Personally, Tame wouldn’t be the first person I’d contact re the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

More problematic is what in the sheer withering fuck is the Jewish lobby attacking her? She has a right to air her views.

Pro-Israel activists have organised mass email campaigns targeting critics of Israel, Tame said and she “has had all her speaking engagements cancelled for 2026.”

Tame has been the target of sustained attacks by right-wing politicians and media following her speech at a Sydney protest in February against the visit of Israeli President Isaac Herzog.

She wrote that her “livelihood has been completely destroyed” in the month since the protest, after a “concerted smear campaign against me”.

Three specific email campaigns targeted Tame’s appearances at International Women’s Day events in Sydney and Bendigo, and the No to Violence conference in Hobart.

The pro-Israel activists appear to have scored victories. Adelaide University cancelled the event with the high-profile UN official; Multicultural Affairs Minister Anne Aly cancelled a $670,000 grant for a mostly Afghan Shia Islamic community centre in Melbourne; and Abdulhadi’s visa was denied at the last minute earlier this month.

One of the reasons why One Nation is on the rise is we have these clowns, who we let in to Australia, destroying some’s right to speak freely.

I don’t agree with everything Tame says but I refuse to let a pack of loose deck chairs conduct a deplatforming propaganda war in Australia when Israel is thousands of kilometres away.

Pen Power Australia has sent more than 26,800 letters targeting critics of Israel, including 5,642 letters in February, according to the update.

LIV Golf is financed by the Public Investment Fund, the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia.

It is part of efforts by the Saudi monarchy, which has been criticised for its corruption and human rights abuses, to improve its public image through sports.

It engages in extensive, sophisticated propaganda and PR campaigns, frequently referred to as “sportswashing” and “image laundering”.

Jamal Ahmad Hamza Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist, dissident, author, columnist and editor, was assassinated at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on 2 October 2018 by agents of the Saudi government at the behest of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Human rights defenders and others exercising their rights to freedom of expression and association are subject to arbitrary arrest and detention. Unfair trials lead to lengthy prison terms.

In short, people just disappear.

Migrant domestic workers are subjected to forced labour and exploitation.

Saudi Arabia continues to carry out executions for a wide range of crimes, following grossly unfair trials

Women continue to face discrimination in law and practice.

South Australia is the poorest state in Australia but it’s embrace of Saudi money is breathtaking.

LIV’s UK arm — responsible for the golf tour’s operations outside the US — lost $US461.3 million ($A702 million) in 2024.

It’s total losses over three years amount to $US1.1 billion and LIV is being blitzed by the PGA in the all-important American TV ratings.

The kingdom’s trillion-dollar Public Investment Fund (PIF), which bankrolls LIV as a propaganda exercise, is embarking on a “massive spending freeze”.

But in Adelaide, talk of geopolitics and sovereign wealth funds will be drowned out by the sound of DJs and crowd noise when the LIV festivities tee off in Grange.

Inevitably, LIV’s fourth Adelaide iteration will be accompanied by a blizzard of press releases about high attendance numbers, hotel occupancy and “economic impact” — numbers that are harder to track down in cities where LIV is less popular.

The Malinauskas Labor government has invested plenty of capital — both political and financial — into the Saudi bank-rolled event, including $45 million to upgrade the North Adelaide golf course.

Premier Peter Malinauskas told a tourism conference this week that LIV Golf has “had a bit of a pile on from basically everyone across the political spectrum”.

The ‘pile on’ is from people who don’t believe the SA government should take blood money.

Computers don’t actually do anything. They don’t write, or play.

Which doesn’t mean we can’t play with computers, or use them to invent, or make, or problem-solve. The new AI is unexpectedly reshaping ways of working and making, in the arts and sciences, in industry, and in warfare. We need to come to terms with the transformative promise and dangers of this new tech. But it ought to be possible to do so without succumbing to bogus claims about machine minds.

The story of technology – from prehistory to now – has always been that of the ways we are entrained by the tools and systems that we ourselves have made. To every tool there is a corresponding habit, that is, an automatised way of acting and being. From the humble pencil to the printing press to the internet, our human agency is enacted in part by the creation of social and technological landscapes that in turn transform what we can do, and so seem, or threaten, to govern and control us.

Yet it is one thing to appreciate the ways we make and remake ourselves through the cultural transformation of our worlds via tool use and technology, and another to mystify dumb matter put to work by us. If there is intelligence in the vicinity of pencils, shoes, cigarette lighters, maps or calculators, it is the intelligence of their users and inventors. Digital is no different.

There is a tendency of some scientists to take for granted what can only be described as a wildly simplistic picture of human and animal cognitive life. They rely unchecked on one-sided, indeed, milquetoast conceptions of human activity, skill and cognitive accomplishment.

The surreptitious substitution (to use a phrase of Edmund Husserl’s) of this thin gruel version of the mind at work – a substitution that I hope to convince you traces back to Alan Turning and the very origins of AI – is the decisive move in the conjuring trick.

What scientists seem to have forgotten is that the human animal is a creature of disturbance. Or as the mid-20th-century philosopher of biology Hans Jonas wrote: ‘Irritability is the germ, and as it were the atom, of having a world…’ With us there is always, so to speak, a pebble in the shoe.

And this is what moves us, turns us, orients us to reorient ourselves, to do things differently, so that we might carry on. It is irritation and disorientation that is the source of our concern In the absence of disturbance, there is nothing: no language, no games, no goals, no tasks, no world, no care and so, yes, no consciousness.

Can machines think?  Turing dismissed this as ‘too meaningless to deserve discussion’. Instead of trying to make a machine that can think, he was content to design one that might count as a reasonable substitute for a thinker. Everywhere in Turing’s work, the focus is on imitation, replacement and substitution.

