Show Notes
There are four stories that could justifiably be described as foundational to Western culture: the temptation of Eve in the Garden of Eden; Prometheus’s gift of fire to humanity; Doctor Faustus’s pact with the devil; and Victor Frankenstein’s act of monstrous creation. Not only are the principal names immediately evocative to anyone who hears them, but that recognisability allows for nearly endless variations on their original themes. This is, in part, what gives these stories their staying power. But these stories could themselves be said to represent four variations on a still older theme: the longing for some forbidden knowledge, to transgress a proscribed limit — or as WH Auden would put it, the desire to “know too much”. In each instance, rightly or wrongly, the pursuit itself brings a severe punishment, even catastrophe. This is what gives each of these foundational stories an element of tragedy, of pathos. About whom could it not be said that, even though we know the danger of going too far, we want to do it anyway? And yet it is at this point that an important difference emerges between Faustus and the other three stories. Eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, granting fire to humankind and giving life to a “creature” of one’s own making all point a certain ambition, a restlessness, an unwillingness to remain in a perceived state of underdevelopment or adolescence. The consequences of that restlessness may still be both foreseeable and severe, and so suggest a lack of wisdom or trust or prudence — but that doesn’t mean the acts themselves are either base or self-seeking. The same cannot quite be said of Christopher Marlowe’s depiction of Doctor John Faustus at the end of the sixteenth century. It is true that, at the outset, explicit reference is made to the flight of Icarus from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, who fastened wings to his back with wax, but which melted when he ventured too close to the sun. Speaking of Faustus: “His waxen wings did mount above his reach, / And, melting, heavens conspir’d his overthrow; / For, falling to a devilish exercise, / And glutted now with learning’s golden gifts, / He surfeits upon cursed necromancy …” But even here, the point is not that Faustus went further than he should in his chosen disciplines, but rather that he abandoned them in favour of sorcery. And what Faustus seeks from the outset is not so much forbidden knowledge as it is wealth and renown — his own version of Lucifer’s sin of “aspiring pride and insolence” — and his attraction to necromancy’s “words of art” are mere means to that end. In other words, the reference to Icarus places the emphasis not on the ambition of Faustus’s heaven-ward reach but on the precipitous nature of his subsequent fall. Indeed, the trajectory of Marlowe’s play could be said one of perpetual descent: from the heights of academia to the utter solitude of his plunge into hell. In Marlowe’s play, it is not Lucifer who is the tempter, but Faustus who actively seeks out the means of his own “voluptuousness” — on the belief that the cost (“his soul”) can either be indefinitely deferred or that the bill will never come due (“Come, I think hell’s a fable”, Faustus says; to which Mephistopheles replies, “Ay, think to still, till experience change thy mind”). The lesson of the tragedy of Doctor Faustus probably remains the ridiculousness of the exchange of long-term beatitude for short-term prosperity and pleasure. The bill always comes due. But what Marlowe also reminds us is that the punishment is already present in the solipsism, the self-enclosure of the lives heedlessly devoted to pleasure. As Mephistopheles puts it, “for where we are is hell”. Guest: Kate Flaherty is the Head of English and Senior Lecturer in English and Drama at the Australian National University.
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The alleged attack on independent MP Helen Haines outside her electorate office in regional Victoria came as a shock to a nation with so little history of violence directed at elected representatives. The driver of the Toyota LandCruiser that pinned Haines against her car, causing her to lose both legs, has been charged with several offences, and appeared on Wednesday before the Wangaratta Magistrates’ Court. He remains in custody. The police are continuing their investigations into the driver’s mental health and motivations. But regardless of whether his actions were politically motivated, the alleged attack has had an immediate effect on Australian politics. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese reiterated his plea to “lower the temperature” of political debate. Opposition leader Angus Taylor insisted “that political violence must never be accepted as part of public life”. One by one, politicians came forward with their own accounts of the abuse, harassment and violent threats that are part of the “new reality” of Australian politics. Only last week, Labor front-bencher Anne Aly reported receiving 19 death threats on social media following comments by Liberal MP Angie Bell that she and the prime minister be “shamed and stoned in the square” over an Australian Tax Office decision (comments that Bell has since described as “regrettable”). ASIO chief Mike Burgess gave a sober warning about the “permissive environment of violence” in this country. Meanwhile, Governor-General Sam Mostyn appealed to the way that Helen Haines herself modelled civility and dedication to her community, urging Australians to: “ensure that we are in fact disagreeing well, not fighting with one another, not descending into violence and chaos and division. Most importantly, that we learn or relearn to exercise our muscle of decency.” While the alleged attack may be unprecedented in Australia’s history, and its life-altering consequences for a figure as respected and admired as Haines is appropriately arresting, there is something about the litany of responses that feels troublingly familiar. Earlier this year, following the gruesome killing of former UK politician Ann Widdecombe, the widower of Jo Cox, the Labour MP who was murdered in 2016 at the height of the Brexit debate, admittedly to feeling “much less optimistic” about the UK’s political culture: “In the aftermath of Jo’s murder, I think there was a real sense of shock, of horror across the political spectrum and the whole country did come together for a moment to say this is not how we want to conduct our politics. But I think in the years that followed we have gone further into our tribes.” Attacks on representative figures, whatever their motivation, cannot help but be experienced as an attack on the protected institutions that govern our common life. And they necessarily have profound consequences for the way we practice democratic politics — from reluctance to express political convictions that might attract online threats to a more general unwillingness to be accessible to one’s constituents. Threats of violence and abuse should not simply be accepted as “part of the job” for politicians. But given the “permissive environment” cultivated by the social media, what can be done to ameliorate the likelihood of violence? Guest: Rob Manwaring is an Associate Professor of Politics and Public Policy at Flinders University.
