Outfoxed

I used to live in South London, the leafy mirror world of North London that is populated mostly by foxes. Once, I lived in a flat with a garden. The flat was more expensive than I had intended, but I was desperate and it was nice. The garden was definitely not part of my plan. I do not enjoy gardening and gradually it became overgrown. That would be a problem for me when I moved out, but in the meantime it became a haven for the local foxes. I would watch them from the kitchen window in the mornings. There were at least three, and they were a cheerful sight before getting the train to work. 

The foxes in the area were used to people. Sometimes, walking home along a narrow pavement, with nowhere else to go between a wall on one side and line of parked cars on the other, a fox would nonchalantly squeeze past my legs. Occasionally the brush of its tail would tickle my hand. It was thrilling, like being admitted to a secret society. The foxes were my friends.  

After the garden flat, I moved to a flat on the top floor of a terrace house that could only be accessed via a fire escape at the rear. The legality of this wasn't something I questioned. The flat was cheap and I needed it in a hurry. It was so draughty that whenever it was windy outside my curtains would flap around as though possessed by psychic ducks. Still, I reminded myself, a bargain is a bargain. 

One day I returned from work to find a fox waiting by the door. It must have climbed up the two flights of stairs to get there, and now that I was blocking its escape it looked panicked. I moved to one side and indicated the space I'd created with a nod of my head. The fox looked confused. I backed off a little, but not too much because it was my flat after all and I would very much like to be able to get inside it, even if the inside experienced somewhat similar weather to the outside. To my shock, the fox sprang onto the sloping roof that jutted out past the fire escape. Its claws clattered on roof tiles as it skidded in a barely controlled arc. I was afraid that it was fly over the edge, but at the last second it leapt onto the fire escape below me. Then, with a frantic scramble down the remaining steps, it was away into the night. 

The drama over, I went to unlock the door and noticed something on the doorstep. I squatted down to take a closer look and a familiar smell caught in my nostrils. It appeared that the fox had climbed up two flights of a fire escape to do a poo on my doorstep. Perhaps the foxes were no longer my friends. 

Not long after that incident, I was walking back from St Johns Station when I noticed a fox ahead of me. It was dark, and the fox was at first oblivious of my presence. However something must have caught its attention because it paused and looked over its shoulder at me. Then it carried on along the pavement. Eventually it crossed the road and turned down a side street. On a whim, I decided to follow it. It led me down another street before glancing at me again and ducking under a hedge. Feeling foolish. I continued walking even though I was now heading away from home. When I reached the spot where the fox had dashed under the hedge, I paused and bent over to peer through the branches. 

I let out a small gasp when I saw two golden eyes looking at me. 

"Hello there foxy," I said, delighted with this bonus encounter. 

"Excuse me?" the fox replied. My heart skipped a beat. My mind wrestled with the magical possibility of a talking fox. The fox had a woman's voice. It sounded vaguely Welsh. Like sunlight rushing into an unshuttered room, my momentary confusion cleared. Obviously the fox wasn't speaking to me. There must be someone on the other side of the hedge. 

"Sorry," I said, trying a little too desperately to sound sensible. "I was talking to a fox in your hedge." 

"Bloody foxes," said the unseen woman. "If there's one in my hedge, you shoo it out." 

I looked into the fox's eyes. I felt there was a conspiratorial bond between us. It tried to silently impart that I was on its side and there would be no shooing from my side of the hedge. 

"Sorry to bother you," I said to the woman. "It's gone now anyway." 

"Bloody menaces they are," she grumbled. "Shrieking and wailing all night, and you know what?" 

"What?" I asked. 

"The other day one of them shat on my doorstep." 

Perhaps you deserved it, I thought, uncharitably. That would of course have meant that I had also deserved it, but logic had no place in the fox conspiracy. I winked at the fox, straightened up and walked back down the road towards home. 

That night I was woken up by a piercing wail that sounded like babies being murdered. Maybe the woman behind the hedge had a point. Or maybe all magic has a price, and this is the price I pay for the magical moment when a fox spoke to me.

