Everyday tragedies

Standing peacefully in the sunshine today, queueing to buy some fresh salmon from the fishmonger who comes every Tuesday, I fell to thinking about the contrast between this pastoral scene and what’s going on in Ukraine. Here we are, engaged in our everyday routines, while elsewhere in Europe, atrocity rules, apparently unstoppably. Which in turn brought to mind one of my favourite poems, Auden’s Musee des Beaux Arts, inspired by Breughel’s painting of ordinary life proceeding while Icarus falls, unnoticed, to his watery death.

In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

And we, too, are sailing calmly on.

Quote of the Day

”It is better to have loafed and lost than never to have loafed at all.”

• James Thurber

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ry Cooder | Living on Straight Street | live in studio.

Link

Long Read of the Day

Why ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ Resonates 50 Years Later

Lovely review essay by James Parker on Kurt Vonnegut’s great novel, a work that has never got old and has never waned in energy. It’s the only kind of masterpiece that could match the enormity of the (Western) war crime in Dresden in the Second World War.

There are novels so potent, and so perfected in their singularity, that they have the unexpected side effect of permanently knocking out the novelist: Nothing produced afterward comes close. Had Russell Hoban written no books before Riddley Walker, and no books after it, his reputation today would be exactly the same. Should William S. Burroughs, post–Naked Lunch, or Joseph Heller, with the last line of Catch-22 on the page (“The knife came down, missing him by inches, and he took off.”), have tossed their typewriters out of the window? Probably. And Kurt Vonnegut, at the age of 46, with Mother Night and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (those twin magnificences) under his belt, was projected into a state of creative culmination/exhaustion by Slaughterhouse-Five.

And…

Fifty years have passed since the publication of Slaughterhouse-Five. It’s the same age as me. And the older I get, and the more lumps fall off my brain, the more I find that rereading is the thing. Build your own little cockeyed canon and then bear down on it; get to know it, forward and backward; get to know it well. So I don’t know how many times I’ve read Slaughterhouse-Five. Three? Four? It never gets old, is the point. It never wanes in energy. This book is in no way the blossom of a flower. Slaughterhouse-Five is more in the nature of a superpower that the mutant author had to teach himself to master—and then could use, at full strength, only once.

The self-training took decades. The mutating event was, as always, brief. Between February 13 and February 15, 1945, Allied bombers dropped nearly four thousand tons of high explosives and incendiaries on the historic German city of Dresden. The effect was elemental: Air became fire. Vonnegut, an American prisoner of war, was there—but 60 feet underground. Captured during the Battle of the Bulge, conveyed to Dresden by boxcar, and billeted in a derelict slaughterhouse as the bombs fell, he was sheltering with some fellow POWs and a couple of dazed German guards in a basement meat locker. They emerged to rubble, ash, twisted metal, death. Somewhere between 18,000 and 25,000 people (we still don’t know) had been killed.

Really worth your time.

The ‘Soft’ Impacts of Emerging Technology

Interesting reflections on how to evaluate the longer-term impact of technologies.

Getting a handle on the various ways that technology influences us is as important as it is difficult. The media is awash with claims of how this or that technology will either save us or doom us. And in some cases, it does seem as though we have a concrete grasp on the various costs and benefits that a technology provides. We know that CO2 emissions from large-scale animal agriculture are very damaging for the environment, notwithstanding the increases in food production we have seen over the years.

However, such a ‘balanced’ perspective usually emerges after some time has passed and the technology has become ‘stable’, in the sense that its uses and effects are relatively well understood. We now understand, better than we did in the 1920s, for example, the disastrous effects of fossil fuels and CO2 emissions. We can see that the technology at some point provided a benefit, but that now the costs outweigh those benefits. For emerging technologies, however, such a ‘cost-benefit’ approach might not be possible in practice.

My commonplace booklet

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The Lookout post

On being European

Recently my wife and I went on our first trip outside of GB since January 2020. I have a large extended family in Ireland and we used to go to the the Republic a lot in pre-pandemic times. And then it all came to a halt when the lockdown happened. So going back for the first time in over two years was a big deal.

It was very interesting to be back on familiar territory. The weather was consistently beautiful (which you could say was out of the ordinary) but the most striking thing for me was that the country felt different in some subtle way. The only way I can express it is that for the first time it felt much more European in that I was picking up the kinds of signals I used to get when we went to France, Denmark or Holland in pre-pandemic times.

This is entirely subjective, of course, and it could be partly a reflection of suddenly being in a country that is not entirely overshadowed by the results of Brexit and the incompetence of the ship of fools that is the Johnson government; but it felt very real, somehow.

Then I came back and a friend pointed me to a very interesting conversation between the economist Tyler Cowen, whose blog I read every day, and Roy Foster, the distinguished Irish historian. Here’s an exchange that stood out for me:

COWEN: John Stuart Mill once wrote this in a letter: “I know tolerably well what Ireland was, but have a very imperfect idea of what Ireland is.” Is that still true? Was it ever true?

FOSTER: It’s true of many people. It’s interesting you quote Mill, who wrote a wonderful essay called England and Ireland, which reflects, I think, that opinion.

