Need a sociotechnical approach to AI regulation? Haaaaaaaave you heard of Ubuntu? It’s all about ultimate social flourishing and complex, interconnected systems.

Need to think through approaches to climate change amid a shifting zeitgeist? Haaaaaaaave you heard of Ubuntu? Postulate environmental personhood and you have a battle-tested philosophy ready to apply.

Outside of the US, and to a lesser extent Europe, you don’t have to force communal thinking into the conversation. And had Tutu been around to keep up the proselytising, it would be more of an embedded concept. Still, here we are, so in every policy discussion I’m the parrot going “Ubuntu, Ubuntu, Ubuntu”.

I know this must grow tedious to hear, and I apologise. But also, Ebola is of international concern again.

Haaaaaaaave you heard of Ubuntu?

A lot of factors make the current Ebola outbreak tricky. Not least of all the fighting in that part of the Democratic Republic of Congo, with roots all the way back in the Rwandan genocide now more than three decades ago.

The Bundibugyo strain of Ebola brings some complications too.

But in many ways, this outbreak is no different from the last big outbreak, or, at a high enough level of abstraction, from any deadly disease. It does not respect borders. Without intervention, it will get worse before it gets better. Intervention costs more money the later you start.

And having huge camps where internally displaced people are squeezed together and poorly-governed (in this case, rebel-held) cities, those don’t help.

I know the argument for foreign aid and international development is lost. Epidemiology is not economic development, though. You could say that a healthy person is a healthy person through other healthy people, that we are all interconnected and responsible for one another, whether we like it or not.

If only we had a way to think through the consequences of that, and what a considered approach would be.

Hey, come to think of it, haaaaaaaave you heard of Ubuntu?

And yet, until this week I never realised it is going to get my inbox flooded with long PR pitches.

If you don’t live in my neighborhood, there’s a social hierarchy to public relations practitioners. At the top are the deep strategic thinkers who whisper into the right ears and make things happen. At the bottom are the spammers, who grab any old mailing list and spew out press releases and interview pitches.

Most PRs are somewhere in the middle, because most of the time they’re playing a numbers game, and some clients want to see dissemination-effort statistics, bless their vain hearts.

For more than two decades I have ignored better than 99% of all those pitch emails because they are a terrible way to go about story discovery. There are gems in the muck, absolutely, but nothing worth the time investment of even a cursory scan of every email that comes in.

So I have, you know, a little bit of unread email.

I also don’t have time to waste on inbox hygiene, and storage is cheap, so I have a lot of email. Now AI has turned that into an asset.

“Hey Gemini,” I said jokingly, “find me a source on this [extremely niche technical subject] with a phone number.”

And there it was, exactly the missing piece I needed, in an unregarded pitch email from four months ago.

That changes all the incentives. I neither know whether nor care if that PR sent me a hundred pieces of junk. I need them to be verbose rather than pithy, the better for my machine to categorise the people they are putting forward. Hell, they can even throw in a couple of attached whitepapers and reports, why not?

Spray-and-pray PR used to be a lottery. Now it is an investment.

God help us all.

South Africa looked at evidence that the phrase was struggle rhetoric rather than actual incitement to violence. It considered how a hypothetical reasonable listener would interpret the chant, and the context in which it was used. It applied a test for hate speech constructed, from first principles, by neutral experts.

Then it had judges pronounce on the outcome.

That legalistic approach took South Africa to a place where saying “kill the farmer” does not mean “kill the farmer” because of historical context and a shared understanding that negates the literal meaning, even if not every farmer is on board with it.

In that complexity at least, the debate on “globalise the intifada” in the United Kingdom is familiar to the South African ear. Some at the receiving end might hear in it a call to “commit violence worldwide”, but those using it say they intend to convey “take Palestinian solidarity global”.

Boil it down to that, and it starts to look a lot like a dispute of fact, of the kind the slow, mechanical grind of the law is good at settling.

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