Cambridge, late afternoon

St John’s College

Snapped on my way to a book launch in Heffers.

Quote of the Day

”It would be possible to say without exaggeration that the miners’ leaders were the stupidest men in England if we had not frequent occasion to meet the owners.”

• F.E. Smith

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Martin Hayes and Cliodhna Ní Aodain | The Westerly Edge

Link

On Monday night we went to Martin’s one-man show in Cambridge and came away mesmerised. He’s an astonishing musician. Who knew a little violin could express so much?

Long Read of the Day

Cory Doctorow’s McLuhan lecture on enshittification

On Monday night, in the Canadian Embassy in Berlin, Cory Doctorow (Whom God Preserve) gave the Annual Marshall McLuhan lecture at the Transmediale festival. His subject was enshittification, the term he coined for the life-cycle of tech platforms.

The transcript is long but worth your time. In a way, it’s the most succinct tour d’horizon of the dystopian empires that tech companies have built. And Cory never pulls punches.

For example:

Most of our global economy is dominated by five or fewer global companies. If smaller companies refuse to sell themselves to these cartels, the giants have free rein to flout competition law further, with ‘predatory pricing’ that keeps an independent rival from gaining a foothold.

When Diapers.com refused Amazon’s acquisition offer, Amazon lit $100m on fire, selling diapers way below cost for months, until diapers.com went bust, and Amazon bought them for pennies on the dollar, and shut them down.

Competition is a distant memory. As Tom Eastman says, the web has devolved into ‘five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four,’ so these giant companies no longer fear losing our business.

Or:

Google and Facebook – who pretend they are called Alphabet and Meta – have been unscathed by European privacy law. That’s not because they don’t violate the GDPR (they do!). It’s because they pretend they are headquartered in Ireland, one of the EU’s most notorious corporate crime-havens.

And Ireland competes with the EU other crime havens – Malta, Luxembourg, Cyprus and sometimes the Netherlands – to see which country can offer the most hospitable environment for all sorts of crimes. Because the kind of company that can fly an Irish flag of convenience is mobile enough to change to a Maltese flag if the Irish start enforcing EU laws.

Which is how you get an Irish Data Protection Commission that processes fewer than 20 major cases per year, while Germany’s data commissioner handles more than 500 major cases, even though Ireland is nominal home to the most privacy-invasive companies on the continent.

You get the idea. He’s one of the smartest and most creative people I know. I kept wondering as I read the transcript what the sober citizens of Berlin were making of it. And whether there is now a German translation of enshittification.

My commonplace booklet

The UK National Grid Dashboard

We get our electricity from Octopus, because it seemed to be the most imaginative and efficient energy supplier in the UK.

Recently Octopus has been working with UK Power Networks on an imaginative flexibility service called Power-ups to help balance the local grid in East Anglia. The scheme funds free electricity for some areas where there’s regularly extra wind energy available.

It works like this:

• Power-ups are usually an hour or two long, at times when wind and solar make up a high percentage of the electricity mix (often in the middle of the day).
• Octopus emails us (usually the day before) and we opt in if want to participate at that time.
• When it’s time to Power up we can use as much electricity as we like and it’s free.

All of which means that I’ve started to take a healthy interest in how the Grid is dynamically balanced.

And why I find the National Grid Live dashboard fascinating. Maybe you will too.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Two Donald Trump supporters die and go to heaven. God meets them at the Pearly Gates. “Tell us, “they say, “what were the real results of the 2020 election, and who was behind the fraud? “God answers: “My children, there was no fraud.” After a few seconds of stunned silence, one turns to the other, whispering: “this goes higher up than we thought. “

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All that remains…

… of a groyne on a beach in North Norfolk.

Quote of the Day

“The Massachusetts Institute of Technology now has almost eight times as many nonfaculty employees as faculty employees. In the University of California system, the number of managers and senior professionals swelled by 60 percent between 2004 and 2014. The number of tenure-track faculty members grew by just 8 percent.”

• David Brooks, writing in the New York Times.

Hard to believe, isn’t it? But useful if you’re seeking to understand what has happened to elite schools in the US.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Matt Molloy | The Morning Thrush

Link

Long Read of the Day

Please list all the tweets you regret not posting

Thoughtful and perceptive Substack post by Charles Arthur (Whom God Preserve). It was triggered by a remark of Hugo Rifkind on a podcast who, in response to a journalist’s rueful expression of regret about something she had tweeted in the past, offered his view on what one should do in such situations: “It’s a good rule of thumb that every time you want to tweet something: Don’t. And you’ll very rarely look back and go ‘I wish I’d tweeted that’. Whereas you’ll very often be glad you didn’t.”

This axiom, writes Charles,

is relearnt again and again by people the world over; usually it happens when they have aged somewhat from the years when they wrote those tweets (see, that’s why we can still call them tweets) and find themselves in a job or position where suddenly the freedom of expression and eager audience they treasured in their youth seem less attractive than just having kept their virtual mouth shut.

Sometimes, though, it happens with people who you really think should know better. And I was fascinated by the contents of an employment tribunal judgment that came out earlier this week, in which a professor who had worked at the Open University (OU) took up a case claiming that as an employer the university had failed to protect her from harassment and discrimination over her beliefs by colleagues…

Do read it. And wonder at the stupidity/carelessness of nominally intelligent people. And at the way a university can get this stuff badly wrong.

It was expensive and underpowered, but the Apple Macintosh still changed the world

Yesterday’s Observer column:

Forty years ago this week, on 22 January 1984, a stunning advertising video was screened during the Super Bowl broadcast in the US. It was directed by Ridley Scott and evoked the dystopian atmosphere of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Long lines of grey, shaven zombies march in lockstep through a tunnel into a giant amphitheatre, where they sit in rows gawping up at a screen on which an authoritarian figure is intoning a message. “Today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the information purification directives,” he drones. “We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology.”

