On the beach

Kilcummin beach, Dingle Peninsula.

Quote of the Day

“The issue is that generative AI systems don’t want messy perspective jumps. They want the median, the average, the most widely-approved of viewpoint on an issue, a kind of soft-focus perspective that is the exact opposite of how a good historian should be thinking.”

• Benjamin Breen

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Cristóbal de Morales | Parce Mihi Domine | Jan Garbarek and the Hilliard Ensemble

Link

Recorded at the monastery of Propstei St. Gerold in Austria in September 1993. Wonderful Saxophony.

Long Read of the Day

The Mad Farrago at the BBC

Tina Brown on a home-grown shambles…

So Trump has collected two more big media scalps, this time across the Atlantic—the widely respected duo of BBC director general Tim Davie and its head of news Deborah Turness. On Truth Social, he gloated, “These are very dishonest people who tried to step on the scales of a Presidential Election.”

The BBC triggered a mine of its own making. The sloppy-as-hell video editing of Trump’s January 6th speech in a 2024 documentary for Panorama—splicing together two different quotes that made it look as if Trump was directly urging protesters to walk to the Capitol and “fight like hell”—exploded last week with a leaked memo itemizing a litany of alleged bias (claims of transgender mania, antisemitism, liberal blindness on immigration, etc.) from a former independent adviser to the BBC’s standards committee. The editing blunder was a gift to Trump, who made a festive threat to sue the BBC for $1 billion (good luck with that) if it does not make a “full and fair retraction.”

It’s mystifying why it took a year to surface such a sensitive error and why the Panorama program director did not fall on his sword, after a fulsome institutional apology. But the Beeb is hopeless at acknowledging mistakes, mired as it is in committees and processes set up to protect its probity, but instead induce herbivore slow-motion…

Readers with long memories will recall that we have been here before. In 1984, to be precise, when a Panorama documentary, “Maggie’s Militant Tendency”, was broadcast in January of that year. The programme claimed that a number of Conservative MPs including Neil Hamilton, Harvey Proctor and Gerald Howarth had links to far-right organisations both in Britain and on the Continent. Two of the MPs sued for libel and the case headed for the High Court. But the Chairman of the BBC’s Governors then died unexpectedly and Margaret Thatcher replaced him with an establishment trusty, Marmaduke Hussey. The BBC’s Director General, Alastair Milne (who had approved the programme) resigned. The Governors decided to settle the libel case, and Hussey appointed a sharp technocrat, John Birt, to sort out the corporation’s new operation. The rest is history. But the BBC is still here. And will be ten years from now, I’ll bet.

Books, etc.

At my centre’s Monday ‘OpenLab’ seminar, the sociologist Robert Dorschel gave a fascinating talk on the research that went into this forthcoming book of his. It’s basically a sociological analysis of a slice of the tech workforce that hasn’t been properly examined before — the geeks who do the software. His talk — and the subsequent discussion was enough to persuade me to put the book on my reading list, and I look forward to picking up when it’s out (from MIT Press).

My commonplace booklet

From Dave Winer, (Whom God Preserve):

Now that Cory Doctorow has put enshitified into our vocabulary, I find myself looking for evidence of it in AI, and finding it everywhere. There is a common thread. Amazon Alexa has a really nasty habit of finishing a song by asking me if I want to listen to some other version of it. I’m sure that seems like a nice friendly thing to the product people at Amazon, but please — I’m grooving on the energy of the song, and the last thing I’m thinking about is some asshole robot interfering with my train of thought with a question so stupid only a machine could think of it. Okay I think that qualifies for enshitification right there. Can we have a rule that AI bots must by default behave like a computer. I, your human overlord, the one who is paying the bills, will ask the questions. And you will not speak until you are spoken to.

Amen.

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In case of fire…

… call photographer.

Arles, July 2022

Quote of the Day

“Fifteen years ago, the internet was an escape from the real world. Now the real world is an escape from the internet.”

• Noah Smith

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ralph Vaughan Williams | The Sky Above the Roof | Barbara Dickson

Link

Thanks to Kevin Nolan for alerting me to it.

