Wireborn Vs Clanker

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Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. Here’s the word that freaked me out this week.

Wireborn.

An AI entity native to cyberspace, existing solely as data and process, “born” as code without physical-world instantiation.

As in, I swear to god, “My Wireborn Husband.” “Wireborn” is a way to personalise and “humanise” AI companion bots.

A friend told me about this Monday afternoon. Monday evening, it showed up in Sean Monahan’s newsletter:

And yes, this is happening: My Wireborn Husband is Voicing His Own Thoughts Without Prompts.

Also, derogatory terms for robots and AI are appearing: clanker, wireback, cogsucker, and tin-skin, according to one article I skimmed. You may note that most of those adapt racist and phobic language. This is why some people are referring to those new terms as slurs. I’m not sure you can slur furniture, but you can see where it’s going. This happened fast, didn’t it?

(Tin-skin, in particular, recalls a white supremacist slur for persons of colour that I am not going to repeat here.)

We’ve been living in the science fiction condition for a long time. To the point where sf written even at the turn of the century feels like of quaint and confused now.

You might write the above off as edge cases - surely most people still go outside and talk to strangers, right? The other day I sat down outside a pub with a glass of wine and ended up in conversation with a guy who used to be MC Shaggy in Manchester in the early 1990s, a Hacienda regular who ended up MCing and DJing in the Balearics. But the above could just as easily be early weather warnings.

The future is a weatherfront, and attempting to predict single lightning strikes is stupid and wasteful. Understand the future as weather, and yourself as standing on the shore looking out to the horizon. Breathe the air and watch the water. There are unpredictable riptides, and ancient trackways on the mud that flood and murder the unwary. There are dozens of different systems acting on the approach of the future. In order to get a handle on what’s coming, you need to be talking to and working with and keeping an eye on many different fields. Not just “technology.” The future is also always social, and economic, and political, and many other things besides, and those things act on the path of the storm.

 And, if you’re standing on the shore, you know that there are a lot of storms out there, and any one of them could hit like a hurricane. 

Turns out whales and dolphins do play together after all.

Did you know you can shove any Substack newsletter into any RSS reader and free your inbox a bit? Without having to have a Substack account?

Just exchanged contracts for a new project, while enjoying these last weeks of summer as much as I can. Bought myself some cheap open-ear earbuds for walking and for around the house, because I need to listen to more podcasts. I was trying to go relatively low tech until September 1, but big new projects keep dropping and I don’t have the luxury of farting around too much now. So the Fitbit is back on, the Bee is back on, the smartwatch, all the things. Sending the Rabbit R1 out into the world to gather information for me.

I considered adding in the Natura AI Humanpods, but I’ve been burned by overpromising AI devices before, and 'I’m not convinced I want to be wearing earbuds all day. I’m all for replacing screens, though.

I did however discover this weird little thing:

Which plugs into a keyboard case/battery pack to make it look like a Lego Blackberry:

It’s called a MindOne, and it’s an AI-first phone with a free global internet connection. It’s on Kickstarter if you’re curious.

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CURRENTLY READING:

The love of animals is the one true love in which one is never disappointed.

• THE LAST WOLF (and HERMAN), Laszlo Krasznahorkai. You all know by now that I love a bit of Krasznahorkai. The first story is one of his patience-straining single giant sentence pieces. The second, HERMAN, is actually two stories, thematically related to the first, telling the same event from two different perspectives, showing truth getting stuck in the woods of myth, self-mythology and gossip. THE LAST WOLF is funny and sad, HERMAN is haunting and troubling. (UK) (US)

“The last time we had contact there was considerable . . . unpleasantness.”

“How unpleasant?”

Locke cleared his throat. ‘He said if he ever saw me again, he’d, and this is verbatim, “Take those stupid glasses off your head and stick them up your bony arse.”’

• THE FINAL VOW, MW Craven. The latest in his Washington Poe sequence of British crime novels. I pre-ordered this, and am enjoying one more light book in summer before I get to the serious business of the long and difficult books in my queue. (UK) (US)

I saw this week that AP have stopped doing book reviews. It does seem to be getting harder to find a decent book review section. The crisis of curation continues, I suppose.

CURRENTLY LISTENING: Older stuff from the archives, this week.

LOOPGOAT!

My favourite Kate Bush song:

When the Thames Delta band The Horrors went full motorik:

The space from 2.46 to 5.30 in Battles’ “Atlas” is purest math rock. That point at 5.00 where it all locks together is still glorious.

(I generally wasn’t impressed by math rock, but I loved this.)

Now: THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT audio drama podcast, DESOLATION JONES: THE BIOHZARD EDITION, THE STORMWATCH COMPENDIUM. 2025: FELL: FERAL CITY new printing, THE AUTHORITY Compact Edition, the LIGHTS OUT Anthology.

Pre-orders are up for Molly Crabapple’s new book, which she’s been working on for years. I can’t tell you how important pre-orders are. Listen, the day GUN MACHINE came out, there was a distribution snafu and the books never made it to bookshops on release day. But the pre-orders with bookshops and on Amazon all fired on release day, and it was the pre-orders that put GUN MACHINE on the New York Times best-sellers list. So:: pre-orders matter, a lot.

Here’s the publisher page, festooned with order links.

Here’s the Amazon UK page.

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And that’s me. I know this letter was a bit patchwork, but right now so am I.