Then the camera turns to a young woman carrying a sledgehammer, hotly pursued by sinister cops in riot gear. Just as Big Brother reaches his peroration, “Our enemies shall talk themselves to death, and we will bury them with their own confusion. We shall prevail!” she hurls the hammer at the big screen, which explodes in a flurry of light and smoke, leaving the zombies open-mouthed in shock. And then comes the payoff, scrolling up the screen: “On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984’.”

Chutzpah doesn’t come any better than that…

Read on

Books, etc.

The Economist has been sifting through lists of books due in 2024. Here are a few I thought might be interesting.

• AI Needs You: How We Can Change AI’s Future and Save Our Own by Verity Harding, formerly of Google DeepMind. Due out in March.

• The Heart and the Chip: Our Bright Future with Robots by Daniela Rus, director of the AI laboratory at MIT. Due out in March.

• Literary Theory for Robots: How Computers Learned to Write by Dennis Yi Tenen. Blurb reads “Literary Theory for Robots reveals the hidden history of modern machine intelligence, taking readers on a spellbinding journey from medieval Arabic philosophy to visions of a universal language, past Hollywood fiction factories and missile defence systems trained on Russian folktales. In this provocative reflection on the shared pasts of literature and computer science, former Microsoft engineer and professor of comparative literature Dennis Yi Tenen provides crucial context for recent developments in AI, which holds important lessons for the future of human living with smart technology.”

My commonplace booklet

RIP Peter Magubane

From his obituary in LFI…

Born Peter Sexford Magubane on January 18, 1932 in Vrededorp (today Pageview, a suburb of Johannesburg), the youngster grew up in Sophiatown. He started using a Kodak Brownie box camera, while still at school. As a photojournalist in the mid-fifties, he began documenting the everyday racism of the Apartheid system. In doing so, he was frequently attacked and, in 1985, even shot at. He landed in prison a number of times, spending 600 days in solitary confinement, and was banned from working in his profession for many years. “We were not allowed to carry a camera in the open if the police were involved, so I often had to hide my camera to get the pictures I wanted. On occasion I hid my camera in a hollowed-out Bible, firing with a cable release in my pocket. At another time, at a trial in Zeerust from which the press were banned, I hid my Leica IIIg in a hollowed-out loaf of bread and pretended to eat while I was actually shooting pictures; when the bread went down, I bought milk and hid the camera in the carton. And I got away with it. You had to think fast and be fast to survive in those days,” the photographer recalled.

Photo credit

Pedantic observation: This is a lovely photograph, but it must be from a later demonstration of the camouflage technique mentioned in the obit, because the lens in the picture is a Summilux and that was available only in a Leica M-series (bayonet) mount, whereas the Leica IIIg took only screw-mount lenses.

Feedback

Nice email from Rudy Adrian triggered by my Observer column about the 40th anniversary of the Apple Macintosh. “I still use mine today,” he writes,

because the MIDI software from 1987 is still exactly right for me to make music with (it just records and stores note information, not audio).

Funnily enough, after thirty years of creating ambient music as a hobby, people are now falling asleep to my music …

I do believe the success of the Mac was not because it was over-priced and underpowered, but because it was chosen by talented software writers to create programs for. For instance, ProTools – still the industry standard for mixing sound for film and television, was originally Mac only. The story of [Peter Gotcher] working from his parent’s garage in the 1980s to create sound-manipulating software is one similar to Steve Jobs and Wozniak’s tale.

I hate Apple for its built-in obsolescence and locked-in approach, but some of the 3rd-party software was great!

Yep. Dave Winer is wonderfully eloquent on that particular subject.

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Essence of Xmas, 2023

New Yorker cover, December 11, nailed it.

Quote of the Day

”An optimist will tell you the glass is half-full; the pessimist, half-empty; and the engineer will tell you the glass is twice the size it needs to be.

• Oscar Wilde

Yep, and most of the time the engineer is right.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Diana Krall | Narrow Daylight

Link

Nice line: Winter is over, Summer is near. Nice thought, that, in the bleak midwinter.

Long Read of the Day

A Love Song for Deborah

Lovely essay by Michael Tobin on life after his wife was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and on how he found a way of reaching her.

If life were fair, Alzheimer’s should never have eaten Deborah’s brain.

My wife had no family history of the disease. All four of her Lebanese grandparents lived far into their nineties and were as acerbic, argumentative, and quick-witted at ninety-five as they were at twenty-five.

But Alzheimer’s devoured my wife, my best friend, my soul mate. Gone is the compassionate psychologist who graduated from Wellesley, MIT, and the Sorbonne. The polymath fluent in five languages who could calculate complex mathematical formulas in her head and whose brain came with its own GPS. The woman whose body could contort into pretzel-like yoga postures with the ease and grace of a ballerina. The truth-seeker who had an uncanny ability to pierce through layers of psychic sludge to unearth a soul in all its shining glory.

Diagnosed in November 2018, she had won a very perverse lottery…

Do read it, not least because it’s about something that some of us may one day have to live with.

Books, etc.

Nothing for Something: Cryptos, Cons, and Zombies

Peter Lunenfeld’s sharp review essay on the crypto phenomenon in the Los Angeles Review of Books is worth reading. What I liked most about it is his attempt to get up ‘above’ the crypto craze to “the conceptual space where desires are forever leading us to heartbreak and shame, the universal emotions of every mark who has ever been conned”.

