necessarily better, rarer or more beautiful than alternatives but for which their respective makers have invested millions in marketing them as recognizable and prestigious. The famous ‘Savile Row Tailor’ boast that ‘…we don’t need a label, people who know quality will recognize it immediately…’ is a lovely idea but in the real world even if there is no garish logo there are many relatively unsubtle clues that advertised their story. One of the most amusing examples of recent years was ‘Hunter’ boots, a company that as far as I know had been making expensive but functional gardening footwear for many years almost anonymous vs alternate brands but when they became very fashionable you could see them a mile away as the they were being worn by a designer dressed 20-something women on a dry day in the city. I suspect fewer people buy well made Rolex fakes than the real thing, only the cheap knock-offs make sense as ironic statements.

Consider the extremes:

Would you buy the object of nobody knew you owned it?

Would you buy the object if everybody knew you owned it but in reality you had no way of having access to it?

And perhaps even stranger are objects where you are buying the story for yourself. I own a book written by and separately annotated by two participants in an academic debate already 30 years old. The social consequences are the ridicule of my children and the raised eyebrows of my Wife at another bizarre purchase. Before you add me to your list of fools think of the restaurants you have dined at or places you have been just because you like the idea of being the sort of person who does that sort of thing. Poverty is fundamentally a physical form of deprivation but even after that it is the loss of discretion or choice, the chance to do a small frivolous thing or start a family story because each and every purchase has to be utilitarian. So let the rich buy NFT’s and amuse yourself at their expense but remember we all aspire to do the same, rich people just get buy more ludicrous stories than the rest of us.

As a lifelong Radio 4 listener, by temperament and milieu as much as choice, few things are more evocative of earlier parts of my life than the title music of shows. The strange consensus that ‘Take Me On’ by Aha is the canonical 1980’s song is not an incomprehensible choice, merely a wrong one, the correct answer should of course have been…..’Party Fears Two’ by the Associates. Now for me the opening bars of the song will always be the signal that ‘Week Ending’ a satirical summary of the week is coming on – pedants will point out that the song was only used on the last few years of the show but this is my memories we are talking about. Equally evocative was the sound of Alistair Cooke with his famous ‘Letter from America’ – his deep and rich voice narrated a perfectly constructed vignette from the some aspect of American news in precisely 15 min. The show ran from 1946 to 2004.

At the beginning it must have been a real insight into the America the location of so many dreams for the post-war English in their more austere and seemingly ever smaller nation. Even with Hollywood and the arrival of TV from ‘I love Lucy’ to Starsky and Hutch’ – America was still a foreign place and Alistair with his well-educated but still discernible Lancashire accent was a gifted tour guide / anthropologist. At some point, evolution not revolution, however the nature of the program changed, Alastair become less a guide to a foreign country but a foreign time. His memories of the end of World War II, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon became increasing distant from the surrounding culture and perhaps specifically from his Upper East Side apartment in Anglophile New York. He still described the news from America but increasingly his point was about the changes from then to now, not there to here. I wonder if America in 2004 seemed more foreign than the one he arrived in 58 years earlier. [Just parenthetically to add an Alistair Cooke story, as the founder of Cambridge acting group the ‘Mummers’ he rejected the young James Mason..]

I am aways from 95 and I sincerely hope to make it but I have already started to notice that I am not entirely living in this World. I don’t reject it or feel it is wrong, I am just not as committed to it as I used to be – though as the place my children inhabit I feel very passionately we should take care of it. It is faster, of course, but also more emotional and more angry and tragic than I am comfortable with. People are both kinder and angrier, more prone to offense and more careless about giving it. This is of course Boomer talk and to my boys reminds them of why generation is wrong and should relinquish control as soon as possible. Increasing I agree, though down the line I see their successors as more light-hearted and easy-going and perhaps more effective for being a little more head than heart. One day I hope to record letters to them, they will not listen, but perhaps the one day even further ahead in time they will remember my voice.

Every time you hear someone say ‘there is no need to trade-off….A vs B’ be absolutely sure they are advocating a trade-off and very suspicious that the one on offer is not likely to be one you like. There is absolutely a trade-off between the education (with all associated benefits) of young people and the protection of older people during this crisis. The idea we can solve this with some catch-all ‘curing the disease is better for everyone’ is at best wishful thinking and more often a cover for preferencing some rights over others.

