The heat is what strikes you first. The morning is still young, barely eleven, but the sun scorches where it hits. All around you the tide of humanity floats in a brownian motion. The largest tents and the most colourful are those that promise food. Tacos, pizza, margaritas, deep friend oreos on a stick, cheesy fries and non cheesy fries. There is candy everywhere, in all colours and flavours and sizes.

There are children, but the children are somehow outnumbered by the adults, some of whom seem to be there with the children. I’ve gone with family and friends, four kids in total, ages 2 to 7. 3:4 adult ratio. And maybe a third of the overall visitors are youth? It’s higher than the national average, but it’s still far lower than what one might naively expect.

The people around are a microcosm of the country. You can hear all sorts of accents. There’s a dad with three daughters getting angry irrationally at them for asking for something. He’s wearing a black singlet and tattooed all over. There’s a family with grandma and three young elementary school age kids, and they’re bargaining over the toys they each got. There’s an Indian family busily tucking into a whole table full of stuff they bought. The dad’s inexplicably eating a tub of popcorn himself. The couple who are clearly on a date, she’s laughing at his jokes, he’s laughing at his own jokes, drinking a giant cup of blue.

Every inch of space around promises happiness. Each toy, each multicoloured ride, each game, all of them.

The core fact that one notices about fairs is that they are the final boss of capitalism. Once you enter you enter into a captive world. Every experience is mediated to be the perfect buyable representation of something you want, but in its inner hyde-esque distilled sense. Sells you ‘id’, attracts you with colours and lights. It's a place where money ceases to have any meaning. They design it so, you are meant to convert money into tickets, and then do the maths on those tickets, so you have to do rather complex maths if you want to figure out how to maximise your “fun”. Do I believe I will take 3 rides? 5? 10? What about games? And if so does it make sense to spend $20 for 17 tickets, when the average ride takes 4-5 tickets, depending on the rise, or should I take the addition to spend also on 2 games? The full package or the summation of two middling ones? How much will I actually like these? Should I swap my enjoyment from this ride for that game?

And then do the maths again for your kids. You can ask them, and they'll give you a response too, but can you trust the response? You make sure. Four, seven, ten year olds standing around while their parents try and do differential equations with plugged in utility numbers to figure out what’s the right amount to spend.

But you don't need to worry. The little booths stand around like small purple cartoon-emblazoned ATMs ubiquitous to the point you cannot ever make the excuse of not having enough tickets to get a ride for your child.

The food is everywhere. Pungent but preserved so it stays in the sun. Carefully crafted to give you the impression of indulgence, with none of the consideration for quality, or nutrition, much less taste. The pizza slices are inside hot boxes but are inexplicably room temperature. Too much cheese, runny tomato sauce that is processed enough that it has lost the taste of tomato, and crust thick enough to fill any stomach. A slice of pizza the price of a whole pizza. A pizza-esque experience, at least, if not with the succour a pizza slice demands. You pay for being able to carry a slice with you, it cannot bend nor break, and the portability premium easily supplants the edibility discount.

Is $10 for a cup of coffee too much? A mile to the left or right that would be robbery, double the price with tip, but here? No. You’re paying for the ambience, or the location, or something. For the convenience of being able to go to a corner shop and get the same coffee from the same machine manned by the same disinterested teenager.

And why would he be interested? I look around and I can feel myself getting satiated, can you imagine working here? To feel your neurons get numb at the sight of fried cheese and mozzarella balls, with families fighting to decide who will spend that last token at the game where you throw a little ball into a frog’s mouth to win a stuffed teddy they will forget in a week?

Despite the abundance there is scarce variety. You're hedonically adjusted all the way up. You can only compare the joy of this against the experience of everything else outside the fair in your life but if you work there the memories fade. They must.

A long time ago I went on a cruise, only for a day, in Scandinavia. It was for work (really), and it was the most extraordinarily boring day I’ve spent anywhere, despite being tailor made to satisfy human desire. Something about the extreme convenience and mediocre imitations of everything you might like, together in a shopping mall, seemed to be a mockery of our existence. It’s like the proprietors did an equation - what’s the lowest quality people will agree to consume for our food, music, art or pool hygiene, against what’s the most we can get away with charging them.