The general greed around cryptocurrencies, the nerdish interest in their underlying blockchain technologies, and the desire for something—anything — to fully commodify digital art has not abated. We should expect rebrandings, relaunchings, and hype cycles that do their best to explain that “this time it’s different” even when it’s not. There will be more Bankman-Frieds and FTXs — in fact, there are plenty like him and them on trial or in bankruptcy at this very moment—and when they are gone, their spots will be taken by probably even worse actors in the global techno-economy. One thing we can and should do at this relatively quiescent period in the hype cycle is figure out how these technologies and concepts have attained a kind of immortality already—i.e., how they became zombies destined to shamble through the rest of the 21st century.

My commonplace booklet

“UK quietly drops Brexit law to return to imperial measurements”

From the Financial Times yesterday…

Rishi Sunak’s government has been criticised by a leading Brexiter, after it quietly announced it would not be legislating to expand the use of imperial measures in the UK.

The decision to drop the idea, which had been hailed as a potential “Brexit freedom”, came after it turned out that only a tiny fraction of British businesses and consumers wanted to see a bigger role for imperial units.

The government revealed on Wednesday that out of 100,000 people who responded to a consultation on boosting Britain’s “long and proud history of using imperial measures”, only 1.3 per cent were in favour of increasing their use for buying or selling products.

Jacob Rees-Mogg, former business secretary, said the decision not to expand the use of traditional British measurements — such as gallons, pints, pounds and ounces — was regrettable.

“It is a small reminder that we have government of the bureaucrat, by the bureaucrat, for the bureaucrat,” he said.

(Note for readers outside of the UK: I did not make this up. Apart from anything else, you couldn’t make up a clown like Rees-Mogg.)

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

The Duke of Wellington writing to his nominal bosses in London.

Gentlemen,

Whilst marching from Portugal to a position which commands the approach to Madrid and the French forces, my officers have been diligently complying with your requests which have been sent by H.M. ship from London to Lisbon and thence by dispatch to our headquarters.

We have enumerated our saddles, bridles, tents and tent poles, and all manner of sundry items for which His Majesty’s Government holds me accountable. I have dispatched reports on the character, wit, and spleen of every officer. Each item and every farthing has been accounted for, with two regrettable exceptions for which I beg your indulgence.

Unfortunately the sum of one shilling and ninepence remains unaccounted for in one infantry battalion’s petty cash and there has been a hideous confusion as to the number of jars of raspberry jam issued to one cavalry regiment during a sandstorm in western Spain. This reprehensible carelessness may be related to the pressure of circumstance, since we are at war with France, a fact which may come as a bit of a surprise to you gentlemen in Whitehall.

This brings me to my present purpose, which is to request elucidation of my instructions from His Majesty’s Government so that I may better understand why I am dragging an army over these barren plains. I construe that perforce it must be one of two alternative duties, as given below. I shall pursue either one with the best of my ability, but I cannot do both:

1. To train an army of uniformed British clerks in Spain for the benefit of the accountants and copy-boys in London or perchance,
2. To see to it that the forces of Napoleon are driven out of Spain.

Your most obedient servant,

Wellington

Sadly, it’s so good that it has to be a spoof. Wellington was no admirer of officialdom, but the phrase “may come as a bit of a surprise” is unlikely to be one that he would use. Still,…

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Piece of cake!

Happy Christmas!

Quote of the Day

”Santa Claus has the right idea — visit people once a year.”

• Victor Borge

Musical alternatives to the morning’s radio news

Take your pick!

1. FIZZ – Christmas Medley | Radio 1 Piano Sessions
   Link

2. In the Bleak Midwinter Link

3. Armas Maasalo | Joulun Kellot (The bells of Christmas)
   Link

Long Read of the Day

The chroniclers of the crypto collapse

An object lesson by Dave Karpov in how to write a devastating review essay. Especially good on Mike Lewis’s failure to nail Sam Bankman-Fried.

The middle chapters of the book are full of stories where SBF makes rash, impulsive decisions that work out terribly for him. He’s a terrible manager, constantly making shit up as he goes, surrounded by partners who quit because they just can’t deal with him anymore. His one great advantage is that he combines the disciplined angle-shooting of a Wall Street quant to the crypto goldrush before any of the other Wall Street quants arrive.

There’s a scene on page 176 where people keep encouraging Sam to hire a CFO. He refuses, saying: “Some people cannot articulate a single thing the CFO is supposed to do. They’ll say ‘keep track of the money’ or ‘make projections.’ I’m like *What the fuck do you think I do all day? You think I don’t know how much money we have?” [Act III/court case spoiler alert: Sam does not know how much money they have. He’s playing Storybook Brawl instead.]

If the book had ended with Act II — if it had been released before the collapse — then it would seem outdated now, but it would be an interesting artifact of the sheer confidence these hucksters were able to successfully project while the numbers were going up. But events unfolded, and Michael Lewis refused to adjust…

Yep.

Why AI is a disaster for the climate

Yesterday’s Observer column:

What to do when surrounded by people who are losing their minds about the Newest New Thing? Answer: reach for the Gartner Hype Cycle, an ingenious diagram that maps the progress of an emerging technology through five phases: the “technology trigger”, which is followed by a rapid rise to the “peak of inflated expectations”; this is succeeded by a rapid decline into the “trough of disillusionment”, after which begins a gentle climb up the “slope of enlightenment” – before eventually (often years or decades later) reaching the “plateau of productivity”.

