The First Webcam

This was the world’s very first webcam. In 1991 my friend Quentin Stafford-Fraser and his colleague Paul Jardetzky set it up to watch a coffee-pot in the Cambridge Computer Laboratory’s Trojan Room (a large space previously occupied by an early mainframe computer) which housed a number of graduate students. Quentin and Paul connected it to the lab’s internal network so that graduate students everywhere in the building (rather than just the privileged denizens of the Trojan Room) — could see when the coffee had been brewed. Quentin wrote the X-Coffee program that displayed the live image in a small box on the top right-hand corner of every student’s desktop computer, and Paul wrote the server software to underpin it.

In 1993, when Mosaic — the first web browser that could handle images — appeared, the coffee-pot was hooked up to the Internet and broadcast on the web, and for a brief period was the most watched pot in the world! (Fittingly, it never boiled.) Many years later, when the Computer Lab moved from central Cambridge to its new, vast, building on the West Cambridge site, the venerable pot was auctioned for charity, and Quentin became the first person I’ve ever known who appeared on the front pages of the London and New York Times on the same day!

All of this was brought back by having lunch with him last week, when he suddenly produced the ancient relic from his bag. (It had been briefly liberated from its usual display case in the Lab for a TV interview he had done the day before.)

Quentin wrote a nice memoir of the webcam which was published in the Proceedings of the ACM in 2001.

Quote of the Day

”Me no Leica”.

• Headline on Dorothy Parker’s review of Christopher Isherwood’s I Am A Camera.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Wailin’ Jennys | Light of a Clear Blue Morning

Link

A distinctive take of a Dolly Parton song.

Long Read of the Day

Democratic fragility and resilience.

I know, I know, I/we pay too much attention to what’s going on in the US at the moment. That’s one of the curses of living in the ‘Anglosphere’, as my European friends often point out. But on the other hand, what happens in the US in the next 90-odd days will affect us all. If you doubt that, ask President Zelensky.

In brooding on it I’ve been oscillating between two frames of mind, both triggered by what James Joyce would have called epiphanies.

• The first, triggered by Joe Biden’s disastrous performance in the televised ‘debate’ between him and Trump, was a memory of an afternoon many years ago when my youngest son was revising for his GCSE exams. He was sitting at the dining-room table while I was in the kitchen cooking supper and he suddenly exclaimed, “Dad, I’ve got it! Tragedy is when you can see the disaster coming but you know there’s nothing anybody can do about it.”

• The second was a moment in 2013 when I was reading The Confidence Trap: A History of Democracy in Crisis from World War I to the Present by my friend and colleague David Runciman. In it he argued that democracies are good at recovering from crises but bad at avoiding them. The lesson they draw from their mistakes is that they can survive them — and that no crisis is as bad as it initially appears. This breeds complacency rather than wisdom, leading to the dangerous belief that democracies can muddle through anything. (The ‘confidence trap’ of the book’s title.)

The dangerous thing, of course, is that muddling through takes time, and if democracies are slow to appreciate the next crisis then there may not be enough time to adjust before it’s too late. Watching how agonisingly slow Biden and the Democrats seemed to be in realising the danger led me to conclude that muddling through was no longer an option and that the US would wind up in the grip of a fascist administration with all that implied.

But then Biden conceded to reality and suddenly light appeared at the end of the tunnel. It was an astonishing moment, and of course it may not in the end derail the Trump bandwagon, but there’s now a tangible sense that the US may not fall into Runciman’s confidence trap.

This sense of democratic resilience is admirably captured in a post by Helen Cox Richardson on her admirable Substack blog, which I recommend reading in its entirety.

Here’s how it opens:

Just a week ago, it seems, a new America began. I’ve struggled ever since to figure out what the apparent sudden revolution in our politics means.

I keep coming back to the Ernest Hemingway quote about how bankruptcy happens. He said it happens in two stages, first gradually and then suddenly.