I get it. That’s exactly the equation to be maximised. But when “exit” is no longer an option, as you’re floating in the open ocean, you realise the equilibrium price is dramatically lower than what it would’ve been on land.

And shorn of the need for any actual effort, since the pool and casino and observation deck and comedy cellar and jazz lounge are all in walking distance carefully calibrated to seem short to even those on walkers, one ends up feeling a weird form of ennui. A feeling of “is this all there is to life”? You look at others smiling and laughing and feel ever so slightly jealous.

The children wait in line for rides far more patiently than they have ever waited for anything else. But the distinction between the rides are blurred, when you ask them.

“Did you enjoy riding the boat?”

“Yes, it was fun.”

“Was it more fun than the rotating bears?”

“That was also fun.”

And so on. I am somewhat in awe of the creators here. The machines, and these are machines, help swing, rotate and shake with confidence. They sound like a washing machine ready for repair but the groans are ignored in a form of consensual hallucination and a belief in civil society that's unheard of in other realms of modern life. We don't even suffer schools like this. This is trust, trust in the system.

I looked up what certifications a fairground ride has to go through. There are annual inspections and permits and all forms of documentation of accidents and maintence that’s needed. California isn’t shy about regulating. They must have insurance to. Reading up later I learn that there are multiple committees and standards - NAARSO and AIMS for ride inspectors and operators. And compliance with ASTM. Of course Cal/ OSHA. Title 8. It’s not easy, it would seem, because there are 50 rides, occasionally varying, sometimes more, but enough to require capital M management.

I wonder idly how much money they might have made. I can’t help it, businesses are businesses. If you have ten thousand people visiting, and a third are children, many of whom ride and many of whom will buy the $45 ticket, they might well make up to $100-200k a day. More on weekends.

I can’t easily tell if it’s good. It sure is a lot of effort to go through! The fairgrounds itself is around 270 acres. There are maybe a hundred rides and game booths. Probably more. And then there is food and shopping. Many of them seem small, selling sombreros and so on.. There are a thousand or fifteen hundred workers. When you look at it like that, the $100-200k a day seem not that impressive. It’s a hard way to make money, but then they all are.

There was a circus we went to see not that long ago. Venardi circus. They explained why the name earlier but I forgot the reason. But even as a small circus touring the east bay it had exceptional acrobats. Some more than a few generations in the circus life. I thought the same then, as they swung above us and twirled impossibly, how much effort is needed to get good at this, and how little society actually values it.

The reason I keep thinking about this is not that the economics are fascinating, though they are, but the overwhelming feeling I get from fairs is to find a quiet place in the shade and to have a beer.

That too is in offer at the fair. In fact, that’s inescapable. There are stands everywhere selling beer and lemonade and large cups of blue whose names I forget. The beer is also an emblem, not of beer per se but the existence of beer, because having one on a warm day as a form of respite provides respite even above the beverage itself.

My kids end up wanting to go to a Professor Science show. He asks questions, they know some of the answers. “What’s the name of the large telescope orbiting the earth?” he asks. My seven year old turns to me and asks, “Galileo?”. The logic is correct, the knowledge however isn't there yet. “Hubble,” I tell him. I’m sure he’ll remember Hubble though, I first remember learning about it in a similar fashion, when my dad told me about it. The new oral tradition.

(I also told him about cavitation, I’m not sure why, because it happens when I crack my knuckles, about mantis shrimp, and the apocryphal tail whips of apatosaurs also causing the phenomenon.)

But the scientist, an older gentleman assisted by his wife of forty four years, shows more props. My attention drifts. They get a gang of kids together, get them to break a lightbulb by screaming standing together in a semicircle. They make anodyne jokes, “your parents must be so proud.” The audience laughs.

We go back to the rides. There’s a small rollercoaster shaped like a dragon, riding in a lopsided figure 8. The kids seem to love it, some of them even try to take their hands up while the whiplash makes their necks wobble. Did they enjoy it? Yes, they say.

Next they go to one that does the same as the rotating multi-coloured bears but in multicoloured helicopters.

