Gee-up

Striking mural, Brignoles, Provence

Quote of the Day

”I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas. Not, indeed, immediately, but after a certain interval; for in the field of economic and political philosophy . . . the ideas which civil servants and politicians and even agitators apply to current events are not likely to be the newest. But, soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.

• John Maynard Keynes in The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money.

Dead relevant when contemplating the ways in which neoliberal ideas have shaped our world over the last half-century.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

J.S. Bach | Prelude No. 1, BWV 846 (Das Wohltemperierte Klavier) | Alexandre Tharaud

Link

Hypnotically beautiful. It doesn’t get much better than this.

Long Read of the Day

Express Elevator

Truly interesting and subtle essay by the gifted sci-fi writer Karl Schroeder on the flaws in our conventional ways of thinking about — and imagining — possible futures. The title comes from a term devised aeons (probably in the Sixties) for the practice of taking uppers and downers simultaneously. (Spoiler alert: do not try this at home.)

The sad truth is that coherent, single-message futures are easier to understand. That’s why there are more of them. Full stop, end of story. They’re easier to dream up, easier to flesh out if you’re worldbuilding or developing a scenario, and they’re easier to explain. “It all goes to shit!” is a concise enough description of the year 2050 for most people to nod their heads and get right into the action.

But the real world doesn’t work that way.

For example: ending fossil fuels is unquestionably a good idea. But as it turns out, aerosols in the air, mostly produced by burning those fuels, currently mask about .5 degrees C of global warming. There’s a term in geoengineering—”termination shock”—which is the sudden spike in temperature that would go along with ending a geoengineering effort to manage global temperatures. Termination shock is such an evil thing that Neal Stephenson wrote a whole novel about it (guess what the title is). Meanwhile, even as we pontificate about how bad geoengineering is because it has the potential to cause termination shock, we are experiencing actual, for-real termination shock because we’re eliminating coal plants, and the aerosols they’ve blanketed the Earth with for decades.

Coal phase-outs are an express elevator: simultaneously good and bad…

Do read it. It made me think, which is quite an achievement.

Books, etc.

Somewhat to my surprise, I’m finding Nick Wapshott’s book on the clash between two epochal thinkers of the 20th century enjoyable and informative. It helps that it also has the occasional nice anecdote. Like this one about Joan Robinson, the great (but initially under-appreciated) economist who worked closely with Richard Kahn, another of Keynes’s proteges.

She and Austin Robinson were ostensibly happily married with two daughters, but her close intellectual collaboration with Kahn led them to become lovers. The couple was once surprised by Keynes in flagrante, Keynes telling [his wife] Lydia that the pair were “lovingly entangled on the floor of Kahn’s study, though I expect the conversation was only on ‘The Pure Theory of Monopoly’”.

My commonplace booklet

Susan Wójcicki RIP

speaks onstage during TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2016 at Pier 48 on September 14, 2016 in San Francisco, California.

She originally rented her garage to Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were starting Google — and then joined the company, eventually becoming CEO of YouTube. “As one of the earliest Googlers — and the first to take maternity leave”, writes Sundar Pichai (CEO of Alphabet and Google), “Susan used her position to build a better workplace for everyone. And in the years that followed, her advocacy around parental leave set a new standard for businesses everywhere. Susan was also deeply passionate about education. She realized early on that YouTube could be a learning platform for the world and championed ‘edutubers’ — especially those who extended the reach of STEM education to underserved communities”.

She always seemed to me to be a force for good in the industry. Unlike some other — more famous — women one could name.

NYT obit is here

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

•  The Babylonian Map of the World with Irving Finkel This delightful talk by a great scholar of antiquity is unmissable IMHO.

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Sunset over the Hall

Quote of the Day

”Whether it was a good idea to print the prefaces in a single volume is a moot point, since they were not designed by their author to be encountered in a block. Together they cast much light on what James thought of his own work, on the art of fiction, and on how towards the end of his life he thought about his earlier career. But the process of reading them one after another, without the intervening joys of the fiction, is a bit like being forced to eat a roll of linoleum thickly spread with jam (to make it a little more digestible), while being overseen by a nostalgic nanny who repeatedly attempts to recall the precise origins of each splodge of jam, and of the fruit from which it was, meticulously and with much boiling and concentration, originally confected.”

• Colin Burrow, reviewing The Prefaces by Henry James (CUP, 2024) in the London Review of Books.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Wailin’ Jennys | The Parting Glass

Link

This came to mind as I watched the athletes gathering for the closing ceremony of the Olympic Games last night.

Long Read of the Day

Richard Nixon: My Part In His Downfall

Nice memoir by Lawrence Freedman of his youthful participation in the 1972 Democratic convention.

In July 1972 I was 23, and on my first visit to the United States. As a political junkie – I’d been active in student and Liberal Party politics – I was keen to experience American politics at first hand. Having spent time protesting against the Vietnam War my natural affinities were with the McGovern camp. So a week after arriving in New York and then meeting up with family in New Jersey I took a Greyhound Bus to Miami, itself something of an experience.

