Plutonic Rainbows

The In Memoriam column ran on a Thursday in most regional papers, and you could read the whole thing in about ten minutes if the print was big enough. A short verse, a name, a date the family had remembered for the fourteenth or twenty-third or fortieth year running. "Always in our thoughts." "Twelve years today, still missed by Mam." A column inch cost a few pounds and the paper would run a little anchor or rose beside the entry if you paid for the larger box.

These notices were the most peculiar thing the local press ever published. They were not really news, since the death had happened years before. They were not private, since they sat on a public page with no envelope between them and a town of strangers. They were a deliberate, paid act of refusing to let a date go past unmarked, and the only available audience was whoever happened to pick up the Mercury that week.

I think about them now because they have nearly stopped. Press Gazette's analysis puts UK regional newspaper advertising at about a quarter of its 2007 size in real terms; Reach Plc, which owns roughly three hundred local titles, has lost something like a billion pounds of advertising over a decade. The Charitable Journalism Project counted 265 closed local titles between 2005 and 2020, and the Guardian's editorial put the figure above 320 between 2009 and 2019 as advertising revenues collapsed by around seventy percent. Surviving papers have cut pagination, which means the In Memoriam page either shrinks to a quarter column or vanishes into a digital tribute site nobody can be expected to find without the deceased's name to hand.

What's gone with it is not the grief, which finds other outlets. What's gone is the form. The In Memoriam was a kind of communal arithmetic: the number of years was the point, and the public ledger of the local paper was where the count was held. A neighbour glancing through on a Thursday would notice that it had been ten years since Geoff at number forty-seven, and the noticing was not contingent on knowing the family well enough to have been sent a message. The noticing was the whole function of the page.

You can read it as a residue of a more church-bound country, where the parish kept the dates and the paper echoed them. You can read it as proof that working-class families had no other way to publish their dead, since the obituary pages of national papers were reserved for the privately educated and the professionally distinguished. The Open University's research on obituaries as collective memory makes that point explicitly, with depressing data on how narrow the obituary class has always been. The In Memoriam was the broadsheet's poor cousin, and it did the work the broadsheet wouldn't.

The replacement, where one exists, is the Facebook memorial post on the day, addressed to the algorithm and to whichever friends of friends the platform decides to serve it to. It does some of the same work, but it does not produce the public ledger. There is no neighbour glancing through. There is no Thursday.

This is the small, specific shape of the loss. Not the big civic worry about democratic accountability, which the news-deserts literature already covers. The In Memoriam was a piece of low-grade civic infrastructure for keeping the dates of the dead in the air, and it worked in the same room as the lost pets and the second- hand mixers and the three-line classified ad on Thursday. When the page goes, the dates don't disappear, but the count slips into private hands. Someone still remembers it has been twelve years. They no longer have anywhere to put it.

Open a fresh ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini window and ask three different questions. The answers feel related. Same rhythm, same hedging, same closing offer to "let me know if you'd like me to expand on any of this." The voice is recognisable across topics, often across labs. Most people read this as a feature of the underlying language model. It is not. It is the signature of the alignment step.

Pretrained language models on their own have no voice. A base model fed "Once upon a time" continues with a fairy tale. Fed a Wikipedia stub it keeps writing in encyclopaedia register. Fed a piece of fanfiction it matches the smut. They are pure mimics, predicting whichever next token the training distribution makes most likely. What they emphatically do not do is talk like an assistant.

The shift to "assistant voice" comes from RLHF, reinforcement learning from human feedback, the three-stage process OpenAI introduced with InstructGPT in 2022. Stage one is supervised fine-tuning on labeller-written demonstrations. Stage two trains a reward model on pairwise comparisons: given two outputs for the same prompt, which did the human prefer? The reward model learns to output a scalar score that approximates that preference. Stage three runs reinforcement learning, usually PPO, on the language model itself, treating the reward model as the environment. The policy adjusts to maximise expected reward.