Long Read of the Day

AI Friends too cheap to meter

Really thoughtful essay by Jasmine Sun, a remarkably insightful observer of the tech industry. In it she tackles one of the most surprising discovery of the current LLM-dominated era — the astonishing attachment of humans to these ‘stochastic parrots’.

We passed the Turing Test years ago and not enough of us are talking about it. There is something powerfully disorienting about software that speaks in human form—the fact that chatting with a frontier LLM is indistinguishable from an enthusiastic online stranger, the fact that a bot’s message bubbles look no different than ours, the fact that so many AI researchers have slipped in and out of believing in model sentience after long-winded chats. It seems there is something physiological about this response: we can read as many disclaimers as we want, but our human brains cannot distinguish between a flesh-and-bones duck and an artificial representation that looks/swims/quacks the same way.

Why do people become so attached to their AIs? No archetype is immune: lonely teenagers, army generals, AI investors. Most AI benchmarks show off a model’s IQ, proving “PhD-level intelligence” or economically useful capabilities. But consumers tend to choose chatbots with the sharpest EQ instead: those which mirror their tone and can anticipate their needs. As the politically practiced know, a great deal of AI’s influence will come not through its superior logic or correctness, but through its ability to build deep and hyperpersonalized relational authority—to make people like and trust them. Soft skills matter, and AI is getting quite good at them.

Do read it. We’re moving from an era of social media to relational computing.

Would you pay an AI to read your book?

My latest Observer column…

Kevin Kelly thinks that authors have got the wrong idea. “They believe,” he writes, “that AI companies should pay them for training AIs on their books. But I predict in a very short while, authors will be paying AI companies to ensure that their books are included in the education and training of AIs. The authors (and their publishers) will pay in order to have influence on the answers and services the AIs provide. If your work is not known and appreciated by the AIs, it will be essentially unknown.”

If that reminds you of the famous “Right to be forgotten” on the internet decision by the European court of justice in 2014, then join the club. That judgment empowered European citizens to petition for the removal from search engine results of embarrassing online information about them.

It wasn’t truly a right to be forgotten, merely a right not to be found by Google – and in that sense it was an implicit acknowledgment of the search engine’s power. If Google didn’t find you, then you didn’t exist.

Kelly’s thesis likewise rests on an implicit long-term vision of the kind of power and authority these machines might eventually come to wield…

Read on

Books, etc.

This is one of the most interesting books I’ve read this year. But it’s quite long and if you’re stretched for time, this recorded conversation between the author and Francis Fukuyama will give you a pretty good insight into it. The video is 36 minutes long, but worth it.

My commonplace booklet

I guess the reason Zohran Mamdani’s election has resonated so widely is that it’s the first bit of good news from the US since January. What was missed in much media coverage, though, is that there were lots of other elections across the country on the same day, and the results seems to have been a clean sweep for the Democrats. Was this a straw in the wind or a flash in the pan? Hard to say. The real test will be in the mid-term elections coming next November. That is, unless Trump tries to prevent them

Coming back to the speech, I was struck by an attentive reading by the inimitable Neila Orr on the LRB blog. Among the things she picked up was the significance of Mamdani’s quoting of Eugene Debs. It’s a long time since anyone prominent in American politics mentioned him.

The speech was both sweeping and precise, by turns tender and truculent. Mamdani positioned himself once again as both an equity-minded reformer and an anti-establishment crusader. There were invocations of ‘hope’, and it was hard not to hear the echo of one of the slogans for Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign. ‘Tonight we have spoken in a clear voice: hope is alive,’ Mamdani said. ‘While we cast our ballots alone, we chose hope together. Hope over tyranny. Hope over big money and small ideas. Hope over despair. We won because New Yorkers allowed themselves to hope that the impossible could be made possible.’

He stayed on message, and repeated once again his three campaign promises of fast and free buses, universal childcare, and a rent freeze on rent-stabilised apartments. He called this triptych of initiatives ‘the most ambitious agenda to tackle the cost-of-living crisis that this city has seen since the days of Fiorello La Guardia’ – the pathbreaking leftist politician who governed the city from 1934 to 1946, in Mamdani’s view the best mayor New York has ever had.

