Ancient History, Archaeology, Artificial Intelligence, Internet, Social media

What shaped our post-truth world

CONSPIRACY THEORIES

The internet and social media are full of lies and deceit. The reason should be obvious: the truth is often boring and sometimes discomfiting. Lies are better, more interesting, more apt to comfort the fearful.

Some fields of study attract lies more readily than others. Medicine is easy and profitable to lie about – not least because almost everyone is afraid of illness and death. So many medical problems feel intractable, while modern science seems so slow. Science’s emissaries seem so smug and, hence, untrustworthy.

Lying about religion can have a similar effect. The same with lying about war and politics. You can become very famous and very wealthy by spreading fanciful notions about these topics. World War Three is on the verge of breaking out – according to the cesspit of many unruly social media sites.

All of this is obvious and makes sense. Yet another subject could be added to this group. If you’ve not encountered it, it may come as a surprise: social media is full of blatant falsehoods about archaeology and ancient history.

For those who have a passing interest in archaeology, will have seen examples of this. Some of the most famous are widely known. The idea, for example, that all the pyramids in Egypt are connected, part of some immense underground structure left behind by a god-like race that has perished from the earth.

There are also stories about electrical batteries being found from more than 5,000 years ago. Which means that humanity must have experienced something even more technologically developed than today as far back as before the birth of Christ, and our understanding of all history must be rewritten.

And, next, we come to aliens.

For the ancient aliens connection, we must credit Erich von Däniken – he didn’t invent it, but he made it popular. The Swiss archaeologist, who has died aged 90, was probably the 20th century’s most-read author on the subject of an ancient past. But what he wrote was not true. Däniken’s books, most famously Chariots of the Gods, sold many millions thanks to its cocktail of occultism and alien talk.

He said that there were gods from the past who had lived on earth. And in addition to this, they were spacemen. The first book of his was published in 1968, a time of space fever, when the new-age and hippie movements were popular.

Däniken probably never printed a true word in his life. But that doesn’t mean we should dislike or despise him. His books sold millions of copies by giving people what they wanted; he was a novelist, or a spiritualist, dressed in archaeologist’s clothes. It is perfectly permissible to sell fiction in the guise of fact.

Däniken, however, was the progenitor of nastier things that came after him. The biggest social media accounts covering archaeology inevitably traffic in nonsense and lies. Some of the most listened-to podcasts and biggest documentaries talk about ancient aliens or provide narratives that defame real archaeologists as malign fraudsters engaged in a massive cover-up.

There is no doubt that Däniken’s work was an example of the partly-alien, partly-spiritual nonsense that permeates a lot of popular culture.

Many people make millions on the podcast circuit or on social media platforms by saying nothing more than archaeology and medicine are fake; and, by the way, that shadowy figures run the world. The internet is littered with such proliferation.

Däniken showed the shape of media to come. Nowadays, almost all discussion of archaeology on social media is swamped by insane theories, lies, and AI slop – just as “discussion” of politics, and medicine, and technology already is.

Archaeology led where everything else surely followed.

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Britain, China, Economic, Government, National Security, Politics, United States

Questions to be answered over China’s super-embassy

NATIONAL SECURITY

The construction of the new Chinese “super-embassy” in the heart of London has been a long-running saga, its development plans shrouded in secrecy. Back in 2018, Beijing bought the Royal Mint site – an act whose symbolism was not lost on most Britons – for £255m. Assurances were given that the building would be used for normal diplomatic functions. But when the plans were released, they included a vast basement complex with no obvious purpose. Curiously, the details of the basement were redacted.

The true extent of Beijing’s plan has now been revealed. There will be 208 underground rooms, including a hidden chamber equipped with hot-air extraction systems, one metre away from Britain’s most sensitive communication cables, which transmit financial data to and from the City of London, as well as messaging traffic for millions of internet users.

Even before these revelations came to light, the Chinese plan came with obvious security risks: last year MI5 issued an “espionage alert” about Beijing’s spies targeting MPs and parliamentary staff “at scale”, while the US told Britain to reject the proposal on the grounds that it could effectively become a den of spies working against Western interests.

Planning permission has not yet been granted, but it is widely expected that Sir Keir Starmer will approve the proposal ahead of his visit to China later this month. For many in Britain, the obvious question should loom: why?