On Monday 10 July 1972 I wrote to my parents from the Doral Hotel telling them that I was working as a McGovern volunteer and able to watch was happening behind the scenes. Having been unable to find my relation’s friend who was supposedly a big shot in the campaign I saw a sign which said ‘Volunteers for McGovern: Accommodation Provided.’ As I had nowhere to stay close to the Convention I duly volunteered and was soon filling envelopes with campaign material. This is the sort of thing volunteers often do though it is not very exciting. But I was diligent and keen and when an opportunity came to do something more interesting I took it…

Great read. But to get to understand why the title of the essay (kind-of) makes sense, you have to read to the end!

What opposition to delivery drones shows about big tech’s disrespect for democracy

Yesterday’s Observer column:

Tech determinism is an ideology, really; it’s what determines how you think when you don’t even know that you’re thinking. And it feeds on a narrative of technological inevitability, which says that new stuff is coming down the line whether you like it or not. As the writer LM Sacasas puts it, “all assertions of inevitability have agendas, and narratives of technological inevitability provide convenient cover for tech companies to secure their desired ends, minimise resistance, and convince consumers that they are buying into a necessary, if not necessarily desirable future”.

But for the narrative of inevitability to translate into widespread general deployment of a technology, politicians eventually have to buy into it too. We’re seeing a lot of this at the moment with AI, and it’s not clear yet how that will play out in the long run. Some of the omens are not good, though. One thinks, for example, of the toe-curling video of Rishi Sunak fawning on Elon Musk, the world’s richest manchild, or of Tony Blair’s recent soppy televised conversation with Demis Hassabis, the sainted co-founder of Google DeepMind.

How refreshing it is, then, to come across an account of what happens when the deterministic myth collides with democratic reality…

Read on

My commonplace booklet

Think before you post At last, maybe the UK Crown Prosecution Service is getting serious about prosecuting people who make threats on social media. I’ve never understood how, Twitter/X male users who threaten female politicians with rape are not prosecuted. In related news, Irish police have arrested a guy who made online threats about the Taoiseach (Prime Minister) and his family. So maybe the democratic worm is beginning to turn.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• ‘It made me cry’: photos taken 15 years apart show melting Swiss glaciers Intriguing (though depressing) story in the Guardian.

A tourist has posted “staggering” photos of himself and his wife at the same spot in the Swiss Alps almost exactly 15 years apart, in a pair of photos that highlight the speed with which global heating is melting glaciers.

Duncan Porter, a software developer from Bristol, posted photos that were taken in the same spot at the Rhône glacier in August 2009 and August 2024. The white ice that filled the background has shrunk to reveal grey rock. A once-small pool at the bottom, out of sight in the original, has turned into a vast green lake.

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Free spirits

Funny how plants refuse to do what you want them to do. This rose bush was supposed to enliven a dull patch in the garden fence, but instead has decided to reach for the sky.

Quote of the Day

“Empire will leave behind only two monuments: the game of Association Football, and the expression ‘Fuck off’ ”

• Richard Turnbull, (Governor of Tanganyika 1958-1961)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Chris Rea | Stainsby Girls

Link

Long Read of the Day

Leveraged buyouts are not like mortgages

If, like me, you think that so called ‘private equity’ operators are the hyenas of capitalism, then you’ll enjoy this blast by Cory Doctorow. I’ve known Cory for years, and admired him for even longer. He pulls no punches and takes no prisoners.

Exhibit A:

Here’s an open secret: the confusing jargon of finance is not the product of some inherent complexity that requires a whole new vocabulary. Rather, finance-talk is all obfuscation, because if we called finance tactics by their plain-language names, it would be obvious that the sector exists to defraud the public and loot the real economy.

Take “leveraged buyout,” a polite name for stealing a whole goddamned company:

I. Identify a company that owns valuable assets that are required for its continued operation, such as the real-estate occupied by its outlets, or even its lines of credit with suppliers;

II. Approach lenders (usually banks) and ask for money to buy the company, offering the company itself (which you don’t own!) as collateral on the loan;

III. Offer some of those loaned funds to shareholders of the company and convince a key block of those shareholders (for example, executives with large stock grants, or speculators who’ve acquired large positions in the company, or people who’ve inherited shares from early investors but are disengaged from the operation of the firm) to demand that the company be sold to the looters;

IV. Call a vote on selling the company at the promised price, counting on the fact that many investors will not participate in that vote (for example, the big index funds like Vanguard almost never vote on motions like this), which means that a minority of shareholders can force the sale;

V. Once you own the company, start to strip-mine its assets: sell its real-estate, start stiffing suppliers, fire masses of workers, all in the name of “repaying the debts” that you took on to buy the company…

Do read on. What’s striking about this racket is the way it has been used to destroy a number of venerable UK companies. It should be outlawed — just as permitting companies to buy their own shares should be banned. But because democracies have spent over half a century devising legal regimes that prioritise the interests of corporations and private capital these abuses continue.

You can see why Cory is not exactly popular in some quarters. He’s always welcome here, though.

Books, etc.

Sometimes, serendipity works. This is one of my favourite books. It uses the arguments about the real source of true knowledge between Thomas Hobbes (hence the Leviathan of the title) and the scientist Robert Boyle (of Boyle’s Law and other things) to make us ponder how we came to regard experimental science as the preferred way of producing knowledge.

During the pandemic I lent my copy to a bright graduate student after she and I had had a discussion about Hobbes, but then (of course) forgot to whom I had given the volume. (I keep meaning to keep a list of borrowers, but…) And then, the other day, it turned up in my pigeon-hole in College: she’s leaving to take up a Fellowship in a place hear Swindon-which-shall-not-be-named and was clearing out her apartment before departing.

