The millennial spire

A church that is over 900 years old, framed by autumnal leaves.

Quote of the Day

”When confronted with magical thinking by dictators, historians feel out of place, like a bridge player invited to judge prestidigitation, say, or a surgeon hired to care for wax figures.”

• Timothy Snyder

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Peter Maxwell Davies | Lullaby for Lucy (1981)

Link

Words by the Scottish poet George Mackay Brown for the birth of Lucy Randall, the first child born in Rackwick, Hoy, in 32years.

Long Read of the Day

Stranded Astronauts and the Biggest Disruption In (modern) Business History

An interesting and instructive essay by Andrew McAfee whose book The Geek Way on how corporations have changed and evolved over a century or more. There’s a whiff of techno-worship and whiggery in his writing, but he’s invariably interesting and knowledgeable. I found this particular essay informative, and it contains some charts that make one sit up, especially the ones that compare the West and East coasts of the US. He begins with the irony of how Boeing (an old-style industrial corporation) took an unconscionable time to build a spacecraft that could take astronauts to the International Space Station, but is unable to take them back to earth. So they will have to be rescued by — guess what? — by a SpaceX rocket built by Elon Musk’s geeks! And it turns out that they only brought underwear for a short stay.

My commonplace booklet

Barry Blitt’s front cover of the current issue of the New Yorker.

Linkblog

Stolen iPhone. I Survived.

David Birch’s iPhone was stolen. He’s written a really helpful account of how he mitigated the potential damage. He sums up the lessons thus:

If your iPhone is snatched:

First, use your laptop (or a friend’s laptop) log in to your Apple account immediately, wipe the iPhone and change your iCloud password. Do this before you call the police or anyone else.

Second, use your spare phone (or a friend’s phone) and call the phone company get the number blocked.

Third, call the police and get the crime number you will need for your insurance. The police are not going to do anything about getting your phone back (it would take every police officer in Britain to do something about this).

To which I would add — if you’re in London (and especially in Westminster — where almost a third of the thefts occur — do not walk around with your iPhone in your hand or in an accessible pocket.

The latest figures (from the Office of National Statistics) show that over the last decade mobile phones have overtaken cash and payment cards as the items most often stolen from individuals 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!

Before the Fall

Seen on a woodland walk yesterday.

Quote of the Day

”Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity. So it’s like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again. You’d better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that’s really the only unique situation that’s going to be left. It’s terribly exciting. But on the other hand it doesn’t matter if you think it’s exciting or not; it’s what’s going to happen.”

• David Bowie, speaking to the New York Times — in 2002!.

Amazingly perceptive. Apple’s iPod was just a year old and we were all carrying our music around with us, rather as Victorian tourists in India carried bottles of boiled water. And now we just turn on the tap marked ‘Spotify’.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart | Piano Sonata No. 12 in F Major, K. 332: II. Adagio | Seong-Jin Cho

Link

Long Read of the Day

You may think that; I couldn’t possibly comment

Lovely blog post by Charles Arthur (Whom God Preserve) on the vexed topic of the comments that appear under many articles published online.

When you arrive at the bottom of a story on a news site, you will—especially if the story appears in the “Opinion” section—often find yourself effectively being invited to comment on what you’ve just read. Come on, you’re not just a reader now: you’re also one of the people with the power to make your voice heard! At last you can stick it to The Man!

So what’s your reaction when you find that 1,500 people have already commented on the article?

So when you see that number, do you think: wa-hey! This must have some fun going on, it’s time that people heard my view on this too.

Or do you think: there cannot possibly be any value in being the 1,501st comment below this story.

My guess is that you fall into the latter category. And yet there are plenty of people out there who do not. They see an article with 200 comments—arguably more than even a quite devoted reader who reaches that point is going to bother with—and think to themselves what this really needs is my opinion, because that’s what people have been missing in all this.

Read on.

Speaking personally…. I’ve always been opposed to comment streams that are not moderated — and many (most?) are not because moderation costs money. What unmoderated commenting reveals is that most people haven’t the faintest idea of how to formulate an argument.

Years ago I had an interesting conversation with a well-known journalist who had recently taken up photography and was delightedly posting his work on Flickr — and also following other photographers on the platform. He particularly liked the pictures of one of his followees and one day wrote to him complimenting him on an image but suggesting that it might have been even more effective if it had been cropped in a certain way.

And the response? “Go f**k yourself.”

Constructive criticism is an art not widely understood..

Books, etc.

David Spiegelhalter (Boris Johnson’s least favourite statistician) has a new book coming in September. Hooray!

AI cheating, the education system and common sense

Yesterday’s Observer column:

LLMs are a burning issue for the humanities in particular because the essay is such a key pedagogical tool for teaching students how to research, think and write. More importantly, perhaps, the essay also plays a central role in how they are graded and assessed. The bad news is that LLMs threaten to make that venerable pedagogy untenable. And that there’s no technical fix in sight.

The good news is that the problem isn’t insoluble – if educators in these disciplines are willing to rethink and adapt their teaching to the new reality. Other pedagogies are available. But they require, if not a change of heart, two changes of mindset.

The first is an acceptance that LLMs – as the distinguished Berkeley psychologist Alison Gopnik puts it – are “cultural technologies”, like writing, print, libraries and internet search. In other words, they are tools for human augmentation, not replacement.

