Proxies are important in our society.

By “proxy” I mean a situation where something small and quantifiable happens, and we observe it, and then infer things from it about how to handle a much larger and unpredictable process.

A classic example of this is a job interview. It’s a linear process with a definite end-point. The phases are defined in advance and rarely change along the way. Each candidate moves along their own track in isolation from the others, until they either hit a brick wall or get hired.

Most actual jobs are very different from job interviews – they’re open-ended, there’s a degree of dynamism or unpredictability, different organisational forces are interacting all the time – yet, in general, performance in a job interview is seen as a good proxy for performance in a job.

There are, of course, very valid criticisms of this view, but that’s not really the point of this post so I’ll leave that alone for now.

A driving test is another example of this kind of proxy. If someone can adhere to a checklist of rules and procedures while driving around under observation for 40 minutes, we let them hurtle around for decades in huge steel boxes, entrusting them not only with their own lives but those of everybody around them.

And again, of course, there’s a discussion to be had about the validity of this proxy, but this has to be left alone too.

At the societal rather than individual level, there’s a proxy relationship that inescapably affects us all: elections.

In a typical democracy like the UK, the central idea is that the party that does the better job of fighting an election campaign will also do a better job of what comes after the election, namely running the country (or local council, or city hall, or whatever the election is for). Electoral performance is a proxy for performance once in administration.

This proxy has always been a bit shonky too, like the job interview or the driving test, but recently I’ve been wondering if the gap between electoral and administrative aptitude is actually widening. If so, it’s not good news.

Electioneering involves skills or traits that will come in useful once in power. Coalition-building, making and winning arguments, putting forward plans that can be turned into reality, promises that can be kept; these sorts of things do still play a part in elections, but they feel increasingly ancillary to the main job of fighting an election, which is, of course, waging meme warfare on Facebook through an army of automated sock-puppet accounts.

Maybe we’ve yet to learn that the ability to run disinformation and psy-ops campaigns on Facebook is indeed a reasonable proxy for the ability to administer a council, city or country. But maybe it isn’t? Governments still have a lot of things to do which are not really amenable to deepfaked propaganda, Pepe shitposts and behavioural microtargeting. Hospitals need to be run, tax needs to be collected, roads need to be maintained and so on. These things seem deeply boring compared to the use of deep learning networks to convert placid baby boomers into red-faced white nationalists, but they are and will continue to be part of government for the foreseeable future, and beyond.

Maybe someone deserves a government job because they had a successful run as a far-right misogynist troll on Reddit a few years ago, but maybe they don’t? Maybe the kinds of traits that work in the world of far-right online propaganda won’t work in the field of actual government? My hunch is that they won’t, and the usefulness of election campaigns as a proxy for administrative competence is in a state of decline. At least I don’t have to wait long, or go to any other countries, to find out if my hunch is correct or not.

There is a new movie about Sonic the Hedgehog. It’s called “Sonic the Hedgehog”.

We went to see it today in a place called Malton, in North Yorkshire. The cinema was very unlike the normal multiplex chain type of cinemas we usually go to in London. It’s called the Palace Cinema and is independent and family-run. You can watch this video to learn more about the person who set it up.

When I saw the trailer for the Sonic the Hedgehog movie, I thought, “bad”. Not because of the main character looking weird and like it had human teeth or whatever. I didn’t even see that trailer. The one I saw came out after they fixed the hedgehog and it still made me think, “bad”. They had made the hedgehog look OK as a hedgehog, but as a person? As a person, the hedgehog just came across as a douchebag.

Then when the film came out recently a lot of reviews also came out and most of them said, “bad”. Mark Kermode said it was bad and he didn’t say it was bad because Sonic ruined his childhood or anything like that. It’s safe to say that Mark Kermode did not play Sonic the Hedgehog in his childhood. He just said it was bad because it was bad as a film.

Paul Ford wrote a good tweet about the Sonic the Hedgehog movie.

My wife and I like the phrase “I love that you loved it”. There are many times we’ve been to the cinema with our kids and could have used those words. So when the children today put their foot down and chose the Sonic the Hedgehog movie over Harrison Ford/dog epic “The Call Of The Wild”, we resigned ourselves to leaving the cinema later and saying those words, “I love that you loved it”.

Given all this buildup of expecting a bad movie I was actually surprised to find that I quite enjoyed it.

