I *deleted* my ChatGPT Pro account

Posted on October 16, 2026 by Robert Basil

The platform became harder and harder for me to abide: as a professional writer, editor, and professor, and as a lover of the arts and other human crafts.

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Who is asking for this?

Posted on October 12, 2026 by Robert Basil

In her recent essay “Wishing It So,” on AI and social existence, writer Megyn O’Glieblyn describes an episode at a recent conference presentation:

Some rogue audience member raised his hand and asked, in a calm and reasonable voice, ‘Who the fuck wants this technology?’ The speaker, an expert on existential risk, had been enumerating all the things that could go wrong in the attempt to build artificial general intelligence. In response to the question, he explained that we were in the midst of what was known as a ‘perverse incentive structure.’ Humanity as a whole might not benefit from superintelligence, but no single nation or corporation benefited from not building it – a problem that created a positive feedback loop. It was a rather elaborate way of expressing what I took to be a simpler answer: the market wants it.

[Simone] Weil believed the complexity of modern life had birthed … a global system of economic and political incentives that moved us like puppets and whose motives were not always our own. ‘It came to be realized,’ she wrote, ‘that society itself is a force of nature, as blind as the others, as dangerous for man if does not succeed in mastering it,’ and which prevents us ‘from stamping the world with the seal of our will.’ In one of her most striking metaphors, she writes, ‘On the whole, our present situation more or less resembles that of a party of absolutely ignorant travelers who find themselves in a motor-car launched at full speed and driverless across a broken country.’ 

I remember, still with some alarm, listening to an engineering professor from the University of British Columbia highlight the main themes from a climate-change conference that had just finished. After listing these themes, he noted that he wasn’t really worried that climate change would destroy the world and human civilization.

“The technological imperative will get us first.” It’s irresistible.

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Mayhew Moves

Posted on October 12, 2026 by Robert Basil

No Contest favourite Jonathan Mayhew has moved over to Substack. (You can still find all of this writing dynamo’s first 24 years of blogging on his Stupid Motivational Tricks platform, but it has been discontinued otherwise.) Mayhew has been a true blogger, keeping lively and brilliant what has become an old-fashioned format: very frequent posting at all levels of discourse and across multiple disciplines and obsessions.

From this weekend:

I’ve blogged since 2002. The archives of my blogs is an entire intellectual history of myself, complete with abandoned projects and tangential avenues that led to unexpected places, even if I’ve forgotten about most of them now.

It is great practice for writing prose with a regular, daily rhythm. I developed a blogging style: to the point, well-written at times, always vigorous and usually peppered with a dash of humor. Yes, I am a big believer in revision, when I am writing a scholarly article. For a blog post, revision will minimal.

You can get better at writing simply by writing, as well as by the time-worn method of writing a “shitty first draft” and then revising the bejeezus out it. That way works too, but I prefer to improve by starting over again and writing something better.

It’s funny when people claim that writing never gets easier. Why would one human skill, out of all skills that can be developed, be exempt from the general rule: that practicing something in a systematic way makes it easier to do? A chef who has made thousands of omelets is not going to say that making an omelet never gets easier.

So why is writing difficult? The process of learning to write is hard, but writing once one has some proficiency is not. So, I think that the problem is emotional: writing is difficult because of anxiety or trepidation. Will people like what I am doing? Will I find a publisher? Am I a good writer? Will I get tenure? All the voices in the head yelling at you, when you start to write each day, generate doubts. Free from those doubts, you can simply see writing as a practice as enjoyable as improvising at the piano or cooking a new recipe.

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Pretend You Actually Like Each Other!

Posted on September 15, 2026 by Robert Basil

I always thought the reason people’s faces seemed stern and frozen in 19th-century photographs was the daguerrotype process, which required extended exposures – too long to keep a decent smile going. This common explanation is wrong, alas. In his article Why We Smile in Photos: The Surprising Recent History of Saying ‘Cheese,’ Alex Cooke of Fstoppers writes:

Photography copied its conventions from an older art. Portrait photographers did not invent a new visual language; they inherited three centuries of painted portraiture, and in that tradition the open smile was close to taboo. Walk any gallery of old masters and count the grins. You will run out of paintings before you run out of fingers. As the writer Nicholas Jeeves lays out in an essay on portraiture, the broad smile carried bad associations for centuries. It belonged to “the poor, the lewd, the drunk, the innocent, and the entertainment.” Respectable people kept their mouths composed. …

The thing that actually changed the face in the frame was not a chemistry breakthrough or a dental one. It was marketing, and one company did more of it than anyone else.

George Eastman put photography in ordinary hands. His first Kodak camera arrived in 1888 with the slogan “you press the button, we do the rest,” and in 1900 the Brownie followed at one dollar, cheap enough to hand to a child. Kodak shipped more than 150,000 of them in the first year. That price collapse moved the camera out of the studio and into the backyard, the beach, and the family vacation. The photograph stopped being a solemn appointment and became a casual thing you did on a good day.

What you did on a good day, Kodak spent decades telling you, was be happy.

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‘Rubio Uses Terrorism Law To Ban Secure Email Service’

Posted on August 28, 2026 by Robert Basil

This doesn’t sound so great: “The State Department doesn’t accuse Autistici/Inventati of doing anything more than providing ‘untraceable’ email accounts. But that’s enough to outlaw it as a terrorist organization.”

