Monthly Archives: July 2026

social dynamics

Talking with strangers

Talking with strangers can be a valuable experience, but few take the initiative to do it regularly.

                  When I get on a local bus, few people are talking with each other unless they already know each other. It’s easy to tell. Passengers don’t sit next to strangers unless the bus is fairly full. That’s my opportunity. If I’m sitting next to someone, often I’ll try to strike up a conversation. If it’s a bus leaving the university, I’ll ask if they’re a student, what they’re studying, what year they’re in, what they want to do when they finish, whatever comes up.

                  I’ve been doing this for years, but only occasionally. In the past couple of months, I’ve been doing it more often because of reading Once Upon a Stranger by Gillian Sandstrom. Her book is an engaging account of the benefits of having conversations with strangers. It is also packed with easy-to-follow summaries of research findings, including her own.

                  Who is a stranger? Basically, anyone you don’t already know, and they’re around you in many places, while shopping and travelling. At least that’s the case in cities, where there are large numbers of people you encounter briefly and then never again.

                  Sandstrom’s message is that talking to strangers can make your life better, but most people are afraid to initiate conversations. She encourages you to go ahead and try doing it, knowing that practice will make you better at it.

                  Strangely, though, most people resist talking with strangers, persisting in false beliefs. Study after study shows that fears are unjustified. People think strangers won’t welcome their efforts, but actually most of them do. People are afraid of messing it up, not knowing what to say or fearing they will cause offence, but these sorts of things hardly ever happen.

                  Then there are the benefits of talking with strangers, including learning new things, having your life changed for the better — Sandstrom gives several personal examples — becoming happier and becoming kinder. It almost sounds like a near-guaranteed proposition. If only people knew how good it can be, maybe they would start trying. That’s Sandstrom’s hope.

                  Sandstrom says one thing that holds her back is a voice in her head, a voice of negativity, that says she’ll make a fool of herself, others won’t like her or she won’t be able to think of anything to say. She calls the voice Sid, and suggests ways to silence or ignore Sid. This resonates with the experiences of writers, many of whom are plagued by a negative voice in their heads saying they’re no good, will never be published, and why not wait until tomorrow to write. Self-doubt seems widespread and often manifests in negative self-talk. For writers, it’s useful to think of the voice as a duck. There is a notepad to encourage resistance. It says, “Shut the duck up!”

Obstacles

In recent years, there seem to be more obstacles to initiating conversations. The biggest deterrents are headphones, earbuds and phones. It seems rude to interrupt who seems to be attentively listening to something or other. The ubiquitous phones are so addictive that people’s eyes seem glued to them, and maybe they have lost some of their face-to-face skills.

                  The challenge is to interrupt, to start a conversation anyway, knowing that both you and the stranger will benefit from it. Not always easy.

                  The most promising opportunities are when it’s just you and one other person waiting for something. At a bus stop, if it’s just me and one other waiting, I might ask which bus they’re waiting for or where they’re going, or comment about the weather.


Getting on a Wollongong bus

                  I remember one time I was walking from the railway station to the university, which takes about 15 minutes, and looked for a conversation partner along the way. A woman I met turned out to be a perfect interviewee for one of my research students. Sandstrom has many stories like this.

                  The main text of Sandstrom’s book is about her personal experiences and relevant research. It’s all readable. I can’t say how persuasive she is, because I was already persuaded, but her encouragement helped me up my efforts. She tells about things she’s learned from strangers and about some interactions that changed her life. One led to her marriage.


Gillian Sandstrom

                  Then, in appendices, she provides lots of practical information, such as what topics to introduce and how to continue after an initial exchange. She lists things you can do to make it easier for others to initiate conversations with you, including looking up when you’re out and about — when your head is down, others won’t interact — putting away your phone, not using headphones, not being in a rush, and wearing something striking that strangers will want to comment on.

                  When my parents lived in Tucson, Arizona, they would go for walks in suburban back streets, where there wasn’t much traffic. They would wave to every car that went by, and most of the drivers waved back. Sandstrom tells of research that even just a smile or glance can make others feel recognised and improve their mood, so waving to drivers is a way to make the world a little bit nicer. But this would be unusual in many places.