Given the current hysteria about AI, I thought I’d check to see where it is on the chart. It shows that generative AI (the polite term for ChatGPT and co) has just reached the peak of inflated expectations. That squares with the fevered predictions of the tech industry (not to mention governments) that AI will be transformative and will soon be ubiquitous. This hype has given rise to much anguished fretting about its impact on employment, misinformation, politics etc, and also to a deal of anxious extrapolations about an existential risk to humanity.

All of this serves the useful function – for the tech industry, at least – of diverting attention from the downsides of the technology that we are already experiencing…

Read on

Books, etc.

Christmas reading: a gift from a generous friend.

Colm Toibín had an interesting review of it in the LRB in January last year.

My commonplace booklet

Look how far we haven’t come since Windows NT 

Interesting reflections in The Register which will strike a chord for anyone who remembers what a breakthrough Windows NT was. I was privileged to work later with someone who worked on the team that created it.

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Remembering Tony Holden

On Monday I went to the Memorial Service for Tony Holden in St Martin-in-the-Fields. He was one of the best journalists of his generation, but also a hospitable friend and a writer who was vastly more erudite that any of his journalistic peers. He wrote, co-authored or edited 35 books for example, including: a fine book on Tchaikovsky; an accomplished biography of Shakespeare as well as biographies of Laurence Olivier and Mozart’s librettist, Lorenza Da Ponte. He was also a translator — of Don Giovanni (co-authored with Amanda, his first wife), Aeschylus and Greek pastoral poetry. Crowning it all was a bestseller — Big Deal: A Year as a Professional Poker Player — on his lifelong obsession: poker. And, finally, a nice autobiography, Based on a True Story, written after the stroke that damaged his body but not his mind.

Our journalistic paths crossed occasionally, but I really got to know him through our shared friendship with Frank Kermode, the great literary critic. Among other things, this led to many memorable journalistic lunches in our favourite hostelry, the Three Horseshoes in Madingley.

The Church was packed for a nicely-choreographed memorial service which included readings and memoirs by his three sons and many grandchildren, plus tributes by Alan Samson, Melvyn Bragg, Magnus Linklater, Tina Brown and Gyles Brandreth. There was nice music, two sterling hymns (Abide with Me and Jerusalem) and a live rendition of that politically-incorrect duet from Don Giovanni, La ci darem la mano (see today’s Musical Alternative).

The one complaint I had was that nobody mentioned that in his youth Tony had been a scratch golfer. But maybe you need to play the game to know what that means. (Hint: it means he was bloody good.)

The coup de grace, though, came at the end, when each pew was given a basket of poker chips, from which we each took one as a token of remembrance of a fine journalist and a memorable friend.

Quote of the Day

”Holding Cop28 in the United Arab Emirates is like hosting a Narcotics Anonymous meeting at a drug dealer’s house. Fossil fuel is the narcotic to which all countries present at the UN summit are addicted and Sultan Ahmed Al-Jaber, president of this year’s negotiations, is a top international dealer.”

• Cara Augustenborg, writing in yesterday’s Irish Times

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart: Don Giovanni, K. 527 | Act 1 – Là ci darem la mano (Live)

Link

Pavarotti and Sheryl Crow.

Long Read of the Day

Israel’s Failed Bombing Campaign in Gaza: Collective Punishment Won’t Defeat Hamas

Bracing essay by Robert Paper in Foreign Affairs.

Even now, as Israeli forces push deeper into southern Gaza, the exact purpose of Israel’s approach is far from clear. Although Israeli leaders claim to be targeting Hamas alone, the evident lack of discrimination raises real questions about what the government is actually up to. Is Israel’s eagerness to shatter Gaza a product of the same incompetence that led to the massive failure of the Israeli military to counter Hamas’s attack on October 7, the plans for which ended up in the hands of Israeli military and intelligence officials more than a year earlier? Is wrecking northern Gaza and now southern Gaza a prelude to sending the territory’s entire population to Egypt, as proposed in a “concept paper” produced by the Israeli Intelligence Ministry?

Whatever the ultimate goal, Israel’s collective devastation of Gaza raises deep moral problems. But even judged purely in strategic terms, Israel’s approach is doomed to failure—and indeed, it is already failing. Mass civilian punishment has not convinced Gaza’s residents to stop supporting Hamas. To the contrary, it has only heightened resentment among Palestinians. Nor has the campaign succeeded in dismantling the group ostensibly being targeted. Fifty-plus days of war show that while Israel can demolish Gaza, it cannot destroy Hamas. In fact, the group may be stronger now than it was before…

Why is it that states never learn from experience?

Pape is Professor of Political Science and Director of the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats. He conducted a study analysing the results of over thirty bombing campaigns, including a detailed reconstruction of the Gulf War, and arguing that the key to success is attacking the enemy’s military strategy, not its economy, people, or leaders.

Books, etc.

Just got this after listening to an astonishingly frank (and alarming) discussion about our political future between the author, the economist Diane Coyle and David Runciman. In my bleaker moments, as I ponder (a) the likelihood of humanity finding a way of avoiding climate catastrophe, and (b) the incapacity of liberal democracies to rein in corporations, I think we need a theory of incompetent systems — systems that can’t fix themselves. I came away from the podcast fearing that the need is even more urgent than I had imagined.

My commonplace booklet

Using A.I. to Talk to the Dead

From The New York Times…

Some people are turning to A.I. technology as a way to commune with the dead, but its use as part of the mourning process has raised ethical questions while leaving some who have experimented with it unsettled.

Hmmm…. We can expect more of this, I fear. And it’s not entirely novel, either. One academic expert consulted by the Times reminded the reporter that Thomas Edison tried to invent a “spirit phone.”

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Vanishing point

Green Park Tube Station the other day.