That’s how scholars say fascism happens, too—first slowly and then all at once—and that’s what has been keeping us up at night.

But the more I think about it, the more I think maybe democracy happens the same way, too: slowly, and then all at once.

At this country’s most important revolutionary moments, it has seemed as if the country turned on a dime…

Do read the whole thing.

My commonplace booklet

Linkblog

• Two plus two = 22?. Clever and instructive film about the MAGA mindset.

Thanks to Chris Hall for suggesting it. He uses it in his teaching.

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Safely grazing

A photograph taken on a rural cycle ride yesterday morning. Made me think of Bach — see today’s Musical Alternative.

Quote of the Day

“Get out and vote. Just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what: it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians…. Get out, you’ve got to get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again, we’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.”

• Donald Trump, speaking to Christians at the Turning Point Action Believers’ Summit in West Palm Beach, Florida on July 26.

I have to say that when I first read that I wondered if it might have been Trump’s favourite form of media — fake news. So I dug out the CSPAN video of the speech and watched it. And it’s there, towards the end — spool forward to 1.03:12 and you can see for yourself.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

J.S. Bach | Schafe können sicher weiden — Sheep May Safely Graze — from the Hunt Cantata, BWV 208

Link

Long Read of the Day

How to fix the UK? Let me count the ways

Really interesting essay by Tim Harford of the Financial Times

Here’s the bad news: it is going to take more than a change of government to cure what ails Britain. The symptoms are wearyingly familiar, but worth summarising. Waiting lists for NHS treatment have soared above 7.5mn, from 4.2mn in 2019 and 2.5mn in 2010. Prisons are at capacity, and the court system long since exceeded it. Local government funding has been squeezed for years, with obvious effects on local services such as social care, libraries and leisure centres.

The simple explanation for all this is that 14 years of Conservative-led governments have cut taxes, preferring to trust citizens with their own money even if it leaves the public realm looking threadbare. But that’s not what has happened. While headline taxes on average earners are indeed low, as a proportion of national income the total tax burden is — infamously — near the highest level since the 1940s, while the UK continues to borrow and add to the largest pile of debt in living memory. In short, we are spending more than ever and somehow getting less than ever for it.

Those are the symptoms. The cause is familiar, too: productivity has stagnated since 2008…

It’s good, but a newspaper column can only scratch the surface of the UK’s problems. For a really thorough analysis the best place to look (as Tim suggests) is the Resolution Foundation’s report.

You can download it for free. It’s quite a read, believe me.

AI and the Sigmoid Curve

Yesterday’s Observer column

I bought an iPhone 15 the other day to replace my five-year-old iPhone 11. The phone is powered by the new A17 Pro chip and has a terabyte of data storage and accordingly was eye-wateringly expensive. I had, of course, finely honed rationales for splashing out on such a scale. I’ve always had a policy of writing only about kit that I buy with my own money (no freebies from tech companies), for example. The fancy A17 processor is needed to run the new “AI” stuff that Apple is promising to launch soon; the phone has a significantly better camera than my old handset had – which matters (to me) because my Substack blog goes out three times a week and I provide a new photograph for each edition; and, finally, a friend whose ancient iPhone is on its last legs might appreciate an iPhone 11 in good nick.

But these are rationalisations rather than solid justifications. The truth is that my old iPhone was fine for the job. Sure, it would need a new battery in time, but apart from that it had years more life in it. And if you take a cold, detached look at the evolution of the iPhone product line, what you see from the 2010 iPhone 4 onwards is really just a sequence of steady incremental improvements…

Read on

Books, etc.

If, like me, you’re struggling to work out the impact(s) of digital technology on democracies, then the re-issue of Karl Polyani’s great 1944 book is quite an event. It was a prescient and powerful argument for keeping capitalism under democratic control — and in that sense was read as a rebuttal of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, which, ironically, was also published in 1944.

The economist Branko Milanovic has written a really informative review of the new edition which I think will be helpful to those who didn’t know about Polyani.