It’s so nice to have it back.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• From The Register: WordStar 7, the last ever DOS version, is re-released for free.  The preferred writing tool of Arthur C Clarke and William Buckley Jr. And, for a time, of this blogger.

•  How the KKK Scammed Its Members for Cash. Gripping article by Rosie Cima. Turns out that the Klan was basically a pyramid scheme “fueled by an army of highly-incentivized sales agents selling hatred, religious intolerance, and fraternity in a time and place where there was tremendous demand”. And the two things that brought it down were: the conviction in 1925 of its ‘Grand Wizard’ for rape and murder; and being sued by the federal government in 1944 for $685,000 in back taxes!

Errata

Max Whitby writes:

Congratulations on your bees taking up residence. Judging by their front doors, these are Leaf-cutters (Genus: Megachile) rather than Masons (Genus: Osmia). There are seven species in the UK… including Willughby’s Leaf-Cutter Bee (Megachile willughbiella) named after Francis Willughby (1635-1672) of Trinity College Cambridge.

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Air Bee’n Bee

One of my boys and his partner gave me a ‘bug hotel’ for my birthday and we decided to pin it to the garden fence and await developments. So far, five Mason Bees have booked accommodation.

Quote of the Day

“Humour can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the purely scientific mind.”

• E.B. White

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Eva Cassidy | Autumn Leaves

Link

I know I know, it’s not Autumn yet. But this was new to me and I liked it. Hope you do too!

Long Read of the Day

Gordon Brown on his experience of the Murdoch press

Compelling piece in the Guardian by the UK’s former Prime Minister, in which he details what these rags had been up to — including deleting millions of potentially embarrassing (and perhaps legally problematic) emails.

The kicker is that the guy who presided over much of this chicanery has been appointed Editor of the sainted Washington Post. Truly, you couldn’t make it up.

Books, etc.

Human Voices

I’m currently reading Penelope Fitzgerald’s biography of her uncles, The Knox brothers, and am deeply impressed by it, particularly by her ability to provide contextual detail about four men who had complicated and interesting lives (one was an early cryptographer and code-breaker; two were priests; and one was Editor of Punch).

I hadn’t read anything by her before, and indeed only got the ‘brothers’ book because of reading Henry Oliver’s Second Act and discovering that she was fifty-eight before she published a book and yet is now recognised as one of the best English writers of her generation. So I started wondering which of her novels I should start with. Sarah Harkness’s recent essay solved the problem: Human Voices it shall be.

Which is why her essay is worth reading.

My commonplace booklet

I’m a sceptic about AGI and deeply suspicious of the giant tech corporations which aspire to control the technology. But from the outset I’ve been a pragmatist about Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4, Llama, Claude, Gemini et al. I see these as (a) what Alison Gopnik calls (cultural technologies — like libraries, language, books, etc.) and (b) as potentially useful tools — like spreadsheets, and in that context use them a bit as unpaid but assiduous interns. And I find them useful.

Which explains why I liked this post by Nicholas Carlini. He’s a security researcher and a sceptic about most things, but in the essay he outlines how he’s been using LLMs in his work. His view is that,

current large language models have provided the single largest improvement to my productivity since the internet was created. Honestly, today, if you gave me the choice of solving a randomly selected programming task from my work either with access to the internet or access to a state of the art language model, I’d probably pick the language model more than half the time.

Which is interesting, is it not?

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Director’s cut

I don’t suffer from house envy, but if I did — and had won the lottery — this is the kind of house I’d go for. It’s Cory Lodge, which used to be the residence of the Director of Cambridge University’s Botanic garden (maybe it still is, but given the utilitarianism of university administrations, it could well have been turned into offices). It’s a perfect example of a certain kind of Victorian villa.

In the late 1980s, when I desperately needed a place of my own, I rented a wing of a house of this type and vintage for a year and a half, and it was a lovely, restorative experience. There’s something about this kind of architecture that’s good for the soul.

From 1951 to 1973 John Gilmour was the Director of the Garden and his three daughters gave a nice interview looking back on what it was like growing up in such a lovely home.

Quote of the Day

”The cognitive dissonance the Olympics produces for me: You’re watching these amazing athletes push their bodies to the limits of their abilities, you tear up at the drama and the joy and the excitement and the pain and disappointment of it all, you’re maybe even thinking about what it means to be human and how much intelligence is the result of being an embodied creature… and then every tech company ad wants you to buy into artificial intelligence.”

• Austin Kleon

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Vance VP – a parodic adaptation of ABBA’s Dancing Queen about Trump’s running mate .

Link

Some very sharp lyrics reminding listeners that if Trump were to win in November, this Hillbilly elegist will be just “One Big Mac away” from the nuclear button.

Thanks to Timothy Garton Ash, who spotted it first.

Long Read of the Day

The Friedrich Hayek I knew, and what he got right – and wrong

There’s an interesting essay in the New Statesman by John Gray about one of the most enigmatic thinkers of the 20th century. What I hadn’t realised was that Gray actually knew Hayek. The essay is interesting throughout, but particularly good on the relationship between Hayek and Keynes.

The two men had quite different kinds of minds – Keynes’s swift and mobile, with an almost clairvoyant power of entering into the thinking of others; Hayek’s slowly probing, inwardly turned and self-enclosed. They were nonetheless on cordial terms.