Second, and more importantly perhaps, is a need to reinforce in students’ minds the importance of writing as a process…

Read on

My commonplace booklet

On the language of LLMs

Rob Nelson has a marvellous essay on his Substack

At its core, the debate over how to treat LLMs is about the relationship between computation and cognition. Enthusiasts don’t see a problem with using the concepts of human cognition to describe the behavior of LLMs. For skeptics, human thought is vastly more complex than the computational processes happening in even the largest models, and because LLMs do not understand context, they do not know anything. Using words like think, write, or speak to describe what LLMs do is a category error. As Edsger Dijkstra analogized, asking if a machine can think is as relevant as asking if submarines can swim.

The essay is particularly good on the confusions that arise when machine-learning researchers use terms like ‘attention’ in a very specialised way — as a word to describe the information processing that occurs in a transformer-based LLM, but which is totally unlike how we use the term in ordinary human-to-human discourse. Just to underline the problem, the seminal 2017 research paper in which Google researchers announced the conceptual breakthrough represented by the ‘transformer’ model had the provocative title “Attention Is All You Need”.

Feedback

My comments on how the Breugel painting in last Wednesday’s edition highlighted the ways agriculture has changed over the centuries reminded Joe Dunne of another painting — John Constable’s ‘The Cornfield’.

(For a zoomable version click here)

Joe thinks that in the painting Constable was criticising the impact of the Industrial Revolution on farming. Young people were moving to the cities to work in factories where they could get better and stable wages. And he lists evidence in the painting supporting this conjecture. For example:

• There are only three workers in the field compared to 20 in Breugel’s 1565 ‘The Harvesters’.
• The gate is hanging off its hinges – nobody to fix it (the donkeys & sheep have access to the wheat field so it’s vulnerable to damage).
• The farmer inside the gate of the wheat field is quite old (stooped) indicating the youth have left for the city.
• The plough is still out in the open and therefore rusting even though it’s now August (corn is ripe) and the ploughing was done in March. No staff to look after it properly.
• The tree on the left of the painting is dead – no staff to render the lane safe by cutting it down.
• The young boy in the foreground is looking after the sheep – no mature adult available to do this job.

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!

Harvesting then and now

This remarkable 1565 painting by Pieter Breugel the Elder stopped me in my tracks the other day. It’s fascinating in its detail (for a much bigger version click on the image here) — right down to the people who may be skinny-dipping in a small lake in the far distance, the man bringing a pitcher of water to the others sitting under the tree, and the exhausted man asleep. But it’s also an interesting illustration of how agricultural practices have changed over the centuries.

Consider the number of people involved in harvesting that crop, and then look at this:

This field, which is farmed by a neighbour of ours, is truly vast — stretching almost as far as the eye can see. Yet its cereal crop was harvested in three days by two men (albeit with a couple of enormous machines). And then it was ploughed by a single man in a huge tractor in (I think) two days.

Quote of the Day

“If everyone is thinking alike, then no one is thinking”

• Benjamin Franklin

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mark Knopfler | Ruth Moody | Wherever I Go

Link

Long Read of the Day

Fixed Narratives, Fixing Narratives

Fabulous essay by Timothy Burke which starts with a scorching critique of the New York Times’s delusional (and dangerous) pursuit of editorial ‘balance’ at a time when that requires ‘balancing’ rational thinking and analysis with the ravings of a deluded ex-President and his supporting cast of right-wing nutters.

The NYT is really at its worst in this year’s campaign cycle, to the point that I’m a bit at a loss to imagine what’s going on in the newsroom. Their behavior is so programmatic that I have to think they’re consciously pursuing an obsessive, almost lunatic version of “balance” in their coverage of both presidential campaigns. It’s so over the top and calculated that it ends up feeling less like news coverage and more like an attempt to be a third side—not even being a referee but an advocate set against both campaigns on behalf of some imagined and very Rube Goldberg jerry-rigged “centrism”. Nate Cohn’s weird freak-out about how Harris was far to the left on economic policy right after she moved into the lead spot was a foretaste of what we’ve had ever since.

Today’s piece on why Harris is wrong that inflation has anything to do with price gouging is a good example of what this drive is doing to the clarity and structure of NYT news analysis. It’s not a patient laying out of the concept of inflation, nor an exploration of the history of inflation in post-Bretton Woods global economies. It’s not a methodical sector-by-sector look back at price increases during the pandemic and its immediate aftermath. It’s not a detailed analysis of whether there have been supply chain issues and which commodities have been affected most, or even what “supply chains” mean in the contemporary globalized situation, which is something quite different than what they meant in 1974, 1980, or 1990. The whole piece reads as if the conclusion was reached first and then the authors tried to find ways to make the conclusion hold. Which, I know, is not an unfamiliar habit in journalism or academia, but it’s a bad look when it is this obvious and this motivated.

