Marion Fourcade and Henry Farrell have a short but fascinating thought in The Economist concerning how large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT might influence work rituals.

Organisations couldn’t work without rituals. When you write a reference letter for a former colleague or give or get a tchotchke on Employee Appreciation Day, you are enacting a ceremony, reinforcing the foundations of a world in which everyone knows the rules and expects them to be observed—even if you sometimes secretly roll your eyes. Rituals also lay the paper and electronic trails through which organisations keep track of things.

Organisational ceremonies, such as the annual performance evaluations that can lead to employees being promoted or fired, can be carried out far more quickly and easily with LLMs. All the manager has to do is fire up ChatGPT, enter a brief prompt with some cut-and-pasted data, and voilà! Tweak it a little, and an hour’s work is done in seconds. The efficiency gains could be remarkable.

Exactly because LLMs are mindless, they might enact organisational rituals more efficiently, and sometimes more compellingly, than curious and probing humans ever could. For just the same reason, they can divorce ceremony from thoughtfulness, and judgment from knowledge.

I don’t think any of this is exactly surprising, but the way of thinking about it—through the lens of rituals—was new to me.

Rituals form a critical part of organisational life, even if we don’t always notice them. In health and higher education, rituals around topics like sustainability, inclusion, or diversity set the tone for how organisations present themselves. Yet these rituals can easily become hollow.

In my own experience, many organisations have rituals which are already divorced from their original intention. For instance, consider performance reviews. We all know the drill: managers gather feedback, write it up, and then sit through slightly awkward meetings where everyone knows what’s coming. This ritual started with the idea of providing useful feedback, promoting development, and assessing progress. But it has, in many places, become a tick-box exercise. Managers rush through the task, focus on compliance rather than insight, and employees nod along, knowing that what’s written is often more about playing politics than providing meaningful development.

Now, throw an LLM into the mix. For managers juggling a hundred other tasks, it’s tempting to get ChatGPT to churn out those reviews in seconds—especially if the task has already become perfunctory. But the consequence is that the process, already watered down, becomes even more superficial. The words become smoother, and probably more aligned with corporate standards, but they’re ultimately just noise—an efficient effluent, a downgrading of a ritual that’s already lost most of its meaning.

The same goes for things like corporate values. Having pronouns or a phonetic spelling in one’s email signature started off from a genuine desire to foster inclusivity. These days, their presence—or absence—often ends up being used as a proxy signal for other things, without deeper thought. It’s like the phrase ‘consider the environment before printing this email,’ tacked onto the end of countless emails. It almost certainly does nothing for the environment, but it signals that the person sending the email aligns with certain values.

What’s fascinating here is how easily LLMs could amplify these rituals. They can craft the perfect corporate spiel on inclusion, diversity, or sustainability, and they’ll do it without any sense of irony or understanding. A well-prompted LLM could pump out a flawless internal memo about the company’s dedication to [insert value here] without anyone needing to reflect on whether the company is actually doing anything meaningful about it.

It hadn’t previously occurred to me that LLMs have the potential to reinforce this effect by parroting the corporate lines to perfection, with absolutely no understanding or judgment behind them. Prompt an LLM to write an annual review for an employee in a way that aligns with corporate values, and it will do so—with absolutely no ability to thoughtfully probe whether or not the work actually demonstrates those things.

Of course, LLMs have a place in business, and can be transformative when thoughtfully applied. But the drive towards efficiency is not always thoughtful—even without LLMs involved, we can all think of times when processes have been made more efficient without proper regard to whether they remain effective.

It’s definitely something to think about. And perhaps that’s where the real work lies: recognising where rituals, human or automated, stop being useful and start being obstacles to real progress. If we’re not careful, we might find LLMs influencing deeper organisational habits and values in ways we don’t anticipate.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

A couple of years ago, I took part in some Northumbria University research about the underpasses in Newcastle… by which I mean I filled in a survey.

It made me reflect on a few things, not least the fact that I use several underpasses daily, and rarely did so before I moved to Newcastle. It also made me realise that underpasses where the exit isn’t visible from the entrance seem inherently less pleasant.

It turns out from one of the resultant papers that some of this research was about ‘sensory criminology,’ a concept that was entirely new to me but really quite fascinating. Jordan Reeve, who often posts videos about the urban landscape of Newcastle, has made a video exploring the findings with Ian Cook, one of the authors:

This long piece by James Bennet was published in 1843 last December. Despite seemingly causing a bit of a stir at the time, it passed me by until now.

The writer was the editor of the New York Times Opinion section in June 2020. In the aftermath of protests following the murder of George Floyd, Bennet published an opinion piece by Republican Senator Tom Cotton arguing that the military ought to be deployed to quell the riots. Much unhappiness followed, leading to Bennet’s resignation.

In 18,000 words, Bennett sets out his side of the argument, eloquently and with some flair. It is, perhaps ironically, one of those articles which is worth reading whether you agree with everything he says or not.

