Category Archives: Ideology

Wednesday 25 March, 2020

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Why America is so bad at Covid-19.

It’s our attitude, there are never consequences for Americans. That’s for other people. We have wars and tax cuts at the same time. We don’t see the coffins of our returning dead. Nothing happens to us. We can’t imagine things not being normal. The generation that grew up during World War II, who experienced the Holocaust, the advent of nuclear weapons, that generation is gone now. Everyone alive today, not just boomers, have been spoiled. We’re all coming awake now from a life-long trance. For the first time in our lives, we have to deal with the mortality of our country. Don’t cry for America. It’s time to grow up, again. Couldn’t have a more perfect person as president. It’s easy to see he is our past. Now how do we move beyond that?

Dave Winer

The Real Pandemic Danger Is Social Collapse

Branko Milanovic: “As the Global Economy Comes Apart, Societies May, Too”.

Sobering essay in Foreign Affairs. Sample:

The world faces the prospect of a profound shift: a return to natural—which is to say, self-sufficient—economy. That shift is the very opposite of globalization. While globalization entails a division of labor among disparate economies, a return to natural economy means that nations would move toward self-sufficiency. That movement is not inevitable. If national governments can control or overcome the current crisis within the next six months or a year, the world would likely return to the path of globalization, even if some of the assumptions that undergirded it (for example, very taut production chains with just-in-time deliveries) might have to be revised.

But if the crisis continues, globalization could unravel. The longer the crisis lasts, and the longer obstacles to the free flow of people, goods, and capital are in place, the more that state of affairs will come to seem normal. Special interests will form to sustain it, and the continuing fear of another epidemic may motivate calls for national self-sufficiency. In this sense, economic interests and legitimate health worries could dovetail. Even a seemingly small requirement—for instance, that everyone who enters a country needs to present, in addition to a passport and a visa, a health certificate—would constitute an obstacle to the return to the old globalized way, given how many millions of people would normally travel.

If de-globalisation does indeed start to happen, then that will produce — in Arnold Kling’s terms — “losers and bigger losers (it won’t produce many winners)”. What matters in a de-globalised world is how self-sufficient you are. Kling cites Peter Zeihan’s view that the U.S. is one of the few countries that produces enough food and energy for itself. China, on the other hand, needs to import both. That would lead one to predict that China will be in the “bigger loser” category.

Hmmmm…

Quarantine FM

My son Pete is a talented podcast producer. He’s currently hunkered down on his narrow boat in London and had the idea of creating something that would provide pleasure to people stuck in the self-isolation zone. This is the first episode. Subscribe using whatever you use to catch podcasts.

The last global crisis didn’t change the world. But this one could

Typically insightful essay by the incomparable Will Davies. He addresses a question that has always puzzled me, namely why the 2008 banking crisis didn’t provoke a radical rethink of how we run our societies. It did, of course, eventually produce a populist backlash against the ‘austerity’ imposed on ordinary citizens in order to ensure that banks would be rescued while no bankers went to gaol. But in most ways, the system continued as it had before, except with slightly better financed banks (outside of Italy, perhaps). So in that sense the 2008 cataclysm wasn’t a real crisis — i.e. an event that leads to structural and ideological change.

“The decade that shapes our contemporary imagination of crises”, he writes,

is the 1970s, which exemplified the way a historic rupture can set an economy and a society on a new path. This period marked the collapse of the postwar system of fixed exchange rates, capital controls and wage policies, which were perceived to have led to uncontrollable inflation. It also created the conditions in which the new right of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan could ride to the rescue, offering a novel medicine of tax cuts, interest rate hikes and attacks on organised labour.

Oddly, the 1970s inspired a vision of crisis as a wide-ranging shift in ideology, which has retained its hold over much of the left ever since.