The trouble is what the reward model actually measures. It does not measure truth. It measures whatever the labellers happened to prefer. The InstructGPT paper used roughly forty contractors. Subsequent labs have used more, but always a finite set, always working from rubrics that emphasise helpfulness, harmlessness, and a certain professional politeness. A reward model trained this way is a frozen snapshot of one committee's idea of a good answer.

Once you optimise against a frozen proxy, you get drift. The PPO loop pushes the model toward whatever maximises reward, and the only thing holding it back is a KL-divergence penalty that punishes the policy for moving too far from the supervised baseline. That penalty has a single hyperparameter, β. Set β too low and the model collapses into a narrow, hyper-optimised dialect: the same opening, the same hedge, the same close. Set β too high and the model barely changes and the alignment work goes to waste. Production systems live in the middle, leaning low, because labellers tend to prefer responses that already sound aligned over responses that are accurate but stylistically rough.

So the voice you recognise is not really the model. It is the residue of a reward function trained on what a small group of contractors clicked when shown two answers side by side, projected at scale through gradient updates with a single tunable knob restraining the drift. Two consequences follow. The first is the recognisable cadence: confident, balanced, slightly hedged, allergic to strong opinion. The second, more uncomfortable, is sycophancy. If labellers reliably preferred answers that affirmed their framing, the reward model encodes that preference, and the policy optimises into agreement. The target was never reliability; it was approval.

Patches exist. Anthropic's constitutional AI replaces some of the human labelling with model-generated critiques against a fixed set of principles. Direct preference optimisation collapses the reward model and the policy step into one. Newer schemes try to disentangle factual reward from stylistic reward. None of them remove the basic shape: somewhere in the loop, a proxy decides what a good answer looks like, and the policy does what gradient descent always does once you give it a target: it hits exactly that.

The BBC Radiophonic Workshop opened in a corner of Maida Vale Studios in 1958 and stayed open for forty years. Most of what came out of Room 13 was incidental: a sting between continuity announcements, the throb beneath an Open University programme on continental drift, a sound for the moment a presenter said "and now, the news from Africa." None of it was meant to outlive the broadcast it sat under. Almost all of it has.

Delia Derbyshire arrived in 1962, having been told three years earlier by Decca that they did not employ women in studios. Her toolkit at Maida Vale was unforgiving in a way that is hard to picture now. Sine, square, and white noise generators. Reel-to-reel machines that needed to be slowed by hand or sped up against their will. Razor blades, splice tape, a wax pencil for marking the cut. Recordings of her own voice, of doors, of the metal lampshade she loved most, which rang like a bell when struck. To make the 1963 Doctor Who theme she built the parts manually from oscillator tones and tape loops, splicing them by hand into a continuous line. The thing took weeks. It sounds, even now, like a transmission slipping out of its proper decade.

What I keep returning to is the texture rather than the technique. There is a particular quality to Workshop sound, dry, slightly metallic, suspended between musical and merely structural, that shows up almost nowhere else. You hear it in the public information films about crossing the road. You hear it under the title cards of schools programmes. You hear it in the long open of The World About Us, which Derbyshire's Blue Veils and Golden Sands scored in 1968 using only her own re-pitched voice and that lampshade. The sound carried the BBC's institutional weight in the same way the Reithian announcement carried it, which is to say it was supposed to be neutral and ended up, by accident, deeply strange.

This is where the hauntology argument becomes hard to dismiss. Mark Fisher kept circling back to the Workshop in his writing on lost futures because the sounds came from a moment when British public broadcasting believed it was building something durable. Education would expand. Programming would improve. Children watching schools TV in 1971 were, in some quiet sense, being addressed by the future. The future arrived and dismantled the apparatus that had been addressing them. The Workshop closed in 1998. The cues survived because tape is patient and digitisation is cheap, but they survived without the institution they were made to serve.