Why do they all look and feel the same? Ferris-wheel, boom-flipper (Zipper), spinning drum (Gravitron), tilt-platform, Himalaya oval. I imagine it has to do with the fact that fairs aren’t permanent. They evolved into the sizes that would allow maximum enjoyment but can be “folded up” and transported on a trailer to the next fair. It also can’t be too complex, the workers know the machines but they’re not experts. And they have to pass inspections, which means building things that the inspectors know how to pass.

Convergent evolution is at work here. The rotating swings are like the eyes of the natural world, showing up again and again because it’s the best fit functionally to satisfy the csontraints. Which is also why there aren’t that many suppliers. I learn that there are only three - Chance RIdes which makes the Zipper type coasters. Wisdom Rides making Gravitrons and Himalayas. And a few international ones - Zamperla and Fabbri from Italy, KMG from Netherlands - which make up most of the portable ride market.

And because there are only a few suppliers, the only way to stand out is to add more colours, more art. Like motorheads painting their cars with fire. The carnivals buy them from each other, re-skin them, add more LEDs, different colours, an inevitable trend towards complete garish oversaturation of the visible spectrum until the entire eyeline is covered in neon in several hues of red and yellow and orange. The fact that this is a small market, highly incestuous, where everyone wants to reuse everything shows up in the extreme mundanity of what we all see. They look the same because they literally are the same, just new coats of paint to trick the eyes.

The diversity comes entirely from the things around the rides and the food and the games. Or rather, those sources of diversity exist, whether or not they actually succeed. The music stands set up at regular intervals where local bands can play cover songs from the eighties and nineties that evokes nostalgia for the parents and apathy for the kids.

Professor Science was one of those, though in the United States success breeds replication so now there are Professors of Science across multiple fairs. He too sells a little backscratcher looking thing for five dollars that has an optical illusion at the back of it. Promising a short exploration of the optical system within kids but mostly destined to end up at the bottom of a toybox, as part of a short but fascinating life of a low priced mass manufactured mini toy.

The existence of a form of entertainment has transformed into a beautifully stylized supply chain, a few suppliers who build a few machines that pass inspection, and seemingly a caste of people who think of this as their whole way of life. Occasionally maybe a new game or ride breaks out, or a new cuisine, but by and large this seems an invariant source of entertainment across the ages. With the addition now being of the items on offer squeezed to their ultimate essence, of separating capital from its owners with maximum alacrity. Every trick in the book applied simultaneously.

The biggest attraction though was courtesy of the local pet shop. A large hall filled with animals. Perhaps it came at the end, but perhaps because of what it was. Kids yearn to be with animals. Bunnies, geckos, snakes, birds, turtles, some hissing cockroaches, and pygmy goats. You could touch them, play with them, and of course buy them!

To me it provided a brief respite from the sun. The hall had benches the adults can sit on, to rest from the extreme calf pain only brought about by slowly walking around and occasionally standing.

The detritus of people continues to float in all directions. There are more people, there are also more stationary forms under the shades of trees and awnings. It’s past noon, there’s food everywhere.

We walk out before we melt. The kids are tuckered out from the rides physically but not mentally, every new with is a promise that this one's amazing and even if it looks the same as the old ones they pull on the little heartstrings, holding kitschy toys that they'll forget in a day (they did!) and passing a larger group of people walking in.

The tumult is the attraction. Individually each aspect seems dull, even banal, the same thing one has seen a thousand times over in any lifetime, but together they create a space that invites you to create your own reality. “This is fun” they say, and in saying so repeatedly and liberally try to get you to agree with them. After all, what’s not fun about a rollercoaster at 11 am followed by a cheesy medium-warm hot dog and then a cold beer? Isn’t this the very goal of life?

The metal and plastic are hot but the ridership isn’t down. Kids and couples are still queuing up to go up the dragon and down the misshapen ships. They don’t seem to mind the heat.

As I admitted at the time, my review essay on Adam Becker’s More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity was a bit of a bait-and-switch. Becker’s book explains how the dreams of science fiction have shaped Silicon Valley’s dreams of technology in general. I deliberately made a comparison that was both narrower and more fantastical: emphasizing how debates over AGI resembled the dreams of Renaissance alchemy. In partial redress, here’s a more specific argument about the relationship between science fiction and Silicon Valley.

