JUST so we are clear, nobody has been ‘undressed’ by Grok. When an image of Sir Keir Starmer in a bikini appears in the reply space below his latest lie on X this does not mean the algorithm has reached out of the virtual world to remove his suit and replace it with Lord Alli’s swimwear.
We can agree that AI-generated sexual content, intended to mock and shame, is wrong. We can agree also that those who post it are bad and quite likely have something wrong with them. But we get nowhere when we start to treat what is fake as if it is real.
Grok is not undressing people, and the ‘images’ that are giving the government conniptions are not images or representations ofanything at all. They have no reference point beyond themselves. Let’s not pretend that they are photographs, magicked up by the clever people at X HQ.
This content is possibly as bad as, perhaps even worse than, exploitative and explicit photographs posted without the consent of their subjects. But they are not the same thing.
Perverts on X, of whom there are many, have been doing what perverts always do. They have adapted an available medium to their unspeakably distasteful ends and given the nomenklatura another excuse to indulge their fetish for free speech interventionism.
The Chief Algorithm and First Lord of the Treasury is letting it be known that the state censors will be looking at all available legal measures to address this ‘safeguarding issue’, which is android-speak for ‘Stop pointing out my lies or I will make X illegal in what remains of the UK.’
It is interesting, this sudden and acute concern that women and girls should be given the full protection of the state in the online world when they are all but abandoned in the real one. But this is not about that of course. Starmer hates X because its online parliamentary procedure – the ‘community note’– is having so much fun with his (what is the expression?) ‘misinformation’. He has become a laughing-stock, and even dictators who do not have self-awareness hate to be laughed at.
The easy thing to do would be not to lie, but Starmer hasn’t been trained in that. Instead the Prime Minister, who can be quite snippy for a robot, has decided to go to war with the world’s richest man who happens to be once again on decent terms with the most powerful one.
Sometimes you cannot help cheering for Goliath.
Defenders are pointing out that Starmer has not actually said that X will be taken down. But that’s not the way it works, is it? When Carlo Gambino wished out loud that a problem would ‘go away’ he was not saying explicitlythat he wanted a guy to be whacked. Some things are just put out there, with the subtext understood.
The Prime Minister is tetchy but also shameless. In fact, he does shamelessness very well. It is his professional survival mechanism. I used to think he was an effective practitioner of post-truth politics, I now think he’s the UK’s first complete package post-shame political operator. If Blair was the prototype, Starmer is the real deal.
There is nothing he will not lie about, no form of words which is so outrageously at odds with the facts that it cannot be spoken if that helps muddle through the day.
This is the government’s settled modus operandi. If caught out in a lie, you just move on to the next one. When discourse becomes embarrassing, turn it into noise.
Human beings who are incapable of feeling shame might have sentience, but they are not really people and should ideally have jobs that keep them out of the way of the rest of us. They could be sous-chefs, assassins or pathologists perhaps. But in no possible world should they become Prime Minister except in times of war.
Our constitution has evolved in ways that give it some flexibility. It can be nimble and agile. It cannot, however, be expected to cope with this default shamelessness on the part of the governing class.
The honourable resignation when a Budget is leaked? Gone. Accountability by select committee? I’ll write to you later with the information you’ve requested.
Keir Starmer will lift your wallet and ask you to pay for dinner, both without blushing.
There is an agreeable side to the shamelessness. It has up-ended the assumptions and poked fun at the pretensions of the commentators whose punditry is stuck in the assumptions of the pre-shameless past. It is no longer true that a Prime Minister ‘cannot afford’ to lose his Chancellor, for example. Not if he just carries on as if nothing has happened. What is anyone going to do about it?
The comforting cluelessness of the commentator class will be with us for some time. Groupthink has its own inertia, and it will take time for the journalists to catch up with the post-shame order. In the meantime, expect more confidently asserted vapidity of the ‘Starmer is a dead man walking’ sort.
As for the rest of us, I’m at a loss to think of how we get through this. Mockery can take you only so far. I suppose we have the consolation of small-scale rebellion as an option. We live in an age of hive-mind big statism. The autocrats in SW1 reach into every nook and cranny of our lives. So I guess that even the most trivial withdrawal of co-operation – calling a ‘home training day’ and giving your kid a day off from Bridget Phillipson’s foot soldiers perhaps – is a blow for freedom in its way.
We can hope that Starmer’s shamelessness will do for him in the end, which I fully expect to come with a psychological collapse followed by therapy, followed by therapy for his therapist.