Quote of the Day

“When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said ‘Let us pray.’ We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.”

• Bishop Desmond Tutu

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bob Dylan | Bob Dylan’s Dream

Link

Long Read of the Day

 What the Algorithm Does to Young Girls

For years I’ve been convinced that Instagram is terminally toxic for teenage girls. But who am I, a white male boomer, to know anything about this? So maybe you can understand why I have been so struck by the writing of Freya India, and particularly by this essay, which I stumbled upon the other day. If you’re a parent or grandparent of teenage girls, maybe you should read it and ponder.

Let’s say you were born in the year 1999, so Instagram comes out when you are 12. Back then it was fairly benign: a platform to share pretty sunsets and candid pictures with friends. A few years in, the editing app FaceTune arrives (launched in 2014), and everyone on your feed starts to look perfect. You start editing yourself—smoothing your skin, reshaping your nose, restructuring your jaw. By the time you’re 16, your Instagram face is very different from your natural face, which you’ve come to despise.

And then the algorithms are introduced: your feed is no longer chronological but customized. Instagram now serves you not just photos of the friends you follow but of “influencers”—beautiful women from all over the world, selecting the ones that make you feel the most insecure. Soon you get ads to fix your flaws: Botox; fillers; Brazilian Butt Lifts! By the time TikTok comes out you’re 18, and your feed tracks you even faster. Hate your nose? Try this editing app. Not enough? Try this video editing app. Want it in real life? Nose jobs near you! Suddenly you’re in your 20s and you’ve transformed your style, your face, maybe even your body. And yet you are still insecure. You still hate how you look. And every day your feeds flash on with This is your sign to get a nose job!, The earlier you start Botox the better!, Get ready with me for a Brazilian butt lift!

For many girls, this rewiring of their self-image, this pressure to alter their appearance, happened without them realizing it. It was gradual. Subtle. Drip-fed.

And where have we ended up?

Read on to find out.

Henry K, contd.

 A People’s Obituary of Henry Kissinger

Scorching assessment by historian Greg Grandin in The Nation. He contends that “reading Kissinger as an alien out of tune with the chords of American Exceptionalism misses the point of the man. He was in fact the quintessential American, his cast of mind moulded to his place and time”.

At every single one of America’s postwar turning points, moments of crisis when men of good will began to express doubts about American power, Kissinger broke in the opposite direction. He made his peace with Nixon, whom he first thought was unhinged; then with Ronald Reagan, whom he initially considered hollow; and then with George W. Bush’s neocons, despite the fact that they all rose to power attacking Kissinger; and finally with Donald Trump, whom Kissinger fancifully imagined as the realization of his belief that the greatness of great statesmen resides in their spontaneity, their agility, their ability to thrive on chaos, on, as Kissinger wrote in the 1950s, “perpetual creation, on a constant redefinition of goals.”

“There are two kinds of realists,” Kissinger wrote in the early 1960s, “those who manipulate facts and those who create them. The West requires nothing so much as men able to create their own reality.” Trump, the reality-show president, certainly creates his own reality. A “phenomenon,” Kissinger called Trump, saying that “something remarkable and new” might emerge out of his presidency.

It’s a great piece, worth reading in full, which cuts the old brute down to size. Isaiah Berlin, observing K’s weird partnership with Richard Nixon (whom he seemed to despise), christened the beast ’Nixonger’, presumably because it was more than the sum of its grotesque parts.

My commonplace booklet

Charlie Stross (Whom God Preserve) had heard bad things about Google Bard, the search giant’s ‘AI’-assisted search tool. So he decided to test it on a topic on which he is a world expert: himself. It doesn’t end well, but Charlie’s account of it is both funny and serious.

His takeaway: “LLMs don’t answer your questions accurately—rather, they deliver a lump of text in the shape of an answer.”

Amen.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

This is my Treat of the Week, a recording of Benedict Cumberbatch reading a letter of complaint from George Bernard Shaw to the management of the Royal Opera House after attending a performance of Don Giovanni.

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 view from here

Dingle Bay, early yesterday morning.

Quote of the Day

”Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in depth.”

• Robert Frost

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Van Morrison | Saint Dominic’s Preview

Link

Long Read of the Day

Last Week at Marienbad

Nice witty, ironic essay by Lauren Oyler about a trip she and her boyfriend Thom made to Marienbad. It would, she thought,

confirm that we were in a relationship, and that this relationship was not going to remain forever stuck in the past, in a phase of remembering and fighting over what we remembered – over things that had happened, seriously, the previous year. According to the couple clichés, a trip is a new memory you make together. It’s also a test: how moody one of you might become at a setback; how neurotic the other might be about the schedule; how fundamentally incompatible you are suddenly revealed, in an unfamiliar setting, to be. Kafka knew this. When he and his on-again, off-again fiancée Felice Bauer met at Marienbad for ten days in July 1916, they fought the entire time, unable to overcome the ceaseless rain and ‘the hardships of living together. Forced upon us by strangeness, pity, lust, cowardice, vanity, and only deep down, perhaps, a thin little stream worthy of the name of love, impossible to seek out, flashing once in the moment of a moment.’

We went because we thought it would be funny; we came to realize the movie isn’t even really set there. It takes place, if not in the mind, then in a composite setting of several nineteenth-century Central European spa towns, in a sense of vague possibility and in danger of being lost. The misunderstanding was Thom’s fault. He had seen the movie once before, a long time ago; I had not, but I knew I would have to eventually, because it’s one of those movies you have to see. ‘It’s a trip,’ he told me…

I really enjoyed it. Hope you do too.