He also said something which I’ve often quoted, which I like very much, which is that Ireland is in the mainstream of European history, whereas England is in an eccentric tributary. I think that’s very true, and a lot of what we’ve been saying today, Tyler, seems to me to bear that out, from the 17th century on.

Quote of the Day

I often wished that I had clear
For life, six hundred pounds a year,
A handsome house to lodge a friend;
A river at my garden’s end,
A terrace walk, and half a rood
Of land set out to plant a wood.

• Jonathan Swift

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

J.S. Bach | Toccata and Fugue (on a tin whistle) | Antoine Pithier

Link

Truly extraordinary. Thanks to Ross Anderson, who as a piper himself knows what an achievement this performance is.

Long Read of the Day

 Musings on a Chameleon

John Knowles’s essay on Truman Capote.

MOST OF US FEEL THAT we go solitarily through life. Despite marriages and children and close human ties, we feel the weight of a basic isolation. We sense a uniqueness about ourselves, which makes us secretly feel special, but also alone.

But we aren’t really: Most of us are not alone, not so special, and not unique. Someone in the next street or in Denmark or Algeria or China is quite like us, very similar. That is true of virtually everyone.

But Truman Capote really was alone, and he knew it. No one anywhere on earth can have looked like him, with his odd Pekingese features, or above all sounded like him when he spoke. This very short, thick-legged person with his big head and yellow, later gray bangs, speaking in a tissue-paper thin, whiny lisp, was not at all like anybody else. Clothes were not manufactured that fit him; no voice anywhere echoed his. When he would merely enter a room or utter a few words, strangers stopped short, jerked their heads around to behold him, usually—until he became so famous—with at least a tinge of mockery, or hostility.

So as a form of self-protection, Truman made himself the only writer in the world after Ernest Hemingway whom the man in the street recognized on sight…

Read on. It’s worth it.

COVID Is More Like Smoking Than the Flu

Hundreds of thousands of deaths, from either tobacco or the pandemic, could be prevented with a single behavioral change.

If you’re sick of hearing people who aren’t wearing masks telling you that Covid is “just like the flu”, then join the club. It’s pernicious nonsense and it was good to find this striking piece by Benjamin Mazer elaborating on that theme.

The end state of this pandemic may indeed be one where COVID comes to look something like the flu. Both diseases, after all, are caused by a dangerous respiratory virus that ebbs and flows in seasonal cycles. But I’d propose a different metaphor to help us think about our tenuous moment: The “new normal” will arrive when we acknowledge that COVID’s risks have become more in line with those of smoking cigarettes—and that many COVID deaths, like many smoking-related deaths, could be prevented with a single intervention.

The pandemic’s greatest source of danger has transformed from a pathogen into a behavior. Choosing not to get vaccinated against COVID is, right now, a modifiable health risk on par with smoking, which kills more than 400,000 people each year in the United States. Andrew Noymer, a public-health professor at UC Irvine, told me that if COVID continues to account for a few hundred thousand American deaths every year—“a realistic worst-case scenario,” he calls it—that would wipe out all of the life-expectancy gains we’ve accrued from the past two decades’ worth of smoking-prevention efforts.

The point is simple: whatever the reasons people have for not getting vaccinated, they should at least know the risk they are running: an unvaccinated adult is 68 times more likely to die from COVID than a boosted one.

My commonplace booklet

Jonathan Holland writes:

I love how your Friday post segued into your Monday post via a Scott/Virginia hybrid! Next week: ‘Mrs Galloway’, a modernist novel about a woman preparing for a party in Silicon Valley?

It was generous of Jonathan to attribute creativity to my poor proof-reading! The heading over my Long Read yesterday read  Scott Dalloway on Musk and Twitter, when in fact the post was by Scott Galloway!

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The ‘Wild Atlantic’ having a day off

Decades ago, some marketing genius in Bórd Fáilte the Irish Tourist Board, had the idea of branding the West Coast of Ireland, from Malin Head in Co Donegal to the Old Head of Kinsale in Co Cork, as “The Wild Atlantic Way”.

It’s billed as “the longest coastal drive in the world”, which I think is a bit of a stretch, but it’s clearly been very effective as a way of encouraging visitors to come to the West coast.

This picture was taken off Muckross Head in Co Donegal just over a week ago, when the Atlantic was unusually quiet.

Quote of the Day

“Had Putin been a better student of how Western democracies have responded to vital threats to their security, he would have understood why these assumptions were wrong. True, one lesson of the past century is that Western democracies have frequently ignored emerging security threats, as many of them did in the lead-up to the two world wars, the Korean War, and the September 11 attacks. As the U.S. diplomat and historian George Kennan once put it, democracies are like a prehistoric monster so indifferent to what is happening around him that “you practically have to whack off his tail to make him aware that his interests are being disturbed.” But an equally important lesson of the past century is that when their tails are whacked hard enough, Western democracies react with speed, determination, and strength. For the United States and its European allies, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—which in size and scope constitutes the largest use of military force on the European continent since 1945 and poses a direct threat to NATO territory—has provided just such a case.”

• Ivo H. Daalder and James M. Lindsay, Foreign Affairs, April 7, 2022

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Debussy: Suite bergamasque, L.75: III. Clair de lune | Lang Lang

Link

One of our neighbours held a fundraising concert for Ukraine in their house yesterday afternoon, and one of their children played this. As a contrast with the savagery that’s being unleashed on the Ukrainians, it was moving and unforgettable.

