Snowy and me

He’s been monitoring my workload atop the screens of a succession of MacBooks for many years.

Quote of the Day

”People never die wishing they’d bought more stuff.”

• House-clearance manager

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Beethoven | The Prisoners’ Chorus | Fidelio

Link

Obvious music given what’s in my Commonplace booklet below.

Long Read of the Day

Economics, pluralism and democracy: An interview with Ha-Joon Chang

Link

Ha-Joon taught in the Economics Faculty in Cambridge for years and was the most accessible writer on the subject I knew. I often wondered why the Faculty of Economics hadn’t given him a professorial Chair. Was it because his books sold so well? (One of the reasons, incidentally, why the English Faculty never gave George Steiner a Chair.) My guess was that it might have been because of fundamental intellectual disagreements between Chang and the cabal of neoclassical economists who then ruled the Faculty.

This hunch is confirmed by this revealing interview. As I read it I was continually reminded of Bertrand Russell’s famous observation that “Economics is the study of how people make choices, and sociology is the study of how they don’t have any choices to make”.

It’s a very long read, but I found it unfailingly interesting and thought-provoking and I hope you do too. Maybe worth brewing some coffee and taking some time out, though…

On reflection…At the root of Chang’s difficulties in Cambridge was what Thomas Kuhn wrote about aeons ago in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The book describes the way in which any scientific discipline operates by coalescing around a paradigm — the overarching theoretical framework that determines what gets taught, who gets appointed and who gets promoted, what topics are deemed interesting for research, who gets published, what kind of theorising is esteemed, and so on.

Kuhn was writing about scientific disciplines, but I think that his general framework applies to many academic disciplines. The central problem is that while disciplines cannot operate without a paradigm (because it’s what defines them), sometimes a paradigm may become pathological, effectively condemning the discipline to stew in its own intellectual juices for a long time. Which IMO is what happened to economics as it descended into ‘physics envy’ and the delusion that it could become a ‘hard’ science. Chang’s ‘problem’ in Cambridge was that he never suffered from that delusion. And it perhaps explains why he now has a Chair in SOAS.

(The transcript comes from the Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics, Volume 17, Issue 2, Winter 2024.)

My commonplace booklet

 ‘Are you serious?’: He spent months in a Syrian prison. CNN’s camera caught the moment he’s freed

A remarkable — and moving — CNN video report of the moment when one of one of Assad’s prisoners was rescued.

Coincidentally, Sheila Hayman (Whom God Preserve) sent me a link to an account on Freedom from Torture written in 2008 by a prisoner of Assad, who tells his story in the third person.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

 Gemini Flash mixes cocktails. Simon Willison, a talented geek whom I follow, is a great guide to the newest AI models. He’s very impressed by Google’s Gemini 2.0 Flash, a multi-modal LLM. That means it can handle inputs in the form of images, video, audio and documents. He’s made a short video showing one of his interactions with it, which is fascinating — even if slightly incomprehensible to someone (i.e. me) who has never had a cocktail in his life.

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!

Summertime, when…

It’s that time of year, when everything is muddy, brown and skies are grey. So it was nice while sorting through photos to stumble on a reminder of how the garden looked six months ago.

Quote of the Day

”They tried to bury me but they didn’t know I was a seed.”

• Sinéad O’Connor (1966-2023)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Lightnin’ Hopkins | Live 1964

Link

Mesmerising.

Long Read of the Day

The phoney comforts of AI skepticism

This is an interesting essay by Casey Newton. It was prompted by attending a conference in Berkeley that brought together engineers at big tech companies, independent safety researchers, academics, nonprofit leaders, and people who have worked in government to discuss whether AI poses an existential threat, how the risks and benefits should be weighed, whether it should be regulated (and, if so, how) and when might we expect AGI.

Casey’s takeaway from the event is that there are two intellectual ‘camps’ here: one (mostly external to the tech industry) holds that AI is fake and sucks; the other (mostly internal) believes that AI is real and dangerous. Casey is in the latter camp.

One way you can demonstrate that AI is real is by looking at how many people use it. ChatGPT, the most popular generative AI product on the market, said this week that it has 300 million weekly users, already making it one of the largest consumer products on the internet.

Another way you can demonstrate that AI is real is by looking at where tech giants are spending their money. It’s true that tech companies (and the venture capitalists that back them) often make mistakes; VCs expect to have more failures than they have successes. Occasionally, they get an entire sector wrong — see the excess of enthusiasm for cleantech in the 2000s, or the crypto blow-up of the past few years.

In aggregate, though, and on average, they’re usually right. It’s not impossible that the tech industry’s planned quarter-trillion dollars of spending on infrastructure to support AI next year will never pay off. But it is a signal that they have already seen something real.

The most persuasive way you can demonstrate the reality of AI, though, is to describe how it is already being used today. Not in speculative sci-fi scenarios, but in everyday offices and laboratories and schoolrooms. And not in the ways that you already know — cheating on homework, drawing bad art, polluting the web — but in ones that feel surprising and new.

With that in mind, here are some things that AI has done in 2024…

Read on.

There’s already been lots of interesting (and sometimes predictable) pushback against Casey’s analysis. I liked Dave Karpf’s contribution in particular.

“If you combed through everything I’ve posted or reskeeted on Bluesky”, he writes,

“you could surely find me saying some version of ‘AI is fake and it sucks, probably in the midst of cackling about some headline. I say a lot of things online. Much of what I say is glib.