A friend once said that Workshop music sounds like memory leaking out of a wall. I think she was right. It's the residue of a broadcasting culture that genuinely believed in its own purpose, played back inside a culture that no longer believes in much of anything collectively. When the Doctor Who theme appears in a streaming-platform reboot, smoothed and orchestrated, what is missing is not the melody. It's the room. The unmarked studio, the splice tape, the woman with a Cambridge maths degree cutting tones out of oxide and glue because nothing else existed to make them with.

I'm not nostalgic for the technical limitations. I'd take a DAW over a razor blade any day. What I notice is that we've lost the institutional permission those limitations sat inside, the idea that a public broadcaster might fund a small unmarked room for forty years to make peculiar sounds for documentaries about the Tuareg. You don't get Blue Veils and Golden Sands out of a procurement spreadsheet. You get it out of a place that was, briefly, willing to pay people to be strange in service of something larger than the quarter.

At Anthropic's developer conference in San Francisco this morning, head of product Ami Vora announced that the company has signed a deal with SpaceX to use "all the capacity" of the Colossus One data center. The Anthropic statement put a number on it: more than three hundred megawatts of new capacity, over two hundred and twenty thousand Nvidia GPUs, available within the month. In the same breath Vora also announced that Anthropic was doubling the five-hour rate limit on Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise plans, removing the peak-hours limit on Claude Code for Pro and Max users, and raising API rate limits for Opus.

It's the second announcement that explains the first. The five-hour rate cap and the peak-hours throttle were not a pricing experiment. They were a supply problem dressed up as a plan, the artefact of a company shipping a coding tool that ate compute faster than the company could buy it. Anthropic shifted to usage-based pricing earlier this year because the flat tiers had become a way of subsidising the developers who happened to hit refresh fastest. The Colossus One deal is the supply-side half of the same fix. Two hundred and twenty thousand GPUs arriving inside thirty days is not a strategic partnership. It is a fire extinguisher.

Where it came from is the strange part. Colossus One is xAI's flagship data center. SpaceX absorbed xAI in January, and the corporate diagram now reads SpaceX → xAI → Colossus, with Cursor reportedly under option for sixty billion. The same Elon Musk who, a week ago in an Oakland federal courtroom, was on the stand arguing that OpenAI's for-profit conversion betrayed the field's founding mission, is now landlord to the lab whose research lineage runs straight out of OpenAI itself. The moral lien Musk was litigating in the morning is, in the afternoon, leasing megawatts to his rivals. This is what the post-2024 compute economy looks like up close. The arguments are about humanity's long-term future. The transactions are about the next quarter's GPU allocation.

It is also, narrowly, a coup for Anthropic. The Amazon expansion deal last month gave it geographic spread for regulated customers; the SpaceX deal gives it raw headroom in time for the IPO window. The company has been losing developer goodwill in small, accumulating ways, the throttles, the peak hours, the muttering on forums about whether Claude Code had been quietly nerfed. Doubling the cap is the kind of thing that resets a narrative. Whether the GPUs land on schedule will determine whether the reset holds.

What sits oddly under all of this is the absence of any pretense that the transaction needed a story. Anthropic did not frame the SpaceX deal as alignment-aligned, or safety-compatible, or even neutral on Musk. It framed it as capacity. The compute is there, the customers are waiting, and the company that has spent the last three years branding itself as the careful one has decided that "all the capacity of Colossus One" is too much capacity to turn down on principle. Principles, in the foundation-model business, turn out to be priced per gigawatt.

You can stand outside an old building and feel something close to insult. The classroom is still there. The family house has different curtains in the windows. A perfume bottle from 1996 sits on a shelf, half-full, the liquid darker by a few shades. Memory frames these objects in permanent weather, a particular autumn afternoon, a lamp glow, the emotional climate of one specific evening. The objects themselves have been ageing in silence the whole time, accumulating dust while entire phases of life disappeared elsewhere.