Europe’s AI crackdown bends to tech lobbying

Yesterday’s Observer column:

Wednesday will be a fateful day in Brussels, a faraway city of which post-Brexit Britain knows little and cares less. It’s the day on which the EU’s AI proposals enter the final stages of a tortuous lawmaking process. The bill is a landmark (first in the world) attempt to seriously regulate artificial intelligence (AI) based on its capacity to cause harm and will soon be in the final phase of the legislative process – so-called “trilogues” – where the EU parliament, commission and council decide what should be in the bill, and therefore become part of EU law. Big day, high stakes, in other words.

However, the bill is now hanging in the balance because of internal disagreement about some key aspects of the proposed legislation, especially those concerned with regulation of “foundation” AI models that are trained on massive datasets. In EU-speak these are “general-purpose AI” (GPAI) systems – ones capable of a range of general tasks (text synthesis, image manipulation, audio generation and so on) – such as GPT-4, Claude, Llama etc. These systems are astonishingly expensive to train and build: salaries for the geeks who work on them start at Premier League striker level and go stratospheric (with added stock options); a single 80GB Nvidia Hopper H100 board – a key component of machine-learning hardware – costs £26,000, and you need thousands of them to build a respectable system. Not surprisingly, therefore, there are only about 20 firms globally that can afford to play this game. And they have money to burn…

(And also to spend on lobbying.)

Do read the whole thing.

My commonplace booklet

Remembering Kissinger

Bill Emmott’s reflections on “the prickly, ruthless, amoral intellectual that was Henry Kissinger.” (Er, isn’t he forgetting ‘war criminal’?)

Emmott liked, he says,

an opinion piece in the New York Times, headlined “Henry Kissinger: the hypocrite” by Ben Rhodes, a former member of President Obama’s NSC. Rhodes outlined especially well the enduring impact of Kissinger’s amoral actions in places such as Chile, Bangladesh, Cambodia and Laos on America’s reputation as well as any claims it might make about seeking to defend “the international rules-based order” (which is not a claim Kissinger will ever have made, at least not to my knowledge). Sometimes these days people are inclined to write that during the Cold War the severity and clarity of the ideological and military confrontation with the USSR was such as to make brutal actions such as those somehow more acceptable, but I am not sure future Cold War historians will agree. Those actions led to a considerable backlash against America especially but not only in Europe, one that it will be reasonable for future historians to argue might have made the Cold War last longer. Rather less contestable is the fact that memories of such actions lie behind some of today’s unwillingness in Latin America, Southern Africa and many parts of Asia to support the West over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The war in Iraq certainly plays a big part in that, but so do Kissinger’s actions in places like Chile, Angola and Indochina.

Thanks to Andrew Arends for the link.

My first thought on learning of Kissinger’s death was of Tom Lehrer’s crack that satire died the day he won the Nobel Peace prize.

Ben Rhodes’s piece is worth reading, btw. Kissinger, he writes,

exemplified the gap between the story that America, the superpower, tells and the way that we can act in the world. At turns opportunistic and reactive, his was a foreign policy enamored with the exercise of power and drained of concern for the human beings left in its wake. Precisely because his America was not the airbrushed version of a city on a hill, he never felt irrelevant: Ideas go in and out of style, but power does not.

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Xmas gift ideas!

In an American newspaper — in 1912!

We EV owners used to feel smug about being ‘early adopters’. Turns out we are over a century behind the curve!

Thanks to Quentin (a fellow EV owner) for spotting it.

Quote of the Day

”You’re not a star until they can spell your name in Karachi.”

• Humphrey Bogart

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Franz Schubert | Nachtgesang im Walde Op. 139 | Ruhrkohle-Chor

Link

Long Read of the Day

 Douglas Murray: Wartime Diary

Eyewitness reporting from Israel and Gaza.

I was at the children’s hospital in Tel Aviv when the first children and their parents were released. When the helicopters landed and the hostages got out, IDF soldiers blocked their faces with screens to protect them from the glare of the cameras. But I’d already been sent a single photo taken by the Arab press that showed some of the mothers with their children inside a bus when they were still in Gaza.

The terror on their faces. They looked as though they’d aged by decades.

But at this moment, there was joy. As the helicopters landed, traffic stopped, and people got out of their cars and broke into song. They clapped and their voices rang out as they welcomed back the hostages with songs like “Hevenu Shalom Alechem.” (“We brought you peace.”)

As it happened, 12 of the 13 returnees that night were from Kibbutz Nir Oz, the first place I visited on my trip to Israel…

A premonition…

One of the people I’ve followed for years is Robert Reich, who taught at Berkeley for years and was Secretary for Labour in Bill Clinton’s Administration.

In 1994, when he held that post, he gave a speech at Thanksgiving which I’ve just watched. It’s very striking, and a good way to spend nine minutes or so.

Link

His colleagues in the Clinton Administration were not amused, btw. Here’s how Reich remembers what happened:

Speeches by Cabinet members were supposed to be approved in advance by the White House, but in this case I doubted the White House would approve my speech because it was so foreboding. So I sent to the White House a different speech — one that was anodyne and boring.

I thought I could get away with this because I doubted the media would pay much attention to my speech.

I was wrong. It made headlines.

Not surprisingly, I was ordered to the White House — where an ambush awaited me. Clinton’s chief of staff Leon Panetta, his economic adviser Bob Rubin, his political adviser George Stephanopoulos, and other top advisers told me in no uncertain terms that I had violated White House rules.

They accused me of not being a team player and barred me from making any further speeches.

I told them I didn’t work for them. I had been nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate, and they had no power over me. I’d be silenced only if the president directed me to be.

