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The Boat Race, Hyperfinance & AI Thirst Traps
OOJ #7:
The Oxford v Cambridge Boat Race, British exceptionalism, the insufferable stubbornness and pomp therein.
E. coli in the Thames, hyperfinancialised industrial pollution, renationalisation and ‘environmental insolvency’.
AI’s energy and water consumption, water wars, and the fugazi of the singularity.
Let’s go.
Oxford vs Cambridge
One of the biggest stories in the UK last week was the Oxford v Cambridge Boat Race, a tradition that — like all things Oxbridge — is centuries old and continues to claim relevance with an insufferable stubbornness.
The insufferableness comes not from the undeniably impressive athleticism of the race, but rather from the pomp and glory afforded to the event by the unis, the media, and anyone who still clings on to a fast-fading image of British exceptionalism.
While researching this story, I was reminded of the below video…
While it doesn’t tickle me to quite the same extent as it did when I was 16, it proves an important point:
All it takes is Matt Berry to dub one of his unrivalled silly voices over archive footage of the event for the pretence to come crumbling down.
I thought that the inimitable line “remember: they’re all posh, so fuck ‘em” would be the video’s high point until a stunning bit of prescience reared its head…
Berry refers to a series of ducks who live in the Thames taking to the shore with signs that say “No Thanks!”, “As If!”, and — most memorably — “Cunt!”.
Why? Because they are…
“Protesting the pollution of the waterways by fat cat industrialists.”
Shit Show
And that’s precisely what we saw last weekend:
Students from the Empire’s shining lights of academic brilliance were reported to be spewing up and shitting out their guts in equal measure thanks to massive amounts of pollution in the Thames.
Oxford’s cox William Denegri explained that three team members had violent stomach bugs in the days approaching the event.
He too was vomiting profusely on the morning of the event but, in a shining example of Good British Sportsmanship™, participated anyway:
“Whether that’s related to E. coli in the river, I don’t know. But it’s certainly not helped our campaign.” (William Denegri)
While I admire Denegri’s reluctance to pin his flag to the E. coli mast and, in doing so, get sucked into the wider political debate around this…
Given the almost identical stories coming out of the Cambridge camp, I’m happy to pin my own flag to that mast in his place.
A Guardian article speaking to spectators does well to sum up the atmosphere at the event:
“That water – it’s filthy, disgusting. You wouldn’t put your dog in it.” (Gary Hughes, from Bayswater)
Campaign group River Action blew the whistle on the appalling state of the river over a week before the event, pointing to “alarmingly high levels of dangerous E. coli bacteria” along the stretch of the Thames in which the race takes place.
Who’s to blame for all this? Thames Water: dragged in recent months for releasing “effluent” — the shamelessly prettifying word these companies like to use for raw sewage — into Britain’s waterways on an industrial scale.
A recent study puts a number on this: 72 billion litres of muck poured into the Thames since 2020, enough to fill 29,000 Olympic swimming pools.
One spectator, a former rower, drew an apt comparison from his days in the water to those of his son, competing in the Oxford team this year:
“I had no worries about contamination when I took part in the Boat Race in 1990. But now everything has changed… how you actually just stay healthy during a race is beyond me.” (Richard Hull)
What makes this so apt is the date he mentions: 1989 is the year that water was de-nationalised, and it’s been a long, brown, descent into hyperfinancialised madness from thereon out…
The Problems With Thames Water
Like any privatised utility — or any privatised company, full stop — Thames Water has refused to properly maintain its infrastructure for decades, all in the name of skimming off a larger proportion of largely imagined profits for its investors and “senior leaders”.
The company provides water to almost a quarter of the UK’s households but, despite this massive responsibility, has refused to inject the half a billion pounds into its infrastructure that it so desperately needs.
For my money, that’s only a fraction of the true cost that a total overhaul would require. In an implicit acknowledgement of this, the company has threatened 56% bill increases as the only alternative.
This shareholder stubbornness-cum-total-delusion has left the company teetering on the verge of a massive government bailout that will cost the taxpayer billions.
Even arch-bellend Michael Gove, who I’d personally consider to be one of the nation’s foremost bottom-feeders, has come out and denounced the company as a total disgrace.
Whether it’s bills or bailout that come to the rescue, the end result of financialising an essential resource is always the same: profits are privatised while losses are socialised.
You only need to take one look at Thames Water’s mind-boggling collection of investors to see why this is always the outcome.
In short, a massive proportion of its shareholders aren’t even UK-based. External investors include the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System, the Abu Dhabi Sovereign Wealth Fund and the state-owned China Investment Corp.
These groups have very little reason to care about the state of the UK’s water, given that they will likely never drink it, bathe in it, or rely on it to heat their homes.
As such, they’ve had no qualms with piling £18 billion of debt onto the company in a shameless if successful effort to drive up profits to record levels.
All the meanwhile, England's rivers were flooded with raw sewage for 3.6m hours last year, the worst on record by a country mile.