But the reason why labeling the entire AI skeptic camp according to our most-glib retorts doesn’t sit right is that people in this camp (myself included) have written plenty of more thorough and serious critiques. We, broadly speaking, think that generative AI is very real and very dangerous, specifically because it does not work as-advertised. (Or, as Brian Merchant once wrote, “I’m not saying don’t be nervous about the onslaught of AI services — but I am saying be nervous for the right reasons.”)

Books, etc.

’Tis the season of ‘Books of the Year’ features. The Financial Times’s journalists came up with an autodidact’s nightmare — a list of 173 tomes! The Observer New Review (for which I write) devoted most of Sunday’s edition to the subject. In thinking about a personal list I came up with a different idea — books I read in 2024 from which I had learned something useful or had changed the way I thought about things.

Here’s the list:

• Dan Davies: The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions – and How The World Lost its Mind
• Neil Lawrence: The Atomic Human
• Rob Reich, Mehran Sahami and Jeremy Weinstein: System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot
• Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson: Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity Abe Newman and Henry Farrell: Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy
• Ethan Mollick: Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI
• Tony Judt: *Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945
• Martin Wolf:  The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism
• Francis Spufford: Red Plenty
• Adam Kirsch: The Revolt Against Humanity: Imagining a Future Without Us
• Richard J. Evans: Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich
• Virginia Woolf: Collected Essays
• Claire Keegan: Small Things Like These
• Parmy Olson: AI, ChatGPT and the race that will change the world 

I’ll write some notes on why I chose these in the next week or so.

My commonplace booklet

The Economist on Assad’s torturę centres

Link (gift article)

Among all the symbols of Mr Assad’s brutality, none was as potent as Saidnaya prison. Many of the tens of thousands of people taken over decades to what Syrians called al-Maslakh al-Basharia, the human slaughterhouse, never came out. Human-rights groups estimate that between 13,000 and 30,000 people have been murdered in Saidnaya alone since the beginning of the Syrian uprising in 2011. And there are many other jails as well.

What people found when they got to Saidnaya was even worse than they had imagined. The regime had dug hidden cells into the ground beneath the jail, packing men by the dozen into the pitch-black chambers. Screams echoed into the night air around the prison, both of agony at the prisoners’ suffering and of ecstasy about their liberation. The emptied cells reeked of urine contained in plastic bottles; sodden blankets were piled in corners. In one corridor lay a prosthetic leg, its owner nowhere to be found. On the walls of an abandoned cell someone had scribbled “take me, already” in Arabic. A group of fighters discovered an iron press, which they claimed was used to crush the remains of executed prisoners…

And now Assad has been granted asylum in Russia by his pal Vladimir.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• “Teen creates memecoin, dumps it, earns $50,000 in a few hours!” Ars Technica. The site that enabled him to do this — Pump.fun — is (sadly, or perhaps fortunately) not accessible in the UK.

  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!

Dictionary Sam

The stained-glass portrait of Samuel Johnson in his house in Gough Square, just off Fleet Street, in London. (Which is well worth a visit, btw.)

Quote of the Day

”Whenever AI ‘generates’ something impressive, the first question we should always ask is: ‘What does the closest sample in the training data look like?’ LLMs are amazing interfaces for accessing the world’s information but they need to be treated as the ‘search and synthesis’ tools they are.”

• Chris Offner (of ETH Zurich)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Crosby, Stills and Nash | Teach your Children | 1970

Link

Vintage recording. One of my favourite songs. I often wonder what my kids make of it.

Long Read of the Day

Stop using generative AI as a search engine

In their increasingly frantic search for a business model, LLM providers are trying to move onto Google’s territory. Instead of Googling something, why not use, say, Perplexity. That way, instead of getting a list of sites in response to a query, you just get the answer. What’s not to like?

Plenty, says Elizabeth Lopatto in an interesting cautionary tale in The Verge.

How many presidents have pardoned their relatives? It turns out this is a tricky question to answer.

Following Hunter Biden’s pardon by his father, several commentators have looked to precedents — other pardons of relatives. Case in point: Ana Navarro-Cardenas, a commentator who appears on The View and CNN. On X, Navarro-Cardenas cited a pardon granted by President Woodrow Wilson of his brother-in-law Hunter deButts. That was news to me.

The official clemency records search only works for people who’ve applied since 1989, and a page of clemency recipients by president only stretches back to Richard Nixon. Such a pardon would have been controversial, yet it wasn’t mentioned on the bio page in Wilson’s presidential library. Find a Grave suggests Wilson didn’t even have a brother-in-law with that name — it shows nine brothers-in-law, but not our man Hunter deButts. I can’t prove Wilson didn’t pardon a Hunter deButts; I can only tell you that if he did, that person was not his brother-in-law…

You get the point. LLMs are useful, but you have to treat them as you would any eager, intelligent and industrious intern. You need to check their work before depending on it.

Later John Gruber had some useful observations (also worth reading) on Lopatto’s essay.

I want to make clear that I don’t think Lopatto is in any way a head-in-the-sand Luddite. But all of the arguments being made today against using generative AI to answer questions sound exactly like the arguments against citing web pages as sources in the 1990s. The argument then was basically “Anyone can publish anything on the web, and even if a web page is accurate today, it can be changed at any time” — which was true then and remains true today.3 But it’s just a new technology — one that isn’t going anywhere because it’s incredibly useful in ways nothing else is, but its inherent downsides will force us to adapt and learn new ways of sourcing, citing, and verifying information. The rise of the web didn’t make libraries go away. Generative AI won’t make web search go away.

The problem with conventional search engines (particularly Google) is that their remorseless descent into enshittification is making them increasingly annoying to use. I use Perplexity quite a bit, though never for search. What I like about it is that it provides sources for whatever response it produces.

After AI is photography dead?