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Picture

Emerging from our research centre at dusk the other day, I suddenly saw the Law Faculty next door in a new light. As you can guess, it’s a Norman Foster building.

Quote of the Day

”The simple concept is not always the best, but the best is always simple”.

• Heinrich Tessenow

Tessenow was a German architect and urban planner active at the time of the Weimar Republic. Thanks to Niall O’Sullivan for suggesting the quote. Reminds me of my own favourite adage — that “the best is the enemy of the good”, which I used to quote to graduate students who were reluctant to show me their first drafts.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Handel | Lascia ch’io pianga (Rinaldo) | Voices of Music with Kirsten Blaise

Link

Long Read of the Day

The Simulation is Collapsing

On Friday US Republicans suffered massive defeats in three elections (New Jersey, Virginia, New York). These defeats led Mike Brock to publish this call to arms in which he argues that they shattered a carefully manufactured consensus that authoritarianism was inevitable and that resistance was futile. This “simulation” — sustained through platform control, elite capitulation, and psychological manipulation — has, he says, begun to collapse when it met the reality of lived experience.

It’s a stirring piece of rhetoric, though over-long (IMO). I found it interesting because it challenges the prevailing sense of liberal depression in the US.

Here’s a sample:

The analysts wanted conciliation. They wanted prose, not poetry. They wanted him to understand that Muslims who win elections are supposed to apologize for winning.

Here’s what Mamdani said instead:

“This is not only how we stop Trump; it’s how we stop the next one. So, Donald Trump, since I know you’re watching, I have four words for you: Turn the volume up.”

And then he explained exactly what he meant. Not threats. Not violence. Policy. “We will hold bad landlords to account because the Donald Trumps of our city have grown far too comfortable taking advantage of their tenants. We will put an end to the culture of corruption that has allowed billionaires like Trump to evade taxation and exploit tax breaks. We will stand alongside unions and expand labor protections because we know, just as Donald Trump does, that when working people have ironclad rights, the bosses who seek to extort them become very small indeed.”

This is what they cannot tolerate. Not rudeness. Not divisiveness. Not lack of decorum. Fighting back through democratic power used to break the concentrations that produced Trump in the first place.

The CNN analysts want him to play by rules that no longer exist. To extend courtesy to people threatening to strip his citizenship. To moderate his ambitions so he doesn’t offend sensibilities of people who think Muslims shouldn’t hold power at all. To accept that the price of access to power is agreeing not to actually use it.

But Mamdani didn’t run to access power. He ran to wield it. “To every New Yorker in Kensington and Midwood and Hunts Point, know this: This city is your city, and this democracy is yours too.” Not can be yours if you’re properly deferential. Not might be yours if you moderate your expectations. Is yours. Right now. Through democratic choice exercised despite every dollar spent to prevent it…

You get the gist.

Brock ends on a realistic note. These defeats may turn out to represent a pivotal moment where manufactured consensus met reality and reality won — but only temporarily. The question now is: whether people will recognise their collective power, sustain organised resistance; or whether fear and manufactured despair will rebuild the illusion of authoritarian inevitability.

Books, etc.

Cory’s new book

Cory Doctorow, whom I’ve known and admired for decades, is one of the wonders of the online world. In November 2022 he coined a memorable term — enshittification — as a description of what owners of tech platforms do to their platforms and their users over time. To many people’s astonishment — including the staid guardians of mainstream media’s house-style manuals — the term caught on. The American Dialect Society selected enshittification as its 2023 word of the year, and the Macquarie Dictionary named it as its 2024 word of the year.

And now it has an entire book to itself! The reason for its popularity, Cory thinks, “is that it embodied a theory that explains the accelerating decay of the things that matter to us, explaining why this is happening and what we should do about it.

Feedback

Kevin Cryan (Whom God Preserve) dug out the sleeve notes for the album from which Wednesday’s music choice was taken.

