Yesterday’s Observer column:

In August, a thoughtful blogger, Tanner Greer, posed an interesting question to the Silicon Valley crowd: “What are the contents of the ‘vague tech canon’? If we say it is 40 books, what are they?” He was using the term “canon” in the sense of “the collection of works considered representative of a period or genre”, but astutely qualifying it to stop Harold Bloom – the great literary critic who spent his life campaigning for a canon consisting of the great works of the past (Shakespeare, Proust, Dante, Montaigne et al) – spinning in his grave.

Greer’s challenge was immediately taken up by Patrick Collison, co-founder with his brother, John, of the fintech giant Stripe (market value $65bn) and thus among the richest Irishmen in history. Unusually among tech titans, Collison is a passionate advocate of reading, and so it was perhaps predictable that he would produce a list of 43 books – adding a caveat that it wasn’t “the list of books that I think one ought to read – it’s just the list that I think roughly covers the major ideas that are influential here”. (“Here” being Silicon Valley.)

The list included some predictable choices…

Read on

What’s this?

Outside Cambridge railway station yesterday.

Quote of the Day

”There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.”

• Graham Greene

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Sharon Shannon | Galway Girl | Live at Cambridge Folk Festival

Link

Long Read of the Day

The Policy Paradox: The more obvious an idea is the less likely it will happen.

Sobering (and insightful) blog post by Sam Freedman.

I’ve been around for a while now and have occasionally found myself drifting into the cynicial “it’s been tried before” mode. So I’m trying to avoid it by taking a different approach. When I’m talking to a young think-tanker or political aide, whose enthusiam is not yet dimmed, I try not to dismiss ideas that have been doing the rounds for a while, but ask a different question: “given you’re not the first person to think of this why hasn’t it happened before?”

Just because something hasn’t worked, or has been blocked, in the past, it doesn’t mean it can’t work now. But it is important to understand the history and explain why it can be different this time.

The more of these discussions I have the more I have come to realise that there’s an odd paradox that applies to every policy area: the more obvious the idea, the less likely it is to happen. I don’t just mean obvious to me. There are plenty of policies that I personally – as a member of the dissolute liberal new elite – think are no brainers that are nevertheless hotly contested. No, these are ideas that everyone, bar perhaps a tiny ideological fringe, agree with, and that, at any of those panel events, will get a room full of appreciative nods, but nevertheless don’t happen…

It’s interesting, if sometimes dispiriting and when I was reading I kept thinking of Gramsci’s adage that what we need is “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will”. But, since pessimism can be disabling, maybe “realism of the intellect and optimism of the will” might be more useful.

There’s plenty of realism in this essay.

Thanks to Andrew Curry for alerting me to it.

Books, etc.

Cory Doctorow on a “Big Tech Dissassembly Manual”

Cory (Whom God Preserve) gave the Peter Kirstein Lecture in UCL yesterday. It was a typical Cory performance — which means that nobody slept at the back. The lecture theatre was packed and he outlined his ‘enshittification’ thesis of tech platforms with verve and wit and coruscating sarcasm. I like to think that I am critical of the tech industry, but in comparison to Cory I sound like a PR agent for Zuckerberg & Co.

I’ve also recently finished his first venture into mainstream thriller writing — Red Team Blues — and enjoyed it hugely. What’s special about it is the way it takes for granted the astonishing way in which tech (notably crypto) facilitates money-laundering, tax evasion and criminality on a cosmic scale. Henry Farrell wrote a perceptive review of it recently, and so now has his sister Maria — who was also at yesterday’s event, as evidenced below.

Cory is a truly extraordinary individual, the nearest thing we have to a one-man think-tank on the nature and pathologies of digital capitalism. More power to his elbow, as we say in Ireland.

My commonplace booklet

’Fire of Love’ trailer

This is a movie I’d like to see.

Errata

By now you will have gathered that in yesterday’s edition the number 10^60 (ten to the power of 60, which is as big a number as you are ever likely to contemplate), was rendered as 1060, which sounds like the state of England before the Norman Conquest!

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This morning’s Observer column:

Those whom the Gods wish to destroy,” says the adage, “they first make mad.” Actually, that’s overkill: the Gods just need to make people forget. Amnesia turns out to be a powerful narcotic and it’s been clouding our perceptions of what’s been happening on the internet for at least 25 years, namely the inexorable degradation of the online environment and our passive, sullen acceptance of that.

Thanks to Cory Doctorow, the great tech critic, we now have a term for this decay process in online platforms – enshittification. “First,” he writes, “they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.” Enshittification results from the convergence of two things: the power of platform owners to change how their platforms extract value from users and the nature of the two-sided markets – where the platforms sit between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other and then raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them…

Read on