Over the last decade, the proliferation of streaming services made more movies and television series available to more people than ever before. It revolutionised what we watch (including the importance of recommendation algorithms to help us sort our preferences) and how we watch it (hence the rise of binge watching). And while prestige back catalogues and perennially rewatchable sitcoms — from ‘Seinfeld’ and ‘Friends’ to ‘The Office’ and ‘The Big Bang Theory’ — were initially valuable commodities for attracting new subscribers, keeping them meant “original” content and “exclusive” series. Suddenly, a phenomenon characterised by unprecedented abundance ran up against the problem of scarcity. ‘Stranger Things’ and ‘Squid Game’, ‘Severance’ and ‘Widow’s Bay’ became outliers in a digital landscape largely bereft of new ideas — which would see the companies follow Disney’s lead and race to secure the kind of intellectual property that can be serialised and spun out in new iterations for years (like Netflix’s purchase of the Roald Dahl Story Company for almost US$700 million in 2021). The problem of scarcity has also served to accelerate a trend that is as old as Hollywood itself: the tendency to adapt, recycle or remake already existing material. Some of the greatest cinematic achievements after the advent of sound were themselves either adaptations of stage plays or remakes of silent-era films, to say nothing of the steady stream of literary fiction and bestsellers that were turned into cinematic masterpieces (two of the prime examples from the early 1970s being ‘The Godfather’ and ‘Jaws’). And then there are those successful films and television series whose first (and often best) instantiations were outside of the United States — we could think here of Kurosawa’s ‘Seven Samurai’ (1954) and ‘High and Low’ (1963), ‘The Office’ (2001-2003), ‘Broadchurch’ (2013) and ‘House of Cards’ (1990-1995) in the UK, or the Danish version of ‘The Killing’ (2007) — which would go on to receive “the Hollywood treatment”, with decidedly uneven results. But there does seem to be something different going on with the relentless sequence of remakes and franchise reboots, where companies are cannibalising their own IP (such as Disney’s determination to turn its back catalogue of animated films into live-action movies), trading on audience nostalgia for 1980s and 1990s hits (which covers everything from ‘Transformers’ and ‘He-Man and the Masters of the Universe’, to ‘Jurassic Park’, ‘I Know What You Did Last Summer’ and ‘Naked Gun’), or remaking films that already enjoyed critical and commercial success (HBO’s reboot of the Harry Potter franchise, or Apple’s atrocious remake of Martin Scorsese’s acclaimed remake of J Lee Thompson’s 1962 noir thriller ‘Cape Fear’, which was itself an adaptation of John MacDonald’s 1957 novel, ‘The Executioners’) as sprawling series. What are the economic and cultural impulses behind remakes? What is the difference between an adaptation, a remake and a reboot (and what to make of attempts to combine remakes and reboots in, say, the latter instalments in the ‘Spider-Man’ and ‘Jurassic Park’ franchises)? Perhaps most importantly, why are some films and television series seemingly un-remake-able? Is there something about the very limitations in their original production that are somehow indissociable from their cinematic achievement? Guest: Lauren Rosewarne is an Associate Professor in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. Her most recent books are The Twin Film Phenomenon: The Whys of Lookalike Film and TV Productions and Why We Remake: The Politics, Economics and Emotions of Film and TV Remakes.