Well, that was the end of it. I knew Bill Clinton wouldn’t tell me to stop speaking my mind.

My commonplace booklet

Yesterday was the first anniversary of the arrival of ChatGPT. Azeem Azhar had the nice idea of asking its GenerativeAI sidekick, DALL-E, to produce an image of a birthday cake for his newsletter.

Azeem’s comment:

“You’ve shown us how vulnerable we are to strings of text produced by a machine – willing to believe and put faith in them. Even though you still misspell your own name on your birthday cakes.”

See also  How ChatGPT rewired the tech world .

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Charles Arthur (Whom God Preserve) noticed a piece in Britain’s only broadsheet tabloid about the IEA’s observation that the oil and gas industry faces losses of more than $3 trillion (£2.4 trillion) because of net zero policies.

“Note the faint undertone in this story,” Charles writes, “which appeared in the Daily Telegraph, favourite of the Tory-voting stock-owning (ancient) generation: ‘net zero’ will do these things to companies’ valuations, and therefore net zero is bad. Rather than these companies are contributing to wrecking the planet, and are therefore bad and deserve to fall in value concomitant to the damage they’re causing.”

Quite, as the late Queen might have observed.

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Bike Park

Seen on a riverside walk on Saturday.

Quote of the Day

“Conservative, n: A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal who wishes to replace them with others.”

• Ambrose Bierce (from his Devil’s Dictionary)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Martin Hayes and John Cahill | The Cat In The Corner & John Naughton’s Jig

Link

I would, of course, like to be able to claim that the second jig was one of my compositions, but alas there are many of my namesakes out there, and at least one of them has real musical talent!

Martin Hayes has a gig in the Cambridge Junction on January 29 and I’ve already bought the tickets.

Long Read of the Day

John Banville’s review of Christopher Reid’s 800-page selection of Seamus Heaney’s astonishing correspondence is generous and insightful.

Heaney was as fluent in prose as he was sublime in verse, as readers will know from his essays and articles, and his extensive memoir, Stepping Stones, compiled in interview form with the poet Dennis O’Driscoll. Yet the style in the letters, many of them obviously composed at breakneck speed, is astonishing in its quality and unflagging grace. As one of his correspondents said of Heaney: “He makes the simplest words shine.”

Despite occasional asperities, his generosity and enthusiasm for the work of others are remarkable. Here he is writing in 2006 to Ted Hughes’s widow, Carol, about the poet’s posthumous Selected Translations – and note the beautifully sustained oceanic metaphor: “The delights are dolphin-like, the mighty talent rising again and showing his back above the elements … I got the book and swam in and out of the different coves and caves, safe havens (few) and strange strands. A strong sense of being lifted on the tide of it all.”

Heaney could not have had a better editor than Reid. The task was surely enormous, but Reid fulfils it with a Heaneyesque diligence and scrupulousness. The choice of letters is never less than apposite, the scholarly apparatus discreet to the point of invisibility, and the endnotes to each letter are kept to a minimum.

On this last point, Reid remarks that “the sheer outward-facing busyness” of Heaney’s life, as man and poet, “called for equally busy footnotes”. In fact, there is no sense of busyness here. Reid’s method is to leave the letters themselves clear and cleanly readable, then attach the necessary explanatory matter at its end, often in no more than a few deft lines. The result is an uncluttered text that is a pleasure for the eye as well as to the mind…

It’s a really elegant review, worth reading in full. And if I needed convincing that I should buy the book, Banville’s coda would have clinched the deal.

This is a marvellous book, lovingly edited, beautifully produced – the paper is notably good, a rare thing these days – and brimming with literary insights, much laughter, a sprinkle of gossip and the poet’s insuppressible joie de vivre, even in adversity. Buy it, read it, and keep it to hand on to your children.

— except that I had already ordered it! I can always pretend that it was a Christmas present from my children.

The power of FOMO

Yesterday’s Observer column:

On 22 September last year, a fascinating article appeared on the website of Sequoia Capital, one of the leading venture capital firms in Silicon Valley. (It trades under the motto: “We help the daring build legendary companies.”) The article in question was a breezily readable piece about a tech wunderkind who had recently flashed on to the company’s radar screen. His name was Sam Bankman-Fried (henceforth known as SBF) and he was the founder of Alameda Research, a hedge fund specialising in cryptocurrency, and FTX, a spectacularly growing and profitable exchange that enabled holders of crypto assets to trade efficiently and freely.

Today, that glowing tribute to this young genius is nowhere to be found on Sequoia’s website. Why? Because only the other day a New York jury convicted him of fraud and conspiracy to launder money in a crushing verdict that could keep the lad in prison for decades – and perhaps also whet the appetite of US authorities for bringing the crypto sector to heel. In the end, about $8bn of FTX’s investors’ money was missing. The verdict has also mightily embarrassed the top-tier venture capitalists who were mesmerised by SBF’s ambitious fantasies – to the point where the lead sucker, Sequoia, felt obliged on 10 November to bury the online evidence of its delusions by removing the profile from its website.

Fortunately, the internet has a very good memory in the shape of the Wayback Machine, which had thoughtfully archived Sequoia’s glowing testimonial for SBF for our delectation. And, boy, does it make for delightful reading…

Do read the whole piece.

My commonplace booklet

How low interest-rates foster madness

From David McWilliams’s column in the Irish Times:

WeWork was a glorified subletting company, whose main so-called innovation seemed to be a lick of paint. The brainchild of a photogenic CEO, Adam Neumann, the company leased offices from owners on long leases and then rejigged them on more expensive short leases. It rented them out as shared spaces with “hot desks” to accommodate a new type of worker, a nomadic creature who wanted urban workspace. Essentially, it was a time horizon bet – longer leases are cheaper than shorter ones and if interest rates remained low, the company could finance the long-term cheaply and extract rent expensively in the short-term.

