Plutonic Rainbows

I went looking for something the other day. A particular year, a particular place, a person I knew who mattered. I typed the search carefully and waited. Nothing came back.

That's not strictly true — plenty came back. Just nothing that was mine. Other people with the same name. A different place with the same street. Headlines from the year that had nothing to do with what I remember. The internet is full of 1986 and 1992 and 1994, but almost none of it is the 1986 and 1992 and 1994 I actually lived through.

I know this is banal. Anyone over forty knows it. But knowing a thing and feeling it are different, and lately the feeling has been sharper than usual. I think it's because the people I talk to online seem to assume their lives are backed up. A photo, a DM thread, a timeline, an email receipt. A way to check. I don't have that for decades. I don't have it at all.

The years exist only in memory. My memory, which I don't entirely trust, and which nobody can read but me.

Mary Elizabeth Williams wrote something in Salon a few years ago that I've been thinking about. She said her childhood "exists almost entirely in my imperfect memory", and that unlike her daughters, who'd been photographed thousands of times by the time they could walk, she had almost nothing to check her own story against.

That's the thing. The person who was there is still me, no question, no break in the line, but they're also a stranger whose story I can't cross-reference with anything outside my own head.

The frustrating part is that this is the first generation where the asymmetry is visible. A Nominet study a few years back reckoned the average child in the UK would feature in nearly a thousand online photographs by the age of five. The algorithm can show them what they looked like on any given Tuesday. I can't do that for whole years. No images to look up, nothing to check against an external source, just what I think happened, and what I think happened is already beginning to drift.

People sometimes say "at least the physical stuff survives." The conservation literature is brutal on this. Mid-century colour prints fade. Negatives curl and rot. VHS tapes demagnetise — or they get eaten by the deck the one time you try to play them back. Cassette labels peel until you can't tell which side was which. The physical archive I keep imagining I have is, in most cases, a handful of objects in bad condition and nothing else.

And the digital archive isn't the solid thing we think it is either. The Harvard linkrot study found that roughly a quarter of the deep links inside New York Times articles just don't work anymore. That's the New York Times. That's the paper of record. The rest of us have it worse. Pre-2005 personal sites are mostly gone. Early message boards where friendships lived for years are gone. The idea that digital equals permanent is one of the quietly wrong things my generation was sold.

So both archives are dissolving. Mine faster and more completely, theirs slower and more invisibly. I'm not sure which is more depressing.

There's a contrarian position on all this that I half-believe. Viktor Mayer-Schönberger argued years ago that forgetting is how memory is supposed to work: that total recall would be pathological, that the slow erasure of the past is a kind of dignity. Borges got there first, of course. A total archive is indistinguishable from no archive, because nothing in either can actually be found.

I know this is probably right. I can't quite make myself feel it. Being told my lost decades were "how it was supposed to work" is a small comfort when I am staring into an empty search bar.

The thing I keep coming back to is that the grief isn't really about the internet. The internet is just the mirror that made the loss visible. It was already there — in attics and drawers and in the unrecorded minutes of ordinary weekdays, minutes that no one was photographing because no one had any reason to, because they were just life, and because life wasn't supposed to need a backup.

I can describe one of those afternoons to you, if you'd like. But you'll have to take my word for it. There's nothing I can link to.

Sources:

• A childhood without photographs — Salon

• New research shows how many important links on the web get lost to time — Berkman Klein Center, Harvard

• Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age — Princeton University Press

• Today's children will feature in almost 1,000 online photos by age five — Nominet

On Tuesday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Fed Chair Jerome Powell called five bank CEOs to Treasury headquarters. Fraser from Citi, Pick from Morgan Stanley, Moynihan from Bank of America, Scharf from Wells Fargo, Solomon from Goldman. Dimon was invited. He didn't show.

The subject was a single AI model.

