Cnut Songs #23: The Every (5)

Last one of these, I promise. Or else (much as I'm trying to help promote his book), I'm probably going to get sued by Dave Eggers.

King Cnut could not hold back the tide, and I cannot hold back society's full-throttle descent into dystopia. All I can do is watch helplessly from the sidelines, and nod my head sagely when others hold a mirror up to the madness. Which is why I've been using this space over the past few weeks to quote excerpts from Dave Eggers' novel, The Every. Because everyone should read it and face up to the horror...

In this final extract, Delaney goes to work in the Iris-Tracking department. When she arrives, they give her a demonstration of the tech they’re developing…

“As you sit in front of the monitor,” Eric said, “an infrared light is being directed toward your pupils. This causes reflections in your pupil and your cornea. The vector between the cornea and the pupil is tracked by the infrared camera, and this way we can determine what you’re looking at. This also gives us the ability to track when you get fixated on something, what order you look at things – that kind of hierarchy is so crucial to study – and what things you come back to.”

“So it’s recording what I look at and how long,” Delaney said.

“Exactly!”

“But isn’t this illegal? I mean, didn’t some people sue?”

“They did,” Eric said, “and there are laws in some cities and states that limit their use. But there are millions of systems already in place. It’s been used for years within the Implicit Association Test, the Stroop Test, and of course the gaze contingency paradigms.”

“Using eye-trackers,” he continued, “just to figure out what people are looking at and for how long – that’s only logical. It started with marketing. Advertisers want to know what you look at. This serves the makers of ads, sure, but it serves the audience, too. A bad ad will be ignored, whoever made it will find a new line of work, and you won’t see any more like it.”

“It’s the perfect symbiosis,” Delaney said, and finally she saw Eric smile. “It’s the only meaningful way to determine what someone’s actually seeing, reading and responding to.”

“Well, right,” he said, and Delaney felt he’d finally begun to like her again. “The utility of this tech for advertisers drove its progress in the first place. But then film and TV asked for data, and that was huge. It was kind of hilarious, because with the first test group we did, we discovered that this one very highly paid actress was actually being avoided by most eyes. She would come onscreen and the eyes – seventy-seven per cent of them – would dart away like she was an infection. You can be sure that data affected her future salary negotiations.”

Delaney smiled, then thought she should be more emphatic in her approval of his joke. “Ha!” she said.

“So apply the same idea to any movie or show. Where does the eye really gravitate to?” Explosions, breasts, abs – this was obvious enough. But it gets more subtle. Certain clothing tested high, certain cities, décor, facial expressions, animals, children. If you knew what I knew, you’d know how seriously it’s already affected filmmaking. By any chance have you noticed a pretty dramatic increase in the number of toddlers and medium-sized dogs in contemporary film?”

“I have!” Delaney lied.

Eric nodded. “And fewer heavy people. Fewer romantic scenes between people over 65. Fewer scenes in Baltimore and the Middle East. That’s the easy stuff, to be honest.”

Soon enough, Eye Tracking Technology takes off in a big way…

The global debate about the ethics of eye tracking, which began that afternoon, was vigorous, but anyone hoping to hold back the advent of ETR was proven a fool. The unexamined glee with which it was embraced followed a familiar pattern. First hobbyist explored its limits, producing results both innocuous (which parent does your baby prefer?) and terrifying (which parent does your teenager prefer?). Heedless capitalists leaped in, apps and related products proliferating, enabling anyone with a self-cam to determine where the eyes of any other humans around them were landing. The software and hardware necessary had been built into Every phones for years; it was only a matter of activating it.

Over the next few weeks, it became clear that because half of humanity’s iris scans had already been stored, their owners could be singled out in seconds. If a man ogled a woman at a New Jersey dog park, those eyes could instantly be paired with the offender’s name, and his family, employers, and the public would be duly notified of the transgression. A new wave of suicides ensued, the embarrassment and discredit being too much for certain called-out persons, mostly men. In the first week, one hundred and seven humans in Tokyo took their lives, thirty-one of them by throwing themselves in front of trains, the scene of their eyeshame. Tens of thousands followed elsewhere on earth, and a few hundred, nicknamed Oedipals, chose a middle path – they gouged out their eyes.