On seeing the first daguerreotype around 1840, the French painter Paul Delaroche famously, declared that “From today, painting is dead.” He was wrong, of course, but the impact of the new medium was profound, nevertheless. As the art historian Caterina Bellinetti observed, photography initially developed by following, and then challenging, the themes that were commonly used by painters. But then the middle classes, who desired (but could not afford) family portraits by artists, took to photography and the rest is history.

But now photography has its own crisis moment: does the advent of generative AI mean the death of photography? The leading photography magazine, Aperture has a current issue specially devoted to the question.

Here’s one of the striking images that illustrates the problem.

It latches on to one of the more hallowed genres in photographic history — the work of photographers sent out into rural America by Roosevelt’s Farm Security Administration to record the struggles of rural Americans during the Great Depression. One of those photographers was Dorothea Lange.

It’s good but not entirely convincing if you know her work. Below is one of her actual photographs of a farmer of the period.

Caption: A former tenant farmer who had become a tractor driver. Taken in Bell County near Temple, 1936. Looking at him and knowing how hot it gets here I can assure you that this was one hard-working man.

So photography ain’t dead. But Generative AI is now so good that serious practitioners will need to find ways of providing rock-solid authentication for their work. Alas, it doesn’t come cheap. The new Leica M11-P camera incorporates the ability to attach the digital Adobe Contact Credentials label to images at the point of capture to protect authenticity. The new system, which involves a physical chip, will be incorporated in most (if not all) future Leicas but it is not something that can be installed retrospectively in older models. The M11-P retails at £8000 just for the camera body. Authentication doesn’t come cheap — yet.

My commonplace booklet

The slow-motion car crash that is the Intel corporation continues. In his commentary on it John Gruber remembers a famous aphorism of Andy Grove, the man who built Intel into a dominant corporate giant:

”Business success contains the seeds of its own destruction. Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.”

Yep.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• The Economist’s word of the year for 2024 is… Kakistocracy: “the rule of the worst“. Now why would that be?

Errata

The fragmented rock in Friday’s edition might not be a glacial erratic, as I thought. Erratics are often rocks of a different type from their surroundings because they were delivered by a glacier. This one looks awfully like the local geology round the lake.

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! <hr

Fine cuts

This huge rock is probably a glacial erratic that we encountered on a lakeside walk in Kerry. Note, though, the sharpness of the edges on the fragments. A stonemason would be proud of those cuts.

Quote of the Day

”The world is disgracefully managed, one hardly knows to whom to complain.”

• Ronald Firbank

Note the punctilious grammar.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Handel: Semele – Act 2, Sc. 3 | Where’er You Walk | Rick Wakeman

Link

Long Read of the Day

 In Search of Sanity

This is a transcript of what the comedian and author Andy Horowitz said on Boston Public Radio last week in which he offered “unsolicited advice about getting through the next four years”. Given all the crap that’s currently emanating from the US — amplified by the country’s benighted mainstream media — I thought it came as a breath of fresh air.

During the election, the media just covered the horserace. They weren’t really covering any of the issues. They were covering the polls. They were saying, how does Nate Cohn differ from Nate Silver? Where’s Ann Selzer in this?

So they weren’t really focusing on what the candidates were going to do if elected. And as a result, we’re now at a point where we have this guy who is the president-elect, and the corporate media are still not giving us information that is valuable.

They’ve now sort of gone Jekyll-and-Hyde on us. A few weeks ago, Donald Trump was a senile guy who was bobbing to the music. Now he’s this master political genius along the lines of Talleyrand and Metternich.

Now, look, I think Trump is going to be a terrible president because he was terrible the first time. So I’m not denying or arguing with that. But what I am arguing with is this new characterization of him as competent. Because that is a media invention that I just find absolutely baffling—because there’s no proof of it anywhere. And day after day we have evidence that he is actually incompetent. And it may be our saving grace now…

Do read it.

My commonplace booklet

In praise of e-bikes

I’m biased because we’ve had e-bikes for years and they’re among the best purchases we’ve ever made. This piece spells out why they are are more important than conventional EVs.

On the world’s roads last year, there were over 20 million electric vehicles and 1.3 million commercial EVs such as buses, delivery vans and trucks.

But these numbers of four or more wheel vehicles are wholly eclipsed by two- and three-wheelers. There were over 280 million electric mopeds, scooters, motorcycles and three-wheelers on the road last year. Their sheer popularity is already cutting demand for oil by a million barrels of oil a day – about 1% of the world’s total oil demand, according to estimates by Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

What about electric vehicles, you ask? After all, EVs have been heralded as a silver bullet for car emissions and air pollution in cities, as their tailpipe emissions are zero. If charged with renewable power, they get even greener.

But to see them as an inarguable good is an error. They are cleaner cars, but…

Yep.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

•  Australian Dictionary Chooses ‘Enshittification’ As The Word Of The Year

Link

Remember when Facebook was just a useful website that helped you stay in touch with your friends? And Google did more than serve you half a page of ads? And Twitter ― well, let’s not go there.

There’s a word for this decline: enshittification.

The term, made famous by the tech critic Cory Doctorow in 2023, was just selected by Macquarie Dictionary ― Australia’s oldest! ― as its 2024 word of the year.

Here’s how they defined it:

noun Colloquial: the gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking.

The Macquarie committee politely described the phrase as “a very basic Anglo-Saxon term wrapped in affixes which elevate it to being almost formal; almost respectable.”

Don’t you just love the ‘almost’.

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!

Say ‘Cheese’!

The Little Cheese Shop in Dingle on Saturday night.

Quote of the Day

“God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America.”

• Bismarck

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Grace | The Dubliners & Jim McCann | from the group’s 40 Years Reunion in the Gaiety theatre in 2002.