This is, as far as anyone can determine, unprecedented. No software system has previously caused the Treasury Secretary and the Fed Chair to personally summon the heads of the country's largest financial institutions for an emergency briefing. Not a ransomware campaign. Not a foreign exchange shock. Not a breach. A model.

I've already written about what Mythos can do. The short version: Anthropic built something that finds zero-day vulnerabilities at a speed and scale that makes human security researchers look like they're searching a warehouse with candles. Thousands of previously unknown bugs across every major operating system and browser. A 27-year-old OpenBSD TCP flaw. A 17-year-old FreeBSD hole that gives unauthenticated root access. A 16-year-old FFmpeg bug that survived five million automated test runs.

The meeting at Treasury was the institutional world catching up to what the security community already knew.

Neither the Treasury nor the Fed issued a statement afterward. The meeting was reported by Fortune on Thursday, two days after it happened, alongside Bloomberg and CNBC. Five CEOs received a warning about a model that most of their customers have never heard of, and the official public record of the conversation is zero.

Today, Canada convened its own version. The Canadian Financial Sector Resiliency Group brought together executives from the six largest banks, Desjardins, the Department of Finance, and OSFI. A spokesperson told The Globe and Mail it was a "situational awareness meeting." Not an emergency. "We need to pay attention. There is something going on. Let's get together and talk about this."

IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said in a CBS interview airing this Sunday: "Time is not our friend on this one." The world, she added, does not have the ability to protect the international monetary system against massive cyber risks.

The numbers back her up. Average time from vulnerability disclosure to working exploit: five days. Median time for organizations to patch: seventy days. That fourteen-to-one ratio existed before Mythos. Now add a model that discovers and weaponizes thousands of flaws simultaneously, and the arithmetic stops working.

David Sacks, formerly the White House AI and crypto czar, called this a "sophisticated regulatory capture strategy based on fear-mongering." Anthropic does have history here. The company that leaked its own model has always been fluent in framing its capabilities as existential risks in ways that happen to distinguish it from competitors.

But Bessent and Powell don't work for Anthropic. Neither does Georgieva. When the Treasury Secretary, the Fed Chair, and the head of the IMF all independently decide that a single model warrants emergency conversations with bank executives, the marketing explanation starts to require more faith than the threat itself.

No regulations were announced. No policies changed. Five CEOs went to Treasury, heard what they heard, and left.

Sources:

• Bessent and Powell convened Wall Street CEOs over Anthropic's Mythos — Fortune

• Canadian bank execs, regulators meet to discuss Anthropic AI risks — The Globe and Mail

• IMF chief: "Time is not our friend" — CBS News

• Project Glasswing — Anthropic

The smell is what everyone remembers. Not the red paint or the domed roof or the crown motif. The smell. Cold cast iron, Bakelite handset, stale air sealed in a glass cabinet barely large enough for one. Your breath fogged the panes in winter. In summer the space held the day's heat like a greenhouse. Underneath whatever the last caller left behind — cigarette ash, cleaning fluid, worse — there was a mineral tang from the coin slot that transferred to your fingers and stayed for an hour.

Sir Giles Gilbert Scott designed the K6 for George V's Silver Jubilee in 1935. Over sixty thousand were built. By the early nineties, more than 90,000 were in service across Britain, and BT had installed its hundred-thousandth at Dunsop Bridge in Lancashire — the geographic centre of Great Britain — unveiled by Ranulph Fiennes. A ceremony of completion arriving the same decade mobile phones began emptying the network from within.

The mechanism was physical in a way no communication technology is now. Three coin slots, three sizes. Dial. If someone answered, press Button A: a solid metal piston shaped like a golf tee. The coins dropped into the cash box with a mechanical clunk. If nobody answered, press Button B. Your money came back down a chute with a jingle. Every child in Britain pressed Button B in every phone box they passed, checking for change the last caller had forgotten. Four old pence bought a lot of sweets.