Whatever the name for the offenders, eyeshame was the term that stuck to the crime. The Every resisted it, tried to push ocular offence, but eyeshame was more direct and descriptive. It was not strictly speaking a crime, of course; no laws prevented anyone from looking where they shouldn’t. But shame ensued, and shame was deserved, and shame was the internet’s currency and lever for change. As ETR spread without resistance among the vast majority of the species, there were occasionally calls to ban it. But like most innovations in the twenty-first century, the spread was caterwauling, without organisation or caution, and thus unstoppable.

The latest changes to 6Music have me convinced they want me to switch off completely. It's been reported as another nail in the coffin of guitar music, and I can't say I disagree. Apparently The Bug Club are also up in arms about it. Who'll play songs like this on the radio anymore (other than Mickey and the wonderful Natasha)?

Cnut Songs #22: The Every (4)

King Cnut could not hold back the tide, and I cannot hold back society's full-throttle descent into dystopia. All I can do is watch helplessly from the sidelines, and nod my head sagely when others hold a mirror up to the madness. Which is why I've been using this space over the past few weeks to quote excerpts from Dave Eggers' novel, The Every. Because everyone should read it and face up to the horror...

In this extract, the Every introduces a new app which can measure the quality of friendship. Delaney suggested it as a joke, but once it’s been developed, it quickly goes viral…

Delaney did not breathe. It was AuthentiFriend. Everything was the same, but far more developed, and now it was called Friendy.

“Terrible name,” Joan said, “I hate it already.”

“No,” Preeti said. “It’s like a lie detector test. It tells you if someone’s honest, candid. You know dogs can sense cancer? This senses any untruth. Anything hidden, withheld. Is the word guile?”

“It can sense guile? That’s fucking dark,” Joan said.

“What’s the big number in the corner?” Helen asked. In the upper right of the screen, above Urmila’s face, a number – 88 – was pulsing.

“That’s overall quality of friendship,” Preeti said. “You know the stats about friendship. You live longer and healthier if you have quality friendships. That’s why the slogan.” She pointed to the screen’s upper left corner, where the words “Who are you real friends?” were written in a sharp and accusatory font.

“It’s about quality, not quantity,” Preeti said. “We’re always worried about the number of friends we have, when we should be assessing the quality of those friendships.”

“This is sulphurous,” Joan said, and Delaney loved her for it.

“It’s just for fun,” Preeti said.

“That is some diabolical fun,” Joan said.

Her opinion was in the minority. The others were trying to decide on someone they should call – a test subject. Berit had a college friend she thought would be appropriate. Minutes later, a dark-haired woman named Anita appeared on the main screen. She was in Uppsala, Sweden.

“Hi, Anita!” Berit said. She had positioned herself across the room, in a quiet corner. To Anita, Berit would appear to be alone, talking to her on a tablet. But everyone else was watching Anita on the large screen.

“How are you?” Berit asked.

Anita’s answer, “Good!” was deemed untruthful.

“Are you sure?” Berit asked.

“Yes. Why?” Anita asked.

Friendy’s red lights were pulsing – lack of candour, guardedness.

“I’ve always meant to ask you,” Berit said, “when we were in college, you went to the Stockholm archipelago with a bunch of people. Remember?”

“Of course,” Anita said. “Why?”

“My boyfriend at the time went with you,” Berit said. “Remember Per?”

Delaney’s brain was on fire. A moment ago Berit had seemed confident and kind, and now, with this weaselly tool, she’d become a weasel.

“I do,” Anita said uncertainly.

“You always seemed to have a thing for Per, am I right?” Berit asked.

“I wouldn’t say it was a thing,” Anita said. “Berit, why are you bringing this up now? It was eight years ago. I haven’t seen Per since that summer.”

“I just always had a feeling something happened between you two on that trip. And remember I couldn’t go. My brother was dying.”

“Yes, I know. I’ve always been sorry you couldn’t be with us,” Anita said, her voice quavering and eyes growing wet. Friendy’s sensors were going wild. “Nothing happened between us.”

A green light pulsed. This was truthful. The crowd was impressed. Berit pressed on.

“Just tell me,” she said. “You were attracted to him, yes?”

“Oh Berit,” Anita said. “When are you coming home next? Maybe we can talk then. I don’t like this.”

Overall Anita’s truthfulness score was in the low 20s.

“Never mind,” Berit said. “I got the answers I needed.”

And she ended the connection.

“This was a good friend of yours?” Preeti asked.