Labour’s 2024 general election manifesto promised an audit of Britain’s relationship with China. In the end, only two paragraphs of it were published, in the National Security Strategy. And, as is publicly known, the failure last year to prosecute Christopher Cash and Christopher Berry, two alleged spies for China, was because the UK Government was not prepared to provide witnesses willing to describe China as “an enemy”.

Britain is in the economic doldrums, and Starmer is desperately seeking more direct investment for his growth plans. China has slowly been buying up Britain, purchasing UK gilts as well as companies. This leaves the UK vulnerable to pressure from Beijing, which has a record of using debt as leverage. The PM clearly believes Britain needs to be on good terms with China.

However, that shouldn’t stop him quizzing Beijing. If there is nothing to see, why was so much of the plan redacted? Why does a foreign embassy need 208 rooms underground? Why demolish and rebuild the outer basement wall of the secret chamber, directly beside the fibre-optic cables that carry information critical to Britain’s national security and prosperity? And if the embassy is built, what does Britain gain?

These questions need to be satisfactorily answered before the green light is given to build a Chinese super-embassy in London.

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Arts, Books, Culture, Drama, Films, Literature

Hamnet

FILM REVIEW

Intro: This film adaptation is based on Maggie O’Farrell’s deeply moving historical novel that reimagines the life of William Shakespeare’s family, specifically focusing on the death of his only son, Hamnet, and how that tragedy may have influenced his most famous play, Hamlet

In 1596, William Shakespeare’s only son, Hamnet, died at the age of 11. Sometime between three and five years later, Shakespeare wrote a play which almost shared the boy’s name, and which has since become one of the most lauded dramatic works in existence. The possible link between these two events was the subject of an acclaimed 2020 novel by Maggie O’Farrell.

Now comes this quietly astonishing screen adaptation – with a script sensitively adapted by O’Farrell and the film’s director, Chloe Zhao – and with Jessie Buckley as Shakespeare’s wife, Anne Hathaway, and Paul Mescal as Shakespeare.

As in the book, Hathaway is here called Agnes, the name she was given in her father’s will. Her husband, meanwhile, is no famous playwright yet – his name is not mentioned for more than an hour – but the educated son of a Stratford glovemaker keeps pootling off to a London theatre for work. Agnes, meanwhile, remains with their three children – daughter Susanna and twins, Judith and Hamnet – close to the ancient woodland with which she shares a deep and strange bond.

– In cinemas now

We see in this play that Zhao has swapped the Terrence Malick-like lyricism of Nomadland and The Rider for a less insistent style that allows the story’s emotions to naturally drift to the fore. These emotions are often tough – Agnes’s life, alongside her mother-in-law (a superb Emily Watson), can be hard, even before the plaque comes that will claim the life of one of her children. But there are also constant flashes of everyday wonder and joy, many of which we’re invited to imagine might have inspired elements in Shakespeare’s future work. (The twins often disguise themselves as one another for a game: very Twelfth Night.)

The slow start to this production is groundwork, and the sober visual approach puts a greater burden and expectation on Zhao’s leads, but they don’t so much rise to the challenge as spiral above it. Mescal has never been better, while as Agnes, Buckley seems to discover her character before your eyes: every moment she plays rings transparently true.

This is a category of film that is described as devastating, heartbreaking, even hard to watch – and at times it is certainly all of these things. But, without any doubt, it isn’t a downer, thanks in no small part to the sublime final reel.

Here, Agnes makes the journey to her husband’s playhouse in London – only for her grief to be both complicated and clarified by this play he has written called Hamlet, and is now staging with acutely moving variations on the same two-humans-swap-places trick that the couple’s children once adored.

One of these springs from the casting: the actor appearing as the young Danish prince is played by Noah Jupe – the real-life older brother of the child actor, Jacobi Jupe, who portrayed Hamnet in the earlier scenes.

The play’s speeches are raw and revelatory, despite being among the most worn in the English tongue: that sense of freshness is one of the film’s wildest achievements. What Hamnet leaves you with isn’t sadness, but joy – at the human capacity to reckon with death’s implacability through art, or love, or just the basic act of carrying-on in its defiance. It blows you back on to the street on a gust of pure exhilaration. 

Hamnet U cert, 125 min

Verdict: An exceptionally delivered adaptation ★★★★★

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