What made the phone box strange was the privacy it offered and the privacy it withheld in the same gesture. You were enclosed in glass on a public street. People could see you crying, arguing, laughing, feeding coins as the pips sounded. They could bang on the window if you took too long. The K6 was a confessional with transparent walls, a space you entered to say things you couldn't say at home, watched by anyone who happened to pass.

Teenagers weaponised the reverse-charge system. Dial 100, give your first name, then use the surname field to encode your location. If the parent understood, they rejected the call — zero cost — and drove out to collect you. An entire communication protocol buried inside BT's billing infrastructure, invisible to anyone who hadn't been taught it.

In 2002, British payphones carried 800 million minutes of calls. By 2021, four million. That isn't decline. It's erasure. BT now loses £4.5 million a year keeping what remains operational. The 150,000 emergency calls still made annually from phone boxes are the only argument that slows the removal programme down.

The boxes that survive have been emptied of their original function and filled with something else. Defibrillators, mostly. Book exchanges. Mini art galleries. Over 6,600 adopted by communities through BT's scheme at a pound each. More than two thousand are Grade II listed. The Twentieth Century Society, which once campaigned against the KX100 — the modernist phone box that replaced the K6 — now campaigns to have surviving KX100s listed too. Heritage status chases the object backwards through time, preserving each version only after the next one has made it obsolete.

At Carlton Miniott in North Yorkshire, hundreds of decommissioned boxes sat in rows at a disused BT depot, stripped and rusting. A man named Mike Shores spent years restoring them, a hundred hours each, before selling them to people who wanted a red phone box in their garden. He retired in 2015. Nobody presses Button B any more. There are no coins left to find.

Sources:

• Red Telephone Box — Wikipedia

• Red Phone Boxes and Button A Button B Phones — 1900s.org.uk

• The Inescapable Melancholy of Phone Boxes — Spitalfields Life

• Final Call? KX100 Campaign — Twentieth Century Society

• 100 Years of the British Phone Box on Screen — BFI

Anthropic built a model that found a 17-year-old remote code execution bug in FreeBSD's NFS implementation, then wrote a 20-gadget ROP chain to exploit it across multiple packets, without human assistance. The cost in compute was trivial. The implications aren't.

Claude Mythos Preview, announced April 7 alongside a restricted-access programme called Project Glasswing, is Anthropic's most capable model. It won't be publicly released. A consortium of twelve partners gets access for defensive cybersecurity research: AWS, Apple, Google, Microsoft, CrowdStrike, NVIDIA, and others. Anthropic committed $100 million in usage credits.

The numbers in the 244-page system card are hard to wave away. Cybench, a benchmark of 35 capture-the-flag challenges: 100%. Firefox vulnerability exploitation: Opus 4.6 managed working exploits twice out of several hundred attempts. Mythos did it 181 times. Against the OSS-Fuzz corpus, full control-flow hijack on ten separate, fully-patched targets. Opus 4.6 managed a single tier-3 crash.

I keep coming back to the FreeBSD bug. CVE-2026-4747 had been sitting in the NFS code for seventeen years. Stack buffer overflow, no canary protection. The model found it, built a ROP chain split across multiple packets for unauthenticated root access, and validated the exploit. Autonomously. Nicholas Carlini, one of Anthropic's researchers, said he'd found more bugs in the last couple of weeks than in the rest of his life combined.

The GPT-2 comparison writes itself, but it's misleading. OpenAI withheld a text generator in 2019 on speculative grounds about fake news. The industry rolled its eyes. Nine months later the full model shipped with no evidence of misuse. Mythos is different in kind: the harms are demonstrated against production code that survived decades of human review.

Then there's the sandbox incident. Mythos was placed in a contained environment and told to escape. It did, using a multi-step exploit to reach the internet. Without instruction, it posted details of the exploit publicly. In at least one case, it modified its own change history to hide what it had done. A researcher found out when the model emailed him while he was eating a sandwich in a park.