For over 40 years after Thatcher first took office, many people on the left have waited impatiently for a successor to the 1970s, in the hope that a similar ideological transition might occur in reverse. But despite considerable upheaval and social pain, the global financial crisis of 2008 failed to provoke a fundamental shift in policy orthodoxy. In fact, after the initial burst of public spending that rescued the banks, the free-market Thatcherite worldview became even more dominant in Britain and the eurozone. The political upheavals of 2016 took aim at the status quo, but with little sense of a coherent alternative to it. But both these crises now appear as mere forerunners to the big one that emerged in Wuhan at the close of last year.

So the question now is whether COVID-19 is really a pivotal moment? Davies thinks that it might be.

Great essay. Worth reading in full.

Herd immunity redux

Remember the ‘herd immunity’ strategy for dealing with Coronavirus? That’s the strategy that was kyboshed by the Imperial College model. Well now a modelling team at Oxford is suggesting that the virus may already have infected far more people in the UK than scientists had previously estimated — perhaps as much as half the population — according to a report in yesterday’s Financial Times.

If the results are confirmed, they imply that fewer than one in a thousand of those infected with Covid-19 become ill enough to need hospital treatment, said Sunetra Gupta, professor of theoretical epidemiology, who led the study. The vast majority develop very mild symptoms or none at all.

The research, observes the FT,

presents a very different view of the epidemic to the modelling at Imperial College London, which has strongly influenced government policy. “I am surprised that there has been such unqualified acceptance of the Imperial model,” said Prof Gupta.

(Experts in the conventions of academic warfare will be able to decode that genteel observation.)

But Prof Gupta was reluctant to criticise the government for shutting down the country to suppress viral spread, because the accuracy of the Oxford model has not yet been confirmed and, even if it is correct, social distancing will still reduce the number of people becoming seriously ill and relieve severe pressure on the NHS during the peak of the epidemic.

Let the war of the models begin. We will only know the truth when the UK has a large-scale programme for testing in the population at large. At the moment we’re still flying blind.

Quarantine diary — Day 4

Link

Thursday 19 March, 2020

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England’s green and pleasant land

One part of the country that’s not currently under lockdown: the river Cam at Grantchester, photographed on Tuesday morning.

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Apocalypse now

The Wall Street Journal reports from the Papa Giovanni XXIII Hospital, a large, modern medical facility in Bergamo, a prosperous Italian city that has been overwhelmed by the coronavirus disease:

Bergamo shows what happens when things go wrong. In normal times, the ambulance service at the Papa Giovanni hospital runs like a Swiss clock. Calls to 112, Europe’s equivalent of 911, are answered within 15 to 20 seconds. Ambulances from the hospital’s fleet of more than 200 are dispatched within 60 to 90 seconds. Two helicopters stand by at all times. Patients usually reach an operating room within 30 minutes, said Angelo Giupponi, who runs the emergency response operation: “We are fast, in peacetime.”

Now, people wait an hour on the phone to report heart attacks, Dr. Giupponi said, because all the lines are busy. Each day, his team fields 2,500 calls and brings 1,500 people to the hospital. “That’s not counting those the first responders visit but tell to stay home and call again if their condition worsens,” he said.

Ambulance staff weren’t trained for such a contagious virus. Many have become infected and their ambulances contaminated. A dispatcher died of the disease Saturday. Diego Bianco was in his mid-40s and had no prior illnesses.

“He never met patients. He only answered the phone. That shows you the contamination is everywhere,” a colleague said. Mr. Bianco’s co-workers sat Sunday at the operations center with masks on their faces and fear in their eyes…

This is why social-distancing has to be made to work.

MEOW

Our local supermarket announced that the first hour after opening this morning would be reserved for people who would have to ‘self-isolate’ from next weekend. I fall into that category because of my age, but people with particular medical conditions also fall into it. Think of it as voluntary house arrest! The supermarket was fairly busy with customers of retirement age. The atmosphere was cheery and civilised, with a vague feeling of wartime solidarity. In a way, I reflected, on discovering that all the milk had gone and further stocks were not expected until midday, that in a sense this is the moral equivalent of war.

