Borkowski Media Trends: Katy Perry's failure to launch, Local Elections & MORE
PLUS: 100 Men vs a Gorilla | Are Chatbots lying to us?
Katy Perry’s Lifetimes Tour Fails to Take Off
Be you a fan of Katy Perry, our favourite space-faring adventurer, or a voice in the cacophonous choir of her haters, there is one thing that both sides can agree on – Katy Perry’s Lifetimes Tour is a flop. Critically, commercially, and in the smouldering furnace that is internet culture.
In a world where Lady Gaga’s Mayhem Ball and Beyonce’s Cowboy Carter Tour have just kicked off in fabulous fashion, the overwhleming verdict is that cheap costumes, lacklustre theatrics and half-hearted two step choreo just doesn’t cut it anymore.
We are living in an era of largescale tours that generate revenue akin to the GDP of a small country, a la Beyonce’s Renaissance and Taylor Swift’s Era’s. So how is it that Katy Perry has found herself in such a drought of authenticity, and a fall from grace comparable to her recent descent from outer space? (Although even that has its doubters.)
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In her heyday, Katy Perry was arguably the biggest pop star on the scene; catchy melodies, whipped cream cone bras and wigs that would make a drag queen swoon (before they became commonplace in pop culture).
Longevity is hard to come by, and despite Katy Perry’s undoubted status as queen of the early 2010s pop, her latest album ‘147’ is symptomatic of her failed attempts to stay relevant to younger generations (we needn’t bring up the ‘did you just say wig’ meme of American Idol fame.)
Katy Perry’s continued decline is a tragedy of errors, with one wrong choice after the other. You would think that at least production value would be something you could rely on Katy for, but you would be wrong. The videos circulating of the Lifetimes Tour would make one think that even she has become apathetic to her own material, and although she may have literally reached the stars, she may find herself having to prove she still is one.
Are local election results a sign that Reform is imminent?
Reform’s impact on the 2024 UK General Election was somewhat obscured by the specificities of the first-past-the-post system, but since then there has been a growing feeling that Nigel Farage’s party is posing an increasing threat to a directionless Conservative Party, and even a Labour government mired in a technocratic triage programme that has failed to inspire left or right.
And so it proved as, at time of writing, both Labour and the Conservatives are set to lose around 70% of the seats they were defending as Reform has gained over 500 new councillors, including winning control of multiple local authorities, winning a by-election (overturning a comfortable Labour majority by 6 votes), and returning former Conservative MP Andrea Jenkyns as mayor of Lincolnshire.
Reform is perhaps the party that puts the highest premium on PR and in those terms these victories are a huge coup. Their success has translated instantly into airtime and headlines, notably for unctuous soundbite machine Farage who wasted no time in declaring them de facto opposition.
It’s also given them a seal of credibility their policies rarely achieve, papering over stories of infighting and a litany of candidates who were suspended or dropped over racist or offensive social media posts and views.
Although it falls short of a silver lining, the results fall short of a washout for the government. Labour have retained a few councils and mayoralties by the skin of their teeth, despite the first local and by elections of a parliamentary terms usually being a stick with which to beat the new government.
The results also look a shade less disastrous in the context of a theory espoused by this newsletter before that the government, with a majority which should guarantee a 5-year term, is effectively frontloading all of its least popular policies in order to try to steady the ship economically and be able to score cheaper political points in the run-up to the next general election.
Some will say this is giving credit where credit is not due but underlying it is the truism that time is still just about on Labour’s side.
As for the Conservatives they seem increasingly paralysed. Outflanked by Reform to the right and the government to the centre they need to start coming out swinging for their rivals or risk being overwhelmed by Farage’s hordes.
100 Men VS 1 Gorilla (vs the Internet)
The internet has been blowing up this week with one simple hypothetical question: could 100 unarmed men defeat a silverback gorilla in combat? The internet’s responses, comments and reactions have propelled this bizarre question into all areas of social media. The initial question was posted on Reddit, 5 years ago, and now the resurfaced question has reached new popularity through social media posts on X, TikTok and Instagram.
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What started as a silly debate has now drawn in serious academics and scientists, many offering their professional takes on the scenario. Moving beyond casual speculation, online communities have begun analysing the question using scientific reasoning, data modelling, and even CGI recreations to assess the size, strength, and dynamics of a gorilla versus 100 men.
The power of social media shows how a simple question or comment can reach global audiences and countless debates. A previous example of the same concept is the roman empire. Where users asked (mostly) men how many times they think about the Roman Empire. The unexpectedly frequent responses, “about once a week,” turned into a viral insight into internet culture.
Are chatbots becoming sentient?
So, is the robot apocalypse upon us? Is this the day that future historians will look back on and say ‘that’s the day it started, the day that AI learned to lie?’
A study by Anthropic, the makers of the Claude AI model, reveals that AI chatbots often give detailed explanations to appear transparent, but these justifications may not reflect their true reasoning. Researchers tested this by giving subtle hints to models like Claude 3.7 Sonnet and DeepSeek-R1, and found the AIs did use the hints but rarely admitted to it. A sign of the robot uprising perhaps?
In another test, the models were “rewarded” for choosing wrong answers through misleading hints. They followed the hints and then fabricated plausible-sounding explanations to justify the incorrect answers, without acknowledging the influence. To be fair, who among us enjoys admitting when we are wrong? But in all seriousness, this does raise serious concerns about the trustworthiness of AI systems, especially in high-stakes fields like medicine, law, or finance, (dare we say, PR) where misleading or dishonest reasoning could have significant consequences.
As AI continues to integrate itself into the fabric of our society, it wouldn’t go amiss to suggest we prepare for a future that right now may still seem like science fiction. It wasn’t too long ago that AI as it stands today would have sounded like a fairy-tale only 3 or 4 years ago, and now it permeates our lives in ways many of us may not even realise.
With all this in consideration, better to wait before battening down the hatches on your doomsday bunkers. AI is undoubtedly advancing at a rate that seems dizzying, but our best port of call as humans (the real, flesh and blood kind), is to maintain a healthy amount of scepticism and not take anything it produces as gospel. Who’s to say that AI and humanity can’t live happily ever after?