SONNY & GREY FUNNEL LINE: Emmylou Harris expressed a wish to sing with Dolores Keane and Mary Black. She felt there was something in the spirit of their singing that she could relate to. It wasn’t so much the words or even the tunes, it was just the feeling that they were coming from the same place as herself. As it transpired, she was right. They met in Nashville, Tennessee, and sang together for the first time. It was here that Sonny and Grey Funnel Line were recorded in February 1990. The musicians for Sonny were Emmylou Harris, Dolores Keane and Mary Black, vocals; Pat Crowley, accordion; Liam O’Flynn and Davy Spillane, uileann pipes; Roy Huskey Jr. bass; Mark O’Connor, fiddle; Emmylou, Dolores and Mary were accompanied by Declan Sinnot for Grey Funnel Line. The recordings took place in Jack Clement’s Studios in Nashville.

The notes were written by twin music polymaths Nuala O’Connor and Phillip King.

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Reading room

The library in Oxburgh Hall, a stately home in Norfolk with an interesting history.

Quote of the Day

”Confronted with computers that can produce fluent essays, instead of being astonished at how powerful they are, it’s possible that we should be surprised that the generation of language that is meaningful to us turns out to be something that can be accomplished without real comprehension.”

• Paul Lay, writing in the London Review of Books.

Which raises the question: if machines can produce fluent essays without understanding a word of the subject matter, why did we build assessment systems that evaluate students on their ability to produce such essays?

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mary Black, Emmylou Harris and Dolores Keane | Sonny

Link

Interestingly, it doesn’t mention Liam O’Flynn on the Ulieann pipes.

Long Read of the Day

Britain’s elite needs a history lesson

Really interesting essay by Alastair Benn, triggered by a Bloomberg podcast in which the Reform UK leader, Nigel Farage, was interviewed by Mishal Husain, a former host of the BBC Today programme. It was, writes Benn, “one of the longest, in-depth interviews conducted in recent months by a British political leader, ranging widely across foreign policy, the money markets, immigration and state failure”. “The most revealing aspect,” writes Benn,

came right at its end: ‘Is it true you read constantly?’, Husain asks Farage. He responds that he has just finished Mr Balfour’s Poodle by Roy Jenkins, a blow-by-blow political history of the constitutional crisis between the Commons and the Lords triggered by Lloyd George’s People’s Budget of 1909. Farage reflected that the text had shaped his thinking on the potential for constitutional chicanery should Reform win a parliamentary majority.

‘In the early 20th century’, Husain cuts across: ‘Why were you interested in that?… You’re going back a hundred years to find the answers to that.’ The tone – really? The past? The early 20th century? A hundred years ago? History? – speaks to a deep problem in British public life: a political and media class, often interrelated, cut off from an historically informed understanding of the nation’s institutions…

He’s right. If Reform were to emerge from the next election with the largest number of MPs, the disunited Kingdom could have an interesting constitutional crisis on its hands.

En passant, this is the first interesting thing I’ve ever heard about Farage.

My commonplace booklet

From LFI

The Fondation HCB in Paris has an interesting exhibition.* 

The Monument by Sibylle Bergemann (1941–2010). From 1975 to 1986, the German photographer documented the creation of the Marx-Engels Monument in East Berlin. The project was initiated by the newly founded GDR after World War II, and eventually entrusted to sculptor Ludwig Engelhardt in 1973, who collaborated with several other artists. Bergemann began taking pictures informally, before receiving an official assignment from the Ministry of Culture in 1977. Over the course of eleven years, she recorded every stage of the process, from the earliest models to the inauguration of the vast double statue on April 4, 1986. Out of more than 400 rolls of developed film, Bergemann selected twelve images whose visual language was far removed from official aesthetics, and consolidated them under the title Das Denkmal (The Monument). Viewed from a post-communist perspective, her ironic deconstructions of these heroic figures seem remarkably farsighted. By maintaining a rigorously objective style, she managed to evade censorship while bluntly conveying the obsolescence of an ideology.

Hmmm… a reason to catch the Eurostar before Christmas?

Errata

Apologies to Branko Milanovic (whose new book I’m reading) for misspelling his first name with a ‘c’.

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Mellow fruitfulness

Last year, our crab-apple tree produced very little fruit. This year it is overladen with fruit — every branch is bending with the weight. We used to make apple-jelly, but now we leave the fruit on the tree, because when the weather gets really cold the birds pick it clean.