Two junctures where I really found myself frustrated with the article was first that in fact some economists do say that “price gouging” and profit-seeking were one reason inflation remained high into 2022 and 2023. The article acknowledges that fact, but way down near the bottom of the inverted pyramid, whereas the lede frames the story as “politicians who have a message vs. the strong consensus of experts.” “Gouging” of some kind, fueled in part by the stimulus provided to consumers and nominal increases in wages in response to workers quitting their jobs, was so visible in 2022 and 2023 that some companies touted their continuing strategy of increasing prices to pad profits a part of their annual reports and have developed a marketing narrative to go along with it—that they want consumers to normalize a preference for “premium” brands where the main thing that’s premium about them is the price.

What really drove me nuts is a paragraph early on that sets out to rubbish the idea that companies are keeping supplies artificially low in order to pump demand and keep prices high. It drove me nuts first because there have been demonstrated cases of price manipulation of that kind in the last seventy-five years of global economic history. This is not folklore or conspiracy theory. Sometimes it’s not the companies, it’s speculative buyers that keep supplies low, but it absolutely can happen. More importantly, what the article offers as disproof that this was happening between 2021 and 2023 the following: “At least in theory, such a situation should be only temporary. New competitors should enter the market and provide products at a price people can afford.”

Among other things, the essay supports the view that if the US does finally sink into unshackled authoritarianism in November, then the country’s mainstream media will have — wittingly or unwittingly — been an accessory after the fact.

Books, etc.

Corporate BS

This looks interesting. Blurb reads:

From praising the health benefits of cigarettes to moralizing on the character-building qualities of child labor, rich corporate overlords have gone to astonishing, often morally indefensible lengths to defend their profits. Since the dawn of capitalism, they’ve told the same lies over and over to explain why their bottom line is always more important than the greater good: You say you want to raise the federal minimum wage? Why, you’ll only make things worse for the very people you want to help! Should we hold polluters accountable for the toxins they’re dumping in our air and water? No, the free market will save us! Can we raise taxes on the rich to pay for universal healthcare? Of course not—that will kill jobs! Affordable childcare? Socialism! It’s always the same tired threats and finger-pointing, in a concentrated campaign to keep wealth and power in the hands of the wealthy and powerful.

If in doubt, see Cory’s review!

My commonplace booklet

’Decisive moment’ 2.0

Many thanks to the readers who wrote to me after this pic headed Monday’s edition. Writing back to one of them (a fellow-photographer) I explained that it was the result of a conjunction of a few things: a lovely afternoon; me happening to be in the churchyard; I had a Leica with me (as usual); over to the left, out of view, was an almost extinct bonfire, smoke from which was gently drifting rightwards. The conjunction of all those things made for the ‘decisive moment’ that Henri Cartier-Bresson famously wrote about in his book of that title.

But when I raised the camera to my eye, the scene didn’t look right in colour. So I took out my iPhone, switched on its monochrome filter and took the picture.

“Ah”, wrote my friend, “the decisive moment! That time when you had a Leica and an iPhone and chose to use the iPhone…”. Touché.

But actually, that particular decisive moment happened a long time ago. See this chart.

Most of those ‘digital cameras’ (blue colour) are in smartphones.

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>

The Amphitheatre next door

Arles, 2024

Quote of the Day

”S&P Global is paying Accenture to train all 35k staff in ‘generative AI’. I used to joke that if you say ‘Digital Transformation’ three times, an Accenture partner will appear in a puff of smoke and offer you a contract – now the same happens for ‘AI’. Welcome to enterprise IT.”

• Benedict Evans

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

You Raise Me Up | Life in 3D

Link

I got this from Quentin who discovered these three musical siblings while browsing. Their names are Devon, Daylon and Daura, hence the ‘3D’!

Long Read of the Day

Seeing Like a Matt

Fascinating essay by Henry Farrell (Whom God Preserve) on the intellectual blind spots of anti-anti-neoliberalism. Sounds arcane, I know, but if you’re interested in the ideology that got us into this mess (and I, for one, am), then it’s great read. It’s basically a response to a recent blog post by Matt Yglesias in his series on “Neoliberalism and Its Enemies.”

This is how it opens:

In brief (lots more below), Matt’s diagnosis of the state of affairs seems to me to be as follows. Once, and not so long ago, Democrats like Obama had a technocratic approach to policy which was dubbed neoliberalism by its enemies, but was actually pretty good! This approach involved letting markets do their thing so as to produce lots of delicious economic growth, and redistributing the proceeds to make people happy. Good policy making required careful thinking about the concrete costs and benefits of proposed measures – you calculated the tradeoffs and made the appropriate policy choices, ignoring the complaints of lefties. With notably rare exceptions, such as trade with China, this worked out pretty well. Sadly, in the last few years, many Democrats have fallen off the path of righteousness, seduced by the brazen idols of political economy. They have lost any understanding of tradeoffs, or of proper policy analysis, and are wandering the mazes of their own confused rhetoric in a condition of utter bewilderment. There is a cure. We Must All Return to the One True Path of Technocratic Neoliberalism, Though We Don’t Have To Call It That If It Makes You Feel Sad!

My own take (or, more precisely, my crude riff on other, more intelligent people’s ideas) is unsurprisingly very different. As I see it, there is no realistic prospect of going back to the technocratic shake-and-bake of letting markets rip and divvying up the benefits. It had its virtues, but we live in a different world, in part thanks to its equally substantial flaws.

Do read it. Henry is a fine writer and very erudite, and he’s intellectually combative but never rude. This essay is a model of how to disagree productively.