Link

Extraordinary song written in 1985 by Frank O’Meara (melody) and Seán O’Meara (lyrics) which tells the story of Grace Gifford’s marriage to Joseph Plunkett in Kilmainham Jail, hours before his execution for his part in the 1916 Easter Rising.

Wikipedia has a wonderful, sombre photograph of Grace on the day of their wedding.

For a larger image click here

Long Read of the Day

 On the Coming Merger of Tech and State Power

Sobering and realistic assessment of our new reality by Taylor Owen. The only thing I disagree with is the word ‘coming’ in the title of the essay.

First, the relationship between tech companies and Washington is transforming into something we haven’t seen before. While Silicon Valley has always wielded influence in American politics, what’s emerging now is different – a world where the interests of select technology companies become indistinguishable from US government policy.

Look at Elon Musk’s growing empire. Tesla, Starlink, X, and Neuralink all stand to benefit substantially from this new alignment. They won’t be alone. Peter Thiel’s Palantir and Palmer Luckey’s Anduril are perfectly positioned to collect expanded defense contracts, while major venture capital cryptocurrency investments are likely to see favorable regulatory treatment. The concentration of power in these companies’ hands isn’t just about market dominance, it’s about shaping the very rules of our digital future…

Yep. Do read it.

If AI can provide a better diagnosis than a doctor, what’s the prognosis for medics?

Yesterday’s Observer column:

AI means too many (different) things to too many people. We need better ways of talking – and thinking – about it. Cue, Drew Breunig, a gifted geek and cultural anthropologist, who has come up with a neat categorisation of the technology into three use cases: gods, interns and cogs.

“Gods”, in this sense, would be “super-intelligent, artificial entities that do things autonomously”. In other words, the AGI (artificial general intelligence) that OpenAI’s Sam Altman and his crowd are trying to build (at unconscionable expense), while at the same time warning that it could be an existential threat to humanity. AI gods are, Breunig says, the “human replacement use cases”. They require gigantic models and stupendous amounts of “compute”, water and electricity (not to mention the associated CO2 emissions).

“Interns” are “supervised co-pilots that collaborate with experts, focusing on grunt work”…

Read on

Chart of the day

A neat graphical summary of the UK’s problem.

My commonplace booklet

ChatGPT was two yesterday. So I asked it how it would be feeling if it could feel.

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!

Bee welcoming

Even in B&W you can see why a bee would be interested.

Quote of the Day

You cannot have a political system without disagreement, but the point of democracy is to channel that disagreement into politics, rather than into violence.”

• Danielle Allen

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Brahms | Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 77 (3rd movement) | Itzhak Perlman

Link

Phew! Great performances put musicians through emotional and physical wringers.

Long Read of the Day

Let the Bad Times End (4): The Soviet Union

Timothy Burke is a thoughtful and interesting historian, and at the moment he’s embarked on a series of essays which try to put what’s happening now in context. This essay is #4 in the sequence, and it’s especially relevant for me today because later in the afternoon I will be having a conversation with three distinguished colleagues in the Ireland’s Edge discussion strand of the Other Voices festival on topics that are on everyone’s mind just now.

At one point in his essay, Timothy writes:

I’m grappling in this series whether bad times ever do end. I think it’s important to imagine that they can and sometimes have. I do think the Bolshevik Revolution, one of the most heavily studied and discussed events in modern global history, was a real change—that there was political and social novelty to the Soviet state that it created. For the same reason, I think the Soviet Union really did end, and some of the specific bad times that were deeply encoded into it ended with it. Putin’s Russia is deeply oppressive, but its oppressions have different emphases, different techniques, different ideological precepts. Moreover, while you might hire the Wagner Group to kill your enemies, no other country is going to adopt Putinism as a transnationally salient ideology.

So if the Soviet Union did end, why? It’s becoming hard to remember how astonishing and momentous the years 1989-1992 really were, and how unheralded they seemed. In 1998, few of us realized that apartheid would start to crumble in 1990, that the United States would lead a multinational coalition with restraint to successfully undo Iraq’s annexation of Kuwait, that the Berlin Wall would fall in 1989 and the Soviet Union itself would end only three years later. Looking back, you can forgive some of the hubris of Fukuyama’s The End of History, since these were all developments that seemed impossible, that many of us were raised to think simply wouldn’t change in our lifetimes —none more so than the sudden and peaceful end of the Soviet Union after so much proxy struggle in the Cold War, after so many moments of near-catastrophe for the entire planet…

Do read it. Worth your time.

Books, etc.

I’m a third of the way through this. I got it because I keep running into two ‘isms’ — Anthropocene antihumanism (argues that our climate destruction has doomed humanity and we should welcome our extinction), and Transhumanism (the belief that genetic engineering and AI will lead to new forms of life superior to humans) — which strike me as ludicrous, but which seem have a grip on folks in Silicon Valley and in a certain ancient university located near Reading. This scathing analysis by a good literary critic looked attractive, and it’s enjoyable — so far, anyway.

My commonplace booklet

From John Thornhill in yesterday’s FT:

The default assumption of successful founders seems to be that their expertise in building tech companies gives them equally valuable insights into the US federal budget deficit, pandemic responses, or the war in Ukraine. For them, fresh information plucked from unfamiliar fields sometimes resembles God-given revelation even if it is commonplace knowledge to everyone outside their bubble.

One young American tech billionaire, a college dropout who had just returned from a trip to Paris, once asked me with wide-eyed wonder whether I had heard about the French Revolution. It was incredible, apparently.

