Plutonic Rainbows

Warner Bros. sold THX 1138 with a flat, confident promise, “The Future is here”, but Walter Murch, who co-wrote it with George Lucas and built its sound, described the aim differently on the DVD commentary: a film from the country of the future, rather than one about it. That’s the right way to mark it now. It doesn’t bother predicting gadgets. It predicts who does the watching, the counting and the listening, and that’s easier to check. Lucas made it in 1971 as his first feature, grown out of a student short from USC, for under a million dollars in existing buildings around San Francisco, and it lost Warner money. Variety’s reviewer guessed it “just might in time become a classic of stylistic, abstract cinema”, which is roughly what happened.

The story is thin on purpose. Everyone has a shaved head, white clothes and a code instead of a name, and everyone takes their sedatives, because missing a dose is a crime called drug evasion. Robert Duvall’s THX builds the robot police in a factory. His roommate, LUH, starts swapping his pills, and he feels sick, then anxious, then something like love. Sex is illegal too, so they’re arrested within a reel or two.

The drugs are where people usually start, and I think they’re the weakest match. In 2024/25 the NHS in England prescribed 92.6 million antidepressant items to an estimated 8.89 million patients. That sounds like the film until you remember that nobody is arrested for skipping their sertraline. Lucas’s sedatives are compulsory and exist so that workers can do dangerous jobs without feeling anything about it; ours are something people ask a GP for. The scale rhymes and the mechanism doesn’t.

Surveillance came true, with one edit Lucas didn’t see coming: we paid for the cameras ourselves. In the film a camera inside the bathroom cabinet asks “What’s wrong?” while LUH and SEN sit in a control room watching the city on monitors. IGN’s Scott Collura, writing about it in 2023, said the cabinet camera wasn’t too different from the Alexa in his bathroom. It’s the same pattern I wrote about in The Future We Were Measuring For: the hardware arrived on schedule and the context changed around it. Nobody forced the microphone on anyone. It was on offer at a discount.

Work is where Lucas got closest. The factory loudspeakers congratulate the workers on losing only 195 people last period against the rival plant’s 242, ranking deaths like a sales league. When THX loses concentration on the line, his controllers put him in a “mindlock”, which makes the job more dangerous, then announce that they take “no responsibility for error in mindlock”. In 2019 The Verge published documents showing that Amazon’s warehouse system tracked each worker’s “time off task” through their handheld scanners and issued warnings and terminations automatically, “without input from supervisors”. Amazon said roughly 300 full-time staff were let go for productivity at one facility in about a year, and workers said they skipped toilet breaks to stay inside the numbers. That’s mindlock with better paperwork: a decision that nobody in particular made, so nobody in particular is responsible for it.

The robot police are a miss, so far. On screen they’re actors in chrome masks with calm, faintly bored voices. The NYPD’s Knightscope K5 spent a few months in the Times Square subway station from late 2023. It weighed around 400 pounds, couldn’t climb stairs, needed officers assigned to chaperone it, and some passengers wanted to rough it up. By February 2024 it had been retired to an empty shop unit. The robots matter less than what they’re told to do at the end, though. THX gets away only because central command calls off the chase once catching him would cost more than his allocated budget. He isn’t spared out of mercy, and he doesn’t win. He becomes a bad line in a spreadsheet, which is the film’s sharpest idea and the one closest to the warehouse.

Then there’s OMM. On his way home, THX steps into a booth with a portrait of a Christ-like figure, pours out his worries, and gets soothing stock phrases back. When he finally says “I think I’m dying”, the voice asks, “Could you be more... specific?” In 1971 that was satire about religion turned into a vending machine. In October 2025 OpenAI estimated that around 0.15% of ChatGPT’s weekly users have conversations containing explicit signs of suicidal planning, which at 800 million weekly users is about 1.2 million people a week. The company says the model is trained to point those people towards crisis lines, and as ABC7 reported the figures, OpenAI admits that doesn’t happen 9% of the time. OMM at least gave everyone the same blessing. Lucas pictured the confessor as a state church, and we got it as a consumer product, which lawmakers have only just started trying to stop companies selling as therapy. Of everything in the film, this came closest.

The pattern holds wherever it lands. The cameras and the confessor turned up as things we buy, and the quotas turned up as an employer’s rather than a government’s. Where the film needed the state itself to do the forcing, it mostly missed. Our future didn’t ban sex or grow babies in jars, and it went the other way on looking identical. The consumption gag holds up because it was already voluntary in 1971: THX buys bright plastic blocks and drops them straight into a slot called the consumer, and I have a drawer of chargers that would like a word.