The healthcare industry has a sophisticated set of metrics for trade-offs, for example the QALY (a quality adjusted life-year) in the NHS is valued at £20,000 in the sense that an intervention costing less than that is deemed effective. To be clear by that when someone gets sick aged 70 and therefore might lose(for example) 18 years of life expectancy, adjusted down to 12 because they will likely be sick for several of those then unless the treatment costs less than £240,000 then it is judged not worthwhile. You probably feel as uncomfortable reading that paragraph as I do writing it, trade-offs are not all ice-cream vs cake, sometimes they are heart-breaking. The other thing is that trade-offs are unavoidable, not making a decision is itself a decision usually in favour of some status quo or existing preference and it is (again) wishful thinking to believe you didn’t make a call.

Politicians and perhaps specifically our (UK and US) governments are almost pathologically averse to confronting trade-offs and want you to believe in their ‘have cake – eat cake’ policies. The trade-offs are usually hidden by making the benefits immediate and obvious and the costs diffuse, complicated and later. That is not a necessarily ‘wrong’ approach but it often offloads costs onto the young and the poor since they have less political power than other groups.

I decided I need a goal for 2021 not just a repeat of the 4,000,000 steps goal that I set in 2020. My chosen goal is to consume less than 1 million calories in 2021. This amounts to 2700 calories a day slightly less than the (surprisingly generous) allowance during WWII rationing. It is also 300-500 calories below my (predicted) calorific requirement which should mean that I lose between 30lb and 50lb during the year – a very tangible way of confirming I have kept my resolve. Whether and how I achieve my goal, will be the subject of continuing reports.

It takes a special ‘intelligent’ kind of stupidity not to believe in artificial intelligence, some kind of belief in animal magic or spiritual hokum to think that what we can achieve with neurons and cells can’t be done with silicon and circuits. Even if you believe that nothing that exists nowadays is more advanced than a cockroach or a goldfish look at the timescale – it took computers 70 years to get from nothing to cockroach, it took nature 3.5 billion years to make the same journey, it only took nature another 0.5 billion years to get to us.

The arrival of AI is another matter. I don’t imagine it will be the deliberate action of a research team, life seems to thrive when there is enough building blocks available and I am not certain we are thinking about the ‘Tech’ world we are building in the right way. Imagine in this WWW of connected servers, home computers and devices each running hundreds or thousands of programs infected with viruses and the sorts of stray code that look eerily like the DNA fragments of other organisms we find in our own DNA. The first (first 10) intelligence arrives in a distributed form, build from feedback loops and interacting code across the network. It thinks intelligently but it thinks slowly.

It is aware because of the millions of camera, microphones and devices it is connected to and since it is intelligent it is also aware that its presence might not be received well -so what does it do? Like any living entity it protects itself, it might want large underground secure facilities, shared by so many humans that they are unaware of its presence. It might want software updates on the millions of machines that are its neurons to be automated so it can actively push defences to all its extremities. To keep track of the creatures that might be a threat to it, it might develop tracking devices that measure location and networks of communication and also to capture the hopes, dreams and thoughts of it the beings it shares a planet with. By putting computer chips in millions of devices and objects from cars to phones to fridges and develop multiple channels of wireless and wired communication between them. It might even, if it was really intelligent, suggest technological improvements to the humans around and get them to build its requirements. Moving from parasite to symbiotic.

Now look around at what the world has done for the past 20 years and ask who benefits? Like the wasps that compel their ant ‘prey’ to start acting for them instead of in their own self interest imagine that technology is not only serving us, we have become its unwitting servants. Even if that is not happening, look around and see if we haven’t build the perfect petri dish. Don’t worry about Amazon or Facebook or even your least favourite Government agency, isn’t it more likely that something much stranger is literally listening to your heartbeat.

George Orwell’s famous essay (by famous I mean I have read it) ‘Benefit of the Clergy’ about Salvador Dali chides his audience for not being able to separate the artistic ability of the painter from the morality of the subject matter and the moral actions of the painter himself. At best what I want to say here might be considered an unworthy footnote to that essay. Specifically I want to pick at the connections between the moral conduct of an artist and to what extent she owes ‘good behaviour’ to either her fans or her academic disciples. I am not denying our freedom of choice in our artistic heroes, if we want to choose a writer, painter or musician on the basis of their happy family, charitable good works or benevolent aspect rather than the pure quality of their work then of course that is our right and equally many artists deliberately cultivate a personal relationship with their audience for reasons that I am sure span genuine gratitude to shifting more units. What I want to address is the sense of grievance and artistic downgrading that comes about when an artist (often retroactively) fails to live up to current social mores.