“Since we were six,” Berit said.

“Berit!” Joan snapped. ”Have you regressed to thirteen years old? You can’t take this seriously. It’s a fucking app that some nerds here developed.”

Berit laughed. “I know. I know it’s silly. I’ll call her again some other time and get a read on things.”

Ro comforted her. “Give her a few more chances. Average them together.” Her eyes were soft and magnanimous, almost saintly. “She deserves that – an aggregate score.”

Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood recorded two albums together, in 1968 and 1972. They are essential listening. Less well known is their third collaboration, from 2004, just three years before Barton Lee's death. For some insane reason, this record was never released in the UK, and was only ever available on import from Australia. Utterly absurd, as it's a fantastic album that never fails to put a huge smile on my face...

Cnut Songs #21: The Every (3)

King Cnut could not hold back the tide, and I cannot hold back society's full-throttle descent into dystopia. All I can do is watch helplessly from the sidelines, and nod my head sagely when others hold a mirror up to the madness. Which is why I've been using this space over the past few weeks to quote excerpts from Dave Eggers' novel, The Every. Because everyone should read it and face up to the horror...

In this extract, Delaney has to organise a Welcome2Me event in which she invites a random selection of her colleagues (“Everyones”) to participate in a “get to know you”-type social event. She chooses to take them to a local beach where a colony of elephant seals have gathered to mate… but from the moment she announces the event, she’s prepared for resistance.

Delaney wrote a three-paragraph description of the day’s plan, including six links to basic and concise information about the seals, their history on the Pacific coast, their mating cycles, Point Reyes in general and Playa 36 specifically. “If you haven’t seen Pt. Reyes, be prepared,” Delaney wrote. “It will be spectacular.” Not that anyone living in Northern California needed to be told to bring layers, but she mentioned this, and she mentioned sunscreen, and comfortable shoes, and a warm hat if one’s ears were prone to chill. She sent a draft to Kiki, who, in a distracted moment, wrote only “Food”. Delaney took this to mean that the Everyones could not be expected to bring their own lunches, so Delaney arranged with a deli around the corner from The Sea Shed to create eighty sandwiches for the day, for vegans and vegetarians, pescatarians and carnivores, at least two options for every attendee, and a bounty of side salads and drinks – all to be brought on the bus in reusable containers.

A group of forty-two Everyones were selected by algorithm. It was to be a cross-campus smorgasbord, a sampling rich in variety of departments and interests. And because there would be photos and possibly group photos, a representative and perhaps augmented display of the company’s diversity was essential. Once the forty-two attendees had been chosen, a message list was created, and Delaney’s now-three-page description of the event – elucidating what would be available to drink and eat, and enumerating all that need be brought – was sent to the forty-two on the Tuesday before the excursion.

“No info here for the lactose-free…” said the first message, and Delaney cursed herself for this easy oversight. “Ignore that event description!” she wrote, “Better one to come!” She went through the entire three pages again, editing an adding two pages more, this time anticipating every allergy and preference. She covered gluten, eggs, nuts, nightshades and cinnamon – recent but fast-spreading intolerances and de-preferences, respectively – and this time, in a stroke of what she considered brilliance, she mentioned the particular deli she’d engaged, Emil’s on Pacheco, in case anyone wanted to pre-order and get the precise sandwich they wished.

“Emil’s? Have you seen this?” This message linked to a photo of Emil, the young proprietor, posing with an Israeli flag, on what appeared to be a Tel Aviv beach. This was followed by seventy-six messages from a fourth of the forty-two Point Reyes attendees, most with links to bombastic articles and messages about the rightness or wrongness of Israel vis a vis Palestine and what any given Everyone would be saying by eating sandwiches made by a man (and his staff) who were so proud of Israel and its misdeeds that he so jingoistically would pose with its flag on a luxurious beach of oppression.