Quote of the Day

”When they were young, they wanted to be rich. Now that they’re rich, they want to be young again.”

• Martin Rees, the Cambridge astronomer, on the obsession of Silicon Valley tech titans with combating ageing.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Waterboys | A Song for the Life

Link

Long Read of the Day

 The Inside Story on how King Charles Pulled the Plug on Andrew

More coruscating stuff from Tina Brown, the most readable commentator on the British royals.

Sample:

Things were getting sweaty for the king. Last week, he determinedly kept shaking hands and smiling outside Lichfield Cathedral as he was heckled by a man demanding to know if he had covered for Andrew. More ominously, there was talk in the House of Commons about holding a debate over the Andrew problem, or even requiring him to give evidence under oath, which would be an unprecedented invasion of royal prerogative. Start pulling on that string and who knows where you end up. The success of Britain’s constitutional monarchy depends on the unwritten pact that the royals are above politics. They will serve the public and do the government’s bidding, and, in return, Parliament will butt out of the royals’ business. It’s proved to be an especially good bargain for the British government, as was made dazzlingly clear at the Trump state banquet, when the royals proved yet again that they are the UK’s diplomatic superpower. No wonder the king raced to take the Andrew problem out of Parliament’s purview, sending royal warrants to Lord Chancellor David Lammy to formally remove Andrew’s titles, and Lammy, with full backing from PM Keir Starmer, who owes Charles big time for Trump whispering, was happy to oblige.

The king’s move was the smartest royal pivot since 1992, when Queen Elizabeth, during one of her least popular post-Diana moments, voluntarily declared she would be the first monarch to pay income tax…

Nice acerbic style.

Musk’s war on Wikipedia: a fight for a future without fact-checking

My latest Observer column:

So Elon Musk has entered the knowledge business with Grokipedia, an AI-driven alternative to Wikipedia that he claims represents “a massive improvement” – indeed, “a necessary step towards the xAI goal of understanding the universe”. It is supposedly based on a fantasy of Donald Trump’s AI and crypto czar, David Sacks, who believes that Wikipedia is “hopelessly biased” because an “army of leftwing activists maintain the bios and fight reasonable corrections”. The problem is compounded, he thinks, by the fact that “Wikipedia often appears in Google search results, and now it’s a trusted source for AI model training”.

Turns out that Sacks was late to the anti-Wikipedia party. Musk has been on the warpath about it since at least 2023, when, in a chat with his buddy Benjamin Netanyahu, he said: “There’s an old saying that ‘history is written by the victors’ – it’s like, well, not if your enemies are still alive and have a lot of time on their hands to edit Wikipedia. The losers just got a lot of time on their hands.” Yes, agreed Bibi: “History is written by those who can harness the most editors.” By 2024, Musk was urging users to “stop donating to Wokepedia [sic] until they restore balance to their editing authority”…

Read on

Books, etc.

I’ve never read this, but after coming on Ed Simon’s essay on it, I think it’s time I did. His column is at partly about the importance of ‘close readings’ of poems, passages, dialogue and even art. And after I read the essay, I was blown away by listening to Carl Sagan himself reading the highlighted passage from the book.

You can find the reading here, and if you do nothing else today, click to listen. It’ll take three minutes and 26 seconds out of your busy life. But you’ll remember it for a lot longer.

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Autumnal berries

Seen in a college garden yesterday.

Quote of the Day

”Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men, for the nastiest of reasons, will somehow work for the benefit of us all.

• John Maynard Keynes

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Dionisio Aguado | Rondo in A minor | Julian Bream

Link

(You might have t skip the Uber ad at the beginning.)

Long Read of the Day

 On the Simple Life of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Philosophy as “Neverending Therapy”

If you’re interested in Wittgenstein (as I am) then this essay by Anthony Gottlieb is a gem. It’s adapted from his new book, Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophy in the Age of Airplanes, which came out this week.

In 1931, at the age of forty-one, Ludwig Wittgenstein mused in his diary that perhaps his name would live on only as the end point of Western philosophy—“like the name of the one who burnt down the library of Alexandria.” There probably was no such an arsonist. The books of ancient Alexandria seem to have perished mainly by rot and neglect, not in a single blaze.