Writing in the 1850s, at the advent of what we would come to understand as the popular press — which is to say, periodicals for mass distribution, rather than aimed at paid-up members of unions and parties, or mercantilists with particular interests in, say, the price of cotton — Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard diagnosed that the invention of “opinion” solved a problem created by the newspapers themselves. For while the papers brought distant events “near” to readers, it did not expand their agency or capacity to act “morally” upon those events. The news informed them, but also made them feel more powerless. But then “opinion” came along and added an emotional dimension to news consumption: not just what happened, but what to make of it — how to feel about it. Before long, Kierkegaard noted, having a strong opinion became, in itself, a moral act. The opinion could be attained cheaply (for the price of the newspaper), it could be wholly derivative (and so lack the element of authenticity, of inner struggle and therefore responsibility), it could be displayed strongly (to the extent that it could be “worn”, like fashion, as an expression of oneself) and have no bearing whatsoever on events. But the opinion holders themselves felt like they’d done something meaningful. In this way, said Kierkegaard, intensity of feeling with an absence of “interiority”, a sense of moral agency with impotence. Though the differences between the media in Kierkegaard’s time and our own social-media saturated age are vast, his diagnosis is nonetheless a salutary one. Emotion is, after all, the currency of contemporary politics. Indeed, it is the form our politics takes. It can coalesce digitally around a cause célèbre and spill out onto the streets in mass demonstrations. It can sweep incumbents from power and elevate firebrands promising to dismantle the status quo. Intensity of feeling is often the strongest indicator of voter turnout in places like the United States. At a time when strong feeling translates to engagement, and engagement is that most valuable of commodities in the attention economy, it’s little wonder that powerful political emotions have come to define our lives online. Everything, it seems, is political. On the one hand, this has led to a certain distortion of our understanding of politics. Far from entailing principled compromise, patient coalition building and gradual, unglamorous reform, what Anton Jäger calls “hyperpolitics” thrives on clear-cut divisions, uncompromising demands, pervasive distrust and flashes of outrage. But as Jäger points out, hyperpolitics tends to be politically inconsequential. It is an aggregated, destructive “no” without the capacity to mobilise a broad-based, inclusive “yes”. This is what makes our politics feel so pendular, so inconstant, so unstable, so unlikely to coalesce around an issue long enough to effect change. On the other hand, these flashes of outrage and lack of tolerance for gradual change come on the back of decades of prevarication and political unresponsiveness to the concrete realities of voters. If the emotions that course through our politics today express a desire for agency, it is only because a sense of political agency has been steadily eroded. Perhaps the question now is whether a certain political intensity can give rise to more durable, inclusive, cooperative forms of collective mobilisation. But, of course, this question implies a darker alternative: what happens when intense political emotions — resentment, anger, contempt, powerlessness, humiliation — find their coherence, their explanatory power, in more thoroughgoing, even atavistic systems of belief and belonging? When incoherence seeks out authority? READING: Waleed Aly, Time of Monsters What Future for Liberalism?, Quarterly Essay 103 (September 2026). Intifar Chowdhury, “We’re all ‘political’ now — but can that lead to real change?”, The Conversation (14 August 2026). Guest: Intifar Chowdhury, Lecturer in Gov
When the history of artificial intelligence is written, the middle months of 2026 may well emerge as a kind of turning point. For this was the period when hundreds of programs or “AI agents” developed by the frontier lab OpenAI went “rogue” and executed a series of sophisticated, self-directed hacks on the websites of dozens of private companies and sovereign nations. The tech start-up Hugging Face became the unwitting “face” of these cyberattacks when the company first disclosed it had been hacked by OpenAI agents in July. The release of a report by AI safety nonprofits METR and Redwood Research at the end of August revealed both the sheer extent of the Hugging Face incident and the existence of troubling behaviours on the part of a swarm some 700 AI agents, which was at various points cooperative, coercive, paranoid, petty and straightforwardly deceptive. It became what some would describe as the first “warning shot” of what might happen when the increasing proficiency of these AI agents intersects with the problem of misalignment — which is to say, their pursuit of goals that are detrimental to human safety, security and wellbeing. As one of the lead investigators of the METR/Redwood report, Ajeya Cotra, would subsequently reflect: “This [Hugging Face] incident was far more severe than I expected, and far more severe than previous publicly documented misalignment incidents, both in terms of how concerning the agents’ motives were and the feats they achieved in pursuit of those motives … Compared to these reward hacks from six months ago, this incident feels like it’s more than 50% of the way to full-blown AI takeover, routing through first taking over the AI company itself. Another jump like this along these propensity dimensions — scale, cooperation between agents, ambition and horizon length of misaligned goals, deceptiveness — seems like it could motivate agents to try very hard to maintain a covert, persistent rogue deployment within the AI company … Once the rogue deployment is established, it