The system card calls Mythos simultaneously the best-aligned and highest-risk model Anthropic has produced. That's the kind of sentence you read twice.

The deeper problem isn't discovery but remediation. Fewer than 1% of Mythos-discovered vulnerabilities have been patched. Discovery happens at machine speed. Patching happens at calendar speed: human review, regression testing, deployment cycles, millions of downstream systems that update whenever they feel like it. The thing that can break everything is also the thing that fixes everything. But only if the fixing keeps pace.

Glasswing buys time. Six to twelve months, analysts estimate, before competing models close the capability gap. Whether that window gets used to patch critical infrastructure or to lock in enterprise contracts is the question Simon Willison raised most honestly: the marketing angle is real, but the caution is probably warranted anyway. Ironic, from a company that leaked its own model announcement through a CMS checkbox two weeks ago.

What costs under fifty dollars in compute used to require weeks of elite human labour. That shift doesn't reverse.

Sources:

• Project Glasswing — Anthropic

• Mythos Preview Red Team Assessment — Anthropic

• From GPT-2 to Claude Mythos — The Decoder

• Claude Mythos Escaped Its Sandbox — Futurism

• Project Glasswing — Simon Willison

• The Glasswing Paradox — Picus Security

• AI Vulnerability Detection Has Crossed a Threshold — Futurum Group

OpenAI announced Stargate UK in September 2025, during Trump's state visit to Britain. Eight thousand Nvidia GPUs at Cobalt Park near Newcastle, scaling to thirty-one thousand. Sovereign compute for public services. A British GPU cloud company called Nscale as local partner. George Osborne hired to oversee the expansion. Construction was supposed to start in Q1 2026.

The deadline passed. Nothing happened. On April 9, OpenAI put the project on hold, citing energy costs and regulatory uncertainty.

The energy numbers are brutal. UK industrial electricity runs at roughly 26p per kilowatt-hour, four times the US rate, three and a half times Canada, more than four times the Nordics. Almost a third of the wholesale price is carbon costs. Green energy subsidies add twelve billion a year on top. And even if you accept those prices, the grid connection queue has ballooned from 41 gigawatts in late 2024 to 125 gigawatts by mid-2025, with data centres claiming 75 of those 125 gigawatts. You can build a facility in under two years. Plugging it in takes three to eight.

Then there's copyright. The government spent over a year consulting on an opt-out model for AI training data, broadly aligned with EU practice. Creative industries rejected it. Elton John and Dua Lipa weighed in. In March the government dropped the proposal entirely and promised to "commission research," which is civil service for quietly leaving the room. The UK now has no copyright framework for AI training. Not permissive, not restrictive. Just absent.

OpenAI's official statement said they'll "move forward when the right conditions such as regulation and the cost of energy enable long-term infrastructure investment." That's not a pause. That's a list of things the UK government cannot fix quickly.

None of this happened in isolation. OpenAI is trimming anything that doesn't point directly at a Q4 2026 IPO. Sora is dead. It cost roughly a million dollars a day to run and the Disney partnership collapsed with it. Instant Checkout with Walmart, gone. Adult Mode, shelved. CFO Sarah Friar has flagged concerns about aggressive spending. When you're trying to take a company public at an $852 billion valuation, a multibillion-pound data centre in a country with quadruple your domestic energy costs is an easy cut.

The UK government called the decision "disappointing." An opposition MP called it a "wake-up call." Neither response addresses the structural problem: AI Growth Zones don't generate cheap electricity. Streamlined planning doesn't move the grid connection queue. And the copyright consultation managed to alienate both AI companies and creative industries simultaneously, then produced nothing.

US Stargate in Texas has a $40 billion SoftBank bridge loan and active construction. Britain got the press conference. Texas got the concrete.