“Inevitably,” says John, “this leads to questions about the fungibility of Elon Musk’s IQ given his omnipresence in the US economy and now politics. “

It sure does! And how.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

An interesting exchange on Bluesky…

Molly Jong-Fast asked;

“One of the things I still don’t understand is how these tech bros can be pro-technology and anti science.”

To which Mar Hicks replied:

“Science is ostensibly about the study of natural phenomenon. It’s not unbiased, ofc, but that’s the ideal at least. Tech is about power—centralizing, amassing & wielding power, building ever more tools & infrastructures to design the world you want, not describe or study it.”

Which nails it nicely.

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!

Waiting, waiting…

… for a train which did turn up — eventually.

Quote of the Day

”If you feel pain, you are alive. If you feel other people’s pain, you are a human being.”

• Leo Tolstoy

(Which neatly rules out Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ennio Morricone | Theme from Cinema Paradiso | Renaud Capuçon

Link

From the soundtrack of one of my favourite films.

Long Read of the Day

I stopped using Twitter when Musk bought it in October 2022. Like many people I then tried tried Mastodon but was unimpressed and only recently joined Bluesky — like millions of other refugees from Twitter/X.

And when I say millions I mean it. There’s a fascinating online counter that’s updated every second. As I write this (in the evening of 21 November), the service now has over 21 million subscribers, and they’re joining at the rate of 4.22 users per second! So something’s definitely going on.

Which is why I found this NYT column (gift article) by Paul Krugman, the American economist and Nobel laureate, interesting, especially because of the way he contrasts the fate of Twitter/X with that of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

Pre-Elon Musk, Twitter was the place people in my business had to be. I know different people used it for different purposes — nothing against Katy Perry, but not all of her nearly 106 million followers are on social media platforms for the same reasons I am. What I used Twitter for was to learn from and interact with people possessing real expertise, sometimes in areas I know pretty well, sometimes in areas I don’t, like international relations and climate policy.

I won’t go through the litany of ways the platform has changed for the worse under Musk’s leadership, but from my point of view it has become basically unusable, overrun by bots, trolls, cranks and extremists.

But where could you go instead? In the past couple of years, there have been several attempts to promote alternatives to X, but none of them really caught on. To some extent this may have reflected flaws in their designs, but a lot of it was simply lack of critical mass: Not enough of the people you wanted to interact with could be found on the alternative sites.

Then came this year’s presidential election, which seems to have sparked an exodus (“Xodus”?) from Muskland. From my point of view, Bluesky, in particular — a site that functions a lot like pre-Musk Twitter — quite suddenly has reached critical mass, in the sense that most of the people I want to hear from are now posting there. The raw number of users is still far smaller than X’s, but as far as I can tell, Bluesky is now the place to find smart, useful analysis…

Broadly speaking, his experience mirrors mine. It’s worth a read, especially if you are thinking about signing up for Bluesky. (For a second opinion, try Ian Bogust’s essay.)

Behind all this, of course, is a bigger question: does this ‘Xodus’ signal the beginning of the splintering of social media?

Books, etc.

For those seeking an understanding of what sliding into fascism is like, then Paul Lynch’s prizewinning novel of how it might happen might be hard to beat.

Here’s the blurb:

The explosive literary sensation: a mother faces a terrible choice as Ireland slides into totalitarianism

On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her step. Two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police are here to interrogate her husband, Larry, a trade unionist.

Ireland is falling apart. The country is in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny and when her husband disappears, Eilish finds herself caught within the nightmare logic of a society that is quickly unravelling. Soon, she must decide just how far she is willing to go to keep her family safe.

Exhilarating, terrifying and propulsive, Paul Lynch’s Booker Prize-winning novel is a devastating vision of a country falling apart and a moving portrait of the resilience of the human spirit when faced with the darkest of times…

My commonplace booklet

 In Grandpa’s footsteps

This week I discovered — to my delight — that the actor David Suchet is a passionate photographer, and that he uses the same kit as I do (Leica cameras). His grandfather, James Jarché, was a press photographer, and Suchet set out to retrace Grandpas’s steps and photograph some of the places James had recorded. Here is a charming video of his trip to the former coalfields of South Wales. It’s 14 minutes long and (IMO) worth every second.

  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!

Night lights

Walking through Upper River Court in St John’s on Monday night on my way to a lecture by Marietje Schaake I pulled out my iPhone to see how it would handle the lighting. Fairly well is my verdict. But what struck me most was how peaceful the scene was, even though it’s right in the middle of a busy town. Kids who are able to live and study in places like this have the luck of the devil.

Quote of the Day

”Rationality is leverage — a strong man lifts a block, but a clever man invents a pulley. It’s how Socratic nerds defeat Homeric jocks.”

• Zohar Atkins, poet, rabbi and theologian

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Taj Mahal & Ry Cooder | 2:10 Train | Rising Sons

Link

Long Read of the Day

 How It Went

John Gruber is one of the Elders of the Web. His Daring Fireball blog is something I read every day because he’s such an acute observer of the tech world, and in particular anything to do with Apple. With the late (and much lamented) Aaron Swartz, he created the Markdown language in which (and many thousands of others) write every bit of text I produce (including this blog).

Last Friday, though, his blog was about something else, and it turned out to be an entrancing and moving essay in which a personal story was interwoven with reflections on Election night and its aftermath.

Here’s how it opens:

My mom died at the end of June this year.

I know, and I’m sorry — that’s a hell of a way to open a piece ostensibly about a depressing, worrisome, frightening election result. But here’s the thing I want to emphasize right up front: my mom’s death was OK. It really was. She was 78, which isn’t that old, but her health had not been great. She was hospitalized for several days in May, just a month prior, after she had collapsed at home, too weak to stand, and for days it wasn’t clear what was wrong. Then some more test results came back and we had the answer. She had ovarian cancer, bad. It had already metastasized. The prognosis was grim: months to live, at best. And those months, toward the end, would inexorably grow ever more painful and profoundly sad.