Keynes found Hayek rooms in King’s College when the London School of Economics (where Hayek became a professor of economics in 1931) moved to Cambridge for the duration of the Second World War, and for a time the pair shared fire-watching duties on the roof of the college when it was feared that Cambridge might be bombed…

Like many of these Long Reads, it made me want to read something else related to its topic.

(Memo to self: check out Nicholas Wapshott’s book Keynes Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics in the University Library this morning.)

Back to the 1930s: Silicon Valley’s Trump supporters

Yesterday’s Observer column:

In How Democracy Ends, his elegant book published after Trump’s election in 2016, David Runciman made a startling point. It was that while the liberal democracy that we take for granted won’t last for ever, it will not fail in ways familiar from the past: no revolutions, no military coups, no breakdowns of social order. It will fail forwards in an unexpected manner. The implication was that people making comparisons to what happened in 1930s Germany were misguided.

But then something changed. Significant sectors of Silicon Valley – which for decades had been a Democrat stronghold – started coming out for Trump. In 2016, Peter Thiel, the contrarian billionaire and co-founder of PayPal, had been the only prominent Valley figure to support Trump, which merely confirmed the fact that he was the region’s statutory maverick. But in the past few weeks, quite a few of the Valley’s big hitters (Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen and David Sacks, to name just three) have revealed themselves to be supporters of – and donors to – Trump. Musk has set up and donated to a Republican-aligned political action committee (or Super Pac). On 6 June, the venture capitalist Sacks hosted a $300,000-a-plate fundraising dinner for Trump at his San Francisco mansion. And so on.

Why all this sudden interest in politics?

Read on

Books, etc.

John Simpson, the BBC’s veteran Foreign Editor, reviews of Anne Applebaum’s new book, Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World.

Until around 2015, I tended to be moderately positive about the world. There were far more democracies than when I started at the BBC in 1966, I would tell myself, and markedly fewer dictatorships. Africa and Latin America, once host to so many military dictatorships, were now mostly run by elected leaders. The terrible threat of nuclear war had receded. A billion people were being lifted out of poverty. Yes, what Vladimir Putin had done in Crimea in 2014 was worrying, and Xi Jinping was starting to make disturbing speeches about Muslims and Uyghurs; but given that I’d seen Soviet communism melt away across eastern Europe and in Russia itself, I still felt there was reason for optimism.

That pretty much ended in 2016. Brexit damaged the European project, and Donald Trump shook the columns of American leadership. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, based on the completely false assumption that most Ukrainians would welcome the return of Russian domination, and China’s ruthless suppression of political freedom in Hong Kong have darkened the 2020s much as German, Italian and Japanese intervention darkened the 1930s. And the tide of democracy has turned. Elections have so often become shams. Corruption in government has turned into a major global industry. Well-intentioned but indigent governments welcome Chinese cash because no one else will supply it, and pretend not to notice the strings attached – or even welcome them. Populist movements well up in countries that have traditionally been moderate and calm.

And so the kind of neo-Whig version of history, which taught that trade would bring us all closer together and economics would make war impossible, has collapsed…

Good piece. So much for that Neo-Whig interpretation of post-war history.

My commonplace booklet

What’s going on…

”The far right here and in other countries trawl violent and sexual crimes in the hope that they have been committed by migrants or non-whites. Instances are posted on social media and widely shared, often with a sneering reference to the “joys of multiculturalism”. I hardly need to add that when these crimes are the work of white people, the perpetrator’s origins or ethnicity won’t rate a mention. The absolute jackpot crime would be a child sex murder committed by a Muslim asylum seeker who arrived on a boat. This wouldn’t just rate a mention by your unfriendly local social media nazi and a bevy of YouTube influencers but by half a dozen Telegraph columnists and a score of GBNEWS and Talk TV hosts and their guests.

Within hours of the murders for which Axel Rudakabana has been charged – and in the absence of his identification, far right social media decided that they had completed its blame-bingo card. (Note, however, that despite a judge taking the unusual step of having an under-18 suspect named, it has made no difference whatsoever to those rioting in several towns in England.)…

From David Aaronovitch’s Substack.

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Morning conference

8:30am, Provence, June

Quote of the Day

“If at first you don’t succeed, skydiving definitely isn’t for you”

• Steven Wright

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart | Soave sia il vento | Così fan tutte

Link

Beautiful and so, so cynical. From the 2006 Glyndebourne performance. I’ve often thought that this would make great going-out music for one’s funeral.

Long Read of the Day

Intellectual Diary of an Iconoclast

Background: This is a beautiful essay by the great social scientist James Scott, looking back on his intellectual development in which, instead of him leaving his original discipline of political science, political science left him. After I learned of his death, I wrote a little piece about him in last Wednesday’s edition in which I mentioned how generative his book Seeing Like a State had been — in the sense that it triggered a lot of productive thinking in its readers.

As if on cue, a really thoughtful post about Scott popped into my inbox the other day. It’s by Henry Farrell (Whom God Preserve) and his essay is an insightful meditation on the significance of Scott’s work, and worth reading just for that. But for me it had an added delight — of alerting me to Scott’s own reflection on his intellectual development.