Consider his contribution to mathematics. A Turing machine is a formal model of the informal idea of computation: ie, the idea that some problems can be solved ‘mechanically’ by following a recipe or algorithm. (Think long division.) Turing proposed that we replace the familiar notion with his more precise analogue. Whether a given function is Turing computable is a mathematical question, one that Turing supplied the formal means to answer rigorously.

But whether Turing-computability serves to capture the essence of computation as we understand this intuitively, and whether therefore it’s a good idea to make the replacement, these are not questions that mathematics can decide. Indeed, presumably because they are themselves ‘too meaningless to deserve discussion,’ Turing left them to the philosophers.

In the same anti-philosophical spirit, Turing proposed that we replace the meaningless question Can machines think? with the empirically decidable question Can machines pass what has come to be known as the Turing test. To understand this proposal, we need to look at the test, which Turing called the Imitation Game.

The game is to be played by three players: one man, one woman, and one person whose gender doesn’t matter. Each has a distinct task. The player of unspecified gender, the interrogator, has the job of figuring out which of the other two is a man, and which a woman. The woman’s task is to serve as the interrogator’s ally; the man’s is to cause the interrogator to make the wrong identification.

The point is to explore whether substituting a machine for a player has any effect on the rate of success.

This might make for fun adult entertainment, but Turing feared it would be too easy. Even today, when gender-experiment is commonplace, it wouldn’t be that hard, in most circumstances, to sort people by gender on the basis of superficial appearance. So Turing proposed that we isolate the interrogator in a room, limiting their access to others to the posing of questions. And he added: ‘In order that tones of voice may not help the interrogator the answers should be written, or better still, typewritten. The ideal arrangement is to have a teleprinter communicating between the two rooms.’

What does the Imitation Game teach us about machine intelligence? Here is what Turing says:

We now ask the question, ‘What will happen when a machine takes the part of [the man] in this game?’ Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman? These questions replace our original, ‘Can machines think?’

The interrogator’s goal is not to out the computer; it’s to out the human players as having this or that gender. But Turing goal, and the game’s point, is to explore whether substituting a machine for one of the players has any effect on the interrogator’s rate of success. It is this last question, whether or not there is an effect on outcomes, that is proposed, by Turing, as proxy for the ‘meaningless’ question of whether machines can think.

Instead of arguing about what thinking is, Turing envisions a scenario in which machines might be able to enter into and participate in meaningful human exchange. Would their ability to do this establish that they can think, or feel, that they have minds as we have minds? These are precisely the wrong questions to ask, according to Turing. What he does say is that machines will get better at the game, and he went so far as to venture a prediction: that by end of the century – he was writing in 1950 – ‘general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.’

Despite Turing’s apparent hostility to philosophy, it is possible to read him as capturing a critical philosophical insight. Why should we expect that evidence would be able to secure the minds of machines for us, when it doesn’t perform that function in our ordinary human dealings? None of us has ever found out or proved that the people around us in our lives actually think or feel. We just take it for granted. And it is this observation that motivates his conception of his own task: not that of proving that machines can think; but rather that of integrating them into our lives so that the question, in effect, goes away, or answers itself.

It turns out, however, that not all of Turing’s replacements and substitutions are quite so straightforward as they seem. Some of them are downright misleading.

Consider, first, Turing’s matter-of-fact suggestion that we replace talking by the use of typed messages. He suggests that this is to make the game challenging. But the substitution of text for speech has an entirely different effect: to lend a modicum of plausibility to the otherwise absurd suggestion that machines might participate at all. To appreciate this, recall that a Turing machine is what in mathematics is called a formal system. In a formal system, there is a finite alphabet, and a finite set of rules for combining elements of the alphabet into more complex expressions. What makes the system formal is that the vocabulary needs to be specified in terms of physical properties alone, and rules need to be framed only in terms of these physical, that is to say, formal properties. This is the crux: unless you can formally specify the inputs and the outputs – the vocabulary – you can’t define a Turing machine or a Turing-computable function.

And, crucially, it isn’t possible formally to specify the inputs and the outputs of ordinary human language. Speech is breathy, hot movement that always unfolds with others, in context, and against the background of needs, feelings, desires, projects, goals and constraints. Speech is active, felt and improvisational. It has more in common with dancing than text-messaging. We are so much at home, nowadays, under the regime of the keyboard that we don’t even notice the ways text conceals the bodily reality of language.

The gamification of life is one of Turing’s most secure, and most troubling, legacies.

Although speech is not formally specifiable, text. So text can serve as a computationally tractable proxy for real human exchange. By filtering all communication between the players through the keyboard, in the name of making the game harder, Turing actually – and really this is a sleight of hand – sweeps what the philosopher Ned Block has called the problem of inputs and outputs under the rug.

But the substitution of text-message for speech is not the only sleight of hand at work in Turing’s argument. The other is introduced even more surreptitiously. This is the tacit substitution of games for meaningful human exchange. Indeed, the gamification of life is one of Turing’s most secure, and most troubling, legacies.

The problem is that Turing takes for granted a partial and distorted understanding of what games are. From the computational perspective, games are – indeed, to be formally tractable, they must be crystalline structures of intelligibility, virtual worlds, where rules constrain what you can do, and where unproblematic values (points, goals, the score), and settled criteria of success and failure (winning and losing), are clearly specified.

But clarity, regimentation and transparency give us only one aspect of what a game is. Somehow Turing and his successors tend to forget that games are also contests; they are proving grounds, and it is we who are tested and we whose limitations are exposed, or whose powers as well as frailties are put on display on the kickball field, or the four square court. A child who plays competitive chess might suffer from anxiety so extreme they are nauseated. This visceral expression is no accidental epiphenomenon, an external of no essential value to the game. No, games without vomit – or at least that live possibility – would not be recognisable as human games at all.

All this is to say that true games are much more than they seem to be when we view them, as Turing did, through the lens of the regime of the keyboard. (Which is not to deny that we can, and do, usefully model aspects of the game computationally.)