For those who may be new to the area, let me just summarize the main insights of Polanyi’s. Market economy, defined as an economy that entirely depends on prices of commodities including market-determined prices of factors of production (what Polanyi called “fictitious commodities”) of labor, land and money is an impossibility. It is impossible in practice because such an economy would annihilate society. This, Polanyi writes, was only imperfectly understood when the first time in history such an attempt was made during the British Industrial Revolution. “The Industrial Revolution was merely the beginning of a revolution so extreme and radical as ever inflamed the minds of sectarians, but the new creed was utterly materialistic and believed that all human problems could be resolved given unlimited amount of material commodities. (p. 40). Self-regulating market society would result (and in Britain it did initially result) in pauperism, vagrancy, alcoholism, insalubrious living conditions, “satanic mills”, much longer hours of work, shorter lives, lack of education, all the elements well known from economic history and from the works of literature.

Thus, the “society” (a rather capacious term that Polanyi overuses) had to defend itself against a self-regulated market economy…

My commonplace booklet

One of the great things about having a blog is that one has readers that know more than the blogger! I’m continually learning this. On Friday, I posted a picture of a lovely little vintage car that we saw on our drive northwards from Provence, and asked if anyone knew what it was.

You can guess what happened. Some readers knew immediately what it was — and told me. Others deployed search techniques to come up with the answer — a Renault 4CV!

Max Whitby (Whom God Preserve) had the idea of showing the image to Anthropic’s LLM (Claude 3.5), which replied as follows:

This appears to be a Renault 4CV, a small economy car produced by the French automaker Renault from 1946 to 1961.

The 4CV was one of France’s first post-World War II car designs and played a significant role in motorizing the French population after the war. Its nickname in France was “quatre pattes” (four paws), referring to its four doors.

The LLM also added some interesting points about the vehicle: it was designed in secret during the German occupation of France in World War II; it had a rear-engine, rear-wheel-drive layout; it was very popular, with over a million units produced during its 14-year production run; and its design influenced later Renault models, particularly the Renault Dauphine.

This was slightly annoying because I also use Claude but it never occurred to me to ask it about the car. And although my question about the car’s identity was a trivial one, Max’s use of the LLM was a reminder of how useful these tools can sometimes be.

Many thanks also to the readers who pointed me at the Wikipedia entry for the 4CV. They included James Miller (Whom God Preserve) who pointed out that this page explained how the little car came to have the mysterious letters RNUR engraved on the front badge:

On 1 January 1945, by de Gaulle’s decree, the company was posthumously expropriated from Louis Renault. On 16 January 1945, it was formally nationalised as Régie Nationale des Usines Renault.”

Thanks to all. I may not be wiser, but I am much better informed.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Plastic bottles and regulatory ‘freedom’. Jonty Bloom makes a nice point on his blog about the fact that when you now buy a bottle of water in the UK, you find that after you unscrew the cap and have a drink, the cap continues to be attached to the bottle by a thin piece of plastic. Turns out that this is the produce of a newish EU regulation.

But , writes Jonty,

Because we have left the EU the directive does not effect us, (a classic case of regulatory divergence by inertia, which I have mentioned before) but any British manufacturer of plastic bottle who wants to sell in the EU has to follow the EU rules.

As British industry, Remain and anyone with an ounce of common sense has been pointing out for years now, no company is going to run two production lines, one that meets EU standards and a British one that meets lower UK standards. They will run the one with higher standards and sell them in the UK and the rest of Europe.

Hey Presto! The Brexit fools have discovered that these new bottle tops have been “imposed” on the UK by the EU, we are not free or sovereign, EU regulations still apply, we are still in the dead clutch of Brussels, chained to a corpse and so on…

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l’Auto

Following the Route Napoleon on our drive northwards through the Rhone Alps a couple of weeks ago, we stopped for coffee in the village of Corps and came on this quaint vehicle. It was small but perfectly formed, as they say. Intrigued, we wondered about its ancestry. The only clue was an enigmatic badge:

An early Renault, perhaps? More knowledgeable petrolheads will doubtless know.