When Elon Musk buys into Twitter, I don’t need a little bird to tell me something’s afoot

Yesterday’s Observer column

When the news broke last week that Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX and the world’s richest man, had paid $2.9bn (£2.3bn) for 9.2% of Twitter, the media world – old and new – briefly lost what might loosely be called its collective mind. What was Musk up to? (He’s always up to something, after all, even if it’s just trolling. And, with more than 80 million Twitter followers, he’s quite an effective troll.)

Since nobody knows what goes on inside Musk’s head, fevered speculation began. One camp thought that he had just done it “for the lulz” (fun, amusement, humour, schadenfreude). Indeed, if your net worth is $290bn, $2.9bn is effectively loose change. And it made him the biggest single shareholder in the company. Twitter then recognised the gravity of the situation and agreed to give him a seat on the board in a deal that supposedly prevents him from buying a majority stake in the business.

For what it’s worth, I don’t buy the lulz explanation…

Long Read of the Day

Scott Galloway on Musk and Twitter

Have you ever had the experience of coming on someone who has done something you have tried to do, only much better? Well, apropos my column about Musk buying his way into Twitter, this post by Scott Galloway does just that. Admittedly, he didn’t have to stick within the word-limit of a newspaper column, but he’s been thinking about this for much longer than I have, and he does a really great job. Which is why I think it’s well worth your time.

Here’s a sample:

We found out Elon was Twitter’s largest shareholder on Monday morning, because that’s when he disclosed his holdings to the SEC, as required of anyone who acquires more than 5% of a public company. Only Elon filed the wrong form, and he filed it nearly two weeks late. He filed the form for “passive” investors — and if you’ve been talking to the CEO for the past few weeks about joining the board and changing the product, you are not a “passive” investor.

Elon filed the correct form (Schedule 13D) the next day, but it requires more fulsome disclosures, which revealed he had crossed the 5% threshold on March 14. Meaning he’d been obligated to disclose his stake back on March 24. By illegally concealing his stake for 11 days, Musk was able to continue buying shares from sellers who didn’t know he was accumulating a huge position. Had he disclosed his shares properly on March 24, TWTR would have shot up 25% then, instead of on April 4, and the shares he bought subsequently would have garnered selling shareholders approximately $150 million more. That’s fraud, and while I have increasingly less confidence in the SEC, Congress has recently beefed up its power to seek disgorgement of ill-gotten gains for securities law violations. Shareholder lawsuits may also be in the offing.

Even if the SEC acts, $150 million is immaterial to Elon. On a relative basis, his entire $2.5 billion investment in Twitter is about the price of a MacBook for the average household. A $150 million fine is buying an extra charger. Takerists such as Elon are exempt from the law — they can buy their own…

Do read the whole thing.

Marina Hyde on Dishy Rishi’s local difficulties

Fabulous column. Here’s how it opens:

A debilitating week for Treasury-based luxury casualwear influencer Rishi Sunak. He used to seem invincible; now he’s the pocket Samson who’s just taken a massive haircut courtesy of his wife. I know Rishi wants to be prime minister and stuff, but it’s increasingly difficult to imagine how the mega-rich chancellor would persuade ordinary British people to do difficult things. Mate – you can’t even persuade your own wife to pay you tax.

But before I get accused of being a sexist by … hang on, let me get my lorgnette … James Cleverly, we’d better have a recap of developing events, which now include a US green card controversy. Initially believed to be watching his political oxidisation on Pacific time, the chancellor is in fact on these shores. I hear Lynton Crosby has banned Easter getaways, meaning Sunak will have to unwind in one of his houses in this country, as opposed to the high-end Santa Monica apartment he owns in a complex that includes a pet spa.

Anyway, he has granted a hotly defensive exclusive interview to the Sun, which runs under the apoplectic banner LAY OFF MY MISSUS. And I think you’ll agree that headline truly captures the way Rishi Sunak speaks. This, quite simply, is a guy who is as at-home screaming a warning out of a van window as he is indulging in a desultory browse of Mr Porter’s fine knits, his cursor hovering briefly over a £495 smoke-blue James Perse cashmere hoodie before the window is closed in listless pique. There are some injustices even a knitwear purchase can’t alleviate. Even so, I think the headline could have been punchier. I’d have gone with PAY TAX? IN THIS ECONOMY?!

It’s never a good career move to get on the wrong side of Ms Hyde.

My commonplace booklet

Nine Ways to imagine Jeff Bezos’ wealth

Link

I particularly liked this one:

The average full-time Amazon employee made $37,930 in 2020. In order to accumulate as much money as Bezos ($172 billion)… an employee would have had to start working in the Pliocene Epoch (4.5 million years ago, when hominids had just started standing on two feet!).

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To the Lighthouse

With apologies to Virginia Woolf.

Quote of the Day

”In answer to: Inside every fat woman is a thin woman trying to get out. I always think it’s: Outside every thin woman there’s a fat man trying to get in.”

