There’s been yet another spate of mushroom poisonings in California, and the NYT’s coverage seems a bit, let’s say, AI slop–esque:
Of those poisoned, 60 percent spoke Spanish as their primary language. The outbreak has also affected people who speak English, Mandarin Chinese, Mixteco, Russian and Ukrainian.
The department has made fliers warning about the dangers of the mushrooms in several languages and is asking people to post them in community spaces, such as stores and libraries.
Those who are accustomed to foraging in their home countries may mistake poisonous mushrooms in California for ones that are safe where they are from, the department said.
That would be quite the epidemiological coincidence, wouldn’t it? Native speakers of, say, Ukrainian, Mixtec, and Mandarin all making the same mycological mistake at more or less the same times. 🤨 🧐
There’s a better hypothesis, which I pointed at a few years ago: social media. People aren’t mistaking death caps because they “resemble mushrooms found in grocery stores,” they‘re being influenced, directly or indirectly, by sketchy videos — maybe machine-translated, as so much English-language content is for so many people in the world — that proffer nonsense about how to make Amanita-genus mushrooms edible.
Are there laws against generating content that ‘stochastically’ leads people to harm themselves and each other? Presumably this and that jurisdiction might have a few things on the books that could be tortured into some elaborate and tenuous basis for prosecution. But what are the chances that (1) a spate of seemingly unrelated poisonings (2) would result in a fruitful investigation, (3) culprits would then be identified (4) who are apprehended and (5) charged then (6) tried and convicted by a jury then (7) given an effective sentenced by a judge and (8) forced to serve it (9) without getting off on appeal? Nil. And we haven’t even touched the “free speech” dimension.
Bruno Latour opened his book We Have Never Been Modern with a remarkable passage that gestures at a certain kind of conceptual chaos that permeates “media”:
On page four of my daily newspaper, I learn that the measurements taken above the Antarctic are not good this year: the hole in the ozone layer is growing ominously larger. Reading on, I turn from upper-atmosphere chemists to Chief Executive Officers of Atochem and Monsanto, companies that are modifying their assembly lines in order to replace the innocent chlorofluorocarbons, accused of crimes against the ecosphere. A few paragraphs later, I come across heads of state of major industrialized countries who are getting involved with chemistry, refrigerators, aerosols and inert gases. But at the end of the article, I discover that the meteorologists don’t agree with the chemists ; they’re talking about cyclical fluctuations unrelated to human activity. So now the industrialists don’t know what to do. The heads of state are also holding back. Should we wait? Is it already too late? Toward the bottom of the page, Third World countries and ecologists add their grain of salt and talk about international treaties, moratoriums, the rights of future generations, and the right to development.
The same article mixes together chemical reactions and political reactions. A single thread links the most esoteric sciences and the most sordid politics, the most distant sky and some factory in the Lyon suburbs, dangers on a global scale and the impending local elections or the next board meeting. The horizons, the stakes, the time frames, the actors — none of these is commensurable, yet there they are, caught up in the same story.
On page six, I learn that the Paris AIDS virus contaminated the culture medium in Professor Gallo’s laboratory; that Mr Chirac and Mr Reagan had, however, solemnly sworn not to go back over the history of that discovery; that the chemical industry is not moving fast enough to market medications which militant patient organizations are vocally demanding; that the epidemic is spreading in sub-Saharan Africa. Once again, heads of state, chemists, biologists, desperate patients and industrialists find themselves caught up in a single uncertain story mixing biology and society.
On page eight, there is a story about computers and chips controlled by the Japanese; on page nine, about the right to keep frozen embryos; on page ten, about a forest burning, its columns of smoke carrying off rare species that some naturalists would like to protect; on page eleven, there are whales wearing collars fitted with radio tracking devices; also on page eleven, there is a slag heap in northern France, a symbol of the exploitation of workers, that has just been classified as an ecological preserve because of the rare flora it has been fostering! On page twelve, the Pope, French bishops, Monsanto, the Fallopian tubes, and Texas fundamentalists gather in a strange cohort around a single contraceptive. On page fourteen, the number of lines on high-definition television bring together Mr Delors, Thomson, the EEC, commissions on standardization, the Japanese again, and television film producers. Change the screen standard by a few lines, and billions of francs, millions of television sets, thousands of hours of film, hundreds of engineers and dozens of CEOs go down the drain.
Latour wrote that around 1991, just months before the commercialization of the internet supercharged this kind of illogic, fueling an almost Moore’s Law–like acceleration in the production of sense and nonsense. And here we are
a world
in which
warehouses literally full of GPUs are springing up like mushrooms after a hot summer rain
the surreal opening of Vernor Vinge’s near-term sci-fi novel Rainbows End
In effect, we’ve constructed a Rube Goldberg of systems — cultural, technical, social, mediating. forensic, judicial —
Decades ago, when Financial Times was my daily, I was fortunate to tune in to a basic distinction in their global coverage — between the rules-based approach to accounting of US-style accounting and the principles-based approach that more and more of the world is adopting (Wikipedia is pretty OK on this).