Quote of the Day

”I really am a pessimist. I’ve always felt that fascism is a more natural governmental condition than democracy. Democracy is a grace. It’s something essentially splendid because it’s not at all routine or automatic. Fascism goes back to our infancy and childhood, where we were always told how to live. We were told, Yes, you may do this; no, you may not do that. So the secret of fascism is that it has this appeal to people whose later lives are not satisfactory.

• Norman Mailer

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Buffalo Springfield | For What It’s Worth

Link

Long Read of the Day

Both Sides

Thoughtful essay by historian Timothy Snyder on a pernicious delusion of mainstream media.

Why does American television and press “both-sides” our politics? Why are such different presidential candidates presented as equally flawed? Why do the outrages of Trump, for example at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, lead to the humiliation of Biden?

Both-Sidesism is the habit of reducing the world into two perspectives, treating the two as fundamentally alike, and then ignoring or adjusting the data. One cause of this odd behavior is the ownership of media companies. Another is fear.

But Both-Sidesism is not just a practice. It passes in the United States for a principle of journalism. Indeed, the dualism is almost unquestionable. Americans tends to take it for granted.

But it makes no sense. No data from the world around us indicates that two is the correct number of perspectives, nor that any two perspectives, once chosen, would be equal…

Great essay. I’m reminded of a conversation the economist Paul Krugman had with a group of Harvard undergraduates during the presidency of George W. Bush when Dick Cheney was his adult supervisor (and also Vice-President). At one stage Krugman used the phrase “balance as bias” and some of the students looked puzzled.

So he gave them an illustration of how it works:

Dick Cheney says the Earth is flat. Here’s how the New York Times reports it:
“VP says Earth flat; Others Disagree.”

My commonplace booklet

Shortly after the Trump shooting, Charlie Warzel, a well-known American journalist, went onto Twitter/X and was appalled by what he found there. So he wrote a column about it in The Atlantic which includes this passage:

Some may wish to see the conspiracy peddling, cynical politicking, and information warfare as a kind of gross aberration or the unintended consequences and outputs of a system that’s gone awry. This is wrong. What we are witnessing is an information system working as designed. It is a machine that rewards speed, bravado, and provocation. It is a machine that goads people into participating as the worst version of themselves. It is a machine that is hyperefficient, ravenous, even insatiable—a machine that can devour any news cycle, no matter how large, and pick it apart until it is an old, tired carcass.

If you’re interested in cybernetics, this is an interesting epiphany. Why? Because, for a cybernetician, the purpose of a system is not what people who own or run it say it is. The purpose is what the system actually does.

By the same token, the fact that neoliberalism produces inequality is a feature, not a bug, as programmers say. It’s what the system is designed to do.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• tinyPod — if this makes sense to anyone, they will most likely be denizens of the Apple ecosystem. Basically, you put your Apple Watch into a neat little plastic case that evokes memories of the original iPod and away you go. Effectively turns your wristwatch into a pocket watch! And really only makes sense if your iWatch has a mobile connection. Charming, in a way, but maybe just another example of leading-edge uselessness.

Thanks to Charles Arthur, who first spotted it.

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Peak Viewing

The Peak District viewed from Stanage Edge. Note the strategically-positioned crow.

Photo by my son Pete.

Quote of the Day

“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it …”

• Max Planck

A striking quote often summarised as “Science advances one funeral at a time”.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bach | French Suite No 4 | Murray Perahia

Link

This was on the car radio the other day.

When I reached my destination, I sat, entranced, until it ended.

Long Read of the Day

On The Moral Economy of Tech

A transcript of a remarkable talk by Maciej Ceglowski, one of the sharpest observers of digital technology around (and also the creator of Pinboard.in, which he describes as “bookmarking for introverts” and which has played a central role in my workflow for many years).