“Is the bus using plant-based fuel?” one attendee asked. It’s a standard bus, so I assume so, Delaney wrote. “Do I need hiking boots?” No, Delaney wrote, we’ll just be standing on sand, or in the parking lot near the beach. “I don’t see a packing list. Usually there’s a packing list for such an outdoor activity.” I provided a packing list, Delaney answered, though you might have missed it because it’s embedded and short. You really only need yourselves and, like I said, layers, and maybe a hat. I’m even bringing sunscreen, so you can take that off the list! “What kind of sunscreen are you bringing, Delaney?” Delaney had not actually bought the sunscreen yet, so she looked online and found an organic brand, Sensible Dawn. This triggered an avalanche. “Wait, now we’re supporting Scientology?” an Everyone wrote, and Delaney soon found that Dawn Unger, the sunscreen’s founder, had been a Scientologist, though she didn’t appear to be one now, and had posted no content anywhere in support of Scientology. “Delaney, seeing elephant seals shouldn’t involve cult-complicity,” one helpful Everyone wrote, in the most measured of the messages. After four hours of screeds and ululations, totalling 413 messages covering the sins and virtues of every company that had or still did provide sunscreen to the world, the group settled on an organic maker based in the Antilles. That the product had travelled a few thousand miles seemed likely to provoke a reaction of some kind, but at the end of Day Two, had not yet done so.

The Welcome2Me event inevitably proves disastrous, and soon after Delaney is invited to participate in two restorative events in which the “survivors of the Playa 36 Debacle” are invited to vent their emotions on the trauma they have endured.

The solutions to the beach, the bus, and the uncomfortable proximity to wildlife were, again, direct and increasingly extreme. “Don’t visit that beach,” was the first, and was followed by, “Close the beach,” then “Don’t exploit animals for our gawking pleasure,” and finally it was agreed that, “Humans should not be permitted near any animals in any context,” and that, “Large groups of humans travelling together in fifteen-ton fuel-burning vehicles are so obviously environmentally offensive and metaphorically obvious that we cannot, ever, be part of the problem again.”

And that’s just the beginning of the fall-out…

Speaking of the world going to hell in a handbasket, it's a sign of the times when Shakin' Stevens turns into a protest singer...

Cnut Songs #20: The Every (2)

I bought this for Louise on Mother's Day. He crushed it with his own feet. 

Someone at work asked, "Is Louise a big fan?" No. That's why it was funny. 

Earlier in the week, Martin blogged about his experiments with ChatGPT, the new AI chatbot that's about to replace human "experts" across the world. We all agreed how scary this was. I commented that it reminded me of Dave Eggers' firm belief that society is moving towards handing over freedom of choice in return for the safety of conformity.

Here's another extract from The Every, a novel which is best described as 1984 meets Catch 22 with a healthy dollop of Gulliver's Travels. Yes, it's satire... but so close to reality that it's hard to work out which bits are true and which bits Eggers has created for comic effect.

In the following extract, Delaney has gone to work for the HereMe department which creates Smart Speakers. Eggers uses this as an excuse to chronicle the secret history of Smart Speakers, which sounds like fiction… until you realise we’ve already lived through much of it.

Smart speakers had an awkward introduction to the world. They arrived in the 2010s to phenomenal sales, with hundreds of millions of households adopting them within the first five years. Before The Every entered the picture, the makers of the devices assured the buyers that the AI assistants were never activated unless their designated name or code word was spoken. This reassured the users that their private everyday conversations were not being heard, that only brief requests were audible, and even then, never stored. But a few months later, it was revealed that the smart speakers were in fact listening all the time, or could listen all the time. In fact, they could be activated by their manufacturers any time at all. For this, the manufacturers apologised; perhaps there had been some confusion, they said. Were we unclear?

The users, though momentarily upset at this foundational and central deception, were assuaged when they were told that under no circumstances were their conversations recorded. It would be, both users and manufacturers agreed, an egregious breach of trust to have a machine that a customer brought into their house – a machine, everyone noted, that was purchased primarily to play music and inform them of the current traffic – actually recording the conversations conducted in these private households. That would be unethical. And so it was assumed that no recording was being done by these home assistants, until one day the manufacturers admitted that they had in fact been recording just about every conversation every user had ever had, from the very beginning.

Again the makers were contrite. When you were asking before about whether we were recording conversations, they said, we didn’t quite understand what you meant. We thought you meant recording and listening to these conversations, and that of course we would never do. We would never. We record the conversations of hundreds of millions of users, yes, but no humans ever listen to any of these conversations. Conversations in the home, between family members, are private, are sacrosanct! they said. We simply record these conversations to improve our software, they said, to optimize our services, to better serve you, the customers, better.

And for a while the users, though feeling wary and burned by the series of revelations, looked askance at their smart speakers, wondering if the tradeoff was actually worth it. On the one hand, their private family conversations were being recorded and stored offsite for unknown future use by a trillion-dollar company with a limitless litany of privacy violations. On the other hand, they could find out the weather without ever looking out the window.