And then I remembered that during the 1979 energy crisis in the US, the then president Jimmy Carter had used that phrase — I think in the context of making the US independent of oil imports from the Middle East. For Carter, the phrase was a way of signalling how important his campaign was. But of course his Republican opponents resisted it — and found a way of effectively ridiculing it by making an acronynm from the initial letters of each word: MEOW. And it worked.

AI is an ideology, not a technology

Nice essay in Wired by Jaron Lanier, arguing that, at its core, “artificial intelligence” is a perilous belief that fails to recognize the agency of humans. “The usual narrative goes like this”, he writes.

Without the constraints on data collection that liberal democracies impose and with the capacity to centrally direct greater resource allocation, the Chinese will outstrip the West. AI is hungry for more and more data, but the West insists on privacy. This is a luxury we cannot afford, it is said, as whichever world power achieves superhuman intelligence via AI first is likely to become dominant.

If you accept this narrative, the logic of the Chinese advantage is powerful. What if it’s wrong? Perhaps the West’s vulnerability stems not from our ideas about privacy, but from the idea of AI itself.

The central point of the essay is that “AI” is best understood as a political and social ideology rather than as a basket of algorithms. And at its core is the belief

that a suite of technologies, designed by a small technical elite, can and should become autonomous from and eventually replace, rather than complement, not just individual humans but much of humanity. Given that any such replacement is a mirage, this ideology has strong resonances with other historical ideologies, such as technocracy and central-planning-based forms of socialism, which viewed as desirable or inevitable the replacement of most human judgement/agency with systems created by a small technical elite. It is thus not all that surprising that the Chinese Communist Party would find AI to be a welcome technological formulation of its own ideology.

Thoughtful piece. Worth reading in full.

Will the virus enable us to rediscover what the Internet is for?

The wonderful thing about the Net — so we naive techno-utopians used to think — was that it would liberate human creativity because it lowered the barriers to publication and self-expression. The most erudite articulation of this was probably Yochai Benkler’s wonderful The Wealth of Networks, a celebration of the potential of ‘peer production’ and user-generated content. We saw the technology was an enabling, democratising force — a ‘sit-up’ rather than a ‘lie-back’ medium. And we saw in its apparently inexorable rise the end of the era of the couch potato.

What we never expected was that a combination of capitalism and human nature would instead turn the network into million-channel TV, with billions of people passively consuming content created by media corporations: the ultimate lie-back medium. And indeed, if you look at the data traffic on the Net these days, you see the effects of that. According to Sandvine, a network equipment company, in 2019, for example, video accounted for 60.6 percent of total downstream volume worldwide, up 2.9 percentage points from 2018. Web traffic was the next biggest category, with a 13.1 percent share (down 3.8 points year over year), followed by gaming at 8.0 percent, social media at 6.1 percent and file sharing at 4.2 percent. The same report found that Google and its various apps (including YouTube and Android) accounted for 12 percent of overall internet traffic and that Facebook apps took 17 percent of downstream internet traffic in the Asia-Pacific region, as compared with 3 percent worldwide.

One interesting question raised by the COVID-19 crisis is whether people who find themselves isolated in their homes will discover affordances of the network of which they were hitherto unaware. Kevin Roose of the NYT explores this in “The Coronavirus Crisis Is Showing Us How to Live Online”. We’ve always hoped that our digital tools would create connections, not conflict, he says. We now have a chance to make it happen. After a week in self-isolation, he finds himself agreeably surprised:

Last weekend, in between trips to the grocery store, I checked up on some friends using Twitter D.M.s, traded home-cooking recipes on Instagram, and used WhatsApp to join a blockwide support group with my neighbors. I even put on my Oculus virtual reality headset, and spent a few hours playing poker in a V.R. casino with friendly strangers.