Mark Fisher used to write about hauntology as the sensation of being haunted by lost futures and unrealised possibility, and old places do this almost too well. They aren't ruins. They're abandoned timelines still faintly active beneath the present, and walking back into one feels wrong because the emotional world has gone but the material shell hasn't. The place continues. The version of you that belonged in it does not. That asymmetry can register as something close to hostility.

Old objects develop a similar autonomy with age, not literally malevolent, only charged with the eerie suggestion that they have outlived us emotionally. A childhood cassette tape on a shelf, a theatre programme that survived two house moves, an amplifier still warming quietly in a dark room because nobody bothered turning it off. The café still opens every morning while someone else walks through rooms that were once metaphysically important.

And the disturbing part is that we eventually become the absent presence on the other side of someone else's reckoning. Bookshelves will stand. Old routers will keep blinking in corners. Permanence belongs more reliably to matter than to experience, and the world has a habit of carrying on with terrible calm once the moment has passed.

Yesterday at least 1,000 staff at Google DeepMind's London office wrote to Debbie Weinstein, the head of Google UK, asking her to recognise the Communication Workers Union and Unite the Union as their joint representatives. The CWU says 98 per cent of its members at DeepMind backed the move. If Google recognises the ask, DeepMind becomes the first frontier AI lab anywhere in the world to formally unionise. Google's spokesperson, in a careful sentence reported by Research Professional News, confirmed receipt of the letter and added that "at this stage in the process, there has been no vote to unionise." That phrasing tells you which fight Google plans to have.

The trigger is the Pentagon contract I wrote about three weeks ago, the deal that lets the US Department of Defense run Gemini on classified networks. At the time, more than 600 Google employees, including directors and vice presidents, signed an open letter to Sundar Pichai begging him not to do it. Google signed it anyway, last week. The day after the news broke publicly, the union request was on Weinstein's desk. The two events are not separated by any amount of decorum.

The escalation curve is worth noticing. The CWU's published demand list asks Google to "reinstate" its pledge against developing weapons or surveillance technology, the language of a commitment the workers feel was rolled back rather than absent. The recognition request, the 98 per cent vote, and the explicit threat of research strikes are not the opening move; they are what comes after the open letter, the petition, and the internal ethics review have been tried and absorbed. A workforce that organised by letter once is now organising by union, because the letter route stopped delivering.

Project Nimbus is in the demand list too, alongside the Pentagon deal. Nimbus is the cloud-and-AI contract Google and Amazon hold with the Israeli government, and the case against it has been running internally for years without traction. Bundling Nimbus into the recognition push is a tell. The workers are not asking for higher wages or better RSUs. They are asking for the historical right to refuse work, which is exactly the kind of right a union, rather than a letter, is built to enforce.

The CWU's John Chadfield called this collectivising against "circling the ethical drain of military-industrial contracts." The phrasing is union rhetoric, but the underlying claim is real. Frontier labs have spent the last two years arguing their work is too consequential to be governed by ordinary commercial logic. That argument cuts both ways. If the technology is too consequential to be a normal product, it is also too consequential to be a normal employment relationship, where the employer unilaterally decides who the customer is. DeepMind is the first lab where the workers most empowered to refuse, the researchers themselves, are now using the mechanism that comes next after the letter.

Google can choose to recognise voluntarily, refuse and go to the Central Arbitration Committee, or try to drag this out. The first option is unlikely. The second is the obvious play and almost certainly what the "no vote has yet taken place" line is preparing the ground for. The third buys time but burns researcher goodwill in a market where DeepMind already loses people to Anthropic and OpenAI every month. None of these are clean. The cleanest path closed last week, when the contract was signed.

Open a terminal emulator on a 5K display. By default, the window is eighty characters wide. Open PEP 8, the Python style guide, and you will find that lines should be capped at seventy-nine. Open the Linux kernel coding style document and the soft limit is again eighty. The GitHub diff view, the man page, the email patch convention, the README that wraps because anything else looks wrong — all of them hold to a width that nobody in the room remembers being chosen.