                  Cultural factors influence interactions with strangers. My friend Marina says that in her experience Brazilians are warm and outgoing and often make connections in queues at banks and supermarkets, but at the same time are wary because strangers can take advantage of them: a stranger’s friendliness can be the prelude to a scam.

                  Needless to say, I fully support Sandstrom’s plea to talk more with strangers. Her arguments and evidence are solid, and accord with my experience. How many readers will be inspired to take more initiative and build connections remains to be seen.

                  Sandstrom has no political agenda, but it’s easy to see that talking with strangers is a method of building community, of countering the forces that atomise society by encouraging individualism and self-centredness. If community-building is important to you, why not join in?

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

Thanks to Paula Arvela, Marina Granato, Julia LeMonde and Erin Twyford for useful comments.

corruption

Your book is wonderful!

It seemed like some sort of scam. It was an email from someone I’d never heard of, Mike Williams, praising one of my books and offering to promote it. Several things made me suspicious.

                  The praise for my book was excessive. Never before had anyone written to me in such a way. Williams seemed knowledgeable about my book, but this was too much. Here’s a typical paragraph taken from a much longer email.

“Your voice is calm but dangerous in the best way. There is no melodrama, just clarity. And clarity is disruptive. You mapped out the mechanics of outrage and resistance in a way that feels both academic and deeply practical. For people who care about social movements, civil resistance, institutional accountability, or even personal advocacy, this book is a tactical manual disguised as scholarship.”

Williams didn’t say how they’d come across my book or why it had attracted their interest. That was suspicious.

This is just one of dozens of dubious emails about my writing and research that began arriving in mid 2025. The senders of the first few dubious emails wanted to connect via WhatsApp or Telegram. Later came elaborate messages about my books. These senders give no web address or other contact information. There is no obvious way to check their authenticity.

I didn’t reply, instead filing the emails in a folder titled “AI fakes.” I assumed the messages had been written by AI and sent to me automatically. Why?

                  Though the emails were a nuisance, they were also fascinating. Eventually, assuming others were receiving similar solicitations, I looked online for commentary and found several posts about AI book club scams. Since the middle of 2025, authors have been receiving offers to feature their books in book club selections, and some of them have tried to figure out what was going on. They replied and discovered they were expected to pay a spot fee or participation cost for their book to be featured by a book club, something legitimate clubs never request. To test the process, some of them paid, but the book club promise didn’t eventuate. Here are some who’ve written about their experiences: Angela Hoy, Joanna Sommer, Claude Whitmyer and Pete Mitchell.

                  I was right to assume emails of this sort were scams, but there was an amusing part of the process. Some of the emails were praise for a book that I didn’t write. How did the sender get it wrong? In most cases, it was obvious. There is more than one author named Brian Martin. In fact, there are quite a few.

Brian Martins galore

Martin is a common last name in English-speaking countries. Brian is a moderately common first name, nothing like David or Robert, but frequent enough so that there are thousands of Brian Martins in the world. Using a Google Alert to see when my name pops up online, I’ve discovered Brian Martins who are journalists, tax agents, detectives, crime victims, sportspeople, relatives of the deceased, themselves deceased, and various others  — including criminals. Brian Martin, also known as the Hawk, was once called the most wanted man in Scotland. With so many Brian Martins out there, it’s no surprise that some are authors.

One message praised my book The Queen among Kings.

Not just one message; several different supposed book-clubbers wrote me about it. It didn’t take long to discover that The Queen among Kings was written by a Brian Martin who lives in Texas. I contacted him.


Brian Martin, author of The Queen among Kings

                  There’s research showing that when we have something in common with another person, like a birthday or a favourite sporting team, this makes us like them more. (Check out similarity/attraction theory.) It’s true of names. Having the same name is a good connection. Although it was strange to write to another Brian Martin, we got on fine.