Again, it’s more a riff on Becker than a bald presentation of his argument, but the connections are much clearer, even if it isn’t quite the same argument that Becker makes. What Becker sees as rooted in 1950s and 1960s science fiction arguably goes back a few decades further: to the fusion of “scientifiction” and technocracy that happened in the early 1930s, right at the beginning of the so-called “Golden Age” of science fiction.

Silicon Valley is trapped in a new version of the Gernsback Continuum - a situation in which it is collectively haunted by the visions of an imaginary future of endless expansion that didn’t happen and never will. Our escape route, as Becker suggests, is to acknowledge the physical and social limits that we can’t escape, and to try to construct better futures within those limits.

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*****

Becker contends that Silicon Valley’s vision of the future borrows heavily from the dreams of a particular era of science fiction.

The 1950s and ’60s are the middle and end of the Golden Age of science fiction, which started with pulp sci-fi magazines in the very late 1930s like Astounding Science Fiction. The authors who dominated … were almost all white men, and they wrote primarily about a future in space. Asimov’s stories were often centered around robots, space empires, or both, with nuclear power depicted as a nigh-limitless energy source used for everything from rockets to radios. Heinlein’s stories frequently had a flavor of Ayn Rand in space, usually featuring a self-reliant, polymath male hero dabbling in eugenics or undermining workers on strike for a living wage.

I think that’s right, but I’d go back a few decades further than Becker. If you want to understand the relationship between science fiction and technocratic aspiration, you should start with Hugo Gernsback, the man who brought them both together. To understand this, read William Gibson’s “The Gernsback Continuum,” which is one of the great science fiction short stories of the last half-century, as well as a sly and pointed social history of the genre. It’s in his collection, Burning Chrome, and can easily be found in pirated versions online that I’m not going to point you to, because that would be rude.

Gibson’s 1980s short story depicts a man who is haunted by hallucinations of a future that never happened of “flying-wing liners” that pass above in the sky, and freeways that perpetually threaten to unfold into “gleaming eighty-lane monsters.” He has been hired to photograph the isolated remnants of 1930s and 1940s buildings that promised a future of vast art-deco cities surrounding gleaming ziggurats, traversed by curving roads in the air, hovering blimps, air-cars and gyrocopters. As the narrator travels in search of fragments of this lost American dream of a clean and efficient future, he becomes infected by its “semiotic phantoms, bits of deep cultural imagery that have split off and taken on a life of their own, like the Jules Verne airships that those old Kansas farmers were always seeing.” Gibson’s hero finally exorcises himself by plunging into the seediest aspects of the “near-dystopia we live in,” watching Nazi Love Motel until the ghosts fade away.

It’s a wonderful short story that influenced me at an early age, but I didn’t really know what it was about until I read Finn Brunton’s book Digital Cash a few years ago. Finn’s book begins by describing the Technocrats, a group that I had never understood were an actual political movement, which really got going in the Great Depression.

The Hugo Gernsback of the “Gernsback Continuum” was the founding publisher and editor of Amazing Stories, the pulp magazine that launched the genre of “scientifiction.” Science fiction’s most important awards, the Hugos, are named after him. But Gernsback also the founding publisher and editor of a briefly lived publication, Technocracy Review. I own a copy of Issue 1, Volume 1 (I’ve made an imperfect but readable scan available here if you want to read it; the various illustrations throughout this post are taken from it). As one of the articles describes the technocratic movement:

With a slide rule in one hand, the other gripped upon the switch of a dynamo, Technocracy says pompously, “Science - that is the solution. You babbling fools know not this industrial machine you quarrel over. Only I know it, for I have made it from my brain. I and the technicians I represent. You should surrender it to me, therefore, and when that is done your troubles are over. With this left hand I will work out formulae. With the right, controlling almost infinite power, I shall send new life, the pulsing life of electricity, into the sluggish veins of industry. Away with your foolish theories, they are old, stale and unprofitable. A new world opens, the world of Technocracy.”

Substitute “software” for “power,” and you have Marc Andreessen circa 2011. Substitute “power” back in again and you have Silicon Valley energy debates circa 2025.