Ten years ago, with commercial property still lagging after the crash and interest rates moving towards zero, this rather plodding insight was embraced enthusiastically by cash-rich investors. In the lead-up to an initial public offering in 2019, the company was valued at $47 billion, but the company was losing more than $200,000 an hour. Since it was founded in 2010, WeWork has not once turned a profit. Last Wednesday, WeWork, which leases office space in 777 locations across 39 countries, filed for bankruptcy. This company is one of Dublin’s biggest office tenants. These leases will come on the market now. Who is going to buy them?

Who indeed? McWilliams is a leading Irish economist who has an impressive track record of calling time on the BS consistently retailed by my country’s political establishment. And in this column he makes the point that the process of ‘creative destruction’ (Joseph Schumpeter’s idea of the motive power that drives capitalism — where good businesses replace bad ones, mimicking natural selection in evolution — doesn’t work if certain costs (e.g. interest rates) are kept artificially low. When this happens, so called ‘unicorns’ like WeWork and FTX are kept alive for far longer than they deserve.

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WTF?…

… is going on here? Who knows? London, June.

Quote of the Day

“Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.”

• John Maynard Keynes

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Elton John | Rocket Man (Glastonbury 2023)

Link

Memorable performance. I watched it live.

Long Read of the Day

Boogeyman Diplomacy

On the day when the UK’s ‘AI Safety Summit’ opens, this lovely blog post by Neil Lawrence seems appropriate, not least because Neil is one of the foremost experts on ‘AI’, i.e. machine-learning.

Just like behind my garage, there are many dangers to AI, and some of those dangers are unknown. In the rubbish there could have been rats and asbestos. Similarly with today’s information technologies we already face challenges around power asymmetries, where a few companies are control access to information. Competition authorities on both sides of the Atlantic are addressing these. We also face challenges around automated decision making: the European GDPR is an attempt to regulate how and when algorithmic decision making can be used. The AI boogeyman is frightening extreme conflation of these two challenges, just as an asbestos breathing rat would be a very disturbing conflation of the challenges behind my garage.

But just as the right approach to dealing with an asbestos breathing rat would be to deal with the rats and the asbestos separately, so the AI boogeyman can be dealt with by dealing with both power asymmetries and automated decision making. In both these areas many of us have already been supporting governments in developing new regulation to address these risks. But by combining them, boogeyman diplomacy runs the serious risk of highlighting the problems in a way that distracts us from the real dangers we face.

However, like Mao Zedong and Richard Nixon’s panda diplomacy, boogeyman diplomacy does promise a potential benefit. It is far easier to agree on an exchange of pandas than it is to bridge cultural and political divides between two great nations…

Neil has found a neat way of highlighting the fundamental problem we have with this technology, which is that governments and tech companies are obsessed with contemplating the speculative existential risks of the technology. This is a diversionary tactic because it enables both sides to avoid confronting the actual and real harms already being caused by the technology as it’s being applied right now.

The biggest risk posed by runaway AI isn’t speculative

If its deployment isn’t managed, then it’ll really undermine democracy. Why? Because history suggests that having a stable middle class is an essential requirement for a stable democratic polity. As Rana Faroohar pointed out in yesterday’s FT,

One recent academic study from OpenAI and the University of Pennsylvania found that 80 per cent of the US workforce will have at least some of their work tasks transformed by AI. There’s a huge productivity multiple there — Goldman Sachs estimates labour productivity could rise by 1.5 per cent, which is twice the recent historic rate. That would be similar in scale to the effect of the PC and the tech boom of the 1990s, which doubled the US GDP growth rate. 

The key question is: will the productivity be shared? I suspect we may see the blue-collar disruption of the 80s and 90s come to service work. The OECD warned in July that the job categories most at risk of displacement would be highly skilled, white-collar work accounting for a third of employment in the developed world. Think about the populism that could result — manufacturing is 8 per cent of the US workforce, while jobs at risk immediately from AI represent about 30 per cent.

Her colleague, Edward Luce, has an answer to that question about sharing the fruits of massive increases in productivity.

I share all the forebodings about the future of warfare, the deepfake impact on democracy and the ultimate question about computers deciding we are too stupid as a species to keep around (I have periodic twinges of sympathy with the latter). But an immediate concern is the massive rates of return that owners of AI will inevitably reap in the coming years. We are already living in an oligarchic society. I fear that today will look like child’s play compared to what is around the corner. In other words, it is the Elon Musks and other humans that I fear the most. 

Me too. And in that context, isn’t it interesting that Rishi Sunak has chosen to make a big deal about a live-streamed interview he’s done with Elon Musk, one of the tech lords who have turned up to Bletchley Park. Unregulated deployment of this technology is an entry ramp onto a highway that leads to a techno-feudalism future of the kind envisaged by Marc Andreessen and other fanatics.

My commonplace booklet

From the Economist:

“When on October 20th the Rolling Stones released ‘Hackney Diamonds’, the band’s first original album in almost two decades, many acolytes bought it on vinyl—an old format befitting an old act. The vinyl revival, now well into its second decade, crosses generations and genres. In America, 25- to 34-year-olds buy as many vinyl records as the over-55s.”

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

The iShuffle Principle

Nice little essay from 2005 by Om Malik. He returned to the theme the other day. Nice.

Errata

Many thanks to the readers who, very politely, pointed that Margaret Atwood only has one ’t’ in her surname. And humble apologies to the wonderful lady herself.

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!