Where Does Writing Come From?

There's a very famous Douglas Adams quote wherein he says that "writing is easy. You only need to stare at a blank piece of paper until your forehead bleeds." By strange coincidence, many years before he wrote that, the American sports writer Red Smith offered a similar opinion: "Writing is easy. You just open a vein and bleed." 

Arguments of originality aside, where do the words come from and how do we get them onto the page? Appearing on BBC Radio 4's Museum of Curiosity, JK Rowling described her experience of a lake and shed. Ideas come from the lake and are worked on in the shed. The lake refills itself through some unknown process, and too much time in the shed can lead to the writing being overdone. There is an ideal balance between lake and shed that has to be maintained. I like this analogy, although I don't personally see a lake or a shed. I'm not that much of a visual thinker. 

There is something like a lake though. A reservoir that fills from an unseen source. While I'm finishing one book, vague notions of another begin floating to the surface. And to go back to Mr Adams and Mr Smith, the process of writing isn't necessarily tortuous. Often the difficulty is in starting. One of the reasons I write this blog is that it forces me site down and get something on the page, even if I don't really know what it will be when I'm finished. It's exercising a muscle, keeping my hand in to use the vernacular. Getting used to the idea of starting so that when I've got a more daunting project ahead of me there isn't quite some much inertia to overcome. 

Some people have no such inertia, and find writing as easy as turning on a tap. If anything I'm even more curious about where their inspiration comes from. Are they just lucky enough to have a stronger internal wellspring, or is there something they do that the rest of us do now? Maybe it's a simple as eating the right breakfast cereal and avoiding social media. 

I will sometimes deliberately go to another place to write. The main advantage of this is that there are fewer distractions than in my flat. Libraries are good. Bars and cafés can be too, provided you moderate your inspiration at the former. Very occasionally, for this is England, I will site in one of London's many parks on a sunny day. In fact I wrote large chunks of my forthcoming book The Gang of Four Ride Again during lunchbreaks in Grays Inn Fields. 

I have written on trains, I have written on planes, I have even written on a boat, but that was just a very silly poem about hipster penguins. I've never written on a car or a bus. Well, I did once write CLEAN ME with my finger on the back of a filthy transit van, but that's more of a rite of passage than a literary effort. Cars lurch all over the place, making my already spidery handwriting completely illegible. Buses aren't so bad, but I feel like I'm missing out if I'm not watching the world outside. Things collect on top of bus shelters, did you know that? There used to be one on the Old Kent Road with an old VHS tape of the horror classic Hellraiser on its roof. It can't all be writing. Sometimes to have to be looking too. 

My pet theory is that our imaginations come from the bubbling swamp of our subconsciousness. Everything we've experienced is in there somewhere, even if it is no longer a perfect memory, or even our own memory. This is why writing can be surprising, because none of us truly know what's down there and what will float on up next. I have attempted to aid it when writing books, having installed a mood board next to my desk. I find this terribly embarrassing. I bought a load of adhesive-backed cork tiles and stuck them to the wall so I can pin picture of things I want the mood of in my book, along with other photos which are more for reference. It is currently covered in snapshots of the 1990s with no other theme connecting them. It's just as well I don't get many visitors. Does it help? I think the process of putting it together helps me think about the level of detail I want to commit to. Other than that it has become something of a ritual. 

Do you have any rituals that help with the mysteries of the creative process, or is it just enough to switch your laptop on?

Doomscrolling the Day Away

I have spent most of the past week trying to shake off a particularly tenacious cold. I'm usually quick to shake them off, but this feels like some mutant covid hangover. Very achy. The days start well but by the evening it has rallied again. It's left me feeling drained, and it is in this feeble state that I've been watching the internet reach a hysterical crescendo on the subject of AI. It is no longer coming for your job, it is here and ready to take it. I am reminded of the "THEY'RE HERE!" trailer for Poltergeist, only this time it isn't ghosts that are going to fuck your life up, it's tech billionaires. Is this a form of a mass psychosis? It certainly feels like something big is coming. As a software engineer, this year more than ever it seems like the coming wave is something that I have to figure out how to surf or get wiped out. It's existentially terrifying. 