Penelope Houston, writing in the Monthly Film Bulletin, called its future “rather a pile-up of predictability”. She meant the ideas were secondhand, and they were; Orwell had most of them first. Lucas took a different lesson from the flop. Years later he said THX had been “a very pessimistic film, saying how awful things were”, and that to change anything “you have to make an optimistic movie that gives people hope”. Six years after THX 1138 he released Star Wars.

On Tuesday OpenAI posted 722 manuscripts to GitHub, grouped into 372 problem families, all produced by a model nobody outside the company can use. According to TechSpot, the model was handed about 4,000 problems, so what we’re seeing is the fraction that came out well enough to publish. Some of it touches the Riemann hypothesis and two other Millennium Prize problems, though OpenAI only claims progress on those, not solutions.

Good or bad depends on which half you mean. The mathematics is probably good, much of it. Back in May the unit-distance disproof held up under outside checking and carried a genuinely new idea. This time OpenAI says around 300 of the main results have been formalised in Lean, the proof assistant that checks every logical step mechanically, and Rutgers’ Alex Kontorovich said of the Riemann result that if a human had done it, it would be an instant Fields Medal. Daniel Litt passed on to Fortune a collaborator’s line about having crawled their whole life and now being able to fly. I don’t doubt that’s how it feels from inside.

The release is the bad half, and it’s why I wouldn’t trust the batch yet. Fortune reports roughly three hours of computing time per solution. A long technical paper can take human referees years. Within days OpenAI had retracted three papers over an elementary error and amended several others, which tells me the checking started after publication, not before. Lean doesn’t close that gap on its own, either. A paper covered by TechCrunch found at least two places where the Lean code for OpenAI’s Navier–Stokes result didn’t match the written proof. Lean will confirm that you proved something. It can’t tell you it’s the thing you said you proved.

An advisory group of mathematicians asked labs to stop testing hard problems on proprietary models; OpenAI declined. The group asked for the model’s reasoning, which is where anyone would learn how a result was found, and TechCrunch counts ten manuscripts out of more than 700 that include it. A company spokesperson also told Scientific American that many of the results aren’t yet understood by OpenAI’s own mathematicians. So the company published proofs it hadn’t absorbed, from a system nobody else can inspect, and handed the reading to the rest of the field for nothing. Harvard’s Melanie Wood put the situation exactly: there’s no human understanding at the point of release, “and now the work begins.” That work is real, slow and unpaid, and OpenAI got to announce the results before any of it was done.

Peter Lindbergh photographed Laetitia Herrera on a stone ledge for Armani’s autumn/winter 1994 campaign, and this page ran in American Vogue that September. She sits with her legs crossed and both hands resting on one knee, in a collarless jacket piped along its edges, a fine ribbed top and knitted trousers so soft and loose they could pass for something you’d sleep in. Her hair is scraped straight back, and the background has dissolved into a sepia haze that might be sea or might just be weather.

The early eighties asked the clothes to do far more shouting. Tad Friend, in Vogue’s March 1992 issue, describes how at the end of the seventies Armani “extended and padded the shoulders to create the wedge-shaped power suit”, the silhouette most people still picture when they hear his name. Aldo Fallai shot the 1981 campaigns, and that autumn’s collection went further still, borrowing from ō-yoroi, the ceremonial armour of the samurai, according to Armani’s own archive. By the middle of the decade he’d already dropped the power suit for what Friend calls “the looser, roomier sack suit”, so the softer line was hardly new by 1994. The jacket on Herrera still has a shoulder, a padded one, but it’s rounded off and slopes into the sleeve instead of squaring away from her neck. Armani’s own line on it: “The eighties shoulder was a woman’s manager. Now she doesn’t need to tell anybody what she is. She is.”

The bigger change is in how a look got dressed for the camera, and Armani told Friend this too. Ten years earlier, he said, a kimono cardigan would have come with “a geometric hat, a geometric piece of jewelry, to bring it overboard so people would pay attention. Now I almost want to go unnoticed.” Herrera’s page is that sentence turned into a photograph. No hat, no earrings, no necklace, nothing on her wrists. The knitwear on her legs pulls the tailoring down towards something like lounging, and the haze behind her refuses to tell you where she is.