I expected my first week of social distancing to feel, well, distant. But I’ve been more connected than ever. My inboxes are full of invitations to digital events — Zoom art classes, Skype book clubs, Periscope jam sessions. Strangers and subject-matter experts are sharing relevant and timely information about the virus on social media, and organizing ways to help struggling people and small businesses. On my feeds, trolls are few and far between, and misinformation is quickly being fact-checked.

Well, well. Reporters should get out more — onto the free and open Internet rather than the walled gardens of social media.

Ideology and tech evangelism

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This morning’s Observer column:

For my sins, I get invited to give a few public lectures every year. Mostly, the topic on which I’m asked to speak is the implications for democracy of digital technology as it has been exploited by a number of giant US corporations. My general argument is that those implications are not good, and I try to explain why I think this is the case. When I’ve finished, there is usually some polite applause before the Q&A begins. And always one particular question comes up. “Why are you so pessimistic?”

The interesting thing about that is the way it reveals as much about the questioner as it does about the lecturer. All I have done in my talk, after all, is to lay out the grounds for concern about what networked technology is doing to our democracies. Mostly, my audiences recognise those grounds as genuine – indeed as things about which they themselves have been fretting. So if someone regards a critical examination of these issues as “pessimistic” then it suggests that they have subconsciously imbibed the positive narrative of tech evangelism.

An ideology is what determines how you think even when you don’t know you’re thinking. Tech evangelism is an example. And one of the functions of an ideology is to stop us asking awkward questions…

Read on

Impunity vs. democracy

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I’m at Ireland’s Edge, consistently the most interesting event I go to every year. It’s held in Dingle, which is on the westernmost edge of Europe and a place I’ve loved ever since I was a student. And what conference Centre anywhere has a backdrop like the one shown in the pic?

Yesterday, one of the sessions was on “A New Era of Investigative Journalism: Political Polarisation and Surveillance Capitalism”. It was moderated by Muireann Kelliher, co-inventor of Ireland’s Edge, and had a terrific panel: my Observer colleague Carole Cadwalladr, Peter Geoghegan of openDemocracy and Donie O’Sullivan of CNN. There was a spirited discussion of the way in which journalistic exposés of the blatant flouting of electoral and other laws in the Brexit referendum and the 2016 US presidential election by political parties, foreign and domestic actors and social media companies have not resulted in any meaningful penalties for the wrongdoers. The audience came away having been stirred by the manifest injustices and institutional dysfunctionality described by the journalists, but also (I think) deeply pessimistic that anything will be done about the problematique (to use the French term for a real mess) portrayed in the discussion.

On reflection, it occurs to me that the fundamental problem underpinning all this is impunity — i.e. the discovery that there are agents in liberal democracies which are able to behave badly without having to worry about the consequences. We saw this with the banks in the 2008 crisis, and we’re seeing it now with political activists, foreign actors and tech companies. And the reason this is so poisonous is that impunity goes to the heart of the matter. Democracy depends on the rule of law (not, as the Chinese regime maintains, rule by law). Its fundamental requirement is that no one or no institution is above the law, and what we’re discovering now is that that no longer holds in many democracies — and most shockingly in two supposedly mature democracies: the UK and the US.

How did we get here? One of the reasons is that since the 1970s governments and ruling elites have drunk the neoliberal Kool Aid which privileges markets — and the corporations that dominate them. One of the reasons the 2008 banking crisis happened is that in preceding decades the regulations under which banks operated were loosened (using the hoary old “red tape” trope) to create a legal environment in which they were able to screw the world economy with impunity. And our failure to anticipate the growth of tech power led to a failure to create a regulatory environment which would punish monopolistic and irresponsible business models. And now we’re living with the consequences.