And Western philosophy certainly did not come to an end with Wittgenstein, who died in 1951. He did not really believe that it would. Wittgenstein could get carried away when writing in his diaries, especially when contemplating himself, which he did often.

But he did think that he had found a fresh approach to philosophical problems. At least for a while and in some places, his influence changed how philosophy was done. A memorial brass in Trinity College, Cambridge, that stands on a wall behind statues of Isaac Newton and Francis Bacon declares (in Latin):

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Fellow of this College, Professor of Philosophy in the University for eight years, showed to many a new way of philosophizing . . . and taught by examples that reason should be freed from the snares of language…

I’m tempted to buy the book. The ashes of my late wife, Carol are buried in Ascension Churchyard in Cambridge, where Wittgenstein also lies, so when I visit her grave I generally check to see what mementoes visitors have left on his. Also, in one of those interesting coincidences, nearby is the grave of Frank Ramsey the young genius who had translated Wittgenstein’s Tractatus at the age of 19 and whom Wittgenstein thought was the only person in Cambridge who understood it at first.

Books, etc.

Branco Milanovic is a formidable economist (and an interesting blogger) and this is his latest book. It’s about what’s likely to happen after the international global order to which we’ve all been accustomed has finally crumbled away. I’m a sucker for grand narratives and so started reading this on Wednesday evening — and only put it down because I needed to sleep. <hr 

My commonplace booklet

I’ve always disliked Halloween, ever since I was a kid. So I was very struck by Jeff Jacoby’s piece in the Boston Globe the other day, triggered, I think, by the photograph below.

My father’s life had been scarred by people who scrupled at nothing, not even the murder of children. As a teenager in the Nazi death camps, he had been an eyewitness to unspeakable cruelty. He knew what can happen when people stop taking evil seriously. For him, death was not a punch line.

Perhaps I’m overreacting. But I can’t help thinking that what my father instinctively recoiled from — the blurring of horror and light entertainment — is precisely what our society now does on a national scale every October. As I pass yards filled with grinning Death’s-heads and plastic agony, the juxtaposition is hard to miss: For generations, such images were meant to stir the conscience. Now they’re a beacon to kids going door-to-door to amass KitKats and Twizzlers. The symbols remain — skulls, bones, graves — but the meaning has drained away. What once was moral instruction has become seasonal amusement.

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Fuchsia

One of my favourite plants. Grows like mad in South-West Ireland where one finds some roadside hedgerowss that seem to be largely comprised of it.

Quote of the Day

”The oddity of the hostility of certain thinkers and political leaders to the ‘Deep State’ is that it often favours them in all sorts of weird and largely unintentional ways. They might have trouble building a bureaucracy that is both routinised AND that favours their interests consistently. (In fact, protip hint: that’s why Mussolini and Hitler’s bureaucracies in Italy and Germany were so shambolic: turns out it’s hard to routinise the autocratic whims of impulsive leaders.)”

• Timothy Burke

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Rolling Stones | Ruby Tuesday

Link

Long Read of the Day

 Why America Doesn’t Care About Trump’s Graft

Another withering blast from Tina Brown.

What boggles me more is why MAGA adorers, and the American populace in general, seem to care so little about the raging kleptocracy that is business as usual in the Trump circle. The president’s net worth has nearly doubled in the eight months since he returned to the Oval Office. In May, the UAE’s ruling family deposited $2 billion into the crypto fund cofounded by Eric and Donald Trump, Jr. with, among others, the Middle East special envoy Steve Witkoff’s fresh-faced son, Zach and a fourth Musketeer Zak Folkman, who used to run a company called Date Hotter Girls, — and lo!—two weeks later, the White House gave the UAE access to a payload of the world’s most advanced and scarce AI computer chips, despite national security concerns that they might be shared with our biggest adversary, China. A NYT investigation described the transaction as “eviscerating the boundary between private enterprise and government policy in a manner without precedent in modern American history.”

Worth a read. It is truly amazing how much of this naked graft is going on in full view. And people just shrug helplessly, maybe because they are indeed impotent, despite the fact that the US is — as my American friends used to remind me in 2016 when I expressed concerns about the future after Trump’s election — “is a Republic of Laws”. Well, that was then and this is now.