Here’s the critical upshot: human beings are not merely doers (eg, games players) whose actions, at least when successful, conform to rules or norms. We are doers whose activity is always (at least potentially) the site of conflict. Second-order acts of reflection and criticism belong to the first-order performance itself. These are entangled, and with the consequence that you can never factor out, from the pure exercise of the activity itself, all the ways in which the activity challenges, retards, impedes and confounds. To play piano, for example – that other keyboard technology – is to fight with the machine, to battle against it.

Let me explain: the piano is the construction and elaboration of a particular musical culture and its values. It installs a conception of what is musically legible, intelligible, permitted and possible. A contraption made of approximately 12,000 pieces of wood, steel, felt and wire, the piano is a quasi-digital system, in which tones are the work of keystrokes, and in which intervals, scales and harmonic possibilities are controlled by the machine’s design and manufacture.

The piano was invented, to be sure, but not by you or me. We encounter it. It pre-exists us and solicits our submission. To learn to play is to be altered, made to adapt one’s posture, hands, fingers, legs and feet to the piano’s mechanical requirements. Under the regime of the piano keyboard, it is demanded that we ourselves become player pianos, that is to say, extensions of the machine itself.

But we can’t. And we won’t. To learn to play, to take on the machine, for us, is to struggle. It is hard to master the instrument’s demands.

To master the piano is not just to conform to the machine’s demands. It is to push back, to say no

And this fact – the difficulty we encounter in the face of the keyboard’s insistence – is productive. We make art out of it. It stops us being player pianos, but it is exactly what is required if we are to become piano players.

For it is the player’s fraught relation to the machine, and to the history and tradition that the machine imposes, that supplies the raw material of musical invention. Music and play happen in that entanglement. To master the piano, as only a person can, is not just to conform to the machine’s demands. It is, rather, to push back, to say no, to rage against the machine. And so, for example, we slap and bang and shout out. In this way, the piano becomes not merely a vehicle of habit and control – a mechanism – but rather an opportunity for action and expression.

And, as with the piano, so with the whole of human cultural life. We live in the entanglement between government and resistance. We fight back.

Consider language. We don’t just talk, as it were, following the rules blindly. Talking is an issue for us, and the rules, such as they are, are up for grabs and in dispute. We always, inevitably, and from the beginning, are made to cope with how hard talking is, how liable we are to misunderstand each other, although most of the time this is undertaken matter-of-factly and without undue stress. To talk, almost inevitably, is to question word choice, to demand reformulation, repetition and repair.

 In this way, talking contains within it, from the start, and as one of its basic modes, the activities of criticism and reflection about talking which end up changing the way we talk. We don’t just act, as it were, in the flow. Flow eludes us and, in its place, we know striving, argument and negotiation. And so we change language in using language; and that’s what a language is, a place of capture and release, engagement and criticism, a process. We can never factor out mere doing, skilfulness, habit – the sort of things machines are used effectively to simulate – from the ways these doings, engagements and skills are made new, transformed, through our very acts of doing them. These are entangled. This is a crucial lesson about the very shape of human cognition.

If we keep language, the piano, and games in view, and if we don’t lose sight of what I am calling entanglement – the ways in which carrying on is entangled with everything required to deal with just how hard it is to carry on! – then it becomes clear that the AI discussion tends unthinkingly to presuppose a one-sided, peaches-and-cream simplification of human skilfulness and cognitive life. As if speaking were the straightforward application of rules, or playing the piano was just a matter of doing what the manual instructs. But to imagine language users who were not also struggling with the problems of talk would be to imagine something that is, at most, the shell or semblance of human life with language. It would, in fact, be to imagine the language of machines (such as LLMs).

The telling fact: computers are used to play our games; they are engineered to make moves in the spaces opened up by our concerns. They don’t have concerns of their own, and they make no new games. They invent no new language.

The British philosopher R G Collingwood that the painter doesn’t invent painting, and the musician doesn’t invent the musical culture in which they find themselves. And for Collingwood this served to show that no person is fully autonomous, a God-like fount of creativity; we are always to some degree recyclers and samplers and, at our best, participants in something larger than ourselves.

But this should not be taken to show that we become what we are (painters, musicians, speakers) by doing what, for example, LLMs do – ie, merely by getting trained up on large data sets. Humans aren’t trained up. We have experience. We learn. And for us, learning a language, for example, isn’t learning to generate ‘the next token’. It’s learning to work, play, eat, love, flirt, dance, fight, pray, manipulate, negotiate, pretend, invent and think. And crucially, we don’t merely incorporate what we learn and carry on; we always resist. Our values are always problematic. We are not merely word-generators. We are makers of meaning.

We can’t help doing this; no computer can do this.

Michael Bradley of Marque Lawyers, representing Abdel-Fattah, said that “the moral indefensibility of the Adelaide Festival board’s actions has been amply evidenced by the reaction it’s provoked. It also trampled on Randa’s human rights, and the board will have to answer for that.”

His legal letter specifies board members should “retain all documents in their possession, including emails, texts and messages on disappearing messaging apps” as these may be required for the purposes of litigation.

Yesterday the Chair of the Adelaide Festival Boards, Tracey Whiting, resigned as did Daniela Ritorto, Donny Walford and Nicholas Linke OAM, leaving only three board members and a government observer. The rump does not provide a quorum to make decisions.

“I have decided to resign as chair of the Adelaide Festival Board, effective immediately.” Whiting wrote in a post on LinkedIn.

“Recent decisions were bound by certain undertakings, and my resignation enables the Adelaide Festival, as an organisation, to refresh its leadership and its approach to these circumstances.”

It is unclear at this time what those ‘certain undertakings’ were, but hard copy evidence has been produced that Ms Whiting in the 2024 Adelaide Writers’ Festival, defended the rights of writers to speak.

