Michael Fitzpatrick

Freelance journalist.
i news, BBC, NYTs, Guardian, Fortune, Tgraph, FT and many more. Prof. journalism, Vienna. Mostly Tokyo based now.

[Michael Fitzpatrick @fitzp]

@charliecolecc Balance this exceptionally jaundiced view with fact the £24 billion goes unclaimed every year in the UK>

https://t.co/gltcAfs8HF

[Michael Fitzpatrick @fitzp]

@colecameron Hold my Calpis. https://t.co/l4oD6Xmtad

[Michael Fitzpatrick @fitzp]

@MonCre_Tokyo Wondering why they are all wearing masks. Do you think it has become the norm now for public-facing workers in Japan to wear a dentist's mask all day?

[Michael Fitzpatrick @fitzp]

@rieglobe There is a remedy to that. Would you like to DM me to discuss?

[Michael Fitzpatrick @fitzp]

Obvious way around this problem into pay your freelancers more for stories. Laughable that the flacks offered a measly 100 quid to place a story. Shows you how desperate hacks are when average per 1000 words is only $300. https://t.co/LVXLBelPaz

[Michael Fitzpatrick @fitzp]

I've often enjoyed the versions of this sculpture in Rome and Vienna, but never stopped to think how it relates to journalism and the pursuit of the "truth".

Being dragged to the sea by serpents to be drowned in front of a jeering crowd sums up nicely the experience recently.

[James Lucas @JamesLucasIT]

This is a statue of the only man in Troy who saw the trap. He tried to warn everyone, and this is what the gods did to him because of it...

His name was Laocoön, a Trojan priest. When the Greek army vanished and left a giant wooden horse outside the city gates, all of Troy celebrated. Only Laocoön refused to believe it. He warned his people the horse was a trick and, to prove it was hollow, hurled his spear into its side.

In Virgil's telling, he spoke a line that has outlasted almost everything else about Troy: "I fear the Greeks, even when they bring gifts."

He was right. The horse was packed with soldiers, and Troy was hours from destruction.

This sculpture shows what he got for it. Two enormous sea serpents rise out of the sea and coil around him and his young sons, dragging all three down together. The father's whole body is knotted in the struggle, every muscle straining, his face locked in a scream. The gods wanted Troy to fall, and Laocoön was in the way.

The Trojans watched him die in agony and drew exactly the wrong conclusion: they decided the gods were punishing him for attacking a holy gift. So they pulled the horse inside their own walls, and that night, Troy burned...

The statue is called Laocoön and His Sons. It is the work of three Greek sculptors from the island of Rhodes, Agesander, Athenodoros, and Polydorus, and dates to the Hellenistic period, making it well over two thousand years old.

Buried for more than a thousand years, it was dug out of a Roman vineyard in 1506, and Michelangelo rushed across Rome to see it the day it was found.

It has been called the single greatest depiction of human suffering in the history of art, but it endures because of what it is really about: the man who sees the truth, says it out loud, and is destroyed for being right while the crowd watches...

It is one of the oldest patterns there is, and it has never stopped repeating.

There is nothing new under the sun.

[Michael Fitzpatrick @fitzp]

@itarutomy wrong link, old chap

[Michael Fitzpatrick @fitzp]

@NikkeiAsia There are many reasons why -- the most glaring is the fact that most of these startups (particularly the Tokyo University ones cited) are led by people with no English and little in the way of understanding of how things are done outside of Japan.

[Michael Fitzpatrick @fitzp]

This is rich ... rent-seeking publishers want about USD 600 for each piece of journalism AI caught using. We writers really get that each piece! https://t.co/HUF5LVbtE5

[Michael Fitzpatrick @fitzp]

@BrianRoemmele Brian, if you know anything about the ethos of the BBC from those days is that they liked to save money. And so wiped those tapes to use them again. They did it to both classics and dregs. There is no conspiracy. TV progs were seen as yesterday's newspapers.

[Michael Fitzpatrick @fitzp]

@nick_routledge That will be https://t.co/iDtGeiOb4f the wolf in sheep's clothing. The lamb being publicly funded https://t.co/bl7ZJr18lo.

.com is another entity entirely and mostly mercantile in nature, and what you get outside the UK.

[Michael Fitzpatrick @fitzp]

McLuhan knew all along the effects of the medium itself would have on mankind. This excellent wireless programme on him will explain all: https://t.co/ET5ZqRTw3J

[Will Self @wself]

https://t.co/2TTLj4ehZe

[Michael Fitzpatrick @fitzp]

@culturaltutor Let "the series Travels with Pevsner" from the BBC be your guide. Find them on YouTube.

[Michael Fitzpatrick @fitzp]

@nick_routledge Sorry, forgot Auntie now churlish in her old age has strict rules about Johnny Foreigner listening to the BBC outside the UK. Best use a VPN for BBC content or find another source.

[Michael Fitzpatrick @fitzp]

You could argue we writers do the same. Philip Roth famously compared a writer's process to "a man who feeds his dog its own tail." While we all know Picasso's : "Great artists steal!"

[Alex Veremeyenko @alex_verem]

Let me trace the timeline here because nobody's connecting it.

Step 1: Scrape the entire internet. Every book, every article, every conversation, every piece of art, every forum post. Do it without asking. Do it without paying.

Step 2: Train a model on all of it. Call it "artificial intelligence."

Step 3: Go to BlackRock's Infrastructure Summit and announce: "We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter."

Step 3 is where you sell people's own knowledge back to them. On a meter.

They took the collective output of human thought, compressed it into a model, and now they want to charge you by the token to access a version of what you and everyone you know already created.

One Reddit user put it perfectly: "They stole all this data from us, the people, our life's work, creativity, art, by devouring the internet and blowing through all copyright laws. Now they want to sell it back to us in the form of a utility."

Imagine if someone photocopied every book in the public library, burned the library down, and then opened a subscription service for the copies.

That's the metered intelligence business model.

And they're pitching it to infrastructure investors as though they invented water.

[Michael Fitzpatrick @fitzp]

@james_riney I can not see any of this going global if you do not engage with the media outside of Japan.

[Michael Fitzpatrick @fitzp]

@takaichi_sanae You must be joking. "driving Japanese startups toward global markets." Better start seriously requiring fluent English first in all such roles. Otherwise this will go the same route of "Internationalisation" that fell flat on its face.

[Michael Fitzpatrick @fitzp]

It's taken 25 years since we had the first inklings from the Far East that mobiles and children would spell disaster. Glad the message was finally received. https://t.co/LeQ6pT3UNk

[Jonathan Haidt @JonHaidt]

Thanks to my friend and co-author @glukianoff for laying out what we actually wrote in The Coddling of the American Mind, and applying it in response to seven arguments made by those who objected to my selection as a commencement speaker:

https://t.co/3pGmtJp6NC