What happened, apparently, is that the AI programme, a bot, saw Texas Brian’s new book The Queen among Kings, searched online to find the author and came across my online presence. A human wouldn’t make such a mistake, so I guessed that the bot was a simple one, not making full use of AI capacities. It wouldn’t be hard to instruct the bot to check that it was the correct author.

Then came more messages. Other Brian Martins had recently published books.

The Book of Hekate: A Devotional Guide to Magic, Liminal Space & the Keeper of the Keys

Between Worlds: A Life of Abduction, Addiction, and Awakening


Brian Martin, author of Between Worlds

A Defense of Thomas Jefferson and His Legacy


Brian Martin, author of A Defense of Thomas Jefferson and His Legacy

Barney Dreyfus: Pittsburgh’s Baseball Titan


Brian Martin, author of Barney Dreyfus: Pittsburgh’s Baseball Titan

These are just the books about which I’ve received scam emails. There are quite a few others sharing my name who have written books. It seems that we Brian Martins have been busy!

Conclusion

AI scams are likely to become more common. Email spam and scams have been around for decades, and most are now screened out before they get to us. AI is more sophisticated, as it can readily target individuals, getting around spam filters. No doubt these sorts of scams will become ever more convincing. They are a type of digital pollution, and perhaps eventually many people online will only accept emails from a whitelist or use some other way to screen incoming messages.

One other thing. There are many good books out there, and maybe some of them are by someone named Brian Martin. But be careful, because already there are AI take-offs of legitimate books. Buyer beware.

Brian Martin, bmartin@uow.edu.au

Thanks to Paula Arvela and Suzzanne Gray for useful comments.

Postscript

For the sake of exposition, I’ve simplified the variety of AI scams I’ve received. Let me know if you’d like a copy of the ones I’ve received.

politics, science, social dynamics

AI futures

Will artificial intelligence be a wonderful boon to humanity, or is it a serious threat? And what can we learn from the history of new information technologies?

                  These questions are at the heart of Yuval Noah Harari’s book Nexus. Harari is a master of big picture thinking. His book Sapiens tells the story of human evolution and history in a strikingly original way, and became a bestseller. He followed up with two more major books, Homo Deus and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. And now Nexus.

Harari looks at history from the perspective of information systems. He says humans became the Earth’s dominant species because of their unprecedented capacity for cooperation. When humans lived in small bands, cooperation was limited to those in their group, but what about other groups? What made it possible to trust strangers? Harari’s answer is stories: sets of ideas that are shared.

                  He says there is an objective reality, out there, and a subjective reality, what each person experiences in their mind. And there’s a third reality, intersubjective reality, which involves a shared understanding of the world. Examples include the days of the week, money and nations. If people stopped agreeing about such things, they wouldn’t exist. The idea of intersubjective reality may seem obvious or, on the other hand, contradictory. In any case, it’s fundamental to Harari’s thinking.

The next step is to see the world in terms of information systems, namely the ways people communicate with each other and with texts. Drawing on his knowledge of religion, Harari describes the difficulty of maintaining control over people’s beliefs. How can a religion ensure that its followers maintain the faith, given that faraway groups might change their teachings? One solution is a holy text, like the Bible, that cannot be changed. But then there’s the problem of different interpretations of the text. Those who provide authoritative interpretations can gain power within the faith.

Two purposes

Harari divides the purpose of information systems into two categories. One is seeking the truth, the other maintaining social order. You might think that the truth, a way of understanding the world that is more accurate, would be advantageous, but alas it often comes out second best. Information systems can enable false ideas to thrive and cause untold damage.

A common argument is that the solution to dangerous speech is counter-speech. However, Harari argues that it’s wrong to think more information is necessarily better. As an example of how wrong it can be, he uses the example of witch hunting in Europe, based on the spread of entirely imaginary threats. The invention of printing actually made it easier for delusional claims about witches to spread more widely, with devastating consequences.

“Witch hunts were a catastrophe caused by the spread of toxic information. They are a prime example of a problem that was created by information and was made worse by more information.” (p. 101)

In a pluralist society, there are many sources of information and many recipients, and no one monitors or controls all the information exchanges. The sources might be businesses, community groups, schools and government bodies. A school might contact a business or a public library without anyone else involved.