The picture at the top is by Jason Kuffer, and used under licence.

Until about a week ago, I’d never heard of Berlin’s ultra exclusive nightclub Berghain, and I couldn’t have told you much about techno music either. But the two-part episode of Search Engine in which PJ Vogt investigates why his friends weren’t allowed in to the club is brilliant.

It’s a great example of that podcast-y thing of tugging on a thread and seeing where it leads, exploring everything from the reunification of Germany to the economic downturn in Detroit along the way.

I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Recent posts may have given you the impression that Stockholm is a beautiful city—that was certainly the impression left by my visit. Yet, I’m afraid, a monstrous carbuncle looms over the city: Kaknästornet.

Built in 1957, it is a broadcast tower with radio, television and satellite masts. Until 2018, it was open to the public, and had a notoriously poor restaurant looking out over the city—but these days, the security risks are considered too high for such frivolity.

I know I bang on about it more than I should, but—for a city dweller—I am so lucky to have such a bucolic walk to and from work.

The first posts on this blog were written when I was 18 years old. When Françoise Sagan was 18, her novel was published. It is impossible to imagine what it must be like to have Sagan’s wisdom and insight at such a young age: the proof that I had none of it is abundant on this very website.

Bonjour Tristesse, which I read in Heather Lloyd’s translation, opens with a seventeen-year-old girl, Cécile, living with her widowed father, Raymond. They live a carefree, perhaps mildly hedonistic life together in the French Riviera. Raymond is a bit of a playboy, and Cécile enjoys the freewheeling nature of their existence.

This is challenged when one of Raymond’s former lovers, Anne, turns up. As Raymond and strait-laced Anne become closer, Cécile fears that a degree of predictable rigidity is entering their lives. She seeks to fight against it by engineering the end of Raymond and Anne’s relationship.

Cécile’s meddling has consequences foreseen and unforeseen, which she is then forced to come to terms with—and that jolting realisation catapults her into adulthood.

This was published and set in 1954, but certainly stands the test of time. It’s an entertaining read with real depth below the surface, and no shortage of humour. It may only be a short book—perhaps more a novella than a novel—but there is a lot packed into it. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Here are some passages I highlighted:

‘You don’t realize how pleased with herself she is,’ I cried. ‘She congratulates herself on the life she has had because she feels she has done her duty and …’

‘But it’s true,’ said Anne. ‘She has fulfilled her duties as a wife and mother, as the saying goes …’

‘And what about her duty as a whore?’ I said.

‘I dislike coarseness,’ said Anne, ‘even when it’s meant to be clever.’

‘But it’s not meant to be clever. She got married just as everyone gets married, either because they want to or because it’s the done thing. She had a child. Do you know how children come about?’

‘I’m probably less well informed than you,’ said Anne sarcastically, ‘but I do have some idea.’

‘So she brought the child up. She probably spared herself the anguish and upheaval of committing adultery. She has led the life of thousands of other women and she thinks that’s something to be proud of, you understand. She found herself in the position of being a young middle-class wife and mother and she did nothing to get out of that situation. She pats herself on the back for not having done this or that, rather than for actually having accomplished something.’

‘I detest that kind of remark,’ said Anne. ‘At your age it’s worse than stupid, it’s tiresome.’

I normally avoided university students, whom I considered to be coarse and preoccupied with themselves and, above all, preoccupied with their own youth: to them just being young was a drama in itself, or an excuse for being bored.

I was greatly attracted to the concept of love affairs that were rapidly embarked upon, intensely experienced and quickly over. At the age I was, fidelity held no attraction. I knew little of love, apart from its trysts, its kisses and its lethargies.

I did not want to marry him. I liked him but I did not want to marry him. I did not want to marry anyone. I was tired.

We met Charles Webb and his wife at the Bar du Soleil. He specialized in theatre advertising and his wife specialized in spending the money he made, which she did at an incredible rate by lavishing it on young men.

How difficult she made life for us, with her sense of dignity and her self-esteem!

The association between Los Angeles, cars and traffic is well documented—not least in decades of Hollywood movies. Christopher Grimes had a pessimistic, or perhaps realistic, article in the Financial Times last week about the latest efforts to convince Angelenos to try public transport.

But here’s the thing: my mental conception of the city is completely different.

Wendy and I have visited Los Angeles exactly once, six years ago. This Amtrak train delivered us there.

We explored the city on foot and by Metro. Perhaps as a consequence, when I think of Los Angeles, my memories are inextricably caught up with public transport. I think of the grand architecture of Union Station and the whimsical decoration of some of the Metro stops, like these film reels at Hollywood/Vine:

Oh, and I remember my efforts to forget about work being undermined by these public health messages, which seemed to be everywhere:

But what I absolutely don’t think of is cars, freeways and traffic—despite them being so clearly a major part of life for those who live in the city.

It’s a tidy reminder of how experiences of a city can vary, and how a brief visit can leave one with completely the wrong impression of what a place is really like to live in.