Instead, the State Department announcement states that the group “builds and operates the digital infrastructure for violent Antifa cells and other far-left militants across the world,” allowing these “militants” to “disseminate target information, tactical manuals and techniques, and communiqués about recent attacks” while staying “anonymous, untraceable, and beyond the reach of the law.”

In other words, Secretary of State Marco Rubio is attacking the group for running an online platform that the U.S. government can’t spy on and for facilitating communications the U.S. government doesn’t like. But precisely because Autistici/Inventati is based in another country—Italy—the U.S. government has basically unchecked power to impose counterterrorism sanctions on it.

Reason Magazine (“Free Minds and Free Markets”) is often on top of these things. Although I have left behind most of my libertarian views and impulses over the years, my esteem for this publication has remained very high. It’s honest, subtle, wide-reaching, and always well-written.

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Street Photography

Posted on August 13, 2026 by Robert Basil

This year’s “Pure Street Photography Awards” introduced me to some dazzling, indeed inspiring photographs. The one below, by Daniel Kashi of France, won the Grand Prize. It’s a mesmerizing triumph.

“Chantilly June 2025,” © Daniel Kashi

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Euphemism Effort

Posted on August 5, 2026 by Robert Basil

From The Tyee:

The United Conservative Party government must be encountering stiffer opposition than it expected to its plan to make Alberta North America’s dumping ground for the artificial intelligence data centres that citizens most everywhere else are organizing to fight. 

Consider the slick propaganda section that’s appeared on the Government of Alberta’s official website, which bizarrely tries to pass off water- and energy-gobbling hyperscale data centres as “digital refineries.”

The site’s first goal is obviously to get voters on side with the massive Sturgeon County data centre planned by Meta Platforms Inc. a few kilometres northeast of Edmonton. …

“What is a data centre, really?” it asks. … “When people say ‘the cloud,’ they mean a data centre. There is no cloud. There is just somebody else’s computer, in a big building, doing work on your behalf. AI data centres are the next generation of the same infrastructure. Instead of mostly storing information, they are built to think.”

No points for trying.

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We don’t have the luxury to ignore it

Posted on July 25, 2026 by Robert Basil

Not long ago we removed our AI newsfeed. That topic’s ubiquity made it not just unnecessary but de trop, as the French like to say. Nonetheless, our colonization by artificial-intelligence platforms won’t stop any time soon if ever.

Starting three years ago today, No Contest has been linking to the excellent work of Ethan Mollick, whose “One Useful Thing” blog is both comprehensive and lucid. His most recent post is “An Opinionated Guide to Which AI to Use to Do Stuff.”

Mollick recommends giving AI platforms the keys to your computer, so to speak.

The most powerful way to use AI is to give it access to your computer. …

Why would you want an AI on your computer? Well, first it lets the AI do more complicated projects since it can work with many files over a longer period of time. This is incredibly useful, since you can ask for very ambitious outcomes. I shared a lot of things I built with Fable in Claude Code, but we can get more practical. I have a new book coming out in October (which you can pre-order). It has been through rounds of professional editing and proofreading, but I gave GPT-5.6 Sol in Codex the full PDF anyway and asked it to check it all over. The AI worked for 30 minutes, chased down 195 references, and gave me pages of notes that would have taken a team of researchers many hours.

One sign of how far AIs have come is that every one of the AI’s notes was accurate and there were no hallucinated page numbers, no invented text, no errors I could spot at all. In fact, I had the opposite issue: the AI was incredibly nitpicky.

It is always time to rethink things. The hard part is determining when to change them.

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“public interventions”

Posted on July 18, 2026 by Robert Basil

From Alex Cooke at Fstoppers:

Walk past a certain bus stop near Meta’s London headquarters and you see a glossy campaign shot: Kylie Jenner in a pair of the company’s smart glasses. Step to the side and the poster becomes a black-and-white X-ray of her face under the words “We’re always watching.”

The swap is deliberate. As Hyperallergic reported, the piece is a lenticular spoof ad installed by Everyone Hates Elon, a UK activist group that stages public interventions aimed at tech billionaires. The poster is printed so the image you see changes with your viewing angle, which is how one advertisement holds two opposite meanings at once. From straight on, it sells the glasses. From the side, it warns you about them.

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A Street Photography community

Posted on July 7, 2026 by Robert Basil

The day I started these new feeds, I came upon a video in Fstoppers by Peter Forsgård, a photographer from Helsinki, Finland, discussing what street photographers could learn from the musician Brian Eno. I watched it twice, the second time taking lots of notes: “embrace constraints to foster creativity,” “build systems instead of waiting for inspiration,” “use randomness as a collaborator” – these and other points seemed to wake me up, to take my Canon camera outside once again.

Another big Eno/Forsgård theme: “collaboration”: through conversation, critique, editing, and sequencing.

In that vein, I saw that earlier this year Forsgård had started an online community, “Skool – From Snapshots to Stories,” and joined up. This has been a very happy and edifying experience for me so far. Fellow community members come from all over the world (only a few, it seems, from Canada, out of more than 300).

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