Her mental acuity had begun to slip in recent years, too. Not a lot, but if you knew her you’d notice. But she faced this prognosis with remarkable dignity, courage, and clarity. She knew the score. It was what it was, and she’d make the best of the time she had left. She was tired but still felt pretty good most days. There were flashes of her younger self, the Mom I remember growing up with. It was wonderful to see those flashes. The bad times were coming, but they laid ahead. On the last Monday night in June she and my dad went out to eat at their favorite restaurant. They had a good meal and a good time. It was a great day. Tuesday morning she played Wordle and reported her score to our family group chat. Then around noon, she just fell over, dead. My dad found her unresponsive, called 911, and they arrived in minutes, but she was gone. No suffering. The whole dreadful grind of battling cancer never came. It’s such a cliché but clichés are often true: given what she faced, it was a blessing she died how and when she did. She never wanted to suffer and she didn’t. I loved her and I miss her.

Like I said, it was all OK, in the end — the way and how and when my mom died.

But my dad…

Do read on. It’s long, but I don’t think you’ll regret it.

My commonplace booklet

As long-time (long-suffering?) readers know, I’ve been a keen photographer since I was a teenager. (Full story of how I became addicted is here, if you’re interested.) For much of that time I’ve used Leica cameras — rangefinder cameras with interchangeable lenses. This year is the 70th anniversary of the company’s ‘M’ range — the bigger cameras with a bayonet mount for the lenses.

These cameras are a prime example of German engineering excellence. They’re outrageously expensive, have terrific lenses, are amazingly strong, solid and heavy. (One of my friends used to say they were made from melted-down WW1 battleships, but he was just jealous because I had one and he didn’t.) But some of the greatest photographers of the 20th century relied on them. (Henri Cartier-Bresson was never seen without one, for example.)

Two Leicas. On the left is a M4-P film model which I bought in 1980; on the right a 2022 M10 Monocrom with a digital black-and-white sensor. Both devices feel the same in use, and accept all the lenses that Leica offer. 

But the most remarkable thing about Leica cameras was that they are all ‘backwards-compatible’: the newest lenses will fit every M camera, and so will the oldest. For example, I have a 60-year-old 135mm Elmar lens which fits on the 2022 digital camera body and works perfectly (though it’s not as sharp as newer lenses).

It’s this consistent quality and backwards-compatibility that seemed (to me, anyway) what was quintessentially German about these cameras. And I naively imagined that in that sense they were paradigmatic of the society in which they were made.

But now comes a shocking book by Wolfgang Münchau which suggests that my view of German enterprise may need updating. At any rate he paints a picture of (as an FT review puts it) “an economy, political system, and society dysfunctional to the point of being terminally broken, i.e. kaput. Germany faces a choice, but is unable to summon the political and intellectual resources to make any decisive response”.

I’ll have to get the book to see how Münchau makes his case, but there are some corroborating straws in the wind. In particular, the German car industry seems to be in trouble. VW, the country’s biggest auto manufacturer, recently announced that it was closing some plants and laying off workers. Given how important the car industry to the image of German invincibility, maybe Münchau is reading too much into it. We’ll see.

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!

Walking the planks

On a boardwalk in an RSPB reserve, yesterday.

Quote of the Day

“Moral seriousness in public life is like pornography: hard to define but you know it when you see it.It describes a coherence of intention and action, an ethic of political responsibility. All politics is the art of the possible. But art too has its ethic. If politicians were painters, with FDR as Titian and Churchill as Rubens, then Attlee would be the Vermeer of the professional: precise, restrained — and long undervalued. Bill Clinton might aspire to the heights of Salvador Dali (and believe himself complimented by the comparison), Tony Blair to the standing — and cupidity — of Damien Hurst.”

• Tony Judt, in The Memory Chalet

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Taj Mahal Ry Cooder | Statesboro Blues

Link

Ry Cooder (Lead Guitar), Buddy Miller (Guitar), Don Was (Bass), Joachim Cooder(Drums), Tim Lauer(Piano), Taj Mahal (Vocals)

Long Read of the Day

The night after the election before 

I woke up in the middle of Wednesday night and couldn’t get back to sleep. So I got up and started scribbling. Here’s the result. It’s long, so if you’re not interested in this stuff, feel free to skip it. After all, I’m no expert, just an interested spectator (aka blogger).

=====

Trump’s victory is being billed the greatest comeback since Lazarus and accordingly he is being retrospectively canonised by the new realists, including the high-class savants of the Hoover Institution, the Economist, the so-called ‘serious’ newspapers, etc. They may, of course, be holding their noses as they do it, but they all regard his election as a pivotal event, which it undoubtably is. Accordingly, the party line of the ‘new realism’ is that we all have to adjust to that reality. Trump may be a son-of-a-bitch, but at least he’s our SOB. (Which remains to be seen. To me he looks like his own SOB: the rest of us don’t figure in his narcissistic universe.)

More worrying is the fact that he is now being feted as a political genius — the guy who intuited the ‘real’ nature of the’ real’ Americans: white racists, misogynists and authoritarians. Cue Adolf Hitler. But whereas Hitler reshaped the German people into the master-race Herrenvolk, Trump merely intuited what his’ Volk’ were like and celebrated (and exploited) it.

The inescapable conclusion I had reached from watching videos of some of his rallies was that Trumpism had most of the hallmarks of a cult. He’s the leader who can do no wrong – except to those defined as the “enemies of the people”. So, to his followers, Trump has many of the qualities of a prophet who will lead his people into the promised land.