Louise Adler, the Director of Adelaide Writers’ Week, has also resigned.

It is understood Ms Adler was not consulted about the Board’s decision.

The knock-on effects have spread as according to InDaily, Day two of the festival’s contemporary music program, has now been abandoned, with every artist programmed having pulled out.

Premier Peter Malinauskas yesterday again backed the Board’s decision to remove Abdel-Fattah.

The Board contacted the Premier before making its statement to ‘deplatform’ Abdel-Fattah last week and he supported its decision.

Premier Malinauskas rose up through the ranks of the SDA, which represents the last bastion of ultra-conservative and pro-Catholic thinking in Australia.

The SA Arts Minister Andrea Michaels has taken a short course in invisibility.

Abdel-Fattah was scheduled to talk about her new novel Discipline, set in Sydney during Ramadan.

More than 100 international and domestic writers such as Zadie Smith, Michelle de Kretser, Peter Greste, Yanis Varoufakis, Evelyn Araluen, Amy McQuire, Clare Wright, Chelsea Watego, Bernadette Brennan and Amy Remeikis, have already pulled the plug on speaking. There will be more.

In a statement The Adelaide Festival Board wrote, “We have been shocked and saddened by the tragic events at Bondi. We have been further saddened by the national grief and the significant heightening of both community tensions and community debate.”

“… given her (Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah’s) past statements we have formed the view that it would not be culturally sensitive to continue to program her at this unprecedented time so soon after Bondi.”

What statements? Where were they printed? What did they say? No one knows. Plus they cancelled her for fear of what she might say – but hasn’t said yet.

The Board said its role was to promote social cohesion but it has created a political nightmare.

The Adelaide Festival Board was chaired by marketing executive Tracey Whiting, journalist Daniela Ritorto, Adelaide Airport managing director Brenton Cox and others – but no artists.

In November 2024, Arts Hub analysed the boards of Australia’s highest profile public performing arts companies – the 37 National Performing Arts Framework Organisations and Australia’s 12 major state and contemporary art museums.

Less than one in 10 have senior management experience in the arts, and less than one in 20 have senior management experience in the relevant art form.

In 2023, the Director of Adelaide Writers’ Week, Louise Adler told ABC Radio Adelaide the writers’ festival needed to protect the principle of inviting writers to participate “because we believe their work as writers is important and interesting”.

Last April, Adler told Radio Nationals Arts the influence of artists on arts boards has dropped over the last two decades. People from the commercial sector had joined those boards and their focus is on risk management.

As organisations rely more on external funding, it’s only “natural” that boards would become more “cautious”, she said, “and it’s counterproductive and it’s been devastating”.

Don Dunstan modernised public life. He provided the Festival Centre Trust, the Film Corporation, Carclew and others. Dunstan propelled Adelaide to national prominence as the place to be in the arts scene. By comparison, Malinauskas has done nothing.

Abdel-Fattah was one of the 50 participants who withdrew from the Bendigo Writers Festival over allegations of censorship by the organisers. Talk about history repeating.

Writing festivals must be a platform for the sharing of powerful stories: urgent, necessary and sometimes difficult. Such conversations have never been more timely. They are no place for the spineless.

As Richard Flanagan wrote, “Once upon a time writers’ festivals celebrated them, and with them the values of intellectual freedom and freedom of debate. Writing that mattered wasn’t seen as being about being reassured, comforted, deceived and cosseted in our own opinions.”

On the monument at the Pioneer Women’s Memorial Garden in Adelaide you’ll find the words, “The hours vanish yet they are recorded.”

Let it be recorded this Writers’ Week that the right to free speech vanished.

“We’re living through the greatest information revolution in human history, yet we’re daily drowning in a deluge of online misinformation and disinformation. It’s fuelling a dunderheaded doubt in vaccination, the reality of climate change, the value of democracy and truth itself.

While it may not rate up there with global warming and the decline of the West, mediocre literacy standards and falls in the quality of our reading habits have many experts worried.

“This is a ticking time bomb: if we don’t begin to turn this around now, we’re going to have significant social and economic effects in 10 to 20 years’ time,” warns Anna Burkey, head of Australia Reads, a collaboration of book industry bodies established five years ago to combat reading decline.

Although few Australians are totally illiterate, a staggering 44 per cent of adults (about 7.3 million) have low literacy, where the reading standard ranges from primary school-level up to early high school, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

People with low literacy may still be able to read menus, street signs and medicine labels, as well as get their driver’s licence, but they may struggle with longer paragraphs in a news story. Others may be able to get through the same news stories but find it difficult to tell you what they’ve just read.

Only about 15 per cent of the population read at level 4 to 5 (the highest). Not surprisingly, writing competence has also been in freefall: just-released NAPLAN analysis shows the writing skills of Aussie kids have sunk to an all-time low, according to the Australian Education Research Organisation. Analysis of 10 years of NAPLAN data has revealed that many year 9 students are writing at the standard of a primary-schooler.

There’s a decline in recreational reading across all age brackets: more than one in four adult Australians haven’t read or listened to a book in the past year, according to data collected by Australia Reads. This is of special concern because of the example it sets for kids. Twenty-nine per cent of secondary school students no longer read for pleasure, according to a 2023 study.

Australia Reads’ research has shown that when it comes to boosting intellectual progress in youngsters, a parent who regularly reads to their child has four times more positive impact than if the adult had a university degree. Indeed, observes Burkey, “Reading early as a child is a key predictor of success as an adult, and both teachers and parents play a role in this.”

Step into a typical Australian classroom of 24 students, and you’ll find seven or eight who struggle with reading, says Jordana Hunter, education program director at the Grattan Institute and co-author of a report, The Reading Guarantee, released last year. “Reading is a foundational skill,” she says. “If you can’t read, you can’t keep up with the curriculum. Children who are taught to read well in the early years of school are best placed to make the crucial transition from learning to read to reading to learn.”