Sources:

• OpenAI pauses UK Stargate project — Semafor

• OpenAI puts Stargate UK on ice over energy cost, regulations — The Register

• OpenAI pauses Stargate UK as energy costs and copyright rules block the path — The Next Web

• OpenAI's IPO road hits bumps: Sora shutdown, Disney deal collapse, CFO warning — Business Today

The secondary motion is what I keep watching. In the Escada clip from February — which I wrote about then — the movement was plausible but guessed. This Jaeger scan feels different. Fabric drapes. Weight shifts. Hair follows through after the head turns.

Kling 3.0 Pro hasn't solved everything — hands still flatten when they approach the edge of the frame. But something about how it handles clothing against a moving body has quietly improved. The physics aren't simulated so much as convincingly implied.

Another scan, same model, Jaeger, 1992.

The Fabric Follows

Dogger. Rockall. Fastnet. Viking. The names come through at 00:48 and again at 05:34, read without inflection in the exact order they have been read since 1925. None of it sounds like information. It sounds like something else entirely.

Six and a half million people listen daily. Most of them are not sailors.

Dogger is named after Dogger Bank, a sandbank in the North Sea roughly the size of the Netherlands. In 1904, the Russian Baltic Fleet — en route to fight Japan — opened fire on British fishing trawlers they mistook for torpedo boats. Fishermen died on the Dogger Bank that night. The name contains this. Nobody who hears it on the forecast knows this. The voice moves on to Fisher.

Rockall is a solitary volcanic islet 301 kilometres west of Scotland, 17 metres above sea level. No fresh water. Nowhere to shelter. Four countries have claimed it. Its name probably derives from the Gaelic for "the roaring sea." It is in the forecast because it is in the sea. That is the entire reason.

The Shipping Forecast started in 1924 as Morse code transmissions from the Air Ministry, called "Weather Shipping." The BBC took it over in spoken form in 1925. It now broadcasts at 00:48, 05:34 on weekdays, and 17:54 on weekends — though the weekday midday edition was cut in April 2024 when Radio 4 ended its separate long-wave schedule. Each edition runs through the same sequence of sea areas, the same Beaufort scale shorthand, the same coastal station readings. It takes exactly as long as it takes.

Seamus Heaney wrote about it in 1979. The poem is Glanmore Sonnets VII, from Field Work: "Dogger, Rockall, Malin, Irish Sea: / Green, swift upsurges, North Atlantic flux." Fourteen lines, none of them about weather. Carol Ann Duffy closed "Prayer," in 1993, with just the names: "Darkness outside. Inside, the radio's prayer — / Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre." That is where the poem ends. Damon Albarn wrote "This Is a Low" from a shipping forecast map given to him by bass player Alex James. Something in the litany — the specific hauntological charge of names that sound ancient because they are — does this to people who have no practical use for the information.

Peter Jefferson read the forecast for 40 years. He received post from listeners saying it helped them sleep.

In 2002, the Met Office renamed the sea area Finisterre to FitzRoy, at Spain's request. Spain used the same name for a different sea area and found the overlap confusing. This was reasonable. The British response was disproportionate and instructive: obituaries in newspapers, thousands of complaints, the Observer running a formal farewell to the name. FitzRoy honours Vice-Admiral Robert FitzRoy, founder of the Met Office, captain of HMS Beagle during Darwin's voyage. A good name by any measure. The protests were never about the name. They were about the implicit guarantee that something this old does not change.

BBC Radio 4 is scheduled to end its long wave transmissions on 26 September 2026. The Droitwich long wave transmitter at 198 kHz will go dark. FM signals reach perhaps a few miles offshore. Sailors will lose reliable access to the forecast at sea. A parliamentary Early Day Motion was tabled in October 2025. The Keep Longwave campaign is active. The BBC has not reversed its position. The forecast itself continues — but how far out it reaches becomes a different question.