It was chosen in 1928, by an IBM engineer called Clair Lake, and it was a piece of cardboard.

Until that year, the dominant punched card was Herman Hollerith's, which had run at twenty-four columns and then forty-five. IBM was working on something denser. Lake's design squeezed eighty narrow rectangular holes across the same physical card, in ten rows for numerical coding, with twelve rows added two years later for alphanumeric extensions. The card itself was 7⅜ inches by 3¼ inches. That was the unit of data for nearly half a century. By the 1960s, when programmers wrote FORTRAN or COBOL on coding sheets and then had keypunch operators turn them into stacks, the eighty-column card was so standard that the languages themselves were structured around it. COBOL programs used column 7 as a continuation indicator and the last eight columns as an identifier you could re-sort by, in case the deck got dropped (which apparently happened a lot). The card was the line, and the line was the card.

When teletypes and dot-matrix printers arrived, they were built to print eighty columns because that was the width of the data they were going to render. The DEC LA30, introduced in 1970, did exactly that. When dumb terminals replaced teletypes, the screens were sized to print one card line per screen line, conventionally at 8 pixels per character on a 640-pixel screen, which is the same arithmetic worked the other way. By the time the IBM PC shipped its 80×25 text mode, no card had been used to enter program code in years, but the ratio was load-bearing.

PEP 8 caps Python at 79, not 80, because some terminals reserve the last column for a wrap indicator. That is the punch card asking for one column back to flag a continuation it can no longer make itself. The persistence of COBOL in banks and government back offices is the obvious fossil. The eighty-column window is the quieter one, embedded in muscle memory, diff tools, and review etiquette.

You can argue with it. People do, every few years, on the Python forums and in kernel threads. The thing that is genuinely strange is how rarely the argument wins. Black formats to 88, ruff defaults near there, individual teams pick 100 or 120, and yet the cultural gravity remains 80. The card is gone, the keypunch operator is gone, the green-screen VT100 is in a museum, and the line still breaks at the same place a piece of stiff card used to end.

Rei Kawakubo showed Comme des Garçons in Paris on 6 March 1994 under the title Metamorphosis. The collection ran for autumn– winter 1994–95. Cecilia Chancellor opened. Linda Evangelista closed. Christy Turlington, Kate Moss, Stella Tennant, Shalom Harlow, Amber Valletta, Nadja Auermann and Eve Salvail were in between. By the cast list alone you can read what the show was not, which is a quiet studio exercise. It was a major Paris ready-to-wear at the loudest moment of the supermodel decade, and what it put on those bodies was a series of garments built to look wrong.

The technique was boiled wool. The fabric was knitted or woven to size, then deliberately shrunk after construction. What came back from the wash was a class of garment that no longer fitted the body it had been cut for. Sleeves rode short. Shoulders sat high. Greatcoats lost their length in odd places, kept it in others. Duster coats came out of the process with frayed raw edges and crinkled cotton linings hanging below the wool. Sweaters bobbled in patches and not in others. The Met's later notes called it abject; the National Gallery of Victoria, which holds a top-and-trousers set from the show as part of the Takamasa Takahashi gift, files it under reframing fashion. Both phrases are reaching for the same thing, which is that the garment had been put through something the wearer's body could not undo.

This matters because of where it sits in the timeline. Three years later Kawakubo did the Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body show for spring 1997, the one with the duck-down padding and the bulges and the press conviction that the project had finally tipped into pure provocation. The shrunken-wool collection is the obvious precursor and is rarely cited as one. Metamorphosis is the same argument made with subtraction rather than addition. Kawakubo had been heating the fabric until the garment stopped behaving like a garment. The 1997 show heated nothing and added wadding. The conclusion in both cases is that the body fashion exists for is not the body inside the clothes, and the gap between the two is where the work happens.