In retrospect, it isn’t surprising that science fiction merges into technocracy which in turn merges into techbro exhortations. All are narratives of technological enthusiasm, depicting a future in which the engineers have taken charge, and in which innovation is a fountain of boundless possibilities. As the writer J.G. Ballard described the science fiction genre in a 1967 interview:

There’s a tremendous confidence that radiates through all modern American science fiction of the period 1930 to 1960; the certainty that science and technology can solve all problems.

And as Becker’s book emphasizes, much of this was based on assumptions about boundless energy. Technocracy’s entire political ideology centered on energy, proposing a new currency denominated in watts.

This dream of limitless energy and endless possibility is notably congenial to a particular kind of politics. The most crucial passage of “The Gernsback Continuum” describes a nuclear families from this imagined future:

They were standing beside their car, an aluminum avocado with a central shark-fin rudder jutting up from its spine and smooth black tires like a child's toy. He had his arm around her waist and was gesturing toward the city. … They were white, blond, and they probably had blue eyes. They were American. Dialta had said that the Future had come to America first, but had finally passed it by. But not here, in the heart of the Dream. Here, we'd gone on and on, in a dream logic that knew nothing of pollution, the finite bounds of fossil fuel, or foreign wars it was possible to lose. … They were smug, happy, and utterly content with themselves and their world. And in the Dream, it was their world. Behind me, the illuminated city: Searchlights swept the sky for the sheer joy of it. I imagined them thronging the plazas of white marble, orderly and alert, their bright eyes shining with enthusiasm for their floodlit avenues and silver cars. It had all the sinister fruitiness of Hitler Youth propaganda.

*****

Gernsback’s future of shark-finned aircars and gleaming cities is the proximate ancestor of today’s Silicon Valley rhetoric. Becker writes about J. Storrs Hall, whose book, Where Is My Flying Car: A Memoir of Future Past, is one of the keystone texts for Silicon Valley right luminaries such as Peter Thiel. Hall’s book begins with the “classic art-deco exposition of the technological Utopia” in the 1930s movie, The Shape of Things to Come. It goes from there to ask why we expected flying cars, the spread of mankind throughout the galaxy, and other such forms of progress and to inquire why we never got there. The answer, crudely summarized, is that we gave up, and we shouldn’t have. Hall mentions Gibson’s other writing in passing, but doesn’t seem aware that he is performing a thudding cover version of “The Gernsback Continuum,” in which Gibson’s mordant humor is excised in favor of technophilic literal-mindedness. Hall’s extended discussion of the mechanics of gyrocopters is actually quite funny, viewed from a certain perspective, but it certainly isn’t intended to be.

More recent texts of the Silicon Valley right, such as Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto similarly exhort a return to this defunct dream world of the future, where the problems of technology dissolve into the certainty that science and technology can solve all problems, provided only that we smash the obstacles - DEI, regulations, environmentalism - that stand in their way.

Like the Golden Age science fiction that they draw on, these arguments are not based on scientific claims, but an elaborate ideology in which science is a kind of magical artifact from which progress inevitably flows. Ballard again (this interview from 1968):

The science fiction written in those days came out of all this optimism that science was going to remake the world. Then came Hiroshima and Auschwitz, and the image of science completely changed. People became very suspicious of science, but SF didn’t change. You still found this optimistic literature, the Heinlein–Asimov–Clarke type of attitude towards the possibilities of science, which was completely false.

Or in the Silicon Valley remix: once we begin to construct our flying cars; once we again reach for the stars; once we have AGI to create the earthly paradise, there is nothing that can constrain us from grasping the destiny of our species.

Just as in Gibson’s story (written more than 40 years ago!) there is a decided political whiff emanating from many versions of this ideology. If you get its logic, it is not at all surprising that so many people on the Silicon Valley right have jumped from techno-optimism into fascism, nor that they see little distinction between the two. Notoriously, Andreessen’s manifesto riffs on Marinetti, a technology obsessed fascist.