Books, etc.

Screenshot

The historian Richard J. Evans, my distinguished former colleague, has a new book out, which is on my list. I’ve just seen the NYT review and look forward to reading it. Years ago, Richard, David Runciman and I ran a big, Leverhulme-funded research project on ‘Conspiracy and Democracy’. We started in late 2012 and for the first three and a half years our academic colleagues — who subscribed to the conventional wisdom that conspiracy theories had very little significance for democracy — wondered about our sanity. And then Brexit happened and Trump was elected and our colleagues were no longer incredulous!

My commonplace booklet

Trump’s ‘Affirmative Action Program’: the media

The inability of mainstream media in the US to dispassionately report on Trump is shocking. One sees it everywhere, but it was particularly egregious in the imbalance between the incessant focus on Joe Biden’s frailties and the apparent inability of leading newspapers and broadcast outlets to report truthfully on Trump’s manifestly obvious cognitive disintegration.

So it was refreshing to read John Stoehr, editor of ‘The Editorial Board’ newsletter, on the subject:

Every single person in Washington knows Trump is weak, but he rarely comes off that way to the American public, and that’s thanks to the press corps. In a sense, the press corps is Trump’s “affirmative action program” (if we accept the illiberal definition of affirmative action). It doesn’t matter how much he fails. It doesn’t matter how weak he is. The press corps can be trusted to inject something – anything – he says into any story, even ones where he does not belong, and as a consequence, he will come off as stronger than he is. Case in point: “Biden, Trump exchange jabs as Russia prisoner swap turns political.”

(Trump’s “affirmative action program” was on display this week after he humiliated himself during a televised interview at the annual convention of the National Association of Black Journalists. The audience laughed at him when he doubted Kamala Harris’ Blackness. That was funny! But the press corps bailed him out, again, by framing the story as if Harris were responsible for his buffoonery, not him.)

And because Trump comes off as stronger than he is, Biden comes off as weaker than he is. Remember: Biden really did get those prisoners out.

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!

Gee-up

Striking mural, Brignoles, Provence

Quote of the Day

”I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas. Not, indeed, immediately, but after a certain interval; for in the field of economic and political philosophy . . . the ideas which civil servants and politicians and even agitators apply to current events are not likely to be the newest. But, soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.

• John Maynard Keynes in The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money.

Dead relevant when contemplating the ways in which neoliberal ideas have shaped our world over the last half-century.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

J.S. Bach | Prelude No. 1, BWV 846 (Das Wohltemperierte Klavier) | Alexandre Tharaud

Link

Hypnotically beautiful. It doesn’t get much better than this.

Long Read of the Day

Express Elevator

Truly interesting and subtle essay by the gifted sci-fi writer Karl Schroeder on the flaws in our conventional ways of thinking about — and imagining — possible futures. The title comes from a term devised aeons (probably in the Sixties) for the practice of taking uppers and downers simultaneously. (Spoiler alert: do not try this at home.)

The sad truth is that coherent, single-message futures are easier to understand. That’s why there are more of them. Full stop, end of story. They’re easier to dream up, easier to flesh out if you’re worldbuilding or developing a scenario, and they’re easier to explain. “It all goes to shit!” is a concise enough description of the year 2050 for most people to nod their heads and get right into the action.

But the real world doesn’t work that way.

For example: ending fossil fuels is unquestionably a good idea. But as it turns out, aerosols in the air, mostly produced by burning those fuels, currently mask about .5 degrees C of global warming. There’s a term in geoengineering—”termination shock”—which is the sudden spike in temperature that would go along with ending a geoengineering effort to manage global temperatures. Termination shock is such an evil thing that Neal Stephenson wrote a whole novel about it (guess what the title is). Meanwhile, even as we pontificate about how bad geoengineering is because it has the potential to cause termination shock, we are experiencing actual, for-real termination shock because we’re eliminating coal plants, and the aerosols they’ve blanketed the Earth with for decades.

Coal phase-outs are an express elevator: simultaneously good and bad…

Do read it. It made me think, which is quite an achievement.

Books, etc.

Somewhat to my surprise, I’m finding Nick Wapshott’s book on the clash between two epochal thinkers of the 20th century enjoyable and informative. It helps that it also has the occasional nice anecdote. Like this one about Joan Robinson, the great (but initially under-appreciated) economist who worked closely with Richard Kahn, another of Keynes’s proteges.

She and Austin Robinson were ostensibly happily married with two daughters, but her close intellectual collaboration with Kahn led them to become lovers. The couple was once surprised by Keynes in flagrante, Keynes telling [his wife] Lydia that the pair were “lovingly entangled on the floor of Kahn’s study, though I expect the conversation was only on ‘The Pure Theory of Monopoly’”.

My commonplace booklet

Susan Wójcicki RIP

speaks onstage during TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2016 at Pier 48 on September 14, 2016 in San Francisco, California.

She originally rented her garage to Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were starting Google — and then joined the company, eventually becoming CEO of YouTube. “As one of the earliest Googlers — and the first to take maternity leave”, writes Sundar Pichai (CEO of Alphabet and Google), “Susan used her position to build a better workplace for everyone. And in the years that followed, her advocacy around parental leave set a new standard for businesses everywhere. Susan was also deeply passionate about education. She realized early on that YouTube could be a learning platform for the world and championed ‘edutubers’ — especially those who extended the reach of STEM education to underserved communities”.