If you are also feeling unglued from your previously imagined future, allow me to recommend some places to escape from the coming white-collar apocalypse. 

A CAVE

This is the classic retreat from modernity, as demonstrated by hermits through the ages. With no electricity there's no danger of accidentally doomscrolling the day away on X. I would recommend one somewhere in the warmer parts of Europe as the cave winters can be brutal. Since you'll be avoiding all human contact the language barrier won't be an issue. You can even put a sheet across the cave's entrance to give yourself an extra level of abstraction from the real world.

A BUNKER

AKA a new build cave. This comes with all the exorbitant costs of new build accommodation. On the other hand, bunkers are hot now, albeit very billionaire-coded. They are most likely outside your budget unless you can acquire an old missile silo in the middle of nowhere. A great hack for acquiring a bunker is to get employed as private security for a billionaire. When they inevitably screw the global pooch and retreat to the perceived safety of their own bunker, it will only be a short time before their head of security kills the now powerless idiot who hired them. Stay on his good side and you're golden.

A DESERT ISLAND

Another classic isolation destination. People usually end up there by mistake, which suggests they are easy to chance upon. There is a real danger that the island will sink as increasingly massive server farms accelerate global warming and melt glacial ice. The weather's bound to be good though. Pack a hat.

ANTARCTICA

The aforementioned global warming should make the place a bit more hospitable. The penguins can be quite noisy and the smell of their guano takes some getting used to, so take both ear and nose plugs. On the positive side, I am 100% confident that no penguin will ever be mad enough to add AI to MS Notepad.

THE MOON / MARS / SPACE IN GENERAL

The ultimate isolation but difficult to achieve. Also there is a non-zero chance that you find yourself stuck with Elon Musk.

#booktok

I've spent a lot of time on #BookTok lately. For the uninitiated, #BookTok is the subslice of TikTok that caters to everything to do with writing. It was, at first, illuminating. It is now frequently unhinged. It is everything I hate about the process of publishing a book. Now, I have only ever self-published a book, so I'm aware I'm very much firing shots from afar on this subject.

I'm not going to single out any particular content creators here. There isn't any single person I think is repeatedly giving terrible advice, it's just such a hotly contested subject that the massive spectrum of opinions is bound to contain some clunkers. So without further fanfare or handwringing, here are my favourite worst forms of bad advice on #BookTok and social media in general.

• Cover letters. These are presented with the expectation that their audience is in a cargo cult. I've yet to get representation myself, but if and when I do, I'm fairly sure it will be on the strength of my submission and not driven by the cover letter. Sure, the letter is important. A dreadfully written one could mean an agent doesn't even look at your sample. On the other hand, if the manuscript is good, no agent is going to dismiss you for not having a perfect cover letter, whatever that is. In my very unpublished opinion, agents are people and people have differing tastes. Some of them like some personal details, while others just want the facts of your submission. It's a bit of a lottery as to which is which, although #BookTok is helpful there because some agents are on it. My instinct is to make sure the salient details are first and foremost - genre, synopsis, comps. Anything else is sugar.
• Authorial self-promotion. This is wild. It is the worst. You wanted to be a writer? Surprise! Apparently you also have to be a content creator. I have so far avoided doing this, beyond this veiled alter-ego blog, because it is my nightmare. I like writing. As a creative process it is almost free. You can do it in your head. All that is required to share it is pen and paper. Obviously as a society and industry we have moved beyond that, but the process is fundamentally the same. The difficult part is getting other people to read it. In the past (and this may be the sort of false nostalgia that leads to even worse opinions than I'm expressing here) you would write a book, get an agent, sell the book, and if your publisher wanted you to do some signings or similar they'd sort it out. Otherwise there wasn't an expectation on you, the author, to also be your own PR agency. It is dispiriting. I've seen authors I admire posting relentlessly, and not always about their own work. I sometimes wonder whether this isn't another form of cargo cult. Have they got hard proof that their social media traffic is responsible for their book sales? I hope they do, but in a technological landscape where platforms have the means and motive to present misleading data, I am naturally distrustful. At the other end of this are the unpublished / self-published / maybe-just-experimenting people who I don't mean to cast shade on.
• Live streaming. I find this especially unhinged. Again, I hope those doing it are seeing some sales of the back of it, but I would rather never sell a book again than put myself through it. I've seen people live writing. I've even seen someone live editing. Who is this helping? Are there people out there who find the writing process mysterious and beguiling? Honestly, it is, to quote Douglas Adams, mostly staring at a blank page until your forehead starts to bleed. It can of course be many things, but none of them make for an engrossing spectator sport.
• The bots. That tantalising feeling when one of your posts has received a reply or someone has DM'd you. The latter should immediately get your spidey sense going because bots love DMs. They waste your time with stilted small talk before clumsily trying to sell you an editing/publishing/prostitution service. To be fair I see less of them now. Perhaps they have all been put out of work by Musk's Grok, leaving space for actual people to attempt to sell you editing/publishing/prostitution services in the comments.
• Finally, the endless calls to promote your work. I know or at least hope these come from a place of good intent, but they are endless and appear to do nothing but attract the previously mentioned bots. I suppose they are mostly harmless, but in a social media circle made almost entirely of writers, it feels like we're just a pack of dogs howling in the dark.

