“He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”

- Thomas Jefferson, Selected Writings

I came across this quote by Thomas Jefferson and it brought to mind The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World by Lewis Hyde, a book I read over a decade ago now, but which often comes to me when I think about sharing ideas, talent and everything that animates the human spirit.

Hyde studied various lore and culture to receive the wisdom that a gift must be allowed to move on. It helps to think of gifts as a constantly flowing river, whose correct treatment is to allow oneself to become a channel for its current, else it loses its gift properties. "When someone tries to dam up the river, one of two things will happen: either it will stagnate or it will fill the person up until he bursts," so says Hyde.

And so to Jefferson. Sharing your light with others, does not diminish you. If anything, it is good for you.

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Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 is very prescient. It was first published in 1953 and features an unnamed authoritarian city in the future, with modern technology aplenty and where the freedoms of expression and thought are suppressed to the extent of burning all books. In this society, technology has made house fires a thing of the past, but to ensure that firemen are kept in employment, their role is to douse outlawed books and houses with kerosene and burn them at Fahrenheit 451.

This is what the protagonist Guy Montag does for a living, without thinking too much about it, until he has a Damascene conversion by way of 17 year old Clarisse. Clarisse is his neighbour and he meets her late one balmy night on his way home from work. She is portrayed as ethereal and beguiling, in a manner likely to discomfit modern readers (Montag is 30). Clarisse is perhaps the first person who really sees him:

How like a mirror, too, her face. Impossible; for how many people did you know that refracted your own light to you? ...How rarely did other people's faces take of you and throw back to you your own expression, your innermost trembling thought?

What incredible power of identification the girl had; she was like the eager watcher of a marionette show, anticipating each flicker of an eyelid, each gesture of the hand, each flick of a finger, the moment before it began.

The destruction of books is intended to make people placid by ensuring that ideas do not stir the surface of their "peace". They have interactive parlour walls, akin to TVs, to bamboozle them with "families" that talk and talk, all day and night, but little is said of import. This is intended to keep people "happy" and distracted enough that they don't ask the big questions, a fictional detail that presages the numbing effects of social media.

The city's newspapers have long since stopped to exist. The cumulative result of these conditions is a deeply lonely and uninformed populace, where no one has the courage to look the other in the eye and really see them. All Clarisse has to do is be curious and ask a few choice questions, to send Montag on a dangerous path against the censoring, anti-intellectual government, on behalf of which Montag has hitherto been an instrument of oppression. The city hunts university professors and other keepers of books and knowledge as dangerous elements in need of elimination. They live in hiding in fear for their lives.

Women don't feature as intellectual equals, apart from perhaps the 17 year old Clarisse, who serves as a Manic Pixie Dream Girl plot device to awaken the slumbering fireman and boost his ego. Women are depicted as unable to handle complexity and only too happy to escape into the parlour walls.

There is a terrifying robot dog, neither animal nor machine, trained to know every detail about humans and hunt down dissidents, armed with a lethal injection of something called Procaine.

We're living in the time that Ray Bradbury foresaw, where newspapers are in decline, while other mainsream media have lost their hold on societies and we're siloed into our own private feeds, entertained, but without a public square to forge a shared reality. Book censorship is something we still do, and in any event, many of us don't read anyway, because everything is video now.

In the book, Montag asks, "Where do we go from here? Would books help us?" To which Faber, a former English professor and secret preserver of books replies, "Only if the third necessary thing could be given us. Number one, as I said, quality of information. Number two: leisure to digest it. And number three: the right to carry out actions based on what we learn from the interaction of the first two." I see it as a call to action to read more books, make the time to think about them and take informed action.

Fahrenheit 451 was a quick read that was both discomfitting and prophetic. I could almost smell the kerosene. While I was reading it, I listened to a podcast on Joseph Roth whose books were burned by the Nazis and who wrote The Radetzky March, the next book from my friend's reading list. It made Fahrenheit 451 all too real, awful and worth the time, even if they author, to my reading, thinks little of women.

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Tan subsequently founded the the AI Mental Health Project to campaign on these issues.

In the same spirit of looking after the humans who use AI tools, every now and again, Cory Doctorow talks about AI and psychosis as well as some of the vulnerabilties the internet has a tendency to unearth and reinforce. Doctorow's recent post on the subject struck a chord.

The internet, Doctorow argues, is very good at locating and exacerbating vulnerabilities that could have lain dormant for a lifetime, if one was not exposed to the plethora of stimuli the internet presents. The internet is a supercharger of paranoid delusions and other types of poor mental health. AI companies argue that people have always suffered from poor mental health and AI is not to blame. To which Doctorow counters that:

Even if you accept the AI companies' argument that they aren't inducing AI psychosis in their users, but rather, only surfacing latent vulnerabilities that were there all along, that shouldn't be the end of the story. Even if only a small percentage of the people who use your product experience harm as a result, if your product is intended for widespread deployment (as chatbots are), you will end up harming a lot of people unless you take measures to counteract even those rare events.

This is what Tan means when he talks about a duty of care.

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Long after it ended, this conversation lingered like a bad smell, which is perhaps why I bring it up here. Climate change is not like a placebo or a nocebo, it will affect you and your descendants whatever your feelings about it. My friend's comment came as a surprise to me, becuase this person has an appreciation for nature, a quality I enjoy about them. How can they not believe? It's like saying you don't believe the earth is round or that there are planets. Not sure how to deal with such a revelation. I do however, understand it.