She always seemed to me to be a force for good in the industry. Unlike some other — more famous — women one could name.

NYT obit is here

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

•  The Babylonian Map of the World with Irving Finkel This delightful talk by a great scholar of antiquity is unmissable IMHO.

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!

Sunset over the Hall

Quote of the Day

”Whether it was a good idea to print the prefaces in a single volume is a moot point, since they were not designed by their author to be encountered in a block. Together they cast much light on what James thought of his own work, on the art of fiction, and on how towards the end of his life he thought about his earlier career. But the process of reading them one after another, without the intervening joys of the fiction, is a bit like being forced to eat a roll of linoleum thickly spread with jam (to make it a little more digestible), while being overseen by a nostalgic nanny who repeatedly attempts to recall the precise origins of each splodge of jam, and of the fruit from which it was, meticulously and with much boiling and concentration, originally confected.”

• Colin Burrow, reviewing The Prefaces by Henry James (CUP, 2024) in the London Review of Books.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Wailin’ Jennys | The Parting Glass

Link

This came to mind as I watched the athletes gathering for the closing ceremony of the Olympic Games last night.

Long Read of the Day

Richard Nixon: My Part In His Downfall

Nice memoir by Lawrence Freedman of his youthful participation in the 1972 Democratic convention.

In July 1972 I was 23, and on my first visit to the United States. As a political junkie – I’d been active in student and Liberal Party politics – I was keen to experience American politics at first hand. Having spent time protesting against the Vietnam War my natural affinities were with the McGovern camp. So a week after arriving in New York and then meeting up with family in New Jersey I took a Greyhound Bus to Miami, itself something of an experience.

On Monday 10 July 1972 I wrote to my parents from the Doral Hotel telling them that I was working as a McGovern volunteer and able to watch was happening behind the scenes. Having been unable to find my relation’s friend who was supposedly a big shot in the campaign I saw a sign which said ‘Volunteers for McGovern: Accommodation Provided.’ As I had nowhere to stay close to the Convention I duly volunteered and was soon filling envelopes with campaign material. This is the sort of thing volunteers often do though it is not very exciting. But I was diligent and keen and when an opportunity came to do something more interesting I took it…

Great read. But to get to understand why the title of the essay (kind-of) makes sense, you have to read to the end!

What opposition to delivery drones shows about big tech’s disrespect for democracy

Yesterday’s Observer column:

Tech determinism is an ideology, really; it’s what determines how you think when you don’t even know that you’re thinking. And it feeds on a narrative of technological inevitability, which says that new stuff is coming down the line whether you like it or not. As the writer LM Sacasas puts it, “all assertions of inevitability have agendas, and narratives of technological inevitability provide convenient cover for tech companies to secure their desired ends, minimise resistance, and convince consumers that they are buying into a necessary, if not necessarily desirable future”.

But for the narrative of inevitability to translate into widespread general deployment of a technology, politicians eventually have to buy into it too. We’re seeing a lot of this at the moment with AI, and it’s not clear yet how that will play out in the long run. Some of the omens are not good, though. One thinks, for example, of the toe-curling video of Rishi Sunak fawning on Elon Musk, the world’s richest manchild, or of Tony Blair’s recent soppy televised conversation with Demis Hassabis, the sainted co-founder of Google DeepMind.

How refreshing it is, then, to come across an account of what happens when the deterministic myth collides with democratic reality…

Read on

My commonplace booklet

Think before you post At last, maybe the UK Crown Prosecution Service is getting serious about prosecuting people who make threats on social media. I’ve never understood how, Twitter/X male users who threaten female politicians with rape are not prosecuted. In related news, Irish police have arrested a guy who made online threats about the Taoiseach (Prime Minister) and his family. So maybe the democratic worm is beginning to turn.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• ‘It made me cry’: photos taken 15 years apart show melting Swiss glaciers Intriguing (though depressing) story in the Guardian.

A tourist has posted “staggering” photos of himself and his wife at the same spot in the Swiss Alps almost exactly 15 years apart, in a pair of photos that highlight the speed with which global heating is melting glaciers.

Duncan Porter, a software developer from Bristol, posted photos that were taken in the same spot at the Rhône glacier in August 2009 and August 2024. The white ice that filled the background has shrunk to reveal grey rock. A once-small pool at the bottom, out of sight in the original, has turned into a vast green 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!

Free spirits

Funny how plants refuse to do what you want them to do. This rose bush was supposed to enliven a dull patch in the garden fence, but instead has decided to reach for the sky.

Quote of the Day

“Empire will leave behind only two monuments: the game of Association Football, and the expression ‘Fuck off’ ”

• Richard Turnbull, (Governor of Tanganyika 1958-1961)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Chris Rea | Stainsby Girls

Link

Long Read of the Day

Leveraged buyouts are not like mortgages

If, like me, you think that so called ‘private equity’ operators are the hyenas of capitalism, then you’ll enjoy this blast by Cory Doctorow. I’ve known Cory for years, and admired him for even longer. He pulls no punches and takes no prisoners.