• Katharine Whitehorn (of blessed memory)

… and whose Memorial Service I am looking forward to attending soon. She was a colleague of mine on the Observer.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bach | Cello Suite No.1 in G | Mischa Maisky

Link

I love these Suites. I have the Casals performance on vinyl somewhere. Now where in the attic is my turntable?

Long Read of the Day

 The Unlikely Persistence of Antonio Gramsci

I never read Gramsci until I started to read Francis Fukuyama and then started to think about the ‘hegemonic anxiety’ one can now see in the US as China becomes ever more powerful. This essay by Thomas Meaney in The New Republic is interesting because it helpfully puts Gramsci into a contemporary context.

If Gramsci has aged better than many of his peers, it is in part because he became a thinker for a defeated, rather than a triumphalist, left. With his own cause in ruins, Gramsci became ever more interested in the ways of the enemy. One of his abiding inquiries was how capitalist elites and their publicists laundered their perversions of the social order into “common sense,” how they spun morality tales around their economic interests, and how they were able to preserve their leadership of society after each crisis delivered by the capitalist system. The ground of this inquiry may have shifted in the decades since his death, but the main battle lines remain the same, and this still makes Gram­sci a thinker worth turning to in our moment.

Looks matter, ask Dorian

Jonty Bloom is not impressed by Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer (aka Finance Minister).

They say that politics is show business for ugly people, but the Chancellor is a well turned out, good looking, young chap and it has done him no harm.

But actions matter as well, they have to look and smell good and here the Chancellor is beginning to suffer.

Nothing says we are all in this together like swanning off to your holiday home in California, having totally failed to deal with a cost of living crisis.

And nothing says we are all in this together like discovering that the man responsible for gathering every single penny of taxation in this country is married to a woman who has non-dom tax status.

A wife who is therefore pretty much immune to all the tax rises that her husband is imposing on the rest of the country.

At any other time this would have cost the Chancellor his job and career.

But this is a Dorian Gray government. What matters is whether the public sees the real picture.

My commonplace booklet

Sheila Hayman (Whom God Preserve) was musing on the story of the return of Darwin’s two missing notebooks, and wrote:

It occurred to me to mention, amidst all the rejoicing over the return of Darwin’s notebooks, that in our glorious collective digital future, there will be no notebooks, manuscripts, annotated copies, autographs, sketches or any other evidence of the individual human behind the text on the (flat, textureless, colourless, odourless, undifferentiated) screen. #Senseless.

She’s right. When future historians try to exhume the records of our era, they will find a huge black hole. That’s why I say to people that if they want their great-grandchildren to know what they looked like, they should print off all their digital images on 6 x 4 photographic paper and put them in shoeboxes in the attic. Because, one day, nobody will be able to access those digital images.

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Urban Cormorants

Seen on the Liffey in Dublin one September day in 2019

Quote of the Day

”When I’m good, I’m very good. When I’m bad, I’m better.”

• Mae West

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Steve Cooney | O’Farrell’s Slip Jig

Link

From Wikipedia:

The slip jig is one of the four most common Irish stepdances, the others being the reel, the jig and the hornpipe. It is danced in soft shoes. At one time only men danced it, then for several decades only women, and today slip jigs can be danced by any dancer, though at a competitive level they are almost exclusively danced by women. This dance is graceful and controlled, with heels very high, often called “the ballet of Irish dance”.

Long Read of the Day

Erasmus in the 21st century

Erasmus lived for five years in Cambridge (in Queens’ College) and is often described a “the man who brought the Renaissance to the fens”. As I pass Queens’ I’ve often wondered what he was like.

So this nice essay by Jeroen Bouterse turned out to be a welcome delight. And made me want to find a biography of a remarkable man.

I decided to read Erasmus on war because he was, though I know him only superficially, not completely new to me; I went to a school named after him that consciously sought to channel his individualism and cosmopolitanism, and over the years I have read some of his works, admiring his open-minded, kind and forgiving attitude to people for whom existing social institutions didn’t work so well. Based on this, however, I did not expect to be challenged; I did not expect surprising insights in war from a Christian theologian and classicist who lived before the nation-state, before NATO, before modern artillery and nuclear weapons. I was not looking for analyses, or for arguments pro or contra no-fly zones, but for a simple, friendly voice that cried out for peace.

It’s also appropriate that the great EU student programme is named after him.

Meme stocks and Bitcoin will not redistribute wealth

Useful reality check from Noah Smith…

Financio-populism may not excite quite the passion it did last year, but it’s still definitely an undercurrent in modern society. Most recently, it seems to be manifesting in the form of NFT mania.

And I deeply understand the financio-populist impulse. Wealth inequality is at record levels. That wouldn’t be so bad if fortunes rose and fell, and everyone got to spend a little time at the top. But you hardly hear about anyone going from richest to rags these days. There’s always the nagging sensation that the system is rigged — that to get rich you have to have gone to the right East Coast prep school or met the right angel investors at the right parties. In that kind of world, anything that mixes up the set of who’s rich and who’s not can feel like justice.

There’s just one problem — financio-populism is not really going to do this. Yes, we all know that one guy who worked at Starbucks before he got rich on Bitcoin or GameStop, and now drives a Lamborghini. Financial markets are random enough where there will always be that guy. But overall, trading meme stocks and crypto is likely to leave the average person poorer than before. Their dreams will end up lining the pockets of the rich, knowledgeable, and well-connected…

Sadly, he’s right.