Equally, not all people who embrace this style of thinking are fascists, or even slightly fascist adjacent. If you read the liberal-leaning technocratic utopianism of Demis Hassabis or Dario Amodei, you’ll find the suggestion there too that technology - and in particular AI - is a limitless cornucopia of possibilities. See Hassabis’ WIRED interview a few weeks ago:

If everything goes well, then we should be in an era of radical abundance, a kind of golden era. AGI can solve what I call root-node problems in the world—curing terrible diseases, much healthier and longer lifespans, finding new energy sources. If that all happens, then it should be an era of maximum human flourishing, where we travel to the stars and colonize the galaxy. I think that will begin to happen in 2030.

Again, this leans on a particular reading of science fiction. The future that they aspire to is explicitly the future of Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels, in which vast intelligent AI Minds underpin a civilization in which people can do more or less whatever they want.

Amodei:

I think the Culture’s values are a winning strategy because they’re the sum of a million small decisions that have clear moral force and that tend to pull everyone together onto the same side. Basic human intuitions of fairness, cooperation, curiosity, and autonomy are hard to argue with, and are cumulative in a way that our more destructive impulses often aren’t. It is easy to argue that children shouldn’t die of disease if we can prevent it, and easy from there to argue that everyone’s children deserve that right equally.

Hassabis:

I would recommend “Consider Phlebas” by Iain Banks, which is part of the Culture series of novels. Very formative for me, and I read that while I was writing Theme Park. And I still think it’s the best depiction of a post-A.G.I. future, an optimistic post-A.G.I. future, where we’re traveling the stars and humanity reached its full flourishing.

On the one hand, this is obviously much more attractive, and far less sinister, than the Andreessen version. It’s an optimistic liberal bet on the boundless cornucopia of technology. Banks was a Scots socialist who detested authoritarianism with a passion.

On the other, Banks was making a much more complex and ambiguous argument than the version that Hassabis and Amodei present. The Culture is, to steal Ursula K. Le Guin’s term, an ambiguous utopia, in a universe that is emphatically not a mere backdrop for the playing out of the manifest destiny of mankind.

Some of the best and most moving parts of Becker’s book describe the difference between this ideology of science and what science actually says. Becker has a Ph.D. in cosmology, and knows that the universe is a place of hard, cold limits. He quotes Carl Sagan:

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. . . . There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

That too, is Banks’ understanding. The physical universe is a “dark background,” shaped by the brute limits of material existence rather than human desire. As Francis Spufford emphasizes in his wonderful obituary, Banks revived the form of the classic Golden Age space opera, but combined it with an enduring sense of human tragedy. The Culture is indeed a kind of flourishing - but it is one that will wither and die (the books repeatedly emphasize that it is a temporary and evanescent phenomenon; at best a footnote in the history of the galaxy).

Banks uses the trappings of utopianism to convey a far bleaker and more realistic understanding of the human condition. What speaks definitively in the end is not human destiny, but what Banks describes elsewhere as the “faint, not even ironic hiss” of the universal zero. Entropy, not human flourishing, is the logic of the universe.

The great advantage of Becker’s book is not simply that it explains how tech thinking has gone wrong by positing a universe of “more everything forever,” where all that we need is gumption and optimism to transform the human condition and bring about the universal utopia. It is that it also articulates the beginnings of an alternative understanding, which sets out the actual limits of what we can do.

As Kim Stanley Robinson (another poet of hard physical limits) emphasizes in his recent work, we are almost certainly not going to be able to spread out among the stars. What we have on this planet is pretty well what we have. That doesn’t mean that we can’t do much better than we are doing. We can achieve greater forms of material abundance. But pretending that the hard problems simply don’t exist, or that they will be solved by some magical technology that is right around the corner, is a recipe for the embrace of fascism at the worst, and starry-eyed ingenuous optimism at the best. As I’ve written before, we need usable futures. But to get there, as Becker argues, we need to discard the imagined futures of a past world whose aspirations and understanding of the world are a very poor fit with the present that we find ourselves in.

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Really, any noise other than hatred or complete lack of interest should not be allowed.

The authors of a paper that went viral with attention-grabbing headlines urging people to throw out their black plastic kitchen tools have corrected the work for a second time.

But a letter accompanying the correction suggests the latest update still fails “to completely correct the math and methodological errors present in the study,” according to Mark Jones, an industrial chemist and consultant who has been following the case. “The errors are sufficient to warrant a restating of the abstract, sections of the paper and conclusions, if not a retraction.”