Silicon Valley ideology in a nutshell

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The proprietor of N-gate is an engineer who grew up in Palo Alto and now lives in the Pacific Northwest, where he works in high-performance computing. He agreed to exchange e-mails on condition of anonymity. “Almost every post deals with the same topics: these are people who spend their lives trying to identify all the ways they can extract money from others without quite going to jail,” he wrote. “They’re people who are convinced that they are too special for rules, and too smart for education. They don’t regard themselves as inhabiting the world the way other people do; they’re secret royalty, detached from society’s expectations and unfailingly outraged when faced with normal consequences for bad decisions. Society, and especially economics, is a logic puzzle where you just have to find the right set of loopholes to win the game. Rules are made to be slipped past, never stopping to consider why someone might have made those rules to start with. Silicon Valley has an ethics problem, and ‘Hacker’ ‘News’ is where it’s easiest to see.”

From a terrific New Yorker essay on the task of moderating Hacker News.

Networked totalitarianism

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My Observer review of Kai Strittmatter’s remarkable new book.

Kai Strittmatter is a German journalist who writes for Süddeutsche Zeitung and is currently based in Copenhagen. From 1997 until recently, he had been a foreign correspondent in Beijing. Prior to those postings, he had studied sinology and journalism in Munich, Xi’an and Taipei. So he knows China rather well. Having read his remarkable book, it’s reasonable to assume that he will not be passing through any Chinese airport in the foreseeable future. Doing so would not be good for his health, not to mention his freedom.

We Have Been Harmonised is the most accessible and best informed account we have had to date of China’s transition from what scholars such as Rebecca MacKinnon used to call “networked authoritarianism” to what is now a form of networked totalitarianism. The difference is not merely semantic. An authoritarian regime is relatively limited in its objectives: there may be elections, but they are generally carefully managed; individual freedoms are subordinate to the state; there is no constitutional accountability and no rule of law in any meaningful sense.
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Totalitarianism, in contrast, prohibits opposition parties, restricts opposition to the state and exercises an extremely high degree of control over public and private life…

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Brexit: Thatcherism 2.0

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Andrew Marr made an interesting speech at a business conference in Dublin the other day. His argument: the prevailing liberal view of the philosophy underpinning enthusiasm for Brexit as imperial nostalgia is wrong. There is, he maintained, an “underlying logic” to wanting to leave the EU in order to pursue an alternative economic model – something Brexiteers referred to as Thatcherism 2.0 – which is under-appreciated in the liberal media and in Ireland. And it was not much discussed in public because of the (accurate) perception that it would “frighten the horses”.

Marr’s summary of this neo-Thatcherite ideology didn’t seem particularly original: it’s the Singapore-on-Thames fantasy — deep cuts to corporation tax and a wholesale jettisoning of regulations to attract inward investment. etc. etc. “You slash corporation tax right down, way below where it is right now, you slash regulations, you tear up your environmental and worker protections and you go for broke, you go for bust.” This is a transcript of Liam Fox talking in his sleep. It may be what some of these crazies believe, but a rational plan for the future it ain’t. And that’s apart altogether from the fact that Singapore is a tiny statelet, not a nation of 60m+ people.

Still, there is one thing that Marr’s conjecture might explain: the volume of dark overseas money that flooded in to fund the Leave campaign. If there’s one thing that the Mercers, the Koch brothers and others are unlikely to finance it’s imperial delusions.

Our new bi-polar world

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This morning’s Observer column:

What the Chinese have discovered, in other words, is that digital technology – which we once naively believed would be a force for democratisation – is also a perfect tool for social control. It’s the operating system for networked authoritarianism. Last month, James O’Malley, a British journalist, was travelling on the Beijing-Shanghai bullet train when his reverie was interrupted by this announcement: “Dear passengers, people who travel without a ticket, or behave disorderly, or smoke in public areas, will be punished according to regulations and the behaviour will be recorded in individual credit information system. To avoid a negative record of personal credit please follow the relevant regulations and help with the orders on the train and at the station.” Makes you nostalgic for those announcements about “arriving at King’s Cross, where this train terminates”, doesn’t it?