Exhibit A:

Here’s an open secret: the confusing jargon of finance is not the product of some inherent complexity that requires a whole new vocabulary. Rather, finance-talk is all obfuscation, because if we called finance tactics by their plain-language names, it would be obvious that the sector exists to defraud the public and loot the real economy.

Take “leveraged buyout,” a polite name for stealing a whole goddamned company:

I. Identify a company that owns valuable assets that are required for its continued operation, such as the real-estate occupied by its outlets, or even its lines of credit with suppliers;

II. Approach lenders (usually banks) and ask for money to buy the company, offering the company itself (which you don’t own!) as collateral on the loan;

III. Offer some of those loaned funds to shareholders of the company and convince a key block of those shareholders (for example, executives with large stock grants, or speculators who’ve acquired large positions in the company, or people who’ve inherited shares from early investors but are disengaged from the operation of the firm) to demand that the company be sold to the looters;

IV. Call a vote on selling the company at the promised price, counting on the fact that many investors will not participate in that vote (for example, the big index funds like Vanguard almost never vote on motions like this), which means that a minority of shareholders can force the sale;

V. Once you own the company, start to strip-mine its assets: sell its real-estate, start stiffing suppliers, fire masses of workers, all in the name of “repaying the debts” that you took on to buy the company…

Do read on. What’s striking about this racket is the way it has been used to destroy a number of venerable UK companies. It should be outlawed — just as permitting companies to buy their own shares should be banned. But because democracies have spent over half a century devising legal regimes that prioritise the interests of corporations and private capital these abuses continue.

You can see why Cory is not exactly popular in some quarters. He’s always welcome here, though.

Books, etc.

Sometimes, serendipity works. This is one of my favourite books. It uses the arguments about the real source of true knowledge between Thomas Hobbes (hence the Leviathan of the title) and the scientist Robert Boyle (of Boyle’s Law and other things) to make us ponder how we came to regard experimental science as the preferred way of producing knowledge.

During the pandemic I lent my copy to a bright graduate student after she and I had had a discussion about Hobbes, but then (of course) forgot to whom I had given the volume. (I keep meaning to keep a list of borrowers, but…) And then, the other day, it turned up in my pigeon-hole in College: she’s leaving to take up a Fellowship in a place hear Swindon-which-shall-not-be-named and was clearing out her apartment before departing.

It’s so nice to have it back.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• From The Register: WordStar 7, the last ever DOS version, is re-released for free.  The preferred writing tool of Arthur C Clarke and William Buckley Jr. And, for a time, of this blogger.

•  How the KKK Scammed Its Members for Cash. Gripping article by Rosie Cima. Turns out that the Klan was basically a pyramid scheme “fueled by an army of highly-incentivized sales agents selling hatred, religious intolerance, and fraternity in a time and place where there was tremendous demand”. And the two things that brought it down were: the conviction in 1925 of its ‘Grand Wizard’ for rape and murder; and being sued by the federal government in 1944 for $685,000 in back taxes!

Errata

Max Whitby writes:

Congratulations on your bees taking up residence. Judging by their front doors, these are Leaf-cutters (Genus: Megachile) rather than Masons (Genus: Osmia). There are seven species in the UK… including Willughby’s Leaf-Cutter Bee (Megachile willughbiella) named after Francis Willughby (1635-1672) of Trinity College Cambridge.

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!

Air Bee’n Bee

One of my boys and his partner gave me a ‘bug hotel’ for my birthday and we decided to pin it to the garden fence and await developments. So far, five Mason Bees have booked accommodation.

Quote of the Day

“Humour can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the purely scientific mind.”

• E.B. White

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Eva Cassidy | Autumn Leaves

Link

I know I know, it’s not Autumn yet. But this was new to me and I liked it. Hope you do too!

Long Read of the Day

Gordon Brown on his experience of the Murdoch press

Compelling piece in the Guardian by the UK’s former Prime Minister, in which he details what these rags had been up to — including deleting millions of potentially embarrassing (and perhaps legally problematic) emails.

The kicker is that the guy who presided over much of this chicanery has been appointed Editor of the sainted Washington Post. Truly, you couldn’t make it up.

Books, etc.

Human Voices

I’m currently reading Penelope Fitzgerald’s biography of her uncles, The Knox brothers, and am deeply impressed by it, particularly by her ability to provide contextual detail about four men who had complicated and interesting lives (one was an early cryptographer and code-breaker; two were priests; and one was Editor of Punch).

I hadn’t read anything by her before, and indeed only got the ‘brothers’ book because of reading Henry Oliver’s Second Act and discovering that she was fifty-eight before she published a book and yet is now recognised as one of the best English writers of her generation. So I started wondering which of her novels I should start with. Sarah Harkness’s recent essay solved the problem: Human Voices it shall be.

Which is why her essay is worth reading.

My commonplace booklet

I’m a sceptic about AGI and deeply suspicious of the giant tech corporations which aspire to control the technology. But from the outset I’ve been a pragmatist about Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4, Llama, Claude, Gemini et al. I see these as (a) what Alison Gopnik calls (cultural technologies — like libraries, language, books, etc.) and (b) as potentially useful tools — like spreadsheets, and in that context use them a bit as unpaid but assiduous interns. And I find them useful.