It’s cold comfort to hear the US is faring worse than us, with 54 per cent of adults getting by on a literacy level below that of a sixth-grader (an 11- to 12-year-old), while 20 per cent rank below a fifth-grader (a 10- to 11 year-old), according to the National Literacy Institute. The fall in adult literacy skills in the US – now at their lowest levels in recent decades – is coinciding with some bad policies by the new Trump administration, which is taking a chainsaw to the federal Department of Education. The department provides nearly 14 per cent of funding for public schools and provides loans to 50 million school students and 13 million post-secondary students.

Much still stands in the way of achieving a unified, proven approach to teaching reading, reflects Hunter. “A faddishness has crept into teaching that’s not based on evidence-based teaching practices.” And here’s the thing: because education is a state and territory responsibility, no national guidelines exist on how reading and comprehension should be taught. “We don’t have good data on what teachers are actually teaching in the classroom, and that is a problem because it makes it harder to know which schools need more help,” says Hunter. “We need a national strategy for reading.”

We all should spare a thought for our teachers: as if they don’t have enough stiff challenges already, they now have artificial intelligence (AI) tools like ChatGPT to contend with. For starters, there’s the increasing difficulty of distinguishing an original essay from one generated by ChatGPT. (For now there are telltale signs, such as phrase repetition or inappropriate information, but the technology is advancing fast.)

Teachers could face the warped scenario of providing feedback to AI-generated essays – and, if they suspect an essay has been produced by AI, being unable to prove it. And it’s not just cheating students: in May, two newspapers in the US published an AI-generated summer reading list – the only problem was, the books didn’t exist.

Even more troubling is a preliminary study by MIT’s Media Lab, released last month, which indicated that students who used ChatGPT for essay writing displayed poorer memory retention and lazier brain engagement than their peers, prompting headlines like, “Is ChatGPT making us dumb?”

Reading and writing can be hard work. In a recent, widely discussed story in The Atlantic magazine, “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books”, journalist Rose Horowitch wrote that many students across the US are arriving at college struggling to read books from cover to cover. That’s in part because they weren’t required to read whole texts in high school – only extracts, summaries and news articles.

“Faced with this predicament, many college professors feel they have no choice but to assign less reading,” Horowitch writes.

“Many colleagues have reduced the number of texts students are expected to read.”

There’s nothing to suggest things are any better in Australia. A comprehensive survey of the reading habits of Australian teens by Deakin University, conducted between March 2022 and June 2023, found that 29 per cent of secondary school students do not read in their spare time.

Dr Lucas Thompson, a senior lecturer in English and Writing at the University of Sydney, says he has noticed a decline both in reading and in the quality of essay-writing skills among his English students since he began teaching 13 years ago.

“In general, students are a little less critically engaged with the texts, perhaps because they haven’t read them deeply or put in the time to generate unique perspectives, rather than second-hand opinions.”

What has to be factored in, adds Thompson, is just how overloaded students are today, sometimes having one or two part-time jobs to support themselves, which leaves less time for required reading.

It’s a “small form of social pressure”, he smiles. “I make it clear that by not doing the reading, a student is not only letting themselves down, but also their class.” This simple strategy has increased reading rates in his undergraduate classes. Thompson has also deliberately set fewer lengthy novels and more short ones on his courses, including autofiction: a literary genre combining autobiography with fiction, now popular among Generation Z readers (Irish author and screenwriter Sally Rooney and Vietnamese-American Ocean Vuong are student favourites).

Thompson’s students tell him they relate more to contemporary characters than those populating the pages of Dickens, Austen and Eliot.

“Many of my colleagues have reduced the number of texts students are expected to read and chosen shorter texts,” observes Thompson, who looks every inch the literary academic with his spectacles, tousled hair and wispy beard.

If you’re over 40, you belong to the last generation to remember what life was like before Google, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat and X came along to turbocharge misinformation, fuel our insecurities, body-shame teenagers, stoke social division, upend reading habits, empower political extremism and erode democracy in ways that were unimaginable only 15 years ago. If you grew up in the 1970s, 1980s or 1990s, you’ll recall a time before people were continually hunched over their phones, fixated on the endless merry-go-round of hyper-personalised, algorithm-driven content that has proved so seductive – and such a perfect vehicle for skimming, rather than close reading.

“Social media works in two- or three-second grabs – next thing, next, next, next – so what’s this doing to our brain, our concentration span?” asks Breanna Wright, a behavioural scientist with BehaviourWorks at Monash University. Thirty-seven per cent of those surveyed by Australia Reads told researchers they find it difficult to find the time to read.

The latest in a mountain of studies indicating that young people are the biggest casualties of social media comes from the United Nations, and is based on surveys in the UK, US, Ireland, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. It found a troubling drop in youth happiness due to cyberbullying, body-shaming and the unrealistic standards set by influencers.

David Blanchflower, an economics professor at Dartmouth College in the US, who organised the study, told The Guardian in March that “the young have become isolated … they’re not going out as much; playing with their friends, interacting with others, or having as much sex.” And no doubt, along with all this, doing less real reading. Young people today, Blanchflower warned darkly, are at risk of becoming “the lost generation”.

You know we’re in choppy, uncharted waters when social-media tech giants not only display a callous disregard for their young users but try to bully and coerce democratically elected governments. After tech executives from Meta, the owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, appeared before a parliamentary inquiry in Canberra in June last year and airily dismissed a huge stack of research indicating how social media harms the young, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese declared the time had come for the company to “fess up”. “Meta are showing how out of touch and arrogant they are,” he thundered.

In the years since the meteoric rise of the smartphone (the first iPhone was released in 2007), a slew of studies has reported increased rates of depression, anxiety and sleeplessness, particularly among the young. The findings were reinforced by a robust Australian study released in October 2023, which found the most deleterious effects were among those with “high-severe” smartphone use.