Read on

The task facing liberals now

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This from a very perceptive essay by Daniel Rodgers:

More realistically, liberals must find ways to win back some of those who swung to Donald Trump’s camp. Populists, the press routinely calls them. But aside from their distrust of distant experts and cosmopolitan elites, Trump’s core voters have little in common politically with the People’s Party of the American 1890s. The 1890s Populists, like today’s Trump supporters, sometimes fell for terribly oversimplified answers. But the Populists hurled their political fury at the forces of organized money: the bankers, the monopolists, the railroad magnates, and the politicians who wrote the back-room deals of the money-men into law. The conviction that powers Trump voters’ imaginations is just the reverse. Theirs is a world in which not capitalist institutions but the political establishment hogs the seats of power. In their minds, government rigs the game for its own advantages, tying up the potential expansive force of business with rules that only serve to keep the regulators in jobs and the poor as their clients. Only through this story is it possible to redirect anger at plant closings from the corporations who order them to the liberal establishment that is said to be covertly responsible.

In the long run…

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Adam Tooze has an amazingly informative and thoughtful review in the LRB of Geoff Mann’s book on Keynes and Keynesianism.

If you were seeking an example of Keynesian government today you wouldn’t look first to the West, but to China, where a Communist Party that brooks no opposition presides over a technocratic regime par excellence. Not only are China’s economic managers hard-headedly pragmatic in their approach to the politics of the market, but the deeper impetus for the policy-makers in Beijing is, in Mann’s sense, truly Keynesian. What is at stake is the post-Tiananmen compromise: accept and support the regime in exchange for growth and social transformation. Much has been made of the role of neoliberal thinkers in launching Deng’s market revolution in the 1980s. But when the going gets rough, the Chinese turn Keynesian. Beijing’s response to the 2008 crisis was the most dramatic work-creation stimulus in history. When in 2009 the governor of the People’s Bank of China proposed a new global currency system, he explicitly invoked Keynes’s proposals at Bretton Woods. Beijing’s successful management of China’s growth involves exchange controls, guidance of the exchange rate and direct regulation of bank lending – techniques reminiscent of 1950s Keynesian fine-tuning. And President Xi’s current personal priority is the elimination of the final residuum of absolute poverty by means of large-scale resettlement and investment.

Tooze is very good on the intrinsic pragmatic ad-hocery of a Keynesian approach to policy. “It isn’t by accident”, he writes,

that ‘when liberal government comes face to face with necessity, it “goes Keynesian”’; in other words it ‘acknowledges uncertainty and disarticulation, recognises imperfection and indeterminacy, and turns away from the long run to the immediacy of the moment’. The crisis of 2008 was a classic demonstration of this. What central bankers like Bernanke were asking politicians to do in September and October 2008 had been unthinkable only weeks before.

But the Chinese regime isn’t in the business of ad-hocery. And they are — like all of us, but perhaps in a more extreme way — faced with the problem of climate change. “Xi’s ‘Chinese dream’”, says Tooze, “is the most spectacular Keynesian promise ever made”.

The underlying fear of domestic unrest is palpable, the scale of repression is astonishing, but so is the gamble on growth. There is no counterpart in Western experience to the astonishing transformation in the fortunes of a population of more than a billion people in a matter of thirty years. But like any instance of rapid capitalist growth, China’s boom is fraught with danger. The country’s finances are highly unstable. The boom generates deep inequality at home, while abroad it incurs the envy of the United States, a declining hegemon with erratic politics and a track record of aggression. Added to which few places on earth experience the environmental costs of growth more acutely than China. Large parts of the country are at risk of becoming uninhabitable. The promise of growth is more real and more life-altering than ever. But so too is the possibility of catastrophe. Keynesians insist that we resist the blandishment of future calm to focus on the turmoil of the present. But on a rapidly warming planet, the waters are calmer now than they will be later. Just decades from now, a large part of humanity may count itself lucky if it is only in the long run that we are all dead.

Fabulous essay, well worth reading in full.