Which explains why I liked this post by Nicholas Carlini. He’s a security researcher and a sceptic about most things, but in the essay he outlines how he’s been using LLMs in his work. His view is that,

current large language models have provided the single largest improvement to my productivity since the internet was created. Honestly, today, if you gave me the choice of solving a randomly selected programming task from my work either with access to the internet or access to a state of the art language model, I’d probably pick the language model more than half the time.

Which is interesting, is it not?

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!

Director’s cut

I don’t suffer from house envy, but if I did — and had won the lottery — this is the kind of house I’d go for. It’s Cory Lodge, which used to be the residence of the Director of Cambridge University’s Botanic garden (maybe it still is, but given the utilitarianism of university administrations, it could well have been turned into offices). It’s a perfect example of a certain kind of Victorian villa.

In the late 1980s, when I desperately needed a place of my own, I rented a wing of a house of this type and vintage for a year and a half, and it was a lovely, restorative experience. There’s something about this kind of architecture that’s good for the soul.

From 1951 to 1973 John Gilmour was the Director of the Garden and his three daughters gave a nice interview looking back on what it was like growing up in such a lovely home.

Quote of the Day

”The cognitive dissonance the Olympics produces for me: You’re watching these amazing athletes push their bodies to the limits of their abilities, you tear up at the drama and the joy and the excitement and the pain and disappointment of it all, you’re maybe even thinking about what it means to be human and how much intelligence is the result of being an embodied creature… and then every tech company ad wants you to buy into artificial intelligence.”

• Austin Kleon

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Vance VP – a parodic adaptation of ABBA’s Dancing Queen about Trump’s running mate .

Link

Some very sharp lyrics reminding listeners that if Trump were to win in November, this Hillbilly elegist will be just “One Big Mac away” from the nuclear button.

Thanks to Timothy Garton Ash, who spotted it first.

Long Read of the Day

The Friedrich Hayek I knew, and what he got right – and wrong

There’s an interesting essay in the New Statesman by John Gray about one of the most enigmatic thinkers of the 20th century. What I hadn’t realised was that Gray actually knew Hayek. The essay is interesting throughout, but particularly good on the relationship between Hayek and Keynes.

The two men had quite different kinds of minds – Keynes’s swift and mobile, with an almost clairvoyant power of entering into the thinking of others; Hayek’s slowly probing, inwardly turned and self-enclosed. They were nonetheless on cordial terms.

Keynes found Hayek rooms in King’s College when the London School of Economics (where Hayek became a professor of economics in 1931) moved to Cambridge for the duration of the Second World War, and for a time the pair shared fire-watching duties on the roof of the college when it was feared that Cambridge might be bombed…

Like many of these Long Reads, it made me want to read something else related to its topic.

(Memo to self: check out Nicholas Wapshott’s book Keynes Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics in the University Library this morning.)

Back to the 1930s: Silicon Valley’s Trump supporters

Yesterday’s Observer column:

In How Democracy Ends, his elegant book published after Trump’s election in 2016, David Runciman made a startling point. It was that while the liberal democracy that we take for granted won’t last for ever, it will not fail in ways familiar from the past: no revolutions, no military coups, no breakdowns of social order. It will fail forwards in an unexpected manner. The implication was that people making comparisons to what happened in 1930s Germany were misguided.

But then something changed. Significant sectors of Silicon Valley – which for decades had been a Democrat stronghold – started coming out for Trump. In 2016, Peter Thiel, the contrarian billionaire and co-founder of PayPal, had been the only prominent Valley figure to support Trump, which merely confirmed the fact that he was the region’s statutory maverick. But in the past few weeks, quite a few of the Valley’s big hitters (Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen and David Sacks, to name just three) have revealed themselves to be supporters of – and donors to – Trump. Musk has set up and donated to a Republican-aligned political action committee (or Super Pac). On 6 June, the venture capitalist Sacks hosted a $300,000-a-plate fundraising dinner for Trump at his San Francisco mansion. And so on.

Why all this sudden interest in politics?

Read on

Books, etc.

John Simpson, the BBC’s veteran Foreign Editor, reviews of Anne Applebaum’s new book, Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World.

Until around 2015, I tended to be moderately positive about the world. There were far more democracies than when I started at the BBC in 1966, I would tell myself, and markedly fewer dictatorships. Africa and Latin America, once host to so many military dictatorships, were now mostly run by elected leaders. The terrible threat of nuclear war had receded. A billion people were being lifted out of poverty. Yes, what Vladimir Putin had done in Crimea in 2014 was worrying, and Xi Jinping was starting to make disturbing speeches about Muslims and Uyghurs; but given that I’d seen Soviet communism melt away across eastern Europe and in Russia itself, I still felt there was reason for optimism.

That pretty much ended in 2016. Brexit damaged the European project, and Donald Trump shook the columns of American leadership. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, based on the completely false assumption that most Ukrainians would welcome the return of Russian domination, and China’s ruthless suppression of political freedom in Hong Kong have darkened the 2020s much as German, Italian and Japanese intervention darkened the 1930s. And the tide of democracy has turned. Elections have so often become shams. Corruption in government has turned into a major global industry. Well-intentioned but indigent governments welcome Chinese cash because no one else will supply it, and pretend not to notice the strings attached – or even welcome them. Populist movements well up in countries that have traditionally been moderate and calm.