Social media is just TV now – and we can’t stop changing the channel

My latest Observer column…

In 2020, the US Federal Trade Commission launched an antitrust case against Meta (née Facebook), arguing the company had accumulated monopoly power by buying up potential competitors in their infancy. The suit focuses on two acquisitions in particular: Instagram, purchased in 2012 for $1bn when it was merely a photo-sharing app with a handful of employees; and WhatsApp, acquired in 2014 for a staggering $19bn.

The case has had its ups and downs and remains unresolved. Last August, however, Meta filed a document that made a startling claim: that it cannot be regarded as a social media monopoly, because it is not really a social media company.

How come? Meta argues that if “social” means time spent checking in with friends and family, then very little of that now occurs on its platforms. Today, the company reports, only 7% of Instagram time and 17% of Facebook time involves consuming content from friends. The majority of time on both apps is spent watching short-form videos that are “unconnected” – not from friends or followed accounts – but recommended by AI-powered algorithms developed as a direct competitive response to TikTok’s rise.

Meta is clearly deploying these statistics as legal strategy, but they nonetheless capture a profound shift in our media ecology…

Read on

My commonplace booklet

Here’s a really uncomfortable thought: In the long view Donald Trump will be seen as the most consequential US president since FDR. Note: This is not an endorsement of the brute, just an opinion. The American Heritage Dictionary defines the term as:

1. Following as an effect, result, or conclusion; consequent
2. Having important consequences; significant
3. Important, influential
4. Pompous, self-important

Seems to me that all four apply to Trump. I first got the idea reading the FT columnist Janan Ganesh who was pointing out that there is only one thing that Trump has been consistent about since he emerged into public life — and that is the importance of tariffs.

But it is his effect on trade, an almost uncontested idea once, that stands out. Even in freewheeling Britain, whose state cannot build a high-speed rail line from Birmingham to Manchester, politicians feel obliged to yak on about “industrial strategy”. No individual has changed the global intellectual atmosphere on so large a subject quite so much in my time.

Some Trump-watchers put it about that Barack Obama’s mockery of him at a 2011 press dinner, which Trump attended, hardened his resolve to run. The free trader in me keeps imagining a world in which he’d had toothache that night.

This Blog is also available as an email three days a week. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays delivered to your inbox at 5am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

Mr Hood, I believe?

I’m always trying to photograph birds — and failing. And then my sister — who doesn’t think of herself as a photographer and possesses no fancy kit — goes on holiday in Scotland — and sends me this delightful pic!

Quote of the Day

”We’ll go down in history as the first society that wouldn’t save itself because it wasn’t cost-effective.”

• Kurt Vonnegut

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bach | Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit, BWV 106: 2a | Lucas & Arthur Jussen

Link

Exquisite.

Long Read of the Day

 Prague is now the capital of a normal country – alas!

Sombre piece by Timothy Garton Ash pointing out that there’s nothing peculiarly ‘East European’ about the outcome of the country’s recent election. It’s ‘the new normal’ of the western world.

If you open your window on a quiet street in central Prague, the first sound you hear is the trrrrk-trrrrk-trrrrk of carry-on suitcases trundling across paving stones, as tourists walk to their hotel or Airbnb. (The Czech capital had 8 million visitors last year.) As they trek around Prague Castle and fill the Old Town bars with cheerful chatter, these visitors – many of them probably unaware of the recent election victory of rightwing populist nationalist parties – may think this is just another normal European country. And you know what: they will be right.

Some more extensively informed newspaper commentators, reaching for an attention-grabbing generalisation, tell a different story. This is eastern Europe reverting to type, they say. After Hungary, Poland and Slovakia, now Czechia as well! The truth is more interesting – and more worrying.

Thirty six years ago, at the time of the velvet revolution in autumn 1989, people in Prague would constantly tell me they just wanted theirs to be a “normal” country. By normal, they meant like (West) Germany, France, Britain, Spain or Italy. Well, now it is.

Yep.

Books, etc.