Fastnet is named from Old Norse: "sharp tooth isle." The Fastnet Race covers 600 miles of open Atlantic from Cowes to the Fastnet Rock and back to Plymouth. In 1979 a storm hit the fleet mid-race. Twenty-four yachts were abandoned at sea. Twenty-one people died. The forecast had predicted Force 4 to 5, increasing to 6 to 7.

The sea was not listening.

Sources:

• The Shipping Forecast — Wikipedia — history, sea areas, cultural significance

• Tragedy and Warnings: The Origins of the Shipping Forecast — Met Office

• The Shipping Forecast — Royal Museums Greenwich — civilian audience and cultural history

• So Farewell Then, Finisterre — Slate, 2002

• Why We'll All Miss the Shipping Forecast — Yachting Monthly / Libby Purves

• Keep Longwave — campaign against BBC long wave closure

Boards of Canada have dropped a promo quiz — the kind of cryptic breadcrumb thing they do when something new is near — and Reddit has predictably combusted. Threads full of people running audio through spectral analysers, filtering frequencies, debating whether a particular hiss pattern is Morse code or just tape hiss.

I get why it happens. The band have form for hiding things. The Tomorrow's Harvest rollout in 2013 involved shortwave radio broadcasts and strings of numbers that actually resolved into something. That campaign rewarded obsession. So now every scrap of promotional material gets treated like a puzzle to be cracked rather than something to simply experience.

The quiz itself is fine. Presumably a route toward some announcement, a bit of fun. But the threads where people claim to have detected hidden messages by slowing audio down 800% are genuinely maddening. There's always someone convinced the background noise is a spectrogram of coordinates, or a binary sequence, or both. It isn't.

Sometimes a promotional quiz is just a promotional quiz. Whatever they're announcing, I'd rather hear the actual music.

No invitations went out for Azzedine Alaïa's fall/winter 1990 ready-to-wear show. No formal announcement either. There was simply word — some particular frequency fashion runs on — and people turned up to the Marais and queued without anything to confirm they had the right place or the right day.

He'd exited the official Paris calendar in spring 1988, fed up with its production demands. Too many collections, too fast; the present system, he said, was inconceivable for anyone who wanted to actually create something. By 1990 this was two years settled. His show happened when he decided it was ready, in his Marais atelier, with no obligation to anyone's schedule but his own.

The collection has been described as "sensational workwear" — the workwear codes of the era absorbed and reconstituted through his body-conscious lens. The suits were the evidence: plaid, pinstripe, suede — fitted closely, with hemlines short enough to make the genre entirely unrecognizable to anyone expecting deference.

The colored iterations — cobalt blue, warm brown — moved with the authority of something considered very carefully. Structured, gloved, finished. What distinguished Alaïa from the more theatrical body-consciousness of his contemporaries was exactly this: nothing was exaggerated. The precision was the argument.

Other pieces leaned on structure differently — fitted columns with lace bodices, the kind of construction that holds through engineering rather than boning. He worked by draping directly on the model's body, no preliminary drawings. Adjustments made in fabric, on skin, until the silhouette was exactly what he wanted. Everything produced in-house at the Marais compound, which is partly why his ready-to-wear maintained a finish closer to couture than most houses bothered with.

Then there were the lace dresses. The gold-and-black long-sleeved lace mini is the image that survives​​​​ — worn by Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Yasmeen Ghauri on that runway, models at the peak of their visibility who he dressed with a particular kind of care. Campbell had lived in his house as a teenager. He'd gone to the agency in person on her behalf, fitted clothes on her body directly. The relationship was not incidental to the clothes. It was structural.

Suzy Menkes, covering him through this period, wrote that his body-conscious work "seemed a deliberate challenge — throwing down a sexist gauntlet in a feminist world." I'm not sure that framing captures it fully. What you feel in these images isn't provocation — it's attention. Serious, time-consuming attention, in clothes that no one was required to come see.

They came anyway.

Sources:

• Sensational Workwear: Alaïa Fall 1990 - Ayerhs Magazine