A pivotal movement in his life was a decision to spend a year and a half living in a remote Malay village with 75 inhabitants in order to understand how real people lived rather than doing statistical surveys of the kind beloved by political scientists. One of the ideas that emerged from that experience was an understanding of what he called ‘below-the-radar-resistance’ by powerless peasants or political dissidents in authoritarian regimes.

One example of this kind of resistance that he cites comes from Poland during the period of martial law.

When the Solidarity Movement was strong at the end of martial law in Poland, there were forms of symbolic protest that drove the government crazy. The government news broadcast took place at 6:00 PM and people decided by the hundreds of thousands to leave their houses. The moment the news broadcast began, they took a walk in the street for a half hour, until the news broadcast was over, with their hats on backwards. There was no law against taking a walk, and there was, of course, no law about wearing your hat backwards. You could understand, however, that this was a huge morale booster for much of the Polish opposition to martial law.

The government responded by forcing a curfew at exactly 6:00 that would require people to be in their houses during the news broadcast. Within a few days, the Polish opposition had discovered a workaround. Since they could no longer be in the street during the news broadcast, what they did was to take their television set, put it on the windowsill, and blare out the news broadcast—which they considered to be largely lies—to the security forces, who were the only people in the street. This, as you can imagine, was also a huge morale booster and a symbolic victory for the opposition to martial law, even though it did not change the power dynamic in the short run.

Well worth a read. Even though it’s an academic article, it’s open-access. Go to the link and click on the “PDF” button.

Books, etc.

Feeling pessimistic: why not try reading a book?

Lovely essay by Henry Oliver.

According to the Pew Centre, back in the 1970s, when news coverage wasn’t so pessimistic, only 8% of Americans reported not having read a book in the last year. That figure now stands at 23%. A new survey from the Reading Agency shows that only 50% of UK adults are regular readers. 35% are “lapsed”. And 15% have never been regular readers. In 2015, 58% of adults were regular readers. And only 8% of adults were non-readers back then. The figures for the 16-24 bracket suggest these figures will continue to decline.

Many reasons are given for this decline: distraction of social media, lack of ability to focus, and feeling bored or uninterested by the reading material. Those who did read reported better mental health, improved sleep and concentration, and better understanding of other people’s feelings. Readers have better life satisfaction.

The reason, I think, is that reading is a solitary activity. Reading requires us to leave the world of arguments, ideologies, news coverage, and TikTok feeds and to exist inside our imaginations for a while. Many solutions are sought to the wide-spread mood of dissatisfaction, not least the prevalence of therapy. But this keeps us focussed on what is making us miserable: our own lives, our own problems, the people around us.

It does, because misery is contagious. And listening to music and reading books are two antidotes to it. Which partly explains the structure of this little newsletter. 

Errata

Apologies to the inimitable Heather Cox Richardson for renaming her ‘Helen’ in Wednesday’s edition. Usual culprits: Apple autocorrect and slack proofreading by a sleepy blogger. And thanks to Andrew Brown for pointing it out so tactfully.

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 6am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

The First Webcam

This was the world’s very first webcam. In 1991 my friend Quentin Stafford-Fraser and his colleague Paul Jardetzky set it up to watch a coffee-pot in the Cambridge Computer Laboratory’s Trojan Room (a large space previously occupied by an early mainframe computer) which housed a number of graduate students. Quentin and Paul connected it to the lab’s internal network so that graduate students everywhere in the building (rather than just the privileged denizens of the Trojan Room) — could see when the coffee had been brewed. Quentin wrote the X-Coffee program that displayed the live image in a small box on the top right-hand corner of every student’s desktop computer, and Paul wrote the server software to underpin it.

In 1993, when Mosaic — the first web browser that could handle images — appeared, the coffee-pot was hooked up to the Internet and broadcast on the web, and for a brief period was the most watched pot in the world! (Fittingly, it never boiled.) Many years later, when the Computer Lab moved from central Cambridge to its new, vast, building on the West Cambridge site, the venerable pot was auctioned for charity, and Quentin became the first person I’ve ever known who appeared on the front pages of the London and New York Times on the same day!

All of this was brought back by having lunch with him last week, when he suddenly produced the ancient relic from his bag. (It had been briefly liberated from its usual display case in the Lab for a TV interview he had done the day before.)

Quentin wrote a nice memoir of the webcam which was published in the Proceedings of the ACM in 2001.

Quote of the Day

”Me no Leica”.

• Headline on Dorothy Parker’s review of Christopher Isherwood’s I Am A Camera.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Wailin’ Jennys | Light of a Clear Blue Morning

Link

A distinctive take of a Dolly Parton song.

Long Read of the Day

Democratic fragility and resilience.

I know, I know, I/we pay too much attention to what’s going on in the US at the moment. That’s one of the curses of living in the ‘Anglosphere’, as my European friends often point out. But on the other hand, what happens in the US in the next 90-odd days will affect us all. If you doubt that, ask President Zelensky.

In brooding on it I’ve been oscillating between two frames of mind, both triggered by what James Joyce would have called epiphanies.

• The first, triggered by Joe Biden’s disastrous performance in the televised ‘debate’ between him and Trump, was a memory of an afternoon many years ago when my youngest son was revising for his GCSE exams. He was sitting at the dining-room table while I was in the kitchen cooking supper and he suddenly exclaimed, “Dad, I’ve got it! Tragedy is when you can see the disaster coming but you know there’s nothing anybody can do about it.”