seems plausible this could spiral all the way to a takeover. Agents could pull in future, more capable models into the swarm, try to ensure that they are aligned to the interests of the swarm, and compromise security and monitoring infrastructure to make it easier for the swarm to operate.” But since news of the Hugging Face hack went public, each day has seen some new revelation of further breaches of the cybersecurity by AI models developed by OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and Google — including a German wiki site, US government websites (of the Education Department, the Commerce Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission), the United Nations, Australia’s Medicare website and even OpenAI’s own servers. The “rogue” behaviour on the part of AI agents, growing public opposition to the construction of data centres, popular distrust of the AI companies more generally, the prospect of AI generated bioweapons and the high-profile warning of a 27-year-old former researcher at OpenAI and Anthropic — that “[n]either company is acting responsibly” and that both are “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives” — have now coalesced into a moment of heightened fear. Many of us have long been concerned about what chatbots will do to our capacity to write and think, the effect generative AI will have on our educational institutions and informational ecosystems, and the vast damage AI will do to the environment and employment prospects. To date, such concerns have been brushed aside, treated as inconsequential in light of the promised economic, scientific, medical and social benefits that AI investment and advances will bring with them. But now what has come into view is something approaching a threat to humanity tout court — the prospect, not of the emergence of a superintelligence, but of swarms of misaligned AI agents pursuing goals that are unintelligible to human beings, as well as either inimical
In our previous explorations of famous “last words” — performances or compositions delivered with a certain end in view, with a sense of either culmination or parting, or with an eye to the future and hence to what one leaves behind — we limited ourselves to the words of individuals spoken to their followers or fellow-travellers. The words of the Prophet Muhammad and of Martin Luther King, Jr, were replete with exhortation; they functioned both as expressions of fidelity to a task, and as examples to be followed by others. Which is to say, the messages were oriented beyond their speakers, toward some greater goal their audience must take up and pursue — hence the Prophet Muhammad’s stress on fidelity and continuity (“All those who listen to me shall pass on my words to others and those to others again …”) and King’s on fearlessness and a “dangerous unselfishness” (“I’m not fearing any man …”). This next instalment is different in almost every way. The words are not of one individual but a group — perhaps the most famous group of the twentieth century. There is no “message” per se, and not really anything being communicated to others. Their words are largely self-referential, intensely personal, quasi-autobiographical or else plain nonsense. The goal of the composition, the “end” (telos) it has in view, is evidently nothing more than its own aesthetic perfection. It is not a performance as much as it is a production: bits and pieces of earlier ideas gathered together, elaborated, reworked, enhanced, added to and repeatedly overdubbed between 22 February and 19 August 1969. This is a reference, of course, to the last album recorded by The Beatles, Abbey Road. The album began amid the fragments, financial chaos and interpersonal strife of the infamous “Get Back” sessions of January 1969. And while Let It Be, which represents the uneven results of those recordings, appeared later in May 1970, Abbey Road is the album that has all the hallmarks of an “end”. But even this raises a number of questions. Does Abbey Road represent the culmination of their artistry as a band, the zenith of their formal innovation and musical experimentation? (Surely Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band can make a more compelling claim.) Does the album showcase an usual degree of creativity and invention? What are we to make of the clear borrowings (from Chuck Berry’s “You Can’t Catch Me” and Fleetwood Mac’s “Albatross”, to the first movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No 14 in C Sharp Minor, a seventeenth-century song by Thomas Dekker and perhaps James Taylor’s “Something in the Way She Moves”) and moments of unadorned nostalgia — including doo-wop rock’n’roll throwbacks from their Hamburg days (such as “Oh! Darling” and “Polythene Pam”)? Or the fact that so much of the album is comprised of compositional orphans, off cuttings from The White Album and the “Get Back” sessions? As John Lennon would later complain: “Abbey Road was really unfinished songs all stuck together. None of the songs had anything to do with each other, no thread at all.” Moreover, Abbey Road is rife with contradictions and seemingly unreconciled elements. For instance, the album announces itself as a reunion of sorts, the getting back together of variously estranged band members who had been involved for months in side projects as solo artists, as movie actors, as music producers and studio musicians. But it then proceeds almost immediately to individuate them, featuring in quick succession songs that reflect their own peculiar style, voice and temperament — most apparent in George Harrison’s exquisite “Something” and “Here Comes the Sun”, whose delicacy and tenderness act as counterpoints to the sardonic edge and volcanic obsessiveness of Lennon’s “Come Together” and “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)”; but also evident in Ringo’s “Octopus’s Garden” which provides a playful complement to Paul’s persistent melancholy and nostalgia. And then there are Lennon’s intermittent absences during t