A world of haters

Plus Google can generate a world for you.. from a text prompt

Ever get this feeling?

On Wednesday morning in New York, the chief executive of a gigantic health insurance company was gunned down in the street. His killing was no accident. CCTV footage shows the CEO, Brian Thompson, walking confidently along the street, away from the camera, when a man (judging by height and build) appears a few yards behind him, pulls out a gun, and fires a shot. The bullet hits Thompson in the calf; he staggers to his right, behind a concrete pillar protruding from a building. The killer then resets his gun and fires another shot. A bystander who had been in front of the concrete pillar takes in what’s happening and sidles away as quickly as they can; the killer takes no notice. He resets his gun again, fires again, and runs away between the cars.

Imagine this had happened to a dog: people would be appalled. There would be a massive outpouring of sympathy for the dog, and a concerted hunt for the shooter.

But the target in this case was human, and while there is certainly a concerted hunt for the shooter—the NYPD has released photos and is piecing together what it can about his movements before and after (a visit to Starbucks? A Citi bike from the scene? Bullets left at the scene engraved with the words “delay” and “deny”?) as they try to find him—you’d have to say that the dog would have had it better than Brian Thompson.

Turns out there are lots of Americans who use its private healthcare system who are not fans of its big insurers and their ways of making money.

For example, look no further than Taylor Lorenz, oft-fired “internet writer” who has complained long and loud about people’s lack of respect for immunocompromised people and long Covid sufferers. Here’s the headline of her latest Substack:

I mean.. pardon?

The first paragraph explains the detail I’ve given above. The second paragraph:

Within seconds of the news breaking, people online began celebrating. A Facebook post by UnitedHealthcare about the CEO's passing was met with over 23,000 laughing emojis before it was taken down. "Health insurance companies are parasites siphoning blood money from the sick, dying and injured,” one user posted. “I'm only surprised it hasn't happened sooner.”

At the time of writing, we don’t know precisely why Thompson was killed. It’s even possible that it was a mistaken identity; or that the killer was mentally ill and acting semi-randomly against someone who looked flush. (The semi-professional nature of the killing leans against those; the amateurish leaving of bullets—with fingerprints?—perhaps strengthens them.)

Which hasn’t stopped people of all stripes going on to social media to express their views.

Professor Wilson has deleted that Bluesky post (sensible!) but one might hope that an associate professor in the Department of Health Care Ethics at Saint Louis University would be able to articulate the ethical dilemma of how one should feel about citizens who have committed no crime being gunned down in the street slightly more eloquently.

People in the UK and other countries which have universal health care (even when, as in the UK, it is creaking badly) do have trouble understanding the intense antipathy that many Americans feel towards health insurance companies. For all that American salaries are higher, their medical costs are also significantly higher too.

Not only that: health insurance companies find all sorts of ways not only to bill people, but to deny them coverage, or tack extra costs on. This has, for years, quietly enraged a huge number of people. A few years ago I did an analysis of how the Fortune Top 50 had changed over a period of about 30 years, simply based on the capitalisation of the companies (which is the stock market’s prediction of their total future profits). The big change was that automakers and conglomerates had fallen away, and been replaced by tech firms—and health insurance companies. And those health insurance companies didn’t get that big by happily signing cheques (they still do, in the US) for every payment demand.

The eruption of bile towards Thompson, his company, and health insurance companies generally, as news of his killing spread, was a prime example of social media providing both an outlet for a feeling that had been rumbling away in the background for decades, and a magnifying glass to focus all the warmth into a burning heat. Here’s Taylor Lorenz again:

After I posted a quote tweet about insurance companies no longer paying for certain anesthesia with the phrase, "And people wonder why we want these executives dead," legacy media outlets including Fox News pounced and wrote a slew of articles about my "calls for violence."

I mean.. yes? If Lorenz is saying that she and others want these people dead, when one of these people has been violently made dead, then yes, that is a call for violence. It’s basically putting a target on the back of every other healthcare executive, and it’s astonishingly irresponsible for someone who fashions themselves as a journalist in any way to do so.

But this is what social media does: it finds the magnet of opinion with the biggest pulling power and yanks any iron filings who are oriented that way towards it, where they pile up in a prickly, angry, heap.

We see it happen again and again—whether it’s the ridiculous bile aimed at a successful PhD student at Cambridge University (who, happily, seems to have come through unscathed, or even buffed up) or this week’s Middle East calamity—but the targeting of a very visible group seems like a bad step, and its enabling by people ranging from journalists with big followings to, in effect, academics, is not a good development. This is definitely social warming, and the fact that it was in evidence on all sorts of social networks, including Facebook, X and Bluesky (the kinder, gentler.. ah, forget it), is a worrying trend.

Social media has never been able to solve anything at any scale. It’s good for small things: uniting people with lost wallets, finding homes for lost dogs, shaming people whether deservedly or not. But the big movements, like petitions to stop Brexit, or call elections, fail miserably, because when a million people shout at once, you can’t make out what they’re saying. Once a choir becomes a chorus, at about 80 people, you’re heading into “unmanageable” waters. Rather like the Dunbar number of 150 “friends” you can sensibly stay in touch with, there’s a certain mass of social media users above which nothing actually gets done by the group.

But: individuals can act. And that’s the problem. We do know that there are some properly unhinged people out there; given that the killing of Thompson was not, by all appearances, a professional one, that means it was an otherwise ordinary person.

To quote one of the people in the manhunt:

“This is a solid investigation and I’m confident that he’s going to be an ex-client, an ex-employee or a conspiracy theorist. But it’s insane levels of labor to find all these different things.”

That third one is the worrying one. I’m sure that every executive at every healthcare company has changed their routine in the past day, and gained a security detail. Because you just don’t know what kind of crazy person might be out there, and the US healthcare system has driven plenty of people to the very edge of despair—far enough that they might tip over into murder¹. Social media isn’t helping. And the lack of moderation, and self-moderation, isn’t helping either. Let’s hope that Thompson’s death is the last, not the first. Because otherwise we’re going down a slope with very bad things at the bottom.

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Glimpses of the AI tsunami

(Of the what? Read here. And then the update.)

• Google DeepMind has developed a system that will produce endless 3D worlds, based simply on a text prompt. They envisage it being used to train AI agents (rather than amusing humans).

• The confusing world of AI girlfriends. Interesting (though paywalled) article at The Verge.

• How close is AI to human intelligence? Nature explains. (An unknowable distance, really.)

• The mystery of the names that ChatGPT can’t say. Possibly due to the European Right To Be Forgotten? Nobody’s actually clear about this.

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• You can buy Social Warming in paperback, hardback or ebook via One World Publications, or order it through your friendly local bookstore. Or listen to me read it on Audible.

You could also sign up for The Overspill, a daily list of links with short extracts and brief commentary on things I find interesting in tech, science, medicine, politics and any other topic that takes my fancy.

• Back next week! Or leave a comment here, or in the Substack chat, or Substack Notes, or write it in a letter and put it in a bottle so that The Police write a song about it after it falls through a wormhole and goes back in time.

1. Ironically, about 20 years ago I had an idea for a novel in which despondent pensioners who had been ripped off by pension companies carried out suicide bombings, their zeal amped up by a side effect of a medication they’d been taking in their old age. Never quite got the idea to land. Murderous zeal is quite tough to beat, though.