Fine, the users said sternly, fists on hips, you can continue to record everything we say, but – but! – if we ever find out that you manufacturers were having actual humans listen to our conversations, that will be one step over the line.

We would never! the manufacturers said, hurt by the inference, which, they felt, was offensive even to think about, given how open and transparent they had been from the start. Didn’t we reveal, they asked, after we were caught, that our smart speakers were turning themselves off an on at their own behest? And didn’t we admit, after we were caught, that we were listening to and recording anything we wanted at any time, anything that was said in the private homes of millions of users? And didn’t we reveal, after we were caught, that we were recording all the private conversations every user had in the privacy of their own homes?

After all this openness and contrition, they said, it stings to think that customers would wonder aloud if the other shoes might drop. No more shoes, said the manufacturers, would be dropping. We stand before you barefoot and humbled.

When it was revealed that the manufacturers had in fact hired 10,000 humans, whose only purpose was to listen to, transcribe and analyse the private conversations that had been recorded by these smart speakers, the manufacturers were amazed at the outrage, as muted as it was. Yes, they said, we have all along been recording and listening to your conversations, but none of these 10,000 workers know your names, so what possible difference would it make that we have all of your private conversations recorded, and that we could with one or two keystrokes de-anonymize your conversations at any time? And given the fact that every database ever created has been hacked, these recordings could be accessed by anyone at any time who had will enough to get them? What, the manufacturers asked, are you getting so worked up about?

In fact, no one got worked up at all. Lawmakers were mute, regulators invisible, and sales skyrocketed.

Eggers goes on to suggest the logical next steps for Smart Speakers... and they seem frighteningly prophetic. Go read The Every if you want to be really scared...

Miracle Legion came from Connecticut in 1983. They were on Rough Trade for a while, so the NME loved them. This is from their 1992 album Drenched. I'm a sucker for songs with "Ba ba ba ba baaa" choruses.

Cnut Songs #19: The Every (1)

A few years back, I thought The Circle by Dave Eggers was the most frightening book I've ever read. The novel concerns a huge tech company (essentially Google crossed with Facebook) and its desire to control the world. Everything that happens in the novel is one step away from where we are today (actually, much of what Eggers predicted in The Circle has since come to pass), and that's what makes it so scary.

The Every is the sequel. Here, The Circle has swallowed up "The Jungle" (you can guess which company that might be) to become even more omnipotent, metamorphosing into The Every.

A young woman called Delaney goes to work at The Every with the intention of sabotaging the company from within. Her plan is to push The Every into increasing its control over our lives to the point that the public begin to object, rebel and fight back. It's hardly a spoiler to say that this isn't as easy as she thinks. Where The Circle was a novel about how big companies want to control us, The Every is more about how easily and willingly we cede control over our own lives to these big companies. The antagonist here is not a faceless corporation... it's us.

There's so much in this novel that hits home, and touches on the kind of issues that I've been writing about in Cnut Songs (like King Cnut, I want to hold back the tide... but realise I'm powerless to do so), so I've decided to run a few excerpts over the next few weeks. No further commentary is required from me: Eggers is able to express my fears and complaints about our dramatic plunge into dystopia far better than I ever could.

 

In this extract, Delaney goes to work in a department called TellTale. The manager, Alessandro, explains what the department does…

“People pick up a book,” he said, “and stop in the middle. Why? With e-books we can study all of this in aggregate. We can take, for example, two thousand readers of Jane Eyre and see who finished it. We actually did that. Turns out 188 people did finish it. That’s not good, right? People who read it all seem to like it. It’s at—” He tapped one of his screens a few times and got the answer. “It’s a 83 per cent approval, which is high for a dead author. So we dig deeper and see that of the 2000 people who started Jane Eyre, most quitters put it down around page 177. So then we look at what happens on page 177, and we see that people don’t seem to like this character called Grace Poole. They find her scary and depressing. They want more of the romance with Mr. Rochester. Now, if the author were alive, we could tell him—”

“Her,” Delaney corrected.

“Her?” Alessandro said reflexively, then went pale.

Oh no, Delaney thought. She’d seen this happen.

Alessandro stood up. He didn’t know what to do. He allowed the vines of his hair to obscure his face completely, and seemed likely to douse himself with gas and light a match.