The same interview has Armani saying that “with the Berlin Wall down, it would be offensive to make clothes that are screaming with luxury”. Along the bottom of this page runs Madison Avenue, Rodeo Drive, Newbury Street in Boston, Worth Avenue in Palm Beach, East Oak Street in Chicago, and The Americana at Manhasset out on Long Island. Aldo Fallai’s spring 1989 page for the house had listed two shops. I don’t read that as hypocrisy. A look that refuses to shout is easier to sell in six places than one that only makes sense on Madison Avenue, and the restraint may well have been part of how the list grew.

Tonight I switched Claude Code to Fable 5.1 and asked it, with no web search, whether it knew Tibo, the reset guy. It did. It named Thibault Sottiaux at OpenAI, explained the running joke about him resetting Codex usage limits, and admitted it couldn’t say where it had learned any of this. According to a post doing the rounds on X, that answer means I’d been quietly handed Fable 5.5, because 5.1 supposedly wouldn’t know. The first reply underneath says 5.1 knows him perfectly well.

I’m siding with the reply. Anthropic lists the same June 2026 cutoff for all its current 5.x models, and BitsMinds couldn’t establish when the nickname caught on, so a right answer can’t tell the two models apart.

My hunch is that something is being tested anyway, mostly because the last release went this way. On 18 August an account called leo reported a Fable 5 successor running on some Claude accounts, and Fable 5.1 shipped fourteen days later. The date going round now is tomorrow, Tuesday 6 October, from a single post by an account with no earlier hits anyone could find. Tuesday is the safe guess regardless: Fable 5 and Fable 5.1 both shipped on one. An older thread put Haiku 5.5 first with Fable a week behind, and Haiku, promised since Opus 5.5 launched, still hasn’t appeared. My guess is that tomorrow’s Tuesday belongs to Haiku, which puts my money on Tuesday 13 October for Fable.

Page 281 of the April 1988 Vogue gives Yasmin Le Bon and her roses the whole frame and almost nothing else. She has her face in the bunch, eyes shut, both hands wrapped round the stems, and she’s dressed in the same red against a brown dark that swallows everything behind her shoulder. The photograph sits in a white border notched down both sides like the edge of a film strip. Eddy Kohli’s credit runs up the right margin beside the art director, Nando Miglio, and up the left sits the address of Byblos USA at 650 Fifth Avenue, with a phone number printed so small it reads more like a watermark than an invitation to ring. Underneath, the name runs in hollow, rounded outline letters that look drawn with a single pen stroke.

It’s an odd page for Byblos, a label known for colour and plenty of it. The Girombelli brothers of the Genny group started it in 1973, and from 1981 its clothes came from Alan Cleaver and Keith Varty, two designers hired straight out of London’s Royal College of Art. The Fashion Encyclopedia credits the pair with “market-acute colorful palettes” and a relaxed, resort-going informality. Here one red has to do everything. The dress is a single sheer piece of it, bunched into a collar that slides off one shoulder, and the picture treats it as a setting for the flowers more than as something you’d go and buy.

Nor was the film-strip border unique to Byblos that year. Peter Lindbergh was photographing Le Bon for Loewe from autumn/winter 1987, and those pages keep the ragged film edge and sprocket holes too, almost always in black and white. Put the two side by side and it’s the same device used for opposite ends. Lindbergh’s edges make an advert look like a contact sheet somebody forgot to tidy. Kohli’s are cut as clean as a stencil, around a picture that couldn’t be more finished.

In 1986 Sebastião Salgado photographed the Serra Pelada gold mine in northern Brazil, an open pit so crowded with men that the pictures look like a Bible illustration. Two years later Godfrey Reggio opened Powaqqatsi on the same pit. The Harvard Film Archive describes those shots as “hundreds of men working up and down the steep walls” of the mine, and says the men are “beautiful to watch, often reminiscent of classic statuary.” It’s a fair description. It’s also the whole problem, stated by an admirer without noticing.

Powaqqatsi came out in 1988 as the sequel to Koyaanisqatsi, with no dialogue and a Philip Glass score carrying almost all of the meaning. Where the first film sped up American cities, this one slowed down the developing world: labourers, markets, crowded trains, faces held in slow motion while the music swells. The composer’s own site sells it as a celebration of “the delicate beauty in the eyes of an Indian child, the richness of a tapestry woven in Kathmandu.” The child has eyes but no name, and nobody in the film has a voice, because the film has no voices at all. Glass speaks for everyone.