The paper, “From e-waste to living space: Flame retardants contaminating household items add to concern about plastic recycling,” originally appeared in Chemosphere in September. The study authors, from the advocacy group Toxic-Free Future and the Amsterdam Institute for Life and Environment at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, looked for the presence of flame retardants in certain household plastic items, including toys, food service trays and kitchen utensils. 

The researchers found toxic flame retardants in several items that wouldn’t ordinarily need fire protection, such as sushi trays, vegetable peelers, slotted spoons and pasta servers. Those items, the authors suggested, could have been made from recycled electronics — which do contain flame retardants. 

Then, for kitchen utensils, the authors used findings from another study, which measured how toxic chemicals including BDE-209 transfer from black plastic utensils into hot cooking oil, to estimate potential intake based on findings in their own study. They estimated a daily intake of 34,700 ng/day of BDE-209 from using contaminated utensils, which “would approach the U.S. BDE-209 reference dose” set by the Environmental Protection Agency, they reported.

But the authors miscalculated that reference dose. They had put it at 42,000 ng/day instead of 420,000 ng/day. That hiccup led to the first correction to the paper, published in December. “This calculation error does not affect the overall conclusion of the paper,” the authors said in the corrigendum.

The latest corrigendum, published July 3, states the formula the authors used to estimate exposure to the flame retardant BDE-209 “was misinterpreted.” It continues:

This misinterpretation led to an overestimation of the BDE-209 exposure concentration. The corrected estimated BDE-209 exposure is 7900 ng/day instead of 34,700 ng/day.

“While we regret the error, this is a correction in one exposure example in the discussion section of the study,” lead author Megan Liu of Toxic-Free Future told us by email. “The example was not part of the core research objectives or methods of the study.”

Jones, who spent his career at Dow Chemical, told us the second corrigendum is “inadequate and still incorrect.”

“If the error is sufficiently large to only provide context, the statement in the Conclusions that brominated flame retardants ‘significantly contaminate products’ no longer can be supported and must be corrected or retracted following the reasoning presented in the second corrigendum,” Jones wrote in a letter to the editor published with the second correction.

Jones took to task some of the calculations and other estimates Liu and colleagues made, which the authors refute in a response to Jones’ letter, also published in Chemosphere this week. 

The Elsevier journal was delisted from Clarivate’s Web of Science in December for failing to meet editorial quality criteria. Last December an Elsevier spokesperson told us the publisher’s ethics team was“conducting in-depth investigations” of “potential breaches of Chemosphere’s publishing policies.” The journal had published more than 60 expressions of concern in 2024 and has retracted 34 articles so far this year.

Part of delisting means Clarivate no longer indexes the journal’s papers or counts its citations. Google Scholar shows seven citations to Liu’s paper, and Dimensions lists four scholarly citations.

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There’s a lesson I once learned from a CEO—a leader admired not just for his strategic acumen but also for his unerring eye for quality. He’s renowned for respecting the creative people in his company. Yet he’s also unflinching in offering pointed feedback. When asked what guided his input, he said, “I may not be a creative genius, but I’ve come to trust my taste.”

That comment stuck with me. I’ve spent much of my career thinking about leadership. In conversations about what makes any leader successful, the focus tends to fall on vision, execution, and character traits such as integrity and resilience. But the CEO put his finger on a more ineffable quality. Taste is the instinct that tells us not just what can be done, but what should be done. A corporate leader’s taste shows up in every decision they make: whom they hire, the brand identity they shape, the architecture of a new office building, the playlist at a company retreat. These choices may seem incidental, but collectively, they shape culture and reinforce what the organization aspires to be.

Taste is a subtle sensibility, more often a secret weapon than a person’s defining characteristic. But we’re entering a time when its importance has never been greater, and that’s because of AI. Large language models and other generative-AI tools are stuffing the world with content, much of it, to use the term du jour, absolute slop. In a world where machines can generate infinite variations, the ability to discern which of those variations is most meaningful, most beautiful, or most resonant may prove to be the rarest—and most valuable—skill of all.