His comeback triggers some uncomfortable thoughts. Here are a few:

• The election result reveals how chronically dysfunctional American’ democracy’ has become – and in particular how the vaunted founding principles of the ‘checks and balances’ ensured by the separation of powers between the Executive branch, the two houses of Congress and the Supreme Court, has broken down. Trump now controls all four. Game over.
• Also, we have learned from his first term as President that the unwritten conventions that lubricate the working of functioning democracies are useless in the face of an authoritarian who chooses to ignore them. Peter Hennessy’s ‘Good chap theory of government’ no longer applies.
• Trump’s success confirms what critics like Thomas Frank pointed out decades ago – that the Democrats had lost touch with the people whom the party ostensibly represented – and became instead an enabler of the elites who were the beneficiaries of a neoliberal society. In that sense Hilary Clinton was the most inappropriate candidate imaginable in 2016, and Kamala Harris had some of the same disabilities in 2024.
• There’s something in the theory that Joe Biden’s cussedness in wanting to run again made Harris’s task impossible. But my hunch is that even if the Democrats had had a ‘normal’ process with primaries etc. they might not have beaten Trump. In any event, that’s now just an interesting but irrelevant counterfactual.
• All the passionate, grief-stricken expressions of determination to ‘restore’ or ‘rescue’ democracy in America are doomed to fail without a recognition that Trump’s win was actually a ‘democratic’one. It seems to have been a fair and legally-sound election. (I read somewhere that the alt-right sites which had been incessantly relaying the charge that the election would be ‘stolen’ by the Democrats suddenly went quiet when it became clear that Trump was going to win!)
• The underlying problem – the reason why Trump’s campaigning rhetoric fell on such fertile ground – lies deeper. It is that American democracy has been twisted out of recognition by the economic system to which it is in thrall. The fact that the neoliberal thinking — to which Western governments have been addicted for decades — produces gross social inequality is not an externality; it’s what the system is designed to do. Or, as geeks say, it’s a feature, not a bug.
• In that context the British economic sage Martin Wolf published an interesting book a few years ago based on a metaphor: that the relationship between democracy and capitalism is a marriage – and, like all marriages, it has its ups and downs. In the decades since 1970, it’s been mostly downs. In fact the marriage has become a chronically abusive one, with democracy being bent out of shape to facilitate the needs and priorities of the exploitative partner. Which is why bleating about ‘restoring’ the ‘democracy’ that Trump now threatens is just that – bleating. Much more fundamental change is needed.
• The big question, therefore, is whether this latest dramatic lurch into authoritarianism by the world’s most important democracy can be reversed. We need to adjust to the unpalatable thought that Trumpism may be a longer-term phenomenon than we think. Although he’s ageing and displaying unmistakable signs of cognitive decay, so we should be paying more attention to J.D. Vance, who is hale and hearty and may be president sooner than we think.
• Can liberal democracy be saved? In principle, maybe. But it would require pretty radical changes to revitalise democracies that have been hollowed out by capitalism. And democracies are slow-moving beasts, as David Runciman pointed out years ago. More ominously, though, history suggests that fundamental social change happens only through two processes — revolution or war. The explosion in liberal democracies that we have grown up with was a reaction to the cataclysmic horrors of the Second World War, as Tony Judt demonstrated so vividly in his book Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945. It has become our ‘normal’, something to be taken for granted. But what we are now discovering is that it’s much more fragile than we realised. And it may not last.
• Which leads to a really nightmarish thought. If humans endure for another millennium, might future historians looking back at our period see the post-war proliferation of liberal democracies not as an enduring phenomenon, but as a statistical blip in the history of governance? So might it be time to begin re-reading Thomas Hobbes?
• The fevered speculation about what Trump will do when he takes office in January is already in overdrive. He has said really wild things during the campaign — including proposing to round up and deport 20 million ‘illegal’ immigrants, prosecuting and imprisoning Joe Biden and the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, firing tens of thousands of civil servants and so on. Some people have taken comfort from the thought that much of this stuff is too wild to be realistic. After all, as a friend put it to me, “last time he wasn’t able even to build that bloody wall!”.
• As Francis Fukuyama put it in the FT at the weekend, “The real question at this point is not the malignity of his intentions, but rather his ability to carry out what he threatens.” It would require, for example, “years of investment in the infrastructure necessary to carry it out — detention centres, immigration control agents, courts and so on.” And then I open the Sunday Times yesterday and find the front page story on how the guy Trump proposes to put in charge of the operation describes his plans for carrying it out. And then I remember from reading Richard Evans’s fascinating new book that the original Nazi idea in the 1930s was to force Jews to emigrate, and it was only when that proved slow and inefficient that they built an infrastructure for achieving the same objective by different means.
• Predicting how Trump’s second term will play out is a mug’s game, but there is one racing certainty: there will be tariff wars which will have predictable consequences, most of them bad. And interestingly, this is not because Trump — as Will Dunn puts it in the New Statesman — has “bought a copy of Eighteenth-Century Mercantilism For Dummies” but because just about the only issue on which he has been consistent since he first broke cover in the 1980s is… tariffs. “This is the thread”, wrote Janan Ganesh in the FT, “that runs through his more than four decades on the public record: an intense belief that to run a current account deficit with another nation is to ‘lose’ to it.” And now he believes that by imposing much higher tariffs on imports he can force companies to return manufacturing jobs to the US — which is bad news for the UK, whose biggest single trading partner happens to be the US. (The EU is, of course more important, but that’s a trading bloc.)