My commonplace booklet

More on the provenance of ‘meatspace’…

From Kevin Nolan:

You mentioned this morning that you considered the term ‘meat-space’ to have been coined by John Perry Barlow, or perhaps in the slightly more obscure realms of ‘cyberpunk sci-fi’. I think that this second speculation is correct, and that in fact the term is a demi-invention leading back at least as far as the 1960s, where William Burroughs and other, cynical realists who straddled the zone between High Literature and Anarcho-punk science fiction frequently used the expression ‘meat’ to refer to human flesh (and biology) in a somewhat offhand and dispassionate manner. John Lennon used it a trope also, in his later, vegetarian phases: ‘(Meat is Murder’ etc.)

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Many Happy Returns, Charles

Here’s a bit of good news. Two notebooks of Charles Darwin, missing for two decades, one of which contains his famous ‘Tree of Life’ sketch, have been returned to Cambridge University Library, their rightful home.

Image Credit: Cambridge University Library

They were returned anonymously to the Library on March 9 in a bright pink gift bag (!) containing the notebooks’ archive box and inside a plain brown envelope addressed to the University Librarian with the printed message: “Happy Easter, X”. And they’re in good condition, with no obvious signs of significant handling or damage sustained in the years since their disappearance.

Quote of the Day

”Soon after I enter Decentraland, I fall through a fountain and land in a bar, where an octopus is serving drinks. In the corner, two bots are having a scripted conversation about why the NFTs on display in the metaverse are superior to physical artworks. (It’s because they aren’t hidden away in a collector’s archive.) At least at the Tate my ability to view the art isn’t limited by my computer’s processing power, I think, as I try — unsuccessfully — to order a virtual pint from the octopus.”

• The Financial Times’s Peter Bradshaw, describing his visit to a ‘metaverse’.

Funny to think that this is what Mark Zuckerberg thinks is the human future.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mark Knopfler & Chet Atkins | Instrumental Medley

Link

Recorded at the Secret Policeman’s Ball, 1987. Their version of John Lennon’s Imagine is particularly sweet.

Long Read of the Day

 The geopolitics of fossil fuels and renewables reshape the world

When we come to look back on 2022, my hunch is that Helen Thompson’s book will be seen as one of the most perceptive books published in recent years. When, nearly a decade ago, I was searching for the historical origins of the mess we’re in today, she changed the way I thought about these things. Just as investigative reporters always follow the money, Helen suggested that “following the oil” would be a productive line of inquiry.

Her book is a masterful exposition of how to do that. But it’s a long read and I guess many people won’t be up for the journey, so it’s great to see her capture some of the thinking behind it in this succinct article in Nature. For nearly 200 years, Helen argues, fossil-fuel energy has been central to geopolitics. And with 84% of our energy still coming from oil, coal and gas, the transition to renewable energy sources will take longer and be more painful than most people are willing to admit. Given that the transition will be a long one, therefore, fossil fuels will continue to shape geopolitics. In that sense, the war in Ukraine provides a sobering reality check on our global plight.

My commonplace booklet

My belief that the term ‘meatspace’ was coined by John Perry Barlow in 1995 has sparked some speculation that it may have originated earlier in cyberpunk sci-fi. And someone found it used in a News Group post dated 21 February 1993. It’s possible that Barlow picked it up from there, since he was already a pre-Web internet veteran then. (He was on The Well from 1986 onwards, for example.)

I once shared a speaking gig with him, which was entertaining and, for me, instructive. Our session was allocated 60 minutes, and he spoke first — for 50 of them!

Thanks to David Elliott for launching me down this entertaining rabbit hole.

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Sunset over the Bay

Quote of the Day

”Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do.”

• Bertrand Russell

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Villa-Lobos | Prelude No. 1 | Nicholas Petrou

Link

Long Read of the Day

‘Meatspace’? Technology Does Funny Things to Language

Nice NYT piece by Peter Coy.

Consider this coinage: meatspace. It refers simply to the physical world, where we have tangible bodies made of … meat. “Meatspace” is a word that didn’t need to exist until the invention of cyberspace. Technological progress gives us a new perspective on things we once took for granted, in this case reality itself.

“I.C.E. vehicle” (pronounced “ice”) is similar. I.C.E. is short for internal combustion engine, a modifier that was superfluous until electric cars came on the scene. Like meatspace, it’s what the journalist Frank Mankiewicz called a “retronym” — a new term that’s invented for something old because the original term has become ambiguous, usually because of some development such as a technological advance.

I love essays like this — writing that suddenly causes one to realise the significance of something that one has been doing automatically for years without ever pondering its significance.

Made me think that the term “career planning” is an oxymoron. Doesn’t the verb ‘career’ mean ‘to move fast and in an uncontrolled way’? (Checks). Yes it does!

I’ve always attributed the term ‘meatspace’ to John Perry Barlow.