The title makes this stranger. According to Glass’s page on the film, powaqa refers to “a negative sorcerer who lives at the expense of others,” and the coined word describes a way of life “that consumes the life forces of other beings.” Reggio has said the target was the northern hemisphere “consuming” the lives of people in the south. Then he took a crew south, filmed those people at work, cut the footage in the north and sold it to northern arthouse audiences as a transcendent night out. I’m not sure he missed the irony. He may have meant the viewer to feel implicated, and the title is friction of a kind, if you’ve read the glossary. On screen there’s much less of it; the music is too lovely, the slow motion too kind. You leave feeling moved, which is a comfortable place to leave from.

London was doing a cruder version in print. Arena and the style monthlies around it set expensive designer clothes against destitution, sometimes real, sometimes dressed up for the afternoon, until it stopped being a shoot and became a register, a way of making a jacket look like it had lived. The trick depended on the reader never meeting the backdrop. From an office in Soho a peeling wall reads as authenticity; to the person living behind it, it’s damp and a landlord who won’t answer the phone. The magazine only ever showed you the first version, and the clothes borrowed their seriousness from a place they’d never have to stay.

By the mid-nineties the look had moved off the backdrop and onto the body. The sociologist Karen Bettez Halnon, writing about what she named Poor Chic, notes that Calvin Klein’s heroin chic campaign for cK Be in 1996 ran in Vogue, Elle, Marie Claire and Arena, all pallor and scratches and starved faces. Her sharpest point is about the promise underneath: the reader could travel “to and through radical superficial otherness” and come out with their conventional identity intact. That’s the deal Powaqqatsi offered too. Halnon also quotes Johnny Rotten’s 1977 line about a holiday in other people’s misery, which could stand as the caption for all of it.

The two mechanisms aren’t quite the same, and the difference matters. The cK Be models were paid professionals wearing hardship as a costume, and they could take it off after the shoot. The men on the ladders at Serra Pelada weren’t wearing anything. They didn’t get a credit, and whoever lived in the streets behind an Arena shoot got, at most, a crew in the way for an afternoon. Their lives became texture, which is a specific kind of use: you don’t need the person, just the surface they’ve worn into things. In both cases the viewers were comfortable enough to find that beautiful, and they took the texture home and left the hardship where it was.

At the time it read as sophistication. You were supposed to be the kind of person who could look at poverty without flinching and see form in it. People were asking the obvious questions out loud, though. In 1991 Ingrid Sischy took Salgado apart in The New Yorker, the same Salgado whose Serra Pelada pictures had made him famous: “To aestheticize tragedy is the fastest way to anesthetize the feelings of those who are witnessing it.” Beautification, she argued, produced pictures that “ultimately reinforce our passivity.” Susan Sontag later called him “a photographer who specializes in world misery.” The question existed. It just lost, for a long time, to the people selling the pictures.

It didn’t stop when the decade did, either. In 2002 Zoe Williams wrote in the Guardian that a corrugated iron shack in Soweto and a homeless woman in London had both turned up in the style press within weeks of each other, “not as reportage but as subjects for fashion shoots.” Elle Decoration introduced its Soweto story with “Stricken by apartheid, Soweto’s townships were once a feared part of Johannesburg. Now they’re a source of dynamic design.” Williams did the sensible thing and laughed at it. We have learned, since, to ask who gets to look, who gets looked at, and who benefits. I’m less sure we ask it as readily about whatever’s on the shelves this season as we do about something from 1988.

I still think Powaqqatsi is beautiful, and the score still does what Glass wanted it to do to me. I watch the opening differently now, though, wondering whether anyone ever showed those men the film, while they go on climbing in slow motion every time somebody presses play.

“Body by Roxanne,” says page 98 of the January 1986 Vogue, in white serif type laid straight across Paulina Porizkova’s collarbone. It’s a cheeky credit to hand out. By then she’d fronted the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue two years running, only the second model to manage it, and she was still just twenty. The page never names her, but fans on The Fashion Spot file a Roxanne page from the January 1985 Vogue under her name too, so this looks like her second season with the label. A decade later ESCADA would lean on that same face far harder.

Of course the body helps, but what Roxanne is actually selling is fit. The swimwear label cut its suits in proportioned B, C and D bra sizes, a system it says it has offered since 1955, and the copy leans on that: “Soft, but controlled,” then a suit that “fits like a blouson should but seldom does.” Hence the top, a loose black bandeau bloused over the waist like a jacket, with a magenta sash knotted at the hip to hide the join. It’s an enormous amount of fabric for a swimsuit, and all of it is there to smooth and cover rather than to swim in. The control comes from DuPont’s Antron nylon and Lycra, whose mark sits in the bottom corner, the same fibre that turns up a few years later on a Mary Jane Marcasiano page, trademark symbol and all. A chiffon scarf in the same pink wraps her head and trails down one arm to a silver cuff, the only part of the outfit with nothing to hold in.