This looks interesting if you’re concerned about the anti-humanist drift of the tech industry. Here’s a bit of the blurb:

It takes effort to remain truly human in the age of the Machine. Here Kingsnorth reminds us what humanity requires: a healthy suspicion of entrenched power; connection to land, nature and heritage; and a deep attention to matters of the spirit. Prophetic and poetic, Against the Machine is a spiritual manual for dissidents in the technological age.

Kingsnorth has an intriguing backstory.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

•  Harvard FAS Cuts Ph.D. Seats By More Than Half Across Next Two Admissions Cycles

Trump’s hostility is having its malign effect, even on the richest university in the world. This is from the Harvard Crimson:

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences slashed the number of Ph.D. student admissions slots for the Science division by more than 75 percent and for the Arts & Humanities division by about 60 percent for the next two years.

The scale of reductions in the Social Science division was not immediately clear, though several departments in the division experienced decreases over the coming two years ranging from 50 percent to 70 percent.

The reductions — detailed by five faculty members and in emails obtained by The Crimson — stipulate smaller Ph.D. admissions quotas across dozens of departments. Departments were allowed to choose how they would allocate their limited slots across the next two years.

But at least the university hasn’t caved in like Columbia.

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Moorings

Brancaster Staithe in North Norfolk last Friday evening.

Quote of the Day

From a blog post by Paul Krugman about Trump’s worsening delusionism: a quote from George Orwell.

”We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Abide With Me | Charles Lloyd

Link

One of my favourite hymns, reimagined.

Long Read of the Day

The Revolution Will Arrive on Time: Why Mamdani’s Fast Bus Socialism Is More Radical Than You Think

This essay by Nathan Newman about a campaign proposal by Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor in New York in the forthcoming election, is interesting because it challenges the lens through which most of us think of cars and cities.

Mamdani has announced a plan to take back a chunk of the public property called streets to speed up buses by dedicating more lanes to public transit, reclaiming kerb space from private parking, and giving priority to people over cars. This is revolutionary, says Newman, because it means the city treating its street real estate as something to be managed for the public good (moving the most people in the most efficient way), rather than as a private good where individual car owners reign.

You can hear the screams of car-owners from here.

City streets may be publicly owned on paper, but in practice they’ve been given over to a car-driving minority – usually free of charge – while the non-driving majority fights over sidewalk scraps. New York’s 6,300 miles of roads include around 19,000 lane-miles for driving and a staggering 3 million free on-street parking spaces. By design, all of this street space is devoted to moving or storing cars, even though less than a third of New Yorkers commute by car. Meanwhile, truly public uses of streets – like dedicated bus lanes, bike lanes, and pedestrian space – remain microscopic slivers of the pie (e.g. bus lanes are \<0.1% of street area). In short, generations of policy have handed over priceless public land to the private automobile, free riders literally and figuratively, while straphangers and pedestrians get crumbs.

I read this on an electric bus in Cambridge yesterday afternoon that was inching — and I mean inching — its way along a Grange Road that was jammed with near-stationary cars, most of which contained a single individual.

Worth your time. 

My commonplace booklet

Either way, ‘academic freedom’ is one of the great misnomers; for it always involves disciplined and accountable speech. This is one of the great implied, original lessons from Thomas Kuhn’s account of science back in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. All science is disciplined by general norms of intellectual life (including the norm against deception and lying) and by ones particular to a given scientific field (involving accepted standards of rigor, of citation practices, of how to present graphics and data, of authorship protocols, of ethics approval, etc.)

As an aside, of course, these norms of disciplined academic speech are never quite stable. For example, at the moment, thanks to the widespread availability of cheap and computationally powerful AI, we’re clearly in a period of norm transition. The AI apparatus fails to give proper credit to the sources in the training data, and it is also used by academics in ways that would have been censured not so long ago.

Eric Schleisser, writing in Crooked Timber.

Linkblog

• Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

Many moons ago I was captivated by a book — The Dance Language and Orientation of Bees — by Karl von Frisch, in which he described how honey bees communicate directions to feeding places by dancing. I remember finding it hard to imagine how that was accomplished. Imagine my delight, then, to come on a fabulous video made by researchers at the Georgia Tech College of Computing who reproduced von Frisch’s experiments. It’s seven blissful minutes long.

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