Godfather of Memes” passes away 

Steve Wilhite, the the computer scientist who invented the gif image file format in 1987 has died aged 74. Kate Miltner and Tim Highfield wrote an interesting academic article on the cultural significance of his creation. Here’s the Abstract:

The animated Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) is a digital file format with a long history within internet cultures and digital content. Emblematic of the early Web, the GIF fell from favor in the late 1990s before experiencing a resurgence that has seen the format become ubiquitous within digital communication. While the GIF has certain technical affordances that make it highly versatile, this is not the sole reason for its ubiquity. Instead, GIFs have become a key communication tool in contemporary digital cultures thanks to a combination of their features, constraints, and affordances. GIFs are polysemic, largely because they are isolated snippets of larger texts. This, combined with their endless, looping repetition, allows them to relay multiple levels of meaning in a single GIF. This symbolic complexity makes them an ideal tool for enhancing two core aspects of digital communication: the performance of affect and the demonstration of cultural knowledge. The combined impact of these capabilities imbues the GIF with resistant potential, but it has also made it ripe for commodification. In this article, we outline and articulate the GIF?s features and affordances, investigate their implications, and discuss their broader significance for digital culture and communication.

My Commonplace Booklet

To date, Apple has sold roughly 2.8 billion iPhones. That translates to about 243,056 miles of black glass, which is longer than the distance to the moon.

Source

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Holy Smoke!

The geology of Donegal in North-West Ireland is extraordinary, but its contemporary rocks have given up smoking, despite this pic!

Quote of the Day

Could it really be only a year and a half ago that the British government was declaring, shamelessly, its intention to break international law? And adding that this was ok because, In the words of the Northern Ireland Secretary, Brandon Lewis, it would do so only in a “limited and specific” way?…And now Boris Johnson is preaching to the world “It is no longer enough to express warm platitudes about the rules-based international order. We are going to have to actively defend it against a sustained attempt to rewrite the rules.”

• Fintan O’Toole in the Irish Times, 29.03.2922

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mark Knopfler | The Long Road

Link

Long Read of the Day

The First Authoritarian: Popper’s Plato

Interesting essay by Tae-Yeoun Keum on the interpretation of Plato and his ‘Republic’ in Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies.

Today, The Open Society and Its Enemies is perhaps best remembered for two things: Karl Popper’s coinage of the terms “open society” and “closed society,” and his scorched-earth attack on Plato as the original architect of the latter. For Popper, Plato was the first and the most influential authoritarian thinker.

The assault on Plato took up the first of the book’s two volumes.

Focusing on Plato’s Republic and its blueprint of a city ruled by a handful of elite philosophers, Popper argued that Plato had produced a vision of one such closed society. He pointed to the stratification of the social order in Plato’s ideal city, the strict division of labor between the intellectual and productive classes, the absence of social mobility, state censorship of most culture, and, above all, the promulgation of an openly fraudulent myth, the so-called Noble Lie, to legitimize the status quo. All of this, Popper observed, amounted to nothing less than a dictatorship of philosopher-kings who peddled myths to their subjects in order to suppress free thinking and to lock them into a rigid caste system. The whole business of Plato’s politics boiled down to maintaining this scheme: an effort to “arrest all change.”

The implication was that Plato’s ideas had found their incarnation in fascism. Popper wrote that the Noble Lie, the foundation myth of Plato’s Republic, was “an exact counterpart” to the Nazi’s “modern myth of Blood and Soil.”

When I first read The Open Society… as a student, I rather ignored the attack on Plato and was much more interested in Popper’s critique of Marx, so it was interesting to come on an essay that explains the renewed interest in Plato that followed the election of Trump and the view that some kind of “epistemic democracy” was needed if society were to avoid that kind of degeneration.

Which explains why I enjoyed the piece and thought that you might too.

Applebaum on ‘Putinism’

Transcript of an interesting conversation between Yascha Mounk and Anne Applebaum.

I found this exchange particularly interesting…

Mounk:There was a very clear and specific goal in the actions of the Soviet Union in the post-World War II period: they wanted to erect a communist regime. Part of the point was that it would be subservient to the will of Moscow or the Kremlin, but another part of the point was a set of ideological goals for what those societies would look like internally.

What is the nature of the Putin regime today? It started off as just a kind of kleptocratic dictatorship. There’s an argument being made that Russia is quickly turning into a kind of totalitarian society, but one without a very strong ideology. It does not have the strength of ideology that the Third Reich or the Soviet Union had. What do you think Russian society is going to be like after the war if Putin stays in power? What would following the same Soviet playbook without its ideological foundation look like?

Applebaum: I have actually been arguing for about 15 years that there is a kind of ideology of Putinism: there is a theory of history, an economic theory, and a kind of politics. The theory of history is that Russia was robbed at the end of the Soviet Union when it broke up, the 1990s were a disaster (when the West sought to destroy Russia), and then Putin began to rebuild Russia. There’s a kind of resentment and nostalgia that work together. To explain everything that’s happened in the last 30 years, there’s a kind of fake democracy and fake capitalism. There are some of the forms of capitalism, but in fact, the economy is controlled from above by a group of oligarchs. There appear to be democratic elections, but in fact, the outcomes are predetermined. You have a managed economy and a managed democracy. And there is an elite behind it who controls things, like puppet masters.

Worth a read.

My commonplace booklet

The Leica 0-Series No.105 was also one of the personal cameras of Oskar Barnack – the inventor of 35mm photography. Barnack used the 105 to capture motifs from his family life, gaining technical insights that he then applied to the further development of the camera and its succeeding models.