I don't intend any of the above to sound mean-spirited. Promoting books is difficult, and everyone has to do what they're driven to do. I've even heard some lunatic is planning on releasing their book on cassette for the ZX Spectrum! This could open new avenues for literary promotion. I should consider re-releasing my novel Dead Penguins on a dead penguin. I'm sure ZSL London would cheerfully help out for a suitable donation. That said, the shipping could be expensive as well as legally problematic. So maybe posting writing tips to #booktok isn't such a bad idea after all.

Something on the Piccadilly Line is Eating the Trains

Something on the Piccadilly Line is eating the trains. I am aware that this is an extraordinary claim, but I have no other explanation for what is happening. For background, I live on the Piccadilly Line. When it runs well, it's great and gets me everywhere I want to be. However, recently there have been many times when I have wondered what the point of a tube line is if it doesn't have any trains running. According to TFL, this is because the current stock is old. It suffers from wheel flats, and frequently requires repair while we impatiently await its replacement. Its replacement, a shiny new walk-through model similar to that on the Circle Line, has been delayed for reasons that are unclear. According to TFL, partial line closures are required to make way for the new stock, but I think it's clear by now that there's something TFL aren't telling us. And that is that something is eating the trains.

Consider the evidence. A lack of trains has often been blamed on wheel flats, which is where trains skidding on slippery rails wear unevenly. But couldn't these unevenly shaped wheels also be explained by something chomping them?

I wondered whether I was the first person to make this connection, so I did a little digging in the obscure corners of the internet. It was there that I learned of the Beast of Boston Manor.

The first mention of the beast is in 1975, a mere two years after the introduction of the current Piccadilly Line stock. A westbound driver reported seeing something leap from  the platform and under the train. Fearing the worst, he hit the brakes but after inspection there was no sign of the mystery leaper. It was subsequently ruled upon return to the depot that several of the wheels appeared worn flat, as though something had eaten away at them. This was the first reference to wheel flats on the line. The driver could add little light to the shape he saw dash under the train. It was brown and hairy, and exactly the same size and shape as an Alsatian dog.

There were no more sightings until 1988, when a train inexplicably lost power on the eastbound platform. In his incident report, the driver noted that immediately before the power cut, he had been surprised to see a passenger on the platform who looked uncannily like the writer / wizard / mall Santa / Rasputin impersonator Alan Moore. However subsequent detective work has determined that Alan Moore was in Northampton at the time.

As time passed, the age of the rolling stock became a convenient cover story for the beast. With trains being taken out of service all over the Piccadilly Line, is was clear that the beast had developed quite an appetite. Some have even speculated that it has nested in the Heathrow Loop, specifically at the suspiciously closed Terminal 1. The real reason for the delay in introducing the new stock is that during a test run, one of them was eaten there.