I am only a small minnow in the technology ocean, but since it is my natural habitat, I want to make an effort to describe it to you.

As computer programmers, our formative intellectual experience is working with deterministic systems that have been designed by other human beings. These can be very complex, but the complexity is not the kind we find in the natural world. It is ultimately always tractable. Find the right abstractions, and the puzzle box opens before you.

The feeling of competence, control and delight in discovering a clever twist that solves a difficult problem is what makes being a computer programmer sometimes enjoyable.

But as anyone who’s worked with tech people knows, this intellectual background can also lead to arrogance. People who excel at software design become convinced that they have a unique ability to understand any kind of system at all, from first principles, without prior training, thanks to their superior powers of analysis. Success in the artificially constructed world of software design promotes a dangerous confidence…

It does. This is really worth your time.

Books, etc.

James Scott, RIP

One of the most distinctive social scientists of his time died last Friday. I came to his work late, when I stumbled on his book Seeing Like a State when I was trying to understand how modern states came into being. It was basically a critique of what Scott called “high modernism”, a mindset of rulers to force “legibility” on their subjects by (as Wikipedia puts it) “homogenizing them and creating standards that simplify pre-existing, natural, diverse social arrangements. Examples include the introduction of family names, censuses, uniform languages, and standard units of measurement. While such innovations aim to facilitate state control and economies of scale, Scott argues that the eradication of local differences and silencing of local expertise can have adverse effects.”

Reading the book, I was sometimes reminded of The Open Society and its Enemies, but the most amusing impact it had on me was a kind of admiration for the Norman Conquest, the relentless thoroughness of which evoked Scott’s portrayal of the search for ‘legibility’. What else, after all, was the Domesday book [italics] for [unitalics] than to give William an informed idea of who his new realm’s 268,984 landowners were, how wealthy they were, etc.?

Brad DeLong wrote an interesting review of Seeing Like a State in which he gently chided Scott for not acknowledging his debt to Hayek and the Austrian economists. “One one level”, he wrote, the book

is an extraordinary well-written and well-argued tour through the various forms of damage that have been done in the twentieth century by centrally-planned social-engineering projects— by what James Scott calls “high modernism” and the attempt to use high modernist principles and practices to build utopia. As such, every economist who reads it will see it as marking the final stage in the intellectual struggle that the Austrian tradition has long waged against apostles of central planning. Heaven knows that I am no Austrian—I am a liberal Keynesian and a social democrat—but within economics even liberal Keynesian social democrats acknowledge that the Austrians won victory in their intellectual debate with the central planners long ago…

Scott’s work seems to have been highly generative (a bit like Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty in that respect), stimulating a lot of reflective writing on his themes and preoccupations. I’m thinking, for example, of Henry Farrell’s thoughtful meditation on “Seeing like a Finite State Machine”.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

Cover of the current issue of the New Yorker, showing what has become of the US Supreme Court.

Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words.

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A rose by any other name…

Quote of the Day

“I don’t think I am any good. If I thought I was any good, I wouldn’t be”

• John Betjeman

Lovely man, though logic wasn’t his strong point. I never pass St Pancras station, though, without thinking fondly of him. Without him it’d be some ghastly modernist pile.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Claude-Michel Schonberg | Bring Him Home | The Piano Guys

Link

Long Read of the Day

Putting the Boot in

Lovely essay by Robert Hutton on British journalism, as satirised by Evelyn Waugh, and embodied by Boris Johnson.

Scoop, whatever Waugh’s intention, offered generations of unserious young journalists the hope that they might pitch up somewhere, get drunk on expenses, fail to understand what was going on, and be declared a hero.

Which brings us to Boris Johnson. As well as being Britain’s most successful politician, the prime minister has long been one of the country’s highest-paid journalists, a job he did entirely in the Scoop mould. His sympathetic biographer, Andrew Gimson, describes how, posted to Brussels, Johnson delighted in producing stories that were more entertaining than accurate. It was not that he was opposed to writing accurate stories, but he didn’t see it as in any way essential.