In contrast, in a centralist society, all information exchanges have to pass through the centre, which is like an all-seeing eye. Through this process, the centre gains great control over every part of society.

Harari calls the pluralist society a democracy, the centralist society totalitarianism or dictatorship. Harari sees these political systems as information systems and then looks at them historically. Two thousand years ago, before printing, communication between widely distributed groups of people was limited. This meant there were limits to both pluralist and centralist systems. Ancient Athens, where all male citizens participated in decision-making, was pluralist, but its political system couldn’t be scaled up to millions of people. The Roman Empire, where the centre attempted to control large populations, was limited by slow communication, with agents used to run things far from Rome.

                  Harari says that large-scale political systems only became possible with new information technologies: printing and, later, radio, television and the internet. With this framework, Harari lays the basis for looking at the significance of AI.

One more important concept: self-correction. Harari places great store on whether a system, after being set up, can correct itself. One of his examples is the US Constitution. Since it was passed in 1789, it has been amended dozens of times.

In contrast, the Catholic Church has a difficult time correcting its doctrine, because the Bible can’t be amended and the Pope is supposed to be infallible.

Harari says self-correcting systems are far better able to handle change. Pluralist systems, with their multiple avenues for decision-making and communication, are better at self-correction than centralist ones. So, what about AI?

According to Harari, AI is different from previous information technologies in one important aspect. Previous technologies like printing and radio were passive tools in the hands of humans, for better or worse. AI is different because it has agency: it doesn’t always do what its creators ask. If you start conversations with a chatbot, you won’t know in advance what it will say. It might flatter you, or possibly encourage your delusions, perhaps even encourage you to kill yourself. Another example: you ask AI to write a legal brief. That’s risky, because it might do something you don’t want, like make up non-existent legal cases.

                  Harari is worried about AI because it has the capacity to cause great harm, not from a superintelligent takeover of the world’s nuclear weapons but more likely from manipulating humans. Here’s how Harari’s concepts apply. A pluralist system, with its multiple nodes, has the capacity to control AI, to deal with possible dangers. However, a centralist system — like in Russia or China — is more susceptible to letting AI run things, and this might unleash wider AI manipulation.

A superintelligent AI: would it be self-correcting? Harari says not, and gives an example. When Facebook and YouTube algorithms went rogue, encouraging genocide in Myanmar, many humans raised the alarm, but the algorithms didn’t.

                  The problem is that computer systems, when they impose order on humans, think they have discovered truths about humans. For example, when an algorithm learns that outrage is popular, actually the algorithm is promoting outrage and not encouraging other human possibilities. Computers seem unable to take into account their own influence.

Harari’s goal in writing Nexus is to raise awareness of what’s happening with AI, and the need for controls. The trouble is that governments and corporations pushing AI development see this as a competition — a competition between humans. But they aren’t taking into account that the more important competition in the future may be between AI and humans, and that AI may end up dominant unless suitable controls are imposed.

                  There are parallels with previous technological developments. The rise of industrial technology enabled great productivity but also the capacity for massive pollution. Just as damaging were innovations in military technology, which enabled colonialism, world wars and the threat of nuclear annihilation. The development of surveillance technology has enabled the monitoring of entire populations, making dictatorial power easier to impose. But at least in those cases, it has remained possible for people to raise their concerns and campaign for controls or organise resistance. Although AI has agency, there’s one thing it apparently has a hard time doing: being a partner in discussions of how to make sure it serves the greater good — the greater good of humans, not AI.

It’s reasonable to be sceptical of warnings about AI taking over, of manipulating humans for its own ends. Scepticism is fine, but nevertheless it can be valuable to be aware of risks and discuss options. AI is not under popular control, and neither are the companies and governments developing it. Would you feel safer if AI were in control?


Yuval Noah Harari

 “Due to the superior abilities of AIs to create and disseminate information, the flood of ‘free’ AI speech threatens to void human freedom of speech by twisting, manipulating or silencing human speech — unless some restrictions are placed on AI activities. Human rights are better reserved for humans.” (p. 411)

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au