For all the styling, she stands like a fit model. Arms hang straight, fingers loosely curled against her thighs, hips square to the camera, chin level with the lens. It’s the posture of a woman at a fitting waiting for someone to check the seams, which suits an advert whose whole argument is that the thing fits.

Hegel’s new A200 is a plain black box with two knobs and a small display, and it’s almost certainly the next thing I buy. It only comes in black for now, which I’d have picked anyway. What sold me is what Hegel left out. The A200 shares its 150-watt amplifier with the new H200, but where the H200 adds streaming and a DAC, the A200 has no converter, no network card and no digital inputs at all.

My rack doesn’t need any of that. The Cambridge Audio CXN100 already handles everything upstream: streaming, the 2,000-odd ripped CDs, and its own ESS ES9028Q2M converter. The H200 would mean paying for a second streamer and a second DAC, then leaving one of each switched off. I went back and forth on external DACs at the start of the year, and the conclusion still holds for me: pick the converter you like and don’t bury another one inside the amplifier.

The CXN100 has balanced XLR outputs and the A200 has two pairs of balanced XLR inputs, so the whole connection is one short balanced run. The phono stage borrowed from Hegel’s V10, the variable output for a subwoofer and the headphone socket are, for now, hardware I’d pay for and ignore, which is the H200’s sin on a smaller scale. At least none of it will ever ask me to install a firmware update.

ATC rates the SCM11 at 85dB sensitivity and recommends 75 to 300 watts. The Exposure 2510 I wrote about in February makes 75, the very bottom of that range. It never actually ran out of headroom, and I rarely took the volume past halfway, yet the combination always sounded as if it were leaning into the load rather than sitting back from it. That’s an impression, not a measurement, and it’s carrying most of the case for more power. The A200 doubles the rated power into 8 ohms, which is only about 3dB, margin rather than transformation. Hegel’s quoted damping factor above 4,000 I’d take with some suspicion, since the cable and the SCM11’s own crossover dilute it long before it reaches the drive unit.

The A200 is due in late October at £2,750. ATC describes the SCM11’s impedance curve as flat and easy on amplifiers, so the pairing shouldn’t be a fight. My doubt runs the other way. Back in February I wrote that the SCM11 has a forensic streak that could sound lean or clinical with the wrong amplifier, and the Exposure’s warmth always covered for that. A grippier amplifier might strip the cover away. So I want to hear the CXN100 feeding the A200 over XLR into my own speakers, playing my own records, before any money moves.

Four women come at the camera in cream knitwear and white tights, three of them laughing and one smiling at the floor, and the only words anywhere are two names. SAKS FIFTH AVENUE sits small in the bottom corner, the store’s credit line, while DANA BUCHMAN gets the big serif capitals under four grey squares, which looks backwards until you remember who was famous in October 1987. Buchman’s first collection had only just reached the shops, and in August the Los Angeles Times had promised hers was “a name you’ll hear more often come September,” when the clothes arrived and a national advertising campaign rolled out with them. The label belonged to Liz Claiborne, and it was the company’s first attempt to sell anything under a name other than its own, so the page works hard to make that name stick.

Buchman, then 35, had spent five years designing knitwear at Claiborne after stints at Christian Dior and Ellen Tracy, and it shows. The Times described sweaters, shirts, pants and skirts “in winter white”, with “many long sweater sets over skirts or pants” at $96 to $296, and that’s the picture almost exactly: a V-neck long enough to pass for a dress with a cardigan slung over its shoulders, a checkerboard cardigan knitted tone on tone over a white shirt, a cable turtleneck with the sleeves shoved up, all in creams I couldn’t tell apart. Famke Janssen is on the left, then Suzanne Lanza, then Gail Elliott in the cable knit. Janssen had moved to America from the Netherlands three years before and signed with Elite; the acting came later.

For all that type, my eye goes first to the woman on the right, with her cropped hair, round glasses and one hand in her pocket. She’s in the plainest piece in the picture and looks the least like a model, because she isn’t one. It’s Buchman herself, the “gamin looks” the Times had noted, standing right beside her own name in the biggest letters on the page.

The Times turned out to be right. By the mid-nineties Dana Buchman was one of the leading bridge labels, the price tier Escada’s Laurel took care to place itself just above, and Buchman later said of the launch, “Liz gave me the keys and told me to go for it.” In 2008 she gave up the upscale line to design for Kohl’s, which bought the brand outright in 2011 and dropped it in 2020.