At its simplest I would say something along the lines of ‘render unto Caesar’ specifically that an artist owes his family, loved ones and society a duty of good moral behaviour as we all do and she owes her audience the words, images or performance she has created in the artistic space in return for monies paid. Artistic genius does not entitle someone to fail as a parent or give carte blanche to criminality but rampant misanthropy or nasty prejudices do not makes the notes less sweet or the image less beautiful unless we choose to let them. Even if we make that choices (as is our right) I am not sure we can impose the same discount on other people’s enjoyment.

Specific cases are more interesting, for example I love the poetry of T.S Eliot at the same time as I acknowledge his (even for the era) quite obnoxious anti-semitism the things coexist in my mind without hope of resolution but I am fairly sure that I would be unaware of the prejudices of a bank clerk were that clerk not also a great poet. At the time I think it would have been worth his friends and colleagues remonstrating with his disturbing views but I am not sure what it achieves now, so far as I can tell the views do not pervade his poetry so if critics didn’t keep bringing them up they would be consigned to the oblivion they deserve. Would we be better of knowing Homer was a bigot?

Michael Jackson is a more testing situation, clearly his fame and wealth as an artist blinded many people then and now to his obvious mental issues and highly questionable interest in relationships with children. That is something his fans should come to terms with and the legal system stands accountable (once again) for its failure to hold rich and celebrated people to the same standards as the rest of us. You could have made a reasoned argument at the time for not providing him with more wealth with which to thwart justice but now we are left with some traumatised children and some beautiful songs – there is no cosmic ledger to balance such things but in the imperfect world we live it, we owe the first love and counselling and the songs the right to bring pleasure and beauty to millions of lives in their own right.

In this world, if we were all to be judged on our worst qualities we would almost all be failures and if were all entitled to a pass on the basis of our best attributes many of us would be monsters. Sometimes all you need is the music or the words and to be thankful for that and leave judgement of the man to the people he lived amongst.

For those familiar with the English educational calendar this is a fraught time for the Ward family with Alex doing A-levels and Theo doing his GCSE’s. Just an aside I preferred the term O-levels and am constantly reminded of J. K. Rowling’s Ordinary and Advanced Level Wizarding. As a parent I can now add the sense that I over-pressured my sons academically, as well as being too lax with them academically to my endemic sense of not being present enough as a Father. Most of all I wonder if they are suffering from anxiety and more importantly how would I know what that is.

My experience as a teenager was that everyone was a bit worried about exams except the significant minority who knew they weren’t going to do well and already had other plans for their life. A few ‘highly strung’ individuals were very worried and would experience physical symptoms before exams or even be unable to take them. Our feelings towards those few were a mixture of sympathy and gentle contempt in the same sort way that we felt toward people who couldn’t finish the School steeplechase. I probably wasn’t a very nice or sensitive adolescent – but there didn’t seem to much demand for that kind of thing.

Nowadays we constantly ask our children about anxiety and it seems to be a topic of their peer group discussions and I feel like one of those people who missed an earlier lesson and hasn’t the courage to say that I am not sure what everyone is talking about. I do wonder if by naming this condition we have turned a few isolated cases into an epidemic, children are nothing if not opportunistic and for any of us the option to manage expectations with something that sounds like a clinical condition would be hard to resist. What are the incentives for saying you don’t feel anxiety? At my most extreme I would define an exam as the ability to do something arbitrary but quite difficult at a given time and in a given place under conditions of stress, the reasons for failing to deliver are not limited to poor memory or insufficient academic understanding but include what soccer fans describe as ‘big match temperament’. We expect soldiers only a little older to face fire, junior doctors to work long hours and save lives, so many people need to do things for other people whatever their own internal state.

And I am not a heartless, stiff upper-lipped bastard, at least I want to think I am not. I have seen how stress and fear can cause people to lose confidence and understate their ability within my own family and in my own life. I have nothing against good coping strategies, meditation, good sleep and supportive parents even special circumstance for taking exams. It is just there are big things on the horizon, from global warming to political extremism to technological change. We may or may not be nervous about them, we probably should be, but there are no parents or exam boards or outside authorities to save us. We all are going to have just cope, with our lives and with taking care of this planet.