Firstly because misinformation on the subject abounds, as established in a report by the International Panel on the Information Environment (IPIE)*:

The findings indicate that powerful actors—including corporations, governments, and political parties—intentionally spread inaccurate or misleading narratives about anthropogenic climate change. These narratives circulate across digital, broadcast, and interpersonal communication channels. The result is a decline in public trust, diminished policy coordination, and a feedback loop between scientific denialism and political inaction.

It is true that the Met Office does advise the Government on the state of the climate. But being annoyed with them for doing this is like hating a bin lorry driver for collecting your rubbish. It's their job, and a necessary one.

How can we educate ourselves when the sources of information are missing or they cannot be relied upon because the means of communication are owned by the super rich? Further, how can we manage the complexity of the matter when we are all of us, as Nicholas Carr puts it "Drawing on whatever information is available to us and filtering it through our own desires and biases, each of us creates a mental “pseudo-environment”—a simplified and necessarily fictionalized picture of reality—and then we fit our thoughts and actions to the mirage’s contours." According to Carr, "Depending on the individual and his or her education and personality, the pseudo-environment can take the form of anything from a “complete hallucination” to a scientific “schematic model,” but it is never a true and full picture of reality."

We're living in a quagmire of mistrust.

* International Panel on the Information Environment [E. Elbeyi, K. Bruhn Jensen, M. Aronczyk, J. Asuka, G. Ceylan, J. Cook, G. Erdelyi, H. Ford, C. Milani, E. Mustafaraj, F. Ogenga, S. Yadin, P. N. Howard, S. Valenzuela (eds.)], “Information Integrity about Climate Science: A Systematic Review,” Zurich, Switzerland: IPIE, 2025. SR2025.1, doi: 10.61452/BTZP3426

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I started thinking about this when I came across the Enron Corpus, which Wikipedia defines as "a database of over 600,000 emails written by 158 employees of the Enron Corporation in the years leading up to the company's collapse in December 2001." The database was generated by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) during its subsequent investigation, from the from Enron email servers.

As Wikipedia goes on to explain, this corpus is important because it is:

valued as one of the few publicly available mass collections of real emails easily available for study; such collections are typically bound by numerous privacy and legal restrictions which render them prohibitively difficult to access, such as non-disclosure agreements and data sanitization.

I find we're biased to presume the permanence and continuity of established companies, as well as some seemingly intractable states of affairs, which lulls one into a false sense that they will endure forever. However, as we know, everything changes. Worse than having to endure the loss of your workplace closing, is realising that your email communications will become the subject of studies, long after the company ceased to exist. This is a prolonged and painful invasion of privacy that is difficult to imagine, and ward against, during a quotidian workday.

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I came across Lippman, in Nicholas Carr's The Myth of the Informed Citizen, an extract from his book Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart. Carr explains, "We see the world in “stereotyped shapes” derived from “our moral codes and our social philosophies and our political agitations” as well as the cultural symbols supplied by art, literature, and entertainment."

Carr says that the real person is, "time-strapped and distracted, biased, susceptible to resentment and sentimentality, bombarded with messages and images, overstretched, wavering between confusion and overconfidence."

Lippmann clarifies:

My sympathies are with him, for I believe that he has been saddled with an impossible task and that he is asked to practice an unattainable ideal. I find it so myself for, although public business is my main interest and I give most of my time to watching it, I cannot find time to do what is expected of me in the theory of democracy; that is, to know what is going on and to have an opinion worth expressing on every question which confronts a self-governing community. And I have not happened to meet anybody, from a President of the United States to a professor of political science, who came anywhere near to embodying the accepted ideal of the sovereign and omnicompetent citizen.

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This has all come at the back of the "tax the rich" campaign and is a big win for Social Democrats. The campaign calls for progressive taxation, investments in child care and essential services and a tax on the most profitable corporations. Sounds reasonable, right? Unless you're ultra-rich, of course.

One of the arguments made against implementing a wealth tax is that the rich will leave. I'm with Monbiot when he says it's "good riddance", because they are opting out of paying their share towards public life and goods. Taxes are the only fiscal tools we have to pay for public services that we all benefit from. They are not punishments. Whilst threats of millionaire exodus tend to be exaggerated, it will be interesting to observe how many do indeed flee, and where they will go. My hope is that other countries around the world follow New York's example. Currently, 125 UN member states support the proposed UN Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation, which aims to tackle global tax avoidance and create a more inclusive system. But they face resistance from, among other countries, UK and US. Such a multi-lateral treaty has the power to not only narrow the number of tax refuges the rich escape to, but it will undoubtedly be a big step towards addressing the stranglehold of inequality that's immiserating lives and fragmenting politics globally.

The New York Governor had previously said she would not be taxing wealth, despite Mayor Mamdani's exhortations to do so. However, the Governor was met with such vocal and consistent campaigning on the issue, that she could no longer ignore an organised majority who want this change. Governor Hochul understands that a failure to heed their calls would eventually lose her political office.

The lessons I draw from this are:

1. Organise or die.
2. Create a simple campaign slogan that anyone can understand.
3. Be relentless: talk to your neighbours, rally, lobby legislators.
4. Have hope that things can change for the better and take action.

The simple fact is, we cannot afford ultra-wealthy tax avoiders, as they do us more harm than good. Progressive taxation is one of the best tools we have to redress those harms and create a fairer society where all can thrive.

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