TFL have unofficially stated that there is no silver bullet for getting the new stock online, but they have been stockpiling actual silver bullets in stations around the network.

I attempted to contact TFL for comment, and after a couple of days received the following via email:

"Chew chew choo choo. Chomp chomp chomp. Beast will eat every train. Beast will eat everyone. Good service on all other lines."

There are Too Many Stairs in my Flat

You would think that a flat (or apartment to any American readers) would have no stairs at all, but often in the UK flats are made from subdivided houses, and sometimes you get a staircase from your front door to the flat proper. 

My flat is not like that. It is a new build with a door onto a communal corridor. It should by rights have absolutely zero stairs. This was certainly the case when I bought it, although I must admit it wasn't on my list of things to check. I've been living there for more than a decade now, so I expect some things to need repair. A heat alarm has recently packed in, which is to be expected given its age. The kitchen tap has become quite stiff and will need a plumber's attention soon. All fairly normal for a flat built to a cheap spec.

What I was not expecting to happen was that one day I would discover my bathroom was now upstairs. It first happened in the dead of night. To be fair I'd had a long evening in the pub and so it took a few crawled steps upwards to fully wake up to the situation. 

You may think the this would be an even bigger problem for my upstairs neighbour, who is presumably missing a bathroom-sized chunk of her flat. I couldn't formulate a way of enquiring without sounding like a lunatic, so instead I waited for her to complain. She did not. 

In time I got used to having an upstairs bathroom. I relished the extra shelf space the staircase offered, although I hated that I now had to hoover stairs even though I live in a flat.

I did start to worry about where the bathroom actually was. It's not like there's an abundance of space between the floors in my building. If sci-fi had taught me anything, it's that it's probably in another dimension. Hopefully one beyond Hackney council's tax banding assessors. I've watched a fair bit of horror too, and became concerned that my bathroom was now in an evil dimension. So far there hadn't been any possessions, so I'm probably overthinking it. The shower is never quite as hot as I'd like it, but that's more likely due to limescale in the thermal regulator than demonic plumbing. 

What would happen if I drilled a hole in the bathroom wall? What would I be able to see into? I put off this invasive exploration for as long as I could. It also applied to the stairs. They passed though where my bathroom used to be, even though they take up less space. 

Curiosity got the better of me so I opened the hallway cupboard to find my electric drill. However to my shock the cupboard was empty. My first thought was that I'd been burgled, but then I saw that in place of the shelves and the washer dryer was another staircase. These led down, into darkness. Using my phone's torch, I descended gingerly. At the bottom I found a small room. There was a light switch at the bottom of the stairs. I clicked it on and saw the contents of the cupboard installed along one wall. The washer dryer was even plumbed in. Plumbed into what, I couldn't say. Would I receive an extra dimensional water bill? 

This time I didn't worry about my downstairs neighbour. Presumably this didn't affect them in the same way as the bathroom hadn't affected the woman upstairs. The bathroom had been an eccentricity. The cupboard becoming a whole room was a definite improvement. 

I remembered the drill, and found it in its expected place amongst the shelves. It was time for some investigation. Walking up a ridiculous two flights of stairs to the bathroom, I selected an unobtrusive patch of wall and drilled through it. When I felt it clear the second sheet of plasterboard, I lowered the drill and peered through the hole. I could see my kitchen. I was certain it was my kitchen because I could see all the fridge magnets on my fridge door.

In some respects this was to be expected. As built, the bathroom does share a wall with the kitchen. The cupboard however had expanded into a room. What would happen if I drilled into the walls there? I decided that was enough interdimensional tunnelling for one day. 

I woke up that night gripped by the realisation that the hole between the kitchen and bathroom could be turned into a perpetual motion machine. If I fed a hosepipe through it, then down the stairs and back into the kitchen I could join it in a loop where water would constantly flow downhill. Were my practical skills up to the task of turning this into a generator and cutting my electricity bill? Something told me that breaking the laws of physics would have more severe consequences than fiddling my electricity meter. I put the idea on the back burner. I would probably manage to electrocute myself anyway.