Last December, in a bid to contain some of the collateral damage from social media, the Australian government implemented a minimum age of 16 for users of platforms such as Snapchat, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram and X. The law is the first of its kind in the world. “It has become the No. 1 issue that parents are talking about,” Albanese said at the time.

The Australia Reads survey found that women (75 per cent) are more likely to read for pleasure than men (68 per cent). Among teenagers, a 2021 survey showed that males were more likely to read news online than females. But broadly, it’s women who are propping up book sales in Australia.

Jane Novak, one of Australia’s most respected book publishing agents, with literary giants like Helen Garner and Gerald Murnane on her books, is in a wistful mood, recalling the golden years of publishing in the 1990s when she was starting out, when there was a book store in every shopping centre, when book advances and sales were plump, and writers could make a living from their income. “We didn’t know how good we had it then – or that it wouldn’t last,” she reflects.

“The band of successful books being published is getting narrower every year. There are the monster bestsellers, then a big gap between them and everything else. There are wonderful books that are selling 1000 copies or less, and these tend to be high-quality literary fiction,” the 53-year-old sighs.

“How many of you want to become a writer?” novelist, writer and academic Debra Adelaide asked of her creative writing class. Virtually all the students shoved their hands in the air enthusiastically. But when she asked them whether they’d read the assigned text for discussion that day, only a few hands popped up in the class of 20 or so. “Who do you imagine is going to read your books,” she asked in mild exasperation, “if you’re not prepared to read books yourself?”

That incident back in the early 2000s wasn’t a one-off, as she recalls an earlier one while teaching an undergraduate English literature class at the University of Sydney in the 1980s. “The majority of students would regularly come to tutorials having not read the texts,” she says. “It was demoralising. When I asked them, ‘Why aren’t you reading the texts?’ they’d reply ‘Oh, we don’t really like reading.’ And many were English majors studying to become English teachers!”

Back when I was a journalism student and mobile phones were the size of a house brick, I attended the press conference of a technology symposium in Sydney. The big wigs of all the tech powerhouses were showcasing future wizardry, including smaller phones that could take photos, download music, and help people in pubs appear less lost while waiting for a date to return from the loo.

Somewhat courageously, given the setting, a fellow student raised her hand and asked: “What you’re describing seems unnecessary. What about giving us something we actually need?”

To which one CEO replied: “Um, we decide what you need.”

Thirty years later, what seemed radical then is run of the mill now. So too, it will be with artificial intelligence, which many of us still see as a choice but which will soon be choosing for us. As a matter of fact, it already is.

Is that what we need? Rather than ask a tech CEO, let’s ask a dear colleague of mine who last week was simply doing his job as a graphic designer (something AI is reportedly coming for) by supplying an illustration for a story about an alleged child murderer whose name had been read out under privilege in parliament. Shortly after publication, Google’s new artificial incompetence mode was serving up a summary naming my colleague as the alleged murderer. Its data miners had swept the photo credit and the victim’s name and had put two and two together to make 11.3175 recurring.

Lucky for my colleague, we have a direct line to Google and we got the high-tech equivalent of Liquid Paper over the error. But can you imagine if and when rogue tech incorrectly labels Joe or Josephine Blow a murderer or a rapist or a tax evader or a Wordle cheat or anything he or she is not and they can’t get anything done about it? Sadly, I don’t think you’ll have to imagine that for long.

My colleague is recovering OK. Thanks for asking. Google didn’t. You can’t stop “progress” and there are squillions to be made by nerdy execs who skipped the history class on humanism and who are rolling out this robot we’ll be told we need until we can’t live without.

What struck me most about the 2020 docudrama The Social Dilemma wasn’t the detrimental effects of social media – we knew that before we watched it – but the people who created, marketed and monetised it saying it’s banned in their house and they won’t let their kids near it.

Bit late, folks!

My wife is a university lecturer. As jobs disappear around her, AI is making her and her remaining colleagues’ lives a misery as they try to decipher what their students know and what cheat-tech can help them pretend they know.

My daughter, who is doing the HSC, is trying to pick a career that Open AI’s CEO Sam Altman doesn’t think bots can do better than she can. She’s stressed because she’s creative and wants to do the kind of work Altman claims isn’t “real work”. I’ve suggested she become an internet lawyer. Something tells me we’re gonna need lots of them.

I pray digital journalism is “real work” long enough for me to pay off the mega-mortgage that keeps me awake at night. It’s a rewarding career where we fact check before we publish and if we do incorrectly say an innocent graphic designer is a child-murderer, we are held to account.

My son wants to be a pilot, which I used to be before I realised I enjoyed writing about flying more than actually doing it. I worry for him, not because of the existing perceived dangers but because, to save money, some airlines are considering just one pilot in the cockpit.

Never mind that many modern aviation accidents are due to technology factoring the pilot out of the equation, such as the 2009 Air France disaster when 228 people were in their final moments while the pilots frantically tried to figure out what the hell their plane was doing. Man and machine were at odds with each other. They often are.

Rather than single-pilot cockpits, the challenge for airline manufacturers should be to re-embrace the human it sought to render redundant. And in many ways, that should be society’s challenge as well.

If you’ve read this far, you’re possibly thinking I’m a Luddite who should go plough a field with a horse. Nah, I’m just fed up with hearing everyone bemoan the scourge of social media on mental health and the jobs that will be lost to machines while thinking there’s nothing we can do about it.

Why do we put up with a path to a detrimental future being paved by people who won’t need to walk it? Why don’t we harness AI to fix old problems rather than create new ones? On my way home from work every night, I sit forlornly at red traffic lights on a main road while no cars go through the green light from the minor road. There’s something AI could surely set its sights on.

The only person I’ve heard speak highly of AI is my son, who used ChatGPT to generate a persuasive text trying to convince his dad to buy him an ebike. Unashamedly, he even sent me the prompts he used – his only input.

