As the Gatsby tsunami gathers pace, ahead of the release of the new film based on Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, Sarah Churchwell has a lovely essay on The Great Gatsby in the Guardian which dwells perceptively on the novel’s contemporary relevance.

Our gilded age bears a marked resemblance to Fitzgerald’s. It has become a truism that Fitzgerald was dazzled by wealth, but the charge infuriated him: “Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction,” he insisted, adding later, “I have never been able to forgive the rich for being rich, and it has colored my entire life and works”. He wasn’t in thrall to wealth, but making a study of how it was corrupting the country he loved. “Like so many Americans,” Fitzgerald wrote in his 1927 story “Jacob’s Ladder”, “he valued things rather than cared about them.”

The materialistic world of Gatsby is defined by social politics in a metropolitan America. It is a story of class warfare in a nation that denies it even has a class system, in which the game is eternally rigged for the rich to win.

Spot on.

The Oxford English professor, reviewing Richard Holmes’s history of ballooning, writes that

“Ballooning was a dream that failed and the lesson of Holmes’s story is that an invention that seemed to promise democracy and universal brotherhood became merely another means for humanity to exhibit its insatiable appetite for triviality and destruction. Perhaps the nearest modern parallel will turn out to be the Internet.”

This slick but idiotic ad for Facebook touted the metaphor that the social-networking service is like a chair.

“Chairs”, it burbles.

Chairs are made so that people can sit down and take a break. Anyone can sit on a chair. And if the chair is large enough, they can sit down together and tell jokes and make up stories or just listen. Chairs are for people. And that is why chairs are like Facebook. Doorbells. Airplanes. Bridges. These are things people use to get together so they can open up and connect about ideas and music and other things people share.

This cant was nicely shafted by Mike Monteiro of Mule Design thus:

A well-designed chair not only feels good to sit in, it also entices your ass towards it. So this is nothing new to Facebook. Where it gets interesting to me is when you start asking to what end you are designing. The big why. In the chair example, the relationship is clear. If I can design a chair that entices your ass, then you will buy it. I’ve traded money for ass happiness (and back happiness, but that’s less sexy). But it’s clear who the vendor and who the customer is in that case.

Where I have issues with Facebook is that they’re dishonest about who the customer is. They’ve built an enticing chair, and they let me sit in it for free, but they’re selling my farts to the highest bidder.

Right on!

HT to Alexis Madrigal for the link.

Hotmail is no more. The last remaining users are being ‘migrated’ over to Outlook.com. It’s a significant moment in the evolution of the Net because it was Hotmail that really ushered in the era of cloud computing for the average Internet user. This aspect of the story is told in Chapter 6 of my book.

My friend (and Wolfson colleague), Jon Crowcroft has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. This news has made my day, and I hope his. Among his many merits is the fact that he’s the only computer scientist I know who quoted Flann O’Brien in his PhD dissertation.

Good to see also that Mike Burrows of Google is also now an FRS.

A Boeing 747 falls out of the sky. Literally.

And watching it, I’m reminded of Auden’s wonderful poem about the fall of Icarus.

This is a test of Dave Winer’s new outliner/blogging tool, Fargo. Can’t decide if it will be useful for me or not, but there’s only one way to find out!

And just to see if the editing facility works, here’s a fresh, updated version of the original post.

Wonder how one puts in links — say to Arts and Letters Daily? Has that worked, I wonder?

Yes it has! Hmmm… this could be useful when one wants to blog something but is pressed for time.

Bertrand Russell to the old Fascist leader, Oswald Mosely.

Provenance of the image unclear, but my guess is that it comes from the Russell archives at McMaster university. At any rate, the archive catalogue (snippet below) does list correspondence between Russell and Mosely.

Foreign Policy is a terrific journal, but sometimes even it runs out of ideas for thought-provoking copy.

Take, for example, this morning’s little feature headlined “7 things the North Koreans are really good at”.

BTW, in case you’re interested, they are:

1. Building tunnels

Apparently, the Hermit Kingdom has constructed a massive network of clandestine tunnels underneath the so-called demilitarised zone (DMZ). “Designed as a means to mount a massive military invasion from the north, the tunnels are ‘large enough to shuttle through an entire military division per hour,’ according to Popular Mechanics. GlobalSecurity.org estimates that Pyongyang has built up to 20 tunnels that snake through the Demilitarized Zone.”

2. Counterfeiting US dollars. Foreign Affairs maintains that Kim Jong-Un & Co make the best fake dollars in the world.

3. Hacking (Really? In a country with no real Internet access.)

4. Doing more with less (i.e. absence of choice. Eric Schmidt told me that during his extended visit to North Korea, no public building he entered — except for his hotel — had any form of heating. It seems improbably that a state that cannot heat its buildings would be good at sophisticated software. But then again, they’ve built rockets and nukes.)

5. Cheap labour. (No surprise there.)

6. Massive co-ordinated propaganda displays. (Synchronized swimming was made for North Koreans.)

7. Seafood (Eh??