And so the kind of neo-Whig version of history, which taught that trade would bring us all closer together and economics would make war impossible, has collapsed…

Good piece. So much for that Neo-Whig interpretation of post-war history.

My commonplace booklet

What’s going on…

”The far right here and in other countries trawl violent and sexual crimes in the hope that they have been committed by migrants or non-whites. Instances are posted on social media and widely shared, often with a sneering reference to the “joys of multiculturalism”. I hardly need to add that when these crimes are the work of white people, the perpetrator’s origins or ethnicity won’t rate a mention. The absolute jackpot crime would be a child sex murder committed by a Muslim asylum seeker who arrived on a boat. This wouldn’t just rate a mention by your unfriendly local social media nazi and a bevy of YouTube influencers but by half a dozen Telegraph columnists and a score of GBNEWS and Talk TV hosts and their guests.

Within hours of the murders for which Axel Rudakabana has been charged – and in the absence of his identification, far right social media decided that they had completed its blame-bingo card. (Note, however, that despite a judge taking the unusual step of having an under-18 suspect named, it has made no difference whatsoever to those rioting in several towns in England.)…

From David Aaronovitch’s Substack.

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!

Morning conference

8:30am, Provence, June

Quote of the Day

“If at first you don’t succeed, skydiving definitely isn’t for you”

• Steven Wright

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart | Soave sia il vento | Così fan tutte

Link

Beautiful and so, so cynical. From the 2006 Glyndebourne performance. I’ve often thought that this would make great going-out music for one’s funeral.

Long Read of the Day

Intellectual Diary of an Iconoclast

Background: This is a beautiful essay by the great social scientist James Scott, looking back on his intellectual development in which, instead of him leaving his original discipline of political science, political science left him. After I learned of his death, I wrote a little piece about him in last Wednesday’s edition in which I mentioned how generative his book Seeing Like a State had been — in the sense that it triggered a lot of productive thinking in its readers.

As if on cue, a really thoughtful post about Scott popped into my inbox the other day. It’s by Henry Farrell (Whom God Preserve) and his essay is an insightful meditation on the significance of Scott’s work, and worth reading just for that. But for me it had an added delight — of alerting me to Scott’s own reflection on his intellectual development.

A pivotal movement in his life was a decision to spend a year and a half living in a remote Malay village with 75 inhabitants in order to understand how real people lived rather than doing statistical surveys of the kind beloved by political scientists. One of the ideas that emerged from that experience was an understanding of what he called ‘below-the-radar-resistance’ by powerless peasants or political dissidents in authoritarian regimes.

One example of this kind of resistance that he cites comes from Poland during the period of martial law.

When the Solidarity Movement was strong at the end of martial law in Poland, there were forms of symbolic protest that drove the government crazy. The government news broadcast took place at 6:00 PM and people decided by the hundreds of thousands to leave their houses. The moment the news broadcast began, they took a walk in the street for a half hour, until the news broadcast was over, with their hats on backwards. There was no law against taking a walk, and there was, of course, no law about wearing your hat backwards. You could understand, however, that this was a huge morale booster for much of the Polish opposition to martial law.

The government responded by forcing a curfew at exactly 6:00 that would require people to be in their houses during the news broadcast. Within a few days, the Polish opposition had discovered a workaround. Since they could no longer be in the street during the news broadcast, what they did was to take their television set, put it on the windowsill, and blare out the news broadcast—which they considered to be largely lies—to the security forces, who were the only people in the street. This, as you can imagine, was also a huge morale booster and a symbolic victory for the opposition to martial law, even though it did not change the power dynamic in the short run.

Well worth a read. Even though it’s an academic article, it’s open-access. Go to the link and click on the “PDF” button.

Books, etc.

Feeling pessimistic: why not try reading a book?

Lovely essay by Henry Oliver.

According to the Pew Centre, back in the 1970s, when news coverage wasn’t so pessimistic, only 8% of Americans reported not having read a book in the last year. That figure now stands at 23%. A new survey from the Reading Agency shows that only 50% of UK adults are regular readers. 35% are “lapsed”. And 15% have never been regular readers. In 2015, 58% of adults were regular readers. And only 8% of adults were non-readers back then. The figures for the 16-24 bracket suggest these figures will continue to decline.

Many reasons are given for this decline: distraction of social media, lack of ability to focus, and feeling bored or uninterested by the reading material. Those who did read reported better mental health, improved sleep and concentration, and better understanding of other people’s feelings. Readers have better life satisfaction.

The reason, I think, is that reading is a solitary activity. Reading requires us to leave the world of arguments, ideologies, news coverage, and TikTok feeds and to exist inside our imaginations for a while. Many solutions are sought to the wide-spread mood of dissatisfaction, not least the prevalence of therapy. But this keeps us focussed on what is making us miserable: our own lives, our own problems, the people around us.

It does, because misery is contagious. And listening to music and reading books are two antidotes to it. Which partly explains the structure of this little newsletter. 

Errata

Apologies to the inimitable Heather Cox Richardson for renaming her ‘Helen’ in Wednesday’s edition. Usual culprits: Apple autocorrect and slack proofreading by a sleepy blogger. And thanks to Andrew Brown for pointing it out so tactfully.

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!