Sonic isn’t as insufferable as he came across in the trailer. He alternates between being touchingly vulnerable and annoyingly brash, but in this he is a lot like the 7-10 year old children who are probably the core audience for the film.

Jim Carrey’s star turn is a critical part of why I didn’t dislike it. I suspect that, if he hadn’t been in the movie, my views on it would have been along the lines of, “bad”. His character is the villain but, rather than being an underworld criminal boss, he’s actually a military dark-ops type with high-level security clearance. And he’s not gone rogue or anything either, he’s the person the government has brought in to try to catch Sonic. Is this quite a rare thing in children’s films nowadays, for the main baddies to be government representatives? And was it weird that Carrey’s character reminded me a bit of Dominic Cummings?

Now one thing I have in common with Mark Kermode is that I too didn’t spend my childhood playing Sonic the Hedgehog. I was an Amiga/Nintendo person and didn’t own any Sega consoles prior to the Dreamcast. During the Sonic era I only played Super Mario Kart, so there’s no Gen-X childhood nostalgia for me to be protective here. And for the children in the audience who seemed to enjoy themselves, there wasn’t any Sega nostalgia for the film to exploit either.

It’s nice when kids choose to like or dislike things themselves, shoving aside the nostalgia-fuelled guidance of their parents’ generation. And if this film does well despite the critical consensus being that it is bad, it’ll probably because children just decided they liked it, which is fair enough.

A couple of weeks ago I went to see Robert Henke’s CBM 8032 AV performance.

The basic idea is that all audio and video is provided by an array of four Commodore CBM 8032 computers. These are old machines, older than the C64 or Vic 20, and weren’t made with graphics or audio in mind. So, to make these computers generate music and video, they’re running custom software developed by Robert Henke and his team.

The result is something that might have been technically possible when the machines were released in the early 1980s, but would have been a vast undertaking given the rudimentary nature of available software development tools at the time. (I’m assuming here that Henke & co didn’t actually write their custom software on the 8032s – if they did I’d be even more impressed!)

I like the idea of a computer or device being unwittingly controlled by technological forces from far beyond the time of its origination. It’s a similar concept to emulation, but in this case the newer technology isn’t playing host to its ancestor – it’s acting as a puppetmaster, holding strings that were always part of the ancestor’s design but moving and manipulating them at alien speeds. Robots that solve the Rubik’s Cube in less than a second are another example I guess.

There were loads of people at the performance which I was quite surprised by. I had thought it would be a too niche to draw a large crowd, but it seemed to be sold out. As soon as we arrived at the Barbican it was clearly packed. Also, I was probably among the older cohort among the crowd. It wasn’t like when I went to see Cybotron and there were a lot of grey hairs in the audience.

Robert Henke gave a short speech at the start about the project and about the Commodore CBM 8032. He suggested it was part of the final generation of computers to have been humanly comprehensible, or in other words simple enough in its design that a human being could expect to read and fully understand its specification. He got a laugh from the crowd when he popped open the computer – the monitor and keyboard folded back to reveal the internals, like the bonnet of a car.

Aesthetically, I had certain expectations of the sort of music that would be involved. If you tell me that someone is going to make electronic music with a bank of Commodore CBM computers I will have a clear idea of what it’ll sound like: either a chiptune ode to retro computer game soundtracks or, essentially, a Kraftwerk retread. And the first few tracks in the performance were definitely in the latter category.

I was captivated enough by the visuals not to mind so much the unsurprising nature of the music. The green pixels were really being stretched to their limit, doing things I haven’t seen on these sorts of displays. There certainly wasn’t anything retro, gamey or nostalgia-driven about the video part of the performance. It was almost sinister or uncanny, to see retro display technology being utilised in this sort of way.

As the performance went on the music also started to diverge from the Kraftwerk “Metal on Metal” template and took on a more abstract, ominous, challenging character. I wasn’t sure exactly how much external audio processing was needed to get these machines to make sounds like this, but can only assume it was a lot. There were a few points where the visuals and music combined to create genuinely chilling, almost dystopian, moments.

When the credits were shown at the end, I wasn’t surprised to see that a pretty large team of artists and technologists had been involved in the project. It was a big success with the audience and with me too. It’s a project that could, in different hands, have ended up as an interesting but creatively uninspired proof of concept, using the CBM machines to render the Arkanoid soundtrack and so on. But Robert Henke and his team approached both the creative and technological aspects of this project with full force, and the result was like nothing I’ve ever seen before.