In the morning I discovered that my idea was moot. The kitchen, which is usually a nook at the back of the living room, was now also upstairs. Like the cupboard, it was also now significantly bigger and included an island. I had never imagined I'd be posh enough to have a kitchen island, yet there it was. The fridge, which has once loomed, now looked rather small. I wondered how I would explain the mysterious floorplan of my flat when the fridge inevitably breaks and needs replacing. Maybe this sort of thing happens all the time and everyone's afraid to mention it. Perhaps there's a corner of the internet where people swap stories. If there are, hook me up. I'm enjoying the extra space but worry where it will end. Also, sometimes when I'm in my expanded cupboard room, I am anxious that it might suddenly revert to its specified dimensions, which would almost certainly crush me to death. I read once about a hoarder who had been crushed in a tunnel collapse in her house. The tunnel had been through her room-bursting collection of tat. But what if her house had also spawned extra staircases to bigger rooms? What if she actually had the space for all that crap until suddenly and tragically, she didn't? 

I know what you're thinking, but no, this isn't an elaborate allegory. It isn't a tortured warning of staircasing shared ownership flats, although I do sometimes think it's a psychological manifestation of owning one. They are not without their problems, but they are all well documented in new articles featuring photos of glum couples sitting on their sofa, their latest crippling service charge bill laid bare on their IKEA Lack coffee table. I really do have three staircases in my flat, which is definitely three too many and there is not a whisper of such phenomena in the pages of the Guardian. Maybe I should give them a ring. I could explain how it has made me learn to do my own plumbing, which is no mean feat when you don't know what unearthly realm your pipes pass through to get to the bathroom. I have had to learn this because as hard as it is, it's easier than explaining the situation to a qualified plumber.

There is some good news however. The flat seems to have settled at three staircases. I might not be able to entertain any guests without them being a whole thing, but I have grown used to them. So why am I telling you all this? Well, mostly because as I mentioned earlier, they are an absolute bugger to clean. Can anyone recommend a lightweight vacuum cleaner with a really long lead?

Make Burgers Great Again

We used to call them beefburgers, on the very sensible basis that they are made of beef. As we have fought against transatlantic currents this has been shortened to simply burgers. Burger is short, to the point and crucially doesn't need bother you with its content. This is fine, and I have no problem with this linguistic shift. What I do have a problem with is the shift in proportions of said burger.

Burgers are essentially sandwiches. This makes even more sense when considering sandwiches outside of the relatively spartan prepacked meal deals of the UK. Burgers are substantial sandwiches, but fundamentally they are still meant to be eaten with your hands. Now, I know this isn't a particularly original observation, but at some point burgers went from a squat shape to a tall one that no longer fits in my mouth. This is something that perennially irks me. Why does it need to be so big? The ratio of height to diameter of some is now so large that it's almost a good eating strategy to skewer it through the centre of the buns and gnaw at it like corn on the cob. Inevitably I resort to pressing it down in an attempt to flatten it, removing slippery tomatoes or slicing it into more manageable chunks. Ultimately however I end up with grease everywhere and cheese stuck to my chin. There is little dignity in the process.

For some of you, this may not seem like much of a big deal. In fact some people may even enjoy the messiness of the process. If this is you, then I have good news - very soon your entire digital experience will be one gigantic, misshapen calamity that you will be incapable of handling without getting mess everywhere.

I've complained about AI and enshittification before. This is definitely part of the problem, but it's dangerously lazy to think that the worst will be done by AI being sloppy. The absolute worst will be done by people using it well. These people will be those who want to make money from you, and they will come at you from both ends of the law. At the one end, which currently drifts in a haze of legal possibilities, is privacy at scale. The zettabytes of data that now links us all in in a global network is ripe for exploitation. The boundary of that exploitation is constantly shifting, but as more wealth and power transfers to the tech giants, its direction of travel is a weakening of data protection in its most absolute sense. Exceptions are made, and with them our sense of what is normal shifts. When Facebook first introduced facial recognition there was a backlash of concern over privacy. However since then Google Glass has been and gone with less fuss, police forces routinely use facial recognition in western democracies and Ring have announced it as a new feature for their doorbell cameras. The latter is significant. The ubiquitous doorbells have enrolled large swathes of society into surveillance culture, to the point at which facial recognition has become an acceptable convenience.