I like to think of taste as judgment with style. Great CEOs, leaders, and artists all know how to weigh competing priorities, when to act and when to wait, how to steer through uncertainty. But taste adds something extra—a certain sense of how to make that decision in a way that feels fitting. It’s the fusion of form and function, the ability to elevate utility with elegance.

Think of Steve Jobs unveiling the first iPhone. The device itself was extraordinary, but the launch was more than a technical reveal—it was a performance. The simplicity of the black turtleneck, the deliberate pacing of the announcement, the clean typography on the slides—none of this was accidental. It was all taste. And taste made Apple more than a tech company; it made it a design icon. OpenAI’s recently announced acquisition of Io, a startup created by Jony Ive, the longtime head of design at Apple, can be seen, among other things, as an opportunity to increase the AI giant’s taste quotient.

Taste is neither algorithmic nor accidental. It’s cultivated. AI can now write passable essays, design logos, compose music, and even offer strategic business advice. It does so by mimicking the styles it has seen, fed to it in massive—and frequently unknown or obscured—data sets. It has the power to remix elements and bring about plausible and even creative new combinations. But for all its capabilities, AI has no taste. It cannot originate style with intentionality. It cannot understand why one choice might have emotional resonance while another falls flat. It cannot feel the way in which one version of a speech will move an audience to tears—or laughter—because it lacks lived experience, cultural intuition, and the ineffable sense of what is just right.

This is not a technical shortcoming. It is a structural one. Taste is born of human discretion—of growing up in particular places, being exposed to particular cultural references, developing a point of view that is inseparable from personality. In other words, taste is the human fingerprint on decision making. It is deeply personal and profoundly social. That’s precisely what makes taste so important right now. As AI takes over more of the mechanical and even intellectual labor of work—coding, writing, diagnosing, analyzing—we are entering a world in which AI-generated outputs, and the choices that come with them, are proliferating across, perhaps even flooding, a range of industries. Every product could have a dozen AI-generated versions for teams to consider. Every strategic plan, numerous different paths. Every pitch deck, several visual styles. Generative AI is an effective tool for inspiration—until that inspiration becomes overwhelming. When every option is instantly available, when every variation is possible, the person who knows which one to choose becomes even more valuable.   

This ability matters for a number of reasons. For leaders or aspiring leaders of any type, taste is a competitive advantage, even an existential necessity—a skill they need to take seriously and think seriously about refining. But it’s also in everyone’s interest, even people who are not at the top of the decision tree, for leaders to be able to make the right choices in the AI era. Taste, after all, has an ethical dimension. We speak of things as being “in good taste” or “in poor taste.” These are not just aesthetic judgments; they are moral ones. They signal an awareness of context, appropriateness, and respect. Without human scrutiny, AI can amplify biases and exacerbate the world’s problems. Countless examples already exist: Consider a recent experimental-AI shopping tool released by Google that, as reported by The Atlantic, can easily be manipulated to produce erotic images of celebrities and minors.

Good taste recognizes the difference between what is edgy and what is offensive, between what is novel and what is merely loud. It demands integrity.

Like any skill, taste can be developed. The first step is exposure. You have to see, hear, and feel a wide range of options to understand what excellence looks like. Read great literature. Listen to great speeches. Visit great buildings. Eat great food. Pay attention to the details: the pacing of a paragraph, the curve of a chair, the color grading of a film. Taste starts with noticing.

The second step is curation. You have to begin to discriminate. What do you admire? What do you return to? What feels overdesigned, and what feels just right? Make choices about your preferences—and, more important, understand why you prefer them. Ask yourself what values those preferences express. Minimalism? Opulence? Precision? Warmth?

The third step is reflection. Taste is not static. As you evolve, so will your sensibilities. Keep track of how your preferences change. Revisit things you once loved. Reconsider things you once dismissed. This is how taste matures—from reaction to reflection, from preference to philosophy.

Taste needs to considered in both education and leadership development. It shouldn’t be left to chance or confined to the arts. Business schools, for example, could do more to expose students to beautiful products, elegant strategies, and compelling narratives. Leadership programs could train aspiring executives in the discernment of tone, timing, and presentation. Case studies, after all, are about not just good decisions, but how those decisions were expressed, when they went into action, and why they resonated. Taste can be taught, if we’re willing to make space for it.