• The second was a moment in 2013 when I was reading The Confidence Trap: A History of Democracy in Crisis from World War I to the Present by my friend and colleague David Runciman. In it he argued that democracies are good at recovering from crises but bad at avoiding them. The lesson they draw from their mistakes is that they can survive them — and that no crisis is as bad as it initially appears. This breeds complacency rather than wisdom, leading to the dangerous belief that democracies can muddle through anything. (The ‘confidence trap’ of the book’s title.)

The dangerous thing, of course, is that muddling through takes time, and if democracies are slow to appreciate the next crisis then there may not be enough time to adjust before it’s too late. Watching how agonisingly slow Biden and the Democrats seemed to be in realising the danger led me to conclude that muddling through was no longer an option and that the US would wind up in the grip of a fascist administration with all that implied.

But then Biden conceded to reality and suddenly light appeared at the end of the tunnel. It was an astonishing moment, and of course it may not in the end derail the Trump bandwagon, but there’s now a tangible sense that the US may not fall into Runciman’s confidence trap.

This sense of democratic resilience is admirably captured in a post by Helen Cox Richardson on her admirable Substack blog, which I recommend reading in its entirety.

Here’s how it opens:

Just a week ago, it seems, a new America began. I’ve struggled ever since to figure out what the apparent sudden revolution in our politics means.

I keep coming back to the Ernest Hemingway quote about how bankruptcy happens. He said it happens in two stages, first gradually and then suddenly.

That’s how scholars say fascism happens, too—first slowly and then all at once—and that’s what has been keeping us up at night.

But the more I think about it, the more I think maybe democracy happens the same way, too: slowly, and then all at once.

At this country’s most important revolutionary moments, it has seemed as if the country turned on a dime…

Do read the whole thing.

My commonplace booklet

Linkblog

• Two plus two = 22?. Clever and instructive film about the MAGA mindset.

Thanks to Chris Hall for suggesting it. He uses it in his teaching.

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Safely grazing

A photograph taken on a rural cycle ride yesterday morning. Made me think of Bach — see today’s Musical Alternative.

Quote of the Day

“Get out and vote. Just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what: it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians…. Get out, you’ve got to get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again, we’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.”

• Donald Trump, speaking to Christians at the Turning Point Action Believers’ Summit in West Palm Beach, Florida on July 26.

I have to say that when I first read that I wondered if it might have been Trump’s favourite form of media — fake news. So I dug out the CSPAN video of the speech and watched it. And it’s there, towards the end — spool forward to 1.03:12 and you can see for yourself.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

J.S. Bach | Schafe können sicher weiden — Sheep May Safely Graze — from the Hunt Cantata, BWV 208

Link

Long Read of the Day

How to fix the UK? Let me count the ways

Really interesting essay by Tim Harford of the Financial Times

Here’s the bad news: it is going to take more than a change of government to cure what ails Britain. The symptoms are wearyingly familiar, but worth summarising. Waiting lists for NHS treatment have soared above 7.5mn, from 4.2mn in 2019 and 2.5mn in 2010. Prisons are at capacity, and the court system long since exceeded it. Local government funding has been squeezed for years, with obvious effects on local services such as social care, libraries and leisure centres.

The simple explanation for all this is that 14 years of Conservative-led governments have cut taxes, preferring to trust citizens with their own money even if it leaves the public realm looking threadbare. But that’s not what has happened. While headline taxes on average earners are indeed low, as a proportion of national income the total tax burden is — infamously — near the highest level since the 1940s, while the UK continues to borrow and add to the largest pile of debt in living memory. In short, we are spending more than ever and somehow getting less than ever for it.

Those are the symptoms. The cause is familiar, too: productivity has stagnated since 2008…

It’s good, but a newspaper column can only scratch the surface of the UK’s problems. For a really thorough analysis the best place to look (as Tim suggests) is the Resolution Foundation’s report.

You can download it for free. It’s quite a read, believe me.

AI and the Sigmoid Curve

Yesterday’s Observer column

I bought an iPhone 15 the other day to replace my five-year-old iPhone 11. The phone is powered by the new A17 Pro chip and has a terabyte of data storage and accordingly was eye-wateringly expensive. I had, of course, finely honed rationales for splashing out on such a scale. I’ve always had a policy of writing only about kit that I buy with my own money (no freebies from tech companies), for example. The fancy A17 processor is needed to run the new “AI” stuff that Apple is promising to launch soon; the phone has a significantly better camera than my old handset had – which matters (to me) because my Substack blog goes out three times a week and I provide a new photograph for each edition; and, finally, a friend whose ancient iPhone is on its last legs might appreciate an iPhone 11 in good nick.

But these are rationalisations rather than solid justifications. The truth is that my old iPhone was fine for the job. Sure, it would need a new battery in time, but apart from that it had years more life in it. And if you take a cold, detached look at the evolution of the iPhone product line, what you see from the 2010 iPhone 4 onwards is really just a sequence of steady incremental improvements…

Read on

Books, etc.

If, like me, you’re struggling to work out the impact(s) of digital technology on democracies, then the re-issue of Karl Polyani’s great 1944 book is quite an event. It was a prescient and powerful argument for keeping capitalism under democratic control — and in that sense was read as a rebuttal of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, which, ironically, was also published in 1944.

The economist Branko Milanovic has written a really informative review of the new edition which I think will be helpful to those who didn’t know about Polyani.