“It’s OK,” Delaney said. “You meant Mr. Rochester.”

“I did?”

“I know you did. Like, if Mr. Rochester were alive, we could tell him that his parts of the book were intriguing.”

“Okay. Right.” Alessandro began warming to the idea, believing it his only way out of ruination. “That’s exactly what I meant. Where were we?”

“You were saying you could fix Jane Eyre.”

“Well, we could,” he said, “but because the author is dead, she”— he pressed the word so hard it erased centuries of chauvinism and ignorance, “can’t learn from the data herself.”

“Sucks for her,” Delaney said, and saw Alessandro smile.

“But a living author, or a publisher, can avail themselves of the numbers and act on them,” he said. “And this kind of data has been invaluable to publishers and some of their authors already. Just those data-points, sales versus book-starts versus completions, that’s huge. Completions, of course, convert favourably to sales of the author’s next book. So for publishers, figuring out where and why people are stopping is crucial. Sometimes it’s obvious. Like unlikable characters. We can help fix that. We’ve actually written a pretty simple code for turning an unlikable character into, like, your favourite person.”

“Wow,” Delaney said.

“The main thing is that the main character should behave they way you want them to, and do what you want them to do.”

“That’s just common sense,” said Delaney.

“Right? It kind of makes you worry about a lot of writers – the fact that they didn’t know this. But we’re making inroads with colleges and MFA programs, so now they have the information. We give it to them for free, as a public service.”

Delaney made a grateful, admiring whistle-sound.

Alessandro moves on to discuss screen-writing and the algorithms The Every has developed to “help” screenwriters create more engaging movies (“For example, 82% of the best scripts have the Catalysing Moment on page 11…") These formulas don’t just apply to the creative side of movie making, but also to the critical side…

“Remember when assessments of the quality of a movie were an unruly mess? Before critical aggregation, it was totally random. For a certain movie, you had one critic saying one thing in Los Angeles, and another one in Oslo saying something else, and there was no chance of order or consensus. But when we applied percentages to each review, we could average them together, and it became far more clear. A regular human in a fast-moving society doesn’t have time to read twenty-five, or even three, reviews of a movie before they go see it. But seeing it’s received an aggregated score of 74.61 percent – that’s clarity.”

“And clarity is objectivity,” Delaney said.

He looked at her and grinned. “You belong here.”

“As you know,” he continued,” the aggregates worked so well that they quickly moved from movies into painting, dance, sculpture, poetry. I mean, you should have seen how low sonnets scored! That’s why you don’t see those taught so much any more.”

“Sonnet? What’s a sonnet?” Delaney laughed.

Alessandro’s eyes were wild with mirth and inspiration. “Then we brought numerical specificity to so-called fine art museums. In each case there was some initial pushback, but the undeniable comfort of the numbers, of simply knowing the quality of a work of art by its percentage, was soon embraced by the overwhelming majority of people. Eighty-eight percent, to be exact.”

“That’s the only reason we finally know who the best painter was,” Delaney said. The Every had released their results a few years earlier, the product of 32.1 million respondents. The greatest artist of all time was Norman Rockwell, followed by Dale Chihuly, Frida Khalo, Pablo Picasso and Patrick Nagel.

They shared a smile. “I liked when the Louvre started showing the aggregates,” Delaney said.

“Right,” Alessandro said, “I mean, the Louvre came to us. There were all these places doing bootleg aggregates and they wanted it done right.”

“It was fascinating when The Last Supper was only a sixty-six percent,” Delaney said.

“It had been so overrated for centuries! See, that kind of thing was revelatory. We’re averaging together tens of thousands of ratings, as opposed to taking the received wisdom of a few academics. The aggregates are more democratic and egalitarian. Before the aggregates, it had all been so hierarchical and subjective.”

“Subjectivity is just objectivity waiting for data,” Delaney said.

“Right!” Alessandro said, and she saw him pause, again working out whether any kind of compliment would be acceptable. He decided not to risk it. “I mean, I think creatives are starting to acknowledge that we have a valuable role to play. This high wall that was built between art and data had to be torn down.”

The Klaxon 5 were a short-lived band on the London Pavilion record label in the mid-80s. They only released two singles, and that's a tragedy considering how good this one is... and it's about burning books too, which seems vaguely appropriate.