Er, that’s it. If you have been, thanks for reading.

Those images of Spain’s floods that went viral

Yesterday’s Observer column:

My eye was caught by a striking photograph in the most recent edition of Charles Arthur’s Substack newsletter Social Warming. It shows a narrow street in the aftermath of the “rain bomb” that devastated the region of Valencia in Spain. A year’s worth of rain fell in a single day, and in some towns more than 490 litres a square metre fell in eight hours. Water is very heavy, so if there’s a gradient it will flow downhill with the kind of force that can pick up a heavy SUV and toss it around like a toy. And if it channels down a narrow urban street, it will throw parked cars around like King Kong in a bad mood.

The photograph in Arthur’s article showed what had happened in a particular street. Taken with a telephoto lens from an upper storey of a building, it showed a chaotic and almost surreal scene: about 70 vehicles of all sizes jumbled up and scattered at crazy angles along the length of the street.

It was an astonishing image which really stopped me in my tracks. Not surprisingly, it also went viral on social media. And then came the reaction: “AI image, fake news.”

Read on

My commonplace booklet

The Berlin Wall Never Fell

We (me included) often use the phrase “after the Berlin Wall came down” as shorthand when writing about Gorbachev, the end of communism, the collapse of the USSR, etc. So this blog post by the historian Timothy Snyder comes as an embarrassing reproof.

In summer and autumn 1989, amidst Gorbachev’s perestroika and reforms and gestures among neighboring communist countries, East Germans were finding ways to visit or to emigrate to West Germany. The East German regime, in turmoil itself amid protests, was trying to formulate a new set of rules for the border. Amidst a great deal of confusion, a regime spokesman seemed to announce, in response to a question by an Italian journalist, that the border posts at the wall would allow East Germans to depart for the West.

That was on November 9th, 1989. The Berlin Wall did not topple over because of that press conference. What happened was that tens of thousands of East Berliners took advantage of the pronouncement and crowded the border checkpoints, one of which eventually opened. People rushed through to forbidden West Berlin, where they were greeted with champagne and flowers. It was a night that changed the history of Germany, which would unify less than a year later.

But no wall actually fell. People eventually clambered on it, and chipped off pieces of it…

They did, and I have a piece of it on the window-sill of my study as I write this. It was given to me by a journalistic colleague who had been sent to Berlin by our newspaper to report on the story. Sigh.

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!

Wheels within Wheels

Quote of the Day

”The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”

• Flannery O’Connor

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Vaughan Williams | How cold the wind doth blow | Ellen Leslie, soprano

Link

Long Read of the Day

 Stop Pretending Trump Is Not Who We Are

This remarkable essay by Carlos Ozada appeared in the New York Times on Wednesday. It captures the central, unpalatable message of the Trump victory, which is that the America the readers of the NYT live in is not the real America. The piece is behind the Times paywall but the link is a gift one, so it should work for most readers. If it doesn’t, you can find the text on Robert Reich’s Substack.

It’s a perceptive piece, worth reading in full. But here’s the nub of it:

The Harris campaign, as the Biden campaign before it, labored under the misapprehension that more exposure to Trump would repel voters. They must simply have forgotten the mayhem of his presidency, the distaste that the former president surely inspired. “I know Donald Trump’s type,” Harris reminded us, likening him to the crooks and predators she’d battled as a California prosecutor. She even urged voters to watch Trump’s rallies — to witness his line-crossing, norm-obliterating moments — as if doing so would inoculate the electorate against him.

It didn’t. America knew his type, too, and it liked it. Trump’s disinhibition spoke to and for his voters. He won because of it, not despite it. His critics have long argued that he is just conning his voters — making them feel that he’s fighting for them when he’s just in it for himself and his wealthy allies — but part of Trump’s appeal is that his supporters recognize the con, that they feel that they’re in on it.

Books, etc.

After Trump won in 2016 this book was the most interesting thing I read. It’s a searing critique of the Democratic Party in which Frank argues that, in failing to curb growing economic inequality, the left in America had abandoned its roots to pursue a new class of supporter — college-educated elite professionals.

That lesson failed to land. But people had noticed that the people Obama — a Democratic president — reached for in 2008 to rescue the banks were the self-same elite professionals who had caused the crisis. And maybe then they started to wonder whose side the Democrats were on.

My commonplace booklet

What happens if Americans claim asylum from a Trump regime?

A sobering post by Chris Bertram on the wonderful Crooked Timber blog.

Donald Trump has made very public threats to persecute his political opponents should he be re-elected and statements by him and by other leading Republicans suggests that he might persecute others on the grounds of their religion or their membership of certain social groups. If this were happen (rather than simply being bluster) then it could turn out, very soon, that some US citizens will find themselves outside of their country, with a well-founded fear of persecution on grounds outlined in the 1951 Refugee Convention, and on the territory of a state signatory of the Convention. Some of those states will also be allies of the US through NATO and other treaties and will have extradition treaties with the US. In which case what might happen?

Bertram then outlines four possibilities for Americans fleeing persecution or prosecution by Trump’s agencies.

The basic pattern, he says, is clear:

Liberal democratic states allied to the US would face a choice between their state interests as allies of the US on the one hand and upholding the right to asylum and defending liberal democratic values on the other. Nobody can be confident about what would happen in practice. If I were a US dissident, I would choose my place of asylum carefully.

Although it’s not a parallel, the case of Julian Assange comes immediately to mind.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Watch SpaceX Catch A Starship Booster In Air An astonishing video of a SpaceX booster rocket returning to its nest. (The ‘boosting’ in this case is providing propulsion of a rocket into space, not boosting Musk into the Trump administration.)

  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!