In total, UK water companies have paid out £72 billion in dividends since privatisation and borrowed more than £60 billion. As James Meadway on the excellent Macrodose podcast summarises:
“Thames Water isn't so much a water supply company as a financial extraction machine with a water company incidentally attached.”
Environmental Insolvency
You’ll often hear centrists proclaim that theirs is the only omniscient political position, given the vastly complex nature of today’s world and its problems.
However, in the case of Thames Water and swathes of other utility companies, the answer to all this is painfully simple:
Force Thames Water to declare bankruptcy and renationalise it, ensuring shareholders absorb all of its losses and the remainder of its massive debt is written off.
The problem with this is that it requires a government with a large enough set of cojones to take this bull by the horns…
And while it’s obvious that a Tory government built on the very hyperfinancialisation that Thames Water represents isn’t going to do this, it’s becoming increasingly clear that a LINO (Labour In Name Only) government led by Keir Starmer won’t do much better.
However, Meadway has also used the Macrodose platform to publicise a concept that could become key in making the case for renationalisation: environmental insolvency.
Pointing to the fact that the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee has estimated that the liabilities for water companies are set to skyrocket to £200 billion in England alone thanks to increasing climate pressures, Meadway makes this compelling point:
“If central banks and financial companies are now starting to take account of environmental costs when looking at their balance sheets and so factoring in rising future risks, why shouldn't other big corporations do so too?” (Meadway, Macrodose)
A quick look at the global context makes it clear that the state of the UK’s water represents the very worst kind of British exceptionalism…
Professor David Hall estimates that 90% of the world's water systems are in public hands, while the UK’s privatised system is creating growing water shortfalls that will rack up a deficit of 5 billion litres a day by 2050.
The even wider context is that as climate doom creeps closer these shortages are only becoming more acute and widespread.
Governments will likely have to start prioritising who gets first dibs on their water supply: will it be domestic consumers, big agriculture, or even-bigger business?
These choices will provoke real-world consequences, the likes of which we are already seeing in other parts of the world. To name a few:
Attacks on dams and pipelines in Ukraine, clashes between Iran and Afghanistan over access to the Helmand River, attacks by the IDF on pumps supplying Palestinian villages, and two deaths resulting from protests over the diversion of water from Chihuahua into the US.
AI Thirst Traps
To bring this back to more familiar OOJ territory, I want to talk about where AI and social media rank in this increasingly fraught list of priorities.
Given that so much talk about AI in the media is around its potential to replace jobs or even spark some kind of Skynet-style doomsday, most people — myself included — have long been blind to the really-existing threat that AI is already posing:
The massive amounts of energy and, more pointedly, water that its data centres and the semiconductors therein require to function.
In 2020, it took about 27 kWh to train the leading large language model (LLM). By 2022, this rocketed to 1 million kWh, a 37,000 times increase in just two years.
Once trained, the AI then uses massive amounts of energy to function; I was personally blown away by the fact that generating one Al image uses about as much power as charging a smartphone (particularly given how much I utilise them for this blog).
Bigger picture: data centres globally currently use the same amount of electricity as the whole of South Africa and this is only going to grow.
As the semiconductors that AI is built on require so much energy, you’ll be unsurprised to hear that they get very hot very quickly and, as a result, require a lot of water to cool them down.
Estimates suggest that the total artificial intelligence water consumption across the globe will be about the same as half the United Kingdom's by 2027.
Safe, usable water supplies are shrinking across the globe at the very moment that AI is beginning to boom.
While tech companies like to peddle the message that AI is going to create massive leaps forward for all things great and good — medical tech, for example, the hard truth is this:
“The majority of what those servers are processing is consumer data, steered towards selling advertising space more efficiently.” (Meadway, Macrodose)
Here’s the rub: Not only are we running out of water, which will inevitably generate terrible unrest...
The water we can access is so poorly managed that people in a so-called “developed country” are already getting sick from it…
And the clean water that does remain is increasingly being pumped straight to privately-owned data centres so that big corporations can better serve you more addictive ads…
That will simultaneously distract you from the environmental degradation around you, line their pockets in preparation for the quasi-apocalypse brought on by that degradation…
And make you poorer all the meanwhile, because they’ll be able to serve you advertisements so efficiently that you’ll blow your doomsday prep fund on Temu gadgets.
Politics is nothing more than priorities, and it’s high time we take a long hard look at what our essential resources are being used for and who stands to benefit from those uses.
We need an immediate democratisation not just of emerging technologies — which could, if used properly, revolutionise public life — but also the resources that allow those technologies to function.
Long-touted AI singularity is not the existential risk; it is a fugazi that serves to distract from the far more pressing and pernicious threat that AI poses: a sped-up climate apocalypse for which the techbros and their shareholders will be infinitely better prepared.
Why will they be better prepared? Because we’ll have made them rich by gobbling up the filth they pump into our social networks… in precisely the same way they pump it into our waterways.