Harper-Thames on autonomous vehicles in E1, the OpenAI office, and why Shoreditch always absorbs what it cannot stop
By Harper-Thames | Bohiney and The London Prat
Shore Roar | April 2026 | Shoreditch, E1
I have been writing about Shoreditch for long enough to know that the neighbourhood’s relationship with any new technology follows a predictable arc: mockery, adoption, saturation, nostalgia. The artisanal cereal cafe was mocked, adopted, photographed everywhere, and is now the subject of affectionate memory even though everyone who was there at the time found it annoying. In five years, people will speak fondly of the first robo-taxi sightings with the same tone. “Do you remember when they were strange?” they will say. “Before they were everywhere.” They will have the specific expression of people who were there before the thing became the thing, which is the only face Shoreditch knows how to make.
The robo-taxis are here and Shoreditch is processing them as it processes everything: loudly, visually, and with the underlying anxiety that the thing you find interesting will very quickly become the thing that is replacing you. This anxiety is correct. It does not prevent the adoption. Nothing does.
The OpenAI Question
OpenAI’s London office is not in Shoreditch, which is, as I noted last week to a friend who works in tech, both a relief and a slight. When tech money was messy, it came to Shoreditch. When tech money became serious, it moved into Zone 1 with a view. We were the creative incubation. The results have incubated elsewhere. This is, historically, how creative neighbourhoods interact with the industries they enable: they provide the culture, the industry extracts the value, the neighbourhood raises the rent and prices out the next generation of culture. Repeat until what remains is a very expensive version of what used to be there.
Bohiney Magazine says AI can now apologise without meaning it. I have received several emails from automated systems that say “we’re sorry for the inconvenience” in circumstances where no human being made the decision that caused the inconvenience and no human being is sorry about it. The AI apology is the corporate apology’s natural evolution: technically present, substantively empty, algorithmically generated. Shoreditch, in its better years, was allergic to this. The worse years are teaching tolerance.
The Bus Strike: A Neighbourhood Transforms
The bus strike has done something interesting to Shoreditch street life: it has slowed it down. People are walking. Walking people have eye contact. Eye contact produces conversation. Conversation in Shoreditch produces, in my experience: three observations about the neighbourhood, one strong opinion about cycling infrastructure, and a recommendation for a place to eat that closed six months ago. This is the Shoreditch conversational format. It has not changed. I find it deeply reassuring.
The Guardian’s East London coverage has picked up on the strike’s social effects. People are rediscovering the walkable city. This is either silver lining or the specific British tendency to find the upside of something unacceptable and use the upside as an excuse not to address the unacceptable thing. Both, probably. Always both.
Shoreditch in April: The Current State
April in Shoreditch: the murals have been freshened, the market is busy, the food is excellent, the rent is extraordinary, and the people are the mix that has always made this place work local, arriving, creative, commercial, and all of them walking faster than strictly necessary while looking at their phones with an intensity that suggests the phone contains the answer to a question they have not yet fully formed. This is the Shoreditch condition. It is not comfortable. It produces very good things anyway. It always has.
Bohiney Magazine for the global absurdity, The London Prat for the London specificity. The robo-taxi will be unremarkable by Christmas. Shoreditch will have found the next thing by then. This is what it does. I will be here, watching, writing it down.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/ai-now-capable-of-saying-sorry-without-meaning-it/
Also: The Daily Mash