Up for auction its estimated price of €2-3 million (roughly $3.3 million / £2.5 million), with the starting bid standing at $1.1 million.

(And I won’t blame you if you file this under ‘camera porn’. For that is what it is.)

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Peace on Earth (well, in a small corner of it anyway)

What did this scene remind me of? See today’s Musical Alternative for the answer.

Quote of the Day

”Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.”

• John Kenneth Galbraith

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

J. S. Bach | Cantata Nº 208, ‘Sheep May Safely Graze’, BWV 208

Link

Long Read of the Day

The Strange Rebirth Of Imperial Russia

Unmissable essay by Andrew Sullivan on what most of us have missed about the newly visible monster of post-Communist Russia. “It would be hard to conjure up a period of post-modern bewilderment more vividly than Russia in the post-Soviet 1990s”, he writes.

A vast empire collapsed overnight; an entire totalitarian system, long since discredited but still acting as some kind of social glue and cultural meaning, unraveled in chaos and confusion.

Take away a totalitarian ideology in an instant, and a huge vacuum of meaning will open up, to be filled by something else. We once understood this. When Nazi Germany collapsed in total military defeat, the West immediately arrived to reconstruct the society from the bottom up. We de-Nazified West Germany; we created a new constitution; we invested massively with the Marshall Plan, doing more for our previous foe than we did for a devastated ally like Britain. We filled the gap. Ditto post-1945 Japan.

But we left post-1991 Russia flailing, offering it shock therapy for freer markets, insisting that a democratic nation-state could be built — tada! — on the ruins of the Evil Empire. We expected it to be reconstructed even as many of its Soviet functionaries remained in place, and without the searing experience of consciousness-changing national defeat. What followed in Russia was a grasping for coherence, in the midst of national humiliation. It was more like Germany after 1918 than 1945. It is no surprise that this was a near-perfect moment for reactionism to stake its claim.

It’s a really interesting piece which illuminates something I’ve wondered about from the beginning, which is that Putin isn’t trying to reclaim the territory lost by the USSR in 1989-91, but to redraw the boundaries of Russia to those that obtained when the Tsar ruled!

If the war ends in manifest Russian failure, Sullivan says, then “Putin is surely finished”. But if it becomes a long-drawn-out grinding mess, then he might survive and emerge stronger. Russia, after all, has in the past been good at winning wars of attrition — ask Napoleon’s or Hitler’s ghosts.

Putin had a 21st-century digital battle plan, so why is he fighting like it’s 1939?

Yesterday’s Observer column:

One thing at least we know about Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine: it isn’t going according to plan. Ah, yes, you reply, but which plan? Was it plan A, which simply said that you assemble enough conscripts and heavy artillery, roll into Ukraine, shell a few apartment blocks, amble across to Kyiv and have a victory parade? What we call the George W Bush model (except that he had his Iraq victory parade on the flight deck of an American aircraft carrier).

If this was plan A, then we know what plan B is. It’s to do to Ukraine what was done to the statelet of Chechnya in 1999, namely bomb it to rubble regardless of civilian casualties. Apart from its intrinsic inhumanity, trying to implement this plan in Ukraine faces some practical difficulties: Ukraine is vast whereas Chechnya is small, and Ukraine has a serious army, a feisty capability for resistance and a plentiful supply of serious weaponry from its friends in the west. So if Putin wants a primer before embarking on the next stage of his imperial adventure, he should perhaps download Charlie Wilson’s War, an instructive film about what happened to the USSR in Afghanistan all those years ago.

For those who follow these things professionally, the biggest puzzle is why Putin embarked on a campaign that looks like the second world war in Technicolor, when his military actually had an ultra-sophisticated plan for warfare in a digital age. It’s called the Gerasimov doctrine and it was the creation in 2013 of Valery Gerasimov, a smart lad who is chief of the general staff and first deputy defence minister of the Russian Federation…

Read on

Why have Ukraine’s ‘clay pigeons’ been so successful against Russian targets?

As Putin tries to pretend that the Russian swerve back to Donbas was what he always intended, one of the intriguing aspects of the war so far has been the effectiveness of humdrum aerial warfare — in the shape of the relatively low-tech Turkish Bayraktar drones against the invaders’ supposedly invincible armoured columns. This piece entertainingly explores that mystery.

Before the war began, military experts predicted that Russian forces would have little trouble dealing with Ukraine’s complement of as many as 20 Turkish drones. With a price tag in the single-digit millions, the Bayraktars are far cheaper than drones like the U.S. Reaper but also much slower and smaller, with a wingspan of 39 feet.

As so often has been the case in this war, however, the experts misjudged the competence of the Russian military.

“It’s quite startling to see all these videos of Bayraktars apparently knocking out Russian surface-to-air missile batteries, which are exactly the kind of system that’s equipped to shoot them down,” said David Hambling, a London-based drone expert.

That is confounding, Hambling said, because the drones should be easy for the Russians to blow out of the sky — or disable with electronic jamming.

“It is literally a World War I aircraft, in terms of performance,” he said. “It’s got a 110-horsepower engine. It is not stealthy. It is not supersonic. It’s a clay pigeon — a real easy target.”