For those who may be new to the area, let me just summarize the main insights of Polanyi’s. Market economy, defined as an economy that entirely depends on prices of commodities including market-determined prices of factors of production (what Polanyi called “fictitious commodities”) of labor, land and money is an impossibility. It is impossible in practice because such an economy would annihilate society. This, Polanyi writes, was only imperfectly understood when the first time in history such an attempt was made during the British Industrial Revolution. “The Industrial Revolution was merely the beginning of a revolution so extreme and radical as ever inflamed the minds of sectarians, but the new creed was utterly materialistic and believed that all human problems could be resolved given unlimited amount of material commodities. (p. 40). Self-regulating market society would result (and in Britain it did initially result) in pauperism, vagrancy, alcoholism, insalubrious living conditions, “satanic mills”, much longer hours of work, shorter lives, lack of education, all the elements well known from economic history and from the works of literature.

Thus, the “society” (a rather capacious term that Polanyi overuses) had to defend itself against a self-regulated market economy…

My commonplace booklet

One of the great things about having a blog is that one has readers that know more than the blogger! I’m continually learning this. On Friday, I posted a picture of a lovely little vintage car that we saw on our drive northwards from Provence, and asked if anyone knew what it was.

You can guess what happened. Some readers knew immediately what it was — and told me. Others deployed search techniques to come up with the answer — a Renault 4CV!

Max Whitby (Whom God Preserve) had the idea of showing the image to Anthropic’s LLM (Claude 3.5), which replied as follows:

This appears to be a Renault 4CV, a small economy car produced by the French automaker Renault from 1946 to 1961.

The 4CV was one of France’s first post-World War II car designs and played a significant role in motorizing the French population after the war. Its nickname in France was “quatre pattes” (four paws), referring to its four doors.

The LLM also added some interesting points about the vehicle: it was designed in secret during the German occupation of France in World War II; it had a rear-engine, rear-wheel-drive layout; it was very popular, with over a million units produced during its 14-year production run; and its design influenced later Renault models, particularly the Renault Dauphine.

This was slightly annoying because I also use Claude but it never occurred to me to ask it about the car. And although my question about the car’s identity was a trivial one, Max’s use of the LLM was a reminder of how useful these tools can sometimes be.

Many thanks also to the readers who pointed me at the Wikipedia entry for the 4CV. They included James Miller (Whom God Preserve) who pointed out that this page explained how the little car came to have the mysterious letters RNUR engraved on the front badge:

On 1 January 1945, by de Gaulle’s decree, the company was posthumously expropriated from Louis Renault. On 16 January 1945, it was formally nationalised as Régie Nationale des Usines Renault.”

Thanks to all. I may not be wiser, but I am much better informed.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Plastic bottles and regulatory ‘freedom’. Jonty Bloom makes a nice point on his blog about the fact that when you now buy a bottle of water in the UK, you find that after you unscrew the cap and have a drink, the cap continues to be attached to the bottle by a thin piece of plastic. Turns out that this is the produce of a newish EU regulation.

But , writes Jonty,

Because we have left the EU the directive does not effect us, (a classic case of regulatory divergence by inertia, which I have mentioned before) but any British manufacturer of plastic bottle who wants to sell in the EU has to follow the EU rules.

As British industry, Remain and anyone with an ounce of common sense has been pointing out for years now, no company is going to run two production lines, one that meets EU standards and a British one that meets lower UK standards. They will run the one with higher standards and sell them in the UK and the rest of Europe.

Hey Presto! The Brexit fools have discovered that these new bottle tops have been “imposed” on the UK by the EU, we are not free or sovereign, EU regulations still apply, we are still in the dead clutch of Brussels, chained to a corpse and so on…

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l’Auto

Following the Route Napoleon on our drive northwards through the Rhone Alps a couple of weeks ago, we stopped for coffee in the village of Corps and came on this quaint vehicle. It was small but perfectly formed, as they say. Intrigued, we wondered about its ancestry. The only clue was an enigmatic badge:

An early Renault, perhaps? More knowledgeable petrolheads will doubtless know.

Quote of the Day

”I really am a pessimist. I’ve always felt that fascism is a more natural governmental condition than democracy. Democracy is a grace. It’s something essentially splendid because it’s not at all routine or automatic. Fascism goes back to our infancy and childhood, where we were always told how to live. We were told, Yes, you may do this; no, you may not do that. So the secret of fascism is that it has this appeal to people whose later lives are not satisfactory.

• Norman Mailer

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Buffalo Springfield | For What It’s Worth

Link

Long Read of the Day

Both Sides

Thoughtful essay by historian Timothy Snyder on a pernicious delusion of mainstream media.

Why does American television and press “both-sides” our politics? Why are such different presidential candidates presented as equally flawed? Why do the outrages of Trump, for example at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, lead to the humiliation of Biden?

Both-Sidesism is the habit of reducing the world into two perspectives, treating the two as fundamentally alike, and then ignoring or adjusting the data. One cause of this odd behavior is the ownership of media companies. Another is fear.

But Both-Sidesism is not just a practice. It passes in the United States for a principle of journalism. Indeed, the dualism is almost unquestionable. Americans tends to take it for granted.