So who cares if they're being recorded and maybe even recognised as they walk past someone's house? Aren't we all being recorded everywhere already? Absolutely, yes, we are. In most urban environments the major modes of video surveillance are traffic cameras, street-facing security cameras and internal security cameras in businesses and homes. Some of these are more secure than others, either by accident or design. It is theoretically possible to track your movement all day long by using these. What generally stops this being a real concern unless you have _really_ pissed off the authorities, is that all these systems are separate. It would take a team of skilled people to track you across such a network. Government agencies, with access to more private data such as interactions with contactless payment devices and so on stand a better chance of success. So why worry if you haven't done anything the government would be interested in?

Well, step in our old chum AI. The bottleneck that has been preventing the real-time surveillance of individuals is the greater than real-time required to process the colossal amount of data available at any one time. Chomping though this sort of data is something that AI is very good at however. It can easily (for some values of easy) compile details of a person's activities by collating video data matched by facial recognition and non-video data matched by location.

Again, you may think this is nothing to worry about. Why would people with such technology be interested in you? 

The problem at this point is that it will no longer be just the authorities that can do this. Other actors with different ambitions will seize the opportunity. We already see this in action through older technology. Cold callers talk pensioners into investing into a scam. Phishers trick you into clicking on the wrong link. Some of the latter can be hard to spot if you're not paying attention, especially on a phone, which is where most of our online interactions are right now. Can you trust that the person who sent you the link hasn't been hacked or spoofed? You're internet savvy, you can figure this out. But then, while you're trying to work out whether to click on said link, you get a facetime from your sister. Her car has broken down again and she can't pay for the repair. Your phone doesn't recognise the contact but that is barely noticeable. You recognise your own sister. So does your phone - it helpfully tags her onscreen. Besides, the last few Facebook posts you'd seen from her had been griping about how her car was on its last legs. And you can afford to lend her the money after that #cheltenham win. Just click the convenient link she's provided and give it no further thought.

It's an audacious scam, but one which will be automated. It will be automated at some point in the near future, but it will mostly operate in the past. This isn't a time-travel conundrum. It's the other part of the AI surveillance puzzle, which is our collective internet history.

Interacting with the internet is rarely completely anonymous, especially if you spend any time in some form of public space, be that a publicly available website or social media platform. You have a history, and unlike your browser history, flushing it is not a one-click operation. It's all out there for anyone to find. Again, in the recent past this was not necessarily a problem unless you attracted a determined stalker. But here comes AI again, with its tireless ability to search and collate information. It can work through social networks and the wider internet, discovering trusted connections between people, be they family or friends. Furthermore it can use their conversations to work out which connections are most easily exploited - it can see your sister complaining about her car. It has seen you boast about your winning bet on the horses. That is the tricky part, and will be played like traditional email spam, as an overwhelming numbers game where they just need a few bites to make it worthwhile. The easy part is the part that used to be hard. With a trail of photos and videos behind you both, it will be trivial for the same AI agent that targeted you to create a live simulation of your sister. It will look and sound like her. It will know her history from her online history and use that to engage with you and keep you on the parameters it has been tasked with keeping you on until you transfer the money. It can even use the previously mentioned public and unsecured cameras with facial recognition to track you both so it can work out the most opportune moment to initiate the scam.

I don't know the answer to this. I have a nagging urge to erase my internet presence completely, but (a) the internet is kind of home at this point and (b) I'm not convinced it's possible. So maybe I can solve the burger problem instead. Is it fundamentally about keeping a low profile? I'm not sure, but in the interests of fending off attention from future malignant AI agents, I find them all too expensive for what they are.