Eh? A million dollars each is ‘cheap’? Explains why arms manufacture is such a profitable racket.

Why does Tucker Carlson sound like a Berkeley leftist?

Antonio García Martínez on how the war in Ukraine has exposed an ideological vacuum  at the heart of American right. Unlike many of the commentary at, he actually went to see for himself.

I spent last week reporting from Poland and Ukraine myself. It was more than a bit eye-opening: The refugee crisis on the border is enormous, Europeans have mobilized tremendously to handle it, and Ukraine itself is on a total war footing where all thought and action go toward victory over the Russian invaders. 

On the way back, I was standing in line along with Ukrainian refugees to re-enter the EU zone at a desolate rural crossing point. After all the hours it took to get through, there was a collective euphoria (much stronger among the refugees surely than me) upon entering the European Union and NATO. The line between the worlds of war and destruction and desperation and that of order and safety and prosperity was very stark indeed.

Those who rail constantly against the global liberal order should step outside it every now and then. They might appreciate it more. After all, there’s no law of the physical universe that we must always live in democracies with rule of law. That’s the historical exception not the rule.

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Progress?

Slowly, agonisingly slowly, I’m getting the hang of this wildlife photography business.

Quote of the Day

”Comments Are the Radioactive Waste of the Web.”

• Mic Wright, quoted by Jon Gruber

(Via Charles Arthur)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Pinetop Perkins | How Long Blues

Link

Magical!

Long Read of the Day

The Art of Monetary War

A long and sobering essay by economist Dominik Leusder pointing out the longer-term implications of the West’s ability effectively to shut down the Russian economy. The financial war, he argues, is a genuine war — and its stakes are immense. Over the course of a week, targeted financial sanctions escalated into measures that, if not lifted in the near future, “are almost certain to condemn Russia’s quasi-autarkic economy to sharp and lasting stagnation. No matter their intent or longevity, these sanctions will change the country forever”.

Globalisation turns out to be a many-faceted sword.

As globalization underwrote Putin’s militarism and his increasingly hostile posture toward Russia’s neighbors, it simultaneously rendered the country’s economy fatally reliant: on the net demand from other countries such as Germany and China; on imports of crucial goods such as machinery, transportation equipment, pharmaceutical and electronics, mostly from Europe; on access to the global dollar system to finance and conduct trade. This is one way to construe the deceptively simple insight of Henry Farrell and Abraham L. Newman’s theory of weaponized interdependence: the logic of financial globalization that generated Russia’s trade surplus and gave Putin room to maneuver also provided the economic and financial weaponry that was turned against him.

This vulnerability is reflected in Putin’s strategic economic logic. In the period since 2014, the Russian central bank has successfully sought to de-dollarize a substantial portion of its reserves, and outstanding dollar liabilities throughout the economy have been reduced. These moves were informed by Western dominance of the global payment infrastructure via SWIFT and the dollar interbank system. In a very meaningful way Russia had prepared for the current conflict. But it was also guided by a belief in the sanctity of foreign reserves held at the world’s central banks. If such a sanctity ever existed, it has been obliterated overnight.

What’s happened provides a vivid illustration of the untrammelled power of the global financial system that has turned our ‘democratic’ world upside down. At one level, it’s obviously satisfactory to see the effectiveness of the sanctions against a pitiless adversary. But at the same time we need to ask: who controls this colossus? And if it can do this to an apparently powerful country like Russia, what could it do to others who trigger its rage?

Maybe we will find after this war ends that we should have been more careful about what we wished for.

Calculator Construction Set

If you’re interested in computer lore, then this little tale by the sainted Andy Hertzfeld is a gem. It tells of how Chris Espinosa invented a way of getting Steve Job’s approval on designs.

The history of the personal computer is littered with great stories like this. Many years ago, when I taught at the Open University, Martin Weller and I had the idea of teaching the technology of the PC and the Internet through narratives about the way the technology evolved. The course we created — entitled You, Your Computer and the Net — had 12,000 students on its first presentation and was one of the most popular courses the Open University ever created.

My commonplace booklet

Tyler Cowen on John McGahern

Tyler is one of the most voracious and insightful readers I know of. He’s just read McGahern’s novel, Amongst Women (which is marvellous IMO). Here’s his succinct verdict:

That is the title of a 1990 Irish novel by John McGahern, well-known in Ireland but as of late not so frequently read outside of Ireland. In addition to its excellent general quality, I found this book notable for two reasons. First, it focuses on the feminization of Ireland, being set in the mid-century decades after independence. An IRA veteran slowly realizes that the Ireland he fought for — a place for manly men — was a figment of his civil war imagination, and not an actual option for an independent, modernizing Ireland. The latter will be run according to the standards and desires of women, and actually be far more pleasant, whether or not Moran likes it. Second, the book is an excellent illustration of the importance of context for reading fiction. The story reads quite differently, depending how quickly you realize the protagonist is an IRA veteran with his wartime service as a fundamental experience. Few readers will know this from the very beginning, but I suspect many Irish readers — especially older ones — will figure this out well before they are told. In general, the very best fiction is context-rich, and this is one reason why many people may not appreciate all of the literary classics.

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