I didn’t need AI to help me craft my response, which was until he can persuade me himself, he ain’t getting one.

Bye Bye Pride

Grant McLennan

(The Go-Betweens)

A white moon appears
Like a hole in the sky,
The mangroves go quiet.
In la Brisa de la Palma
A teenage Rasputin
Takes the sting from a gin

When a woman learns to walk
She’s not dependent anymore
A line front her letter May twenty-four
And out on the bay
The current is strong
A boat can go lost.

But I didn’t know someone
Could be so lonesome
Didn’t know a heart
Could be tied up
And held for ransom.

Until you take your shoes
And go outside, stride over stride.
Walk to that tide because
The door is open wide.

Turned the fan off
And went for a walk
By the lights down on Shield Street.

The birds in the trees
Open their wings
He goes home again.

He dreams resistance,
They talk commitment,
Things change over long distance.

Took the shirt off his back
The eyes from his head
And left him for dead.

But I didn’t know someone
Could be so lonesome
Didn’t know a heart
Could be tied up
And held for ransom.

Until you take your shoes
And go outside, stride over stride,
Walk to that tide because
The door is open wide.

Little lies, they’ll take your pride.
Until you take your shoes
And go outside, stride over stride,
Walk to that tide because
The door is open wide.

Stride over stride
Walk to that tide.
Bye bye pride.

Because the door is open wide.
The door is always open wide.
The door is always open wide.

Ode to Tropical Skiing

John Forbes

After breakfast in the Philippines

I take a bath

                                         & it’s a total fucking gas

Enjoy the ice cream, Gerald,

                           the sun sparkling

                           on its white frostiness

is the closest you’ll ever get to St Moritz

racing up the tiny snow fields on the side of a pill

                           as beside you the young girl’s

mirrored goggles reflect all Switzerland

like a chocolate box at the speed of sound

                           & like the ashtray he/she you & it

                           are a total fucking gas

Asleep in

the milk bars

daylight saving annuls our tuxedo

                                       & happy to breathe again

like a revived dance craze

we gulp fresh air, our speeches to the telephone

                            so various,

                                                    so beautiful—

                                      who loves at close range

                                      like they do thru a tube?

& when the sun polishes the wires gold then invisible

                                      a million cheer-up telegrams

                                      collapse in the snow

while Mandy & I have a glass of Coca-Cola

                                      as we fly past the moon &

after the piano goes to sleep in our arms

                                                 we wake up

                                                 & it’s a total fucking gas

                                                 Was that a baby

or a shirt factory?

no one can tell in this weather, for tho

the tropics are slowly drifting apart & a

                                       vicious sludge blurs

                             the green banks of the river, a chalet

drifts thru the novella where I compare thee

                             to a surfboard lost in Peru,

                             flotsam like a crate of strong liquor

                                                            that addles our skis

                                                            & when they bump

                                                                    it’s a total fucking gas

A Step Away from Them

Frank O’Hara

It’s my lunch hour, so I go
for a walk among the hum-colored
cabs. First, down the sidewalk
where laborers feed their dirty
glistening torsos sandwiches
and Coca-Cola, with yellow helmets
on. They protect them from falling
bricks, I guess. Then onto the
avenue where skirts are flipping
above heels and blow up over
grates. The sun is hot, but the
cabs stir up the air. I look
at bargains in wristwatches. There
are cats playing in sawdust.

                                          On

to Times Square, where the sign
blows smoke over my head, and higher
the waterfall pours lightly. A
Negro stands in a doorway with a
toothpick, languorously agitating.
A blonde chorus girl clicks: he
smiles and rubs his chin. Everything
suddenly honks: it is 12:40 of
a Thursday.

                Neon in daylight is a
great pleasure, as Edwin Denby would
write, as are light bulbs in daylight.
I stop for a cheeseburger at JULIET’S
CORNER. Giulietta Masina, wife of
Federico Fellini, è bell’ attrice. 
And chocolate malted. A lady in
foxes on such a day puts her poodle
in a cab.

             There are several Puerto
Ricans on the avenue today, which
makes it beautiful and warm. First
Bunny died, then John Latouche,
then Jackson Pollock. But is the
earth as full as life was full, of them?

And one has eaten and one walks,
past the magazines with nudes
and the posters for BULLFIGHT and
the Manhattan Storage Warehouse,
which they’ll soon tear down. I
used to think they had the Armory
Show there.

                A glass of papaya juice
and back to work. My heart is in my
pocket, it is Poems by Pierre Reverdy.

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.

It’s the same when love comes to an end

or the marriage fails and people say

they knew it was a mistake, that everybody

said it would never work. That she was

old enough to know better. But anything

worth doing is worth doing badly.

Like being there by that summer ocean

on the other side of the island while

love was fading out of her, the stars

burning so extravagantly those nights that

anyone could tell you they would never last.

Every morning she was asleep in my bed

like a visitation, the gentleness in her

like antelope standing in the dawn mist.

Each afternoon I watched her coming back

through the hot stony field after swimming

the sea light behind her and the huge sky

on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say

the marriage failed? Like the people who

came back from Provence (when it was Provence)

and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.

I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,

but just coming to the end of his triumph.

Jack Gilbert

The Milltown Union Bar

You could love here, not the lovely goat

in plexiglass nor the elk shot

in the middle of a joke, but honest drunks,

crossed swords above the bar, three men hung

in the bad painting, others riding off

on the phony green horizon. The owner,

fresh from orphan wars, loves too

but bad as you. He keeps improving things

but can’t cut the bodies down.

You need never leave. Money or a story

brings you booze. The elk is grinning

and the goat says go so tenderly

you hear him through the glass. If you weep

deer heads weep. Sing and the orphanage

announces plans for your release. A train

goes by and ditches jump. You were nothing

going in and now you kiss your hand.