But it makes no sense. No data from the world around us indicates that two is the correct number of perspectives, nor that any two perspectives, once chosen, would be equal…

Great essay. I’m reminded of a conversation the economist Paul Krugman had with a group of Harvard undergraduates during the presidency of George W. Bush when Dick Cheney was his adult supervisor (and also Vice-President). At one stage Krugman used the phrase “balance as bias” and some of the students looked puzzled.

So he gave them an illustration of how it works:

Dick Cheney says the Earth is flat. Here’s how the New York Times reports it:
“VP says Earth flat; Others Disagree.”

My commonplace booklet

Shortly after the Trump shooting, Charlie Warzel, a well-known American journalist, went onto Twitter/X and was appalled by what he found there. So he wrote a column about it in The Atlantic which includes this passage:

Some may wish to see the conspiracy peddling, cynical politicking, and information warfare as a kind of gross aberration or the unintended consequences and outputs of a system that’s gone awry. This is wrong. What we are witnessing is an information system working as designed. It is a machine that rewards speed, bravado, and provocation. It is a machine that goads people into participating as the worst version of themselves. It is a machine that is hyperefficient, ravenous, even insatiable—a machine that can devour any news cycle, no matter how large, and pick it apart until it is an old, tired carcass.

If you’re interested in cybernetics, this is an interesting epiphany. Why? Because, for a cybernetician, the purpose of a system is not what people who own or run it say it is. The purpose is what the system actually does.

By the same token, the fact that neoliberalism produces inequality is a feature, not a bug, as programmers say. It’s what the system is designed to do.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• tinyPod — if this makes sense to anyone, they will most likely be denizens of the Apple ecosystem. Basically, you put your Apple Watch into a neat little plastic case that evokes memories of the original iPod and away you go. Effectively turns your wristwatch into a pocket watch! And really only makes sense if your iWatch has a mobile connection. Charming, in a way, but maybe just another example of leading-edge uselessness.

Thanks to Charles Arthur, who first spotted it.

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Peak Viewing

The Peak District viewed from Stanage Edge. Note the strategically-positioned crow.

Photo by my son Pete.

Quote of the Day

“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it …”

• Max Planck

A striking quote often summarised as “Science advances one funeral at a time”.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bach | French Suite No 4 | Murray Perahia

Link

This was on the car radio the other day.

When I reached my destination, I sat, entranced, until it ended.

Long Read of the Day

On The Moral Economy of Tech

A transcript of a remarkable talk by Maciej Ceglowski, one of the sharpest observers of digital technology around (and also the creator of Pinboard.in, which he describes as “bookmarking for introverts” and which has played a central role in my workflow for many years).

I am only a small minnow in the technology ocean, but since it is my natural habitat, I want to make an effort to describe it to you.

As computer programmers, our formative intellectual experience is working with deterministic systems that have been designed by other human beings. These can be very complex, but the complexity is not the kind we find in the natural world. It is ultimately always tractable. Find the right abstractions, and the puzzle box opens before you.

The feeling of competence, control and delight in discovering a clever twist that solves a difficult problem is what makes being a computer programmer sometimes enjoyable.

But as anyone who’s worked with tech people knows, this intellectual background can also lead to arrogance. People who excel at software design become convinced that they have a unique ability to understand any kind of system at all, from first principles, without prior training, thanks to their superior powers of analysis. Success in the artificially constructed world of software design promotes a dangerous confidence…

It does. This is really worth your time.

Books, etc.

James Scott, RIP

One of the most distinctive social scientists of his time died last Friday. I came to his work late, when I stumbled on his book Seeing Like a State when I was trying to understand how modern states came into being. It was basically a critique of what Scott called “high modernism”, a mindset of rulers to force “legibility” on their subjects by (as Wikipedia puts it) “homogenizing them and creating standards that simplify pre-existing, natural, diverse social arrangements. Examples include the introduction of family names, censuses, uniform languages, and standard units of measurement. While such innovations aim to facilitate state control and economies of scale, Scott argues that the eradication of local differences and silencing of local expertise can have adverse effects.”

Reading the book, I was sometimes reminded of The Open Society and its Enemies, but the most amusing impact it had on me was a kind of admiration for the Norman Conquest, the relentless thoroughness of which evoked Scott’s portrayal of the search for ‘legibility’. What else, after all, was the Domesday book [italics] for [unitalics] than to give William an informed idea of who his new realm’s 268,984 landowners were, how wealthy they were, etc.?

Brad DeLong wrote an interesting review of Seeing Like a State in which he gently chided Scott for not acknowledging his debt to Hayek and the Austrian economists. “One one level”, he wrote, the book

is an extraordinary well-written and well-argued tour through the various forms of damage that have been done in the twentieth century by centrally-planned social-engineering projects— by what James Scott calls “high modernism” and the attempt to use high modernist principles and practices to build utopia. As such, every economist who reads it will see it as marking the final stage in the intellectual struggle that the Austrian tradition has long waged against apostles of central planning. Heaven knows that I am no Austrian—I am a liberal Keynesian and a social democrat—but within economics even liberal Keynesian social democrats acknowledge that the Austrians won victory in their intellectual debate with the central planners long ago…

Scott’s work seems to have been highly generative (a bit like Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty in that respect), stimulating a lot of reflective writing on his themes and preoccupations. I’m thinking, for example, of Henry Farrell’s thoughtful meditation on “Seeing like a Finite State Machine”.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

Cover of the current issue of the New Yorker, showing what has become of the US Supreme Court.

Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words.

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