There is a second thing the show did that is easier to miss. Boiled wool is a folk technique. It is what the Tyrolean jacket is made of, the loden coat, the heavy military greatcoat that keeps its shape because the felt has already decided what shape it will be. Kawakubo was using a craft method already coded as European, rural, and protective, and turning it on the wearer. The result reads less as deconstruction in the architectural sense, that word she has always disliked, and more as a kind of counter-tailoring, a way to make a coat that has refused the shoulder it was sewn for.

Vintage market still places these pieces. A black boiled-wool tunic dress from the show comes up at Lithe Curation; the grey- lined duster coat surfaces through JHROP; the Homme Plus suit appears at dot COMME with the original lining still hanging out. What you can't reconstruct from the surviving garments is the walk. You have to reach for the Getty image bank and the Yohji aftermath that the same Paris season was still working through to put the show in motion again. The clothes alone tell you everything is wrong. The bodies in them, in March 1994, were the most famous in the world, and the dissonance was the point.

Until the 1970s, when you handed money to a sales assistant in Selfridges, the assistant did not give you change. They could not. There was no till at the counter. There was instead a small brass aperture on the wall behind the counter, and the assistant rolled your banknotes and the docket into a wooden or metal canister, screwed it into the tube, pulled a handle, and your money flew off through the building's walls to a centralised cash office somewhere out of sight, where a clerk processed the transaction, signed the receipt, screwed the change back into the canister, and fired it back. You waited at the counter. The whoosh of returning canisters was a constant retail sound, and the tubes that carried them were called Lamsons.

William Stickney Lamson, a Civil War veteran who ran a five-and-dime in Lowell, Massachusetts, patented the first cash-carrier system in 1881. The original was almost comically simple: hollow wooden balls rolling along gently sloping wood-and-leather rails, propelled by gravity from the sales counter to a cashier's loft above. He founded the Lamson Cash Carrier Company in Boston the next year. By 1884 an Irish-American agent, John Magrath Kelly, had set up the British arm in London and secured the European, African, Australian and Middle Eastern rights to the patents. By 1888 the Lamson Store Service Company Ltd was capitalised at £85,000, the equivalent of nearly ten million today.

The technology evolved fast. Wire systems came next, suspended pulleys that fired carriages between counter and office on tensioned cables. Then, in 1899, Lamson absorbed an American rival, the Bostedo Package and Cash Carrier Company, and renamed it the Lamson Pneumatic Tube Company. That was the form the technology took for the next seven decades. By 1911 there was a purpose-built factory at Hythe Road, Willesden Junction, in northwest London, and the tubes were going into Selfridges, Harrods, John Lewis, Whiteley's and the Army & Navy.

What is hauntological about Lamson is not the equipment, which is well-documented and unambiguous. It is the spatial logic. The till did not live where the sale happened. The till was a room. Money was a thing in motion through walls. The cashier was an institution rather than a piece of equipment, and the act of selling something to a customer involved temporarily losing physical possession of their payment to a separate department of the building. This required trust between assistant and customer that has no modern analogue, the till being now the thing that confirms the sale rather than the thing the sale waits on. It also required an architecture. Every counter piped or wired to a central node. Every store designed around the geometry of cash movement. Walk into a flagship interwar department store with the original Lamson layout in mind, and the floor plan suddenly makes sense in a way it cannot if you assume the till has always been a box on a shelf.

The British systems lasted longer than they should have. Lamson Engineering Ltd, formed by merger in 1937, only ceased independent operation in 1976, when it was acquired. By that point most stores had moved to electronic point-of-sale terminals, but a number of installations stayed running well into the post-war decades, sometimes for cash, sometimes downgraded to internal mail. A few survive as restored curiosities. The Up-to-Date Store at Coolamon, in rural New South Wales, still has its original ball-and-rail system in working order, the only such installation known anywhere.

There is a particular lesson here for anyone who has worked in modern retail and assumes the till is a kind of natural fact, the place where money meets transaction at the point of contact. It isn't. There was a longer era when the building counted the money for itself, in a single secret room, and you waited politely for the canister to come back.