When mills shut down, when the worst drunk

says finally I’m stone, three men still hang

painted badly from a leafless tree, you

one of them, brains tied behind your back

swinging for your sin. Or you swing

with goats and elk. Doors of orphanages

finally swing out and here you open in.

Richard Hugo

The Waking

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.

I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?

I hear my being dance from ear to ear.

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?

God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,

And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?

The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do

To you and me; so take the lively air,

And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.

What falls away is always. And is near.

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow

I learn by going where I have to go.

Theodore Roethke

The Song of Mehitabel

this is the song of mehitabel

of mehitabel the alley cat

as i wrote you before boss

mehitabel is a believer

in the Pythagorean

theory of the transmigration

of the soul and she claims

that formerly her spirit

was incarnated in the body

of cleopatra

that was a long time ago

and one must not be

surprised if mehitabel

has forgotten some of her

more regal manners

i have had my ups and downs

but wotthehell wotthehell

yesterday sceptres and crowns

fried oysters and velvet gowns

and today i herd with bums

but wotthehell wotthehell

i wake the world from sleep

as i caper and sing and leap

when i sing my wild free tune

wotthehell wotthehell

under the blear eyed moon

i am pelted with cast off shoon

but wotthehell wotthehell

do you think that i would change

my present freedom to range

for a castle or moated grange

wotthehell wotthehell

cage me and i d go frantic

my life is so romantic

capricious and corybantic

and i m toujours gai toujours gai

i know that i am bound

for a journey down the sound

in the midst of a refuse mound

but wotthehell wotthehell

oh i should worry and fret

death and i will coquette

there s a dance in the old dame yet

toujours gai toujours gai

i once was an innocent kit

wotthehell wotthehell

with a ribbon my neck to fit

and bells tied onto it

o wotthehell wotthehell

but a maltese cat came by

with a come hither look in his eye

and a song that soared to the sky

and wotthehell wotthehell

and i followed adown the street

the pad of his rhythmical feet

o permit me again to repeat

wotthehell wotthehell

my youth i shall never forget

but there s nothing i really regret

wotthehell wotthehell

there s a dance in the old dame yet

toujours gai toujours gai

the things that i had not ought to

i do because i ve gotto

wotthehell wotthehell

and i end with my favorite motto

toujours gai toujours gai

boss sometimes i think

that our friend mehitabel

is a trifle too gay

Don Marquis

Marquis’s best-known creation was archy, a fictional cockroach who first appeared in Marquis’ newspaper column on March 29, 1916. Archy had been a free verse poet in a previous life, and supposedly left poems on Marquis’s typewriter by jumping on the keys. He typed only lower-case letters, without punctuation, because he could not operate the shift key.

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things—

   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

       For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

   Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;

       And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

       With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

                                     Praise Him.

Gerald Manley Hopkins

Drummer Hodge

They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest

     Uncoffined—just as found:

His landmark is a kopje-crest

     That breaks the veldt around;

And foreign constellations west

     Each night above his mound.

Young Hodge the Drummer never knew—

     Fresh from his Wessex home—

The meaning of the broad Karoo,

     The Bush, the dusty loam,

And why uprose to nightly view

     Strange stars amid the gloam.

Yet portion of that unknown plain

     Will Hodge for ever be;

His homely Northern breast and brain

     Grow up a Southern tree,

And strange-eyed constellations reign

     His stars eternally.

Thomas Hardy

Waiting for the Barbarians

What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?

The barbarians are due here today.

Why isn’t anything going on in the senate?
Why are the senators sitting there without legislating?

Because the barbarians are coming today.
What’s the point of senators making laws now?
Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.

Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting enthroned at the city’s main gate
in state, wearing the crown?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and the emperor’s waiting to receive their leader.

He’s even got a scroll to give him,
loaded with titles, with imposing names.

Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?

Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?

Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and things like that dazzle the barbarians.

Why don’t our distinguished orators turn up as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking.

Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion?
(How serious people’s faces have become.)

Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home lost in thought?

Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven’t come.
And some of our men just in from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.

Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?

Those people were a kind of solution.

CP Cavafy

For the Union Dead

“Relinquunt Omnia Servare Rem Publicam.”

The old South Boston Aquarium stands
in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded.
The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.
The airy tanks are dry.

Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass;
my hand tingled
to burst the bubbles
drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish.

My hand draws back. I often sigh still
for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom
of the fish and reptile.  One morning last March,
I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized

fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage,
yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting
as they cropped up tons of mush and grass
to gouge their underworld garage.

Parking spaces luxuriate like civic
sandpiles in the heart of Boston.
A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders
braces the tingling Statehouse,

shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw
and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
on St. Gaudens’ shaking Civil War relief,
propped by a plank splint against the garage’s earthquake.

Two months after marching through Boston,
half the regiment was dead;
at the dedication,
William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.

Their monument sticks like a fishbone
in the city’s throat.
Its Colonel is as lean
as a compass-needle.

He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,
a greyhound’s gentle tautness;
he seems to wince at pleasure,
and suffocate for privacy.

He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man’s lovely,
peculiar power to choose life and die–
when he leads his black soldiers to death,
he cannot bend his back.

On a thousand small town New England greens,
the old white churches hold their air
of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags
quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic.

The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier
grow slimmer and younger each year–
wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets
and muse through their sideburns…

Shaw’s father wanted no monument
except the ditch,
where his son’s body was thrown
and lost with his “niggers.”

The ditch is nearer.
There are no statues for the last war here;
on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph
shows Hiroshima boiling

over a Mosler Safe, the “Rock of Ages”
that survived the blast.  Space is nearer.
When I crouch to my television set,
the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons

Colonel Shaw
is riding on his bubble,
he waits
for the blessèd break.

The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,
giant finned cars nose forward like fish;
a savage servility
slides by on grease.

Robert Lowell