The Scoop character Johnson most resembles isn’t the novel’s hero, the hapless William Boot, though…

Read on to find out who’s the model.

Footnote The piece was published in The Critic in 2021 when the foolishness of the British electorate to give Johnson a mandate to screw the country was becoming obvious to even the dogs in the street.

Books, etc.

One of the nicest surprises of last week was to discover that Rick Gekoski and his wife, Belinda Kitchen, were in town. We had dinner with them on Saturday evening. Rick is a writer, a successful rare-book dealer, a publisher and a former academic. So, like me, he has a foot in several graves.

He is also a consummate storyteller, which is why his essays on the book trade (and academia) are memorable. His book, Tolkien’s Gown, a set of essays about the publishing history of 20 great works, is full of stories that most of us would kill for.

I’ve known him for years and so it was great to catch up with him and Belinda. And then, towards the end of the meal, she pulled this rabbit out of her bag — a set of yarns about his dealings — both in rare books and with their authors. I was mortified that I had missed it (it came out in 2021, in the height of the pandemic). The only consolation for the embarrassment is that I now have literary entertainment for the post-EUFA week!

My commonplace booklet

My observation on Monday about the echoes of the famous Imo Jima photograph from WW2 in Evan Vucci’s remarkable photograph of a defiant Trump in the aftermath of the shooting led Joe Dunne to see another echo — Delacroix’s 1830 painting Liberty Leading the People.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• DJI Drone ascends Everest Link. The kind of mountaineering any couch-potato can enjoy.

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!

The joys of travel

An exhausted young couple trying to catch up on sleep in a crowded departure lounge.

Quote of the Day

“You can’t teach an old dogma new tricks”

• Dorothy Parker

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Renaldo Hahn | A Chloris | Susan Graham with Roger Vignoles

Link

I’d never heard of Hahn and so went digging. He was a Venezuelan composer who died in 1947 and had been Director of the Paris Opera. Proust portrays him in his novel Jean Santeuil .

Many thanks to Margaret Stobo for suggesting it.

Long Read of the Day

Twitter’s ragebait champagne v Threads’s sparkling annoyance

When Elon Musk completed his court-mandated acquisition of Twitter, many thousands of its users fled from the platform. Sensing a commercial opportunity, Meta (neé Facebook) set up a pale imitation called Threads. The other week the company announced on the first anniversary of Threads’s launch that the platform now had 175 million users. Impressive, eh?

Sounds impressive, doesn’t it. Not to Charles Arthur, who has done a penetrating analysis of Threads’s actual performance, and of how Meta has distorted the platform to achieve that 175 million figure.

Note the two figures that aren’t in the Threads number: the 100 million that it hit in the first week. This is actually bad news: it means that in the 51 weeks since, there have only been another 75 million users added, ie only a little more than a million per week, culled from Instagram and Facebook, which have more than a billion users each (though with a lot of overlap). In other words, perhaps one in a thousand users peeled off each week to join the people already there.

The other number that isn’t being revealed is daily active users…

It’s a terrific piece of journalism. And it shines a light on the essence of the social media business model — the amplification of outrage.

Footnote Interesting also that three days ago the European Commission announced that it is investigating X/Twitter for breaking the EU’s Digital Markets Act.

We don’t need ‘scientific’ research to tell us that smartphones are bad for kids

Yesterday’s Observer column: 

Jonathan Haidt is a man with a mission. In his day job, he’s a professor of ethics at New York University’s Stern School of Business. But outside academia, he’s a compelling campaigner. His mission: to alert us to the harms that social media and modern parenting are doing to our children. And his latest book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, pulls no punches. It is, said the New York Times, “erudite, engaging, combative, crusading”, which possibly explains why it has been on the newspaper’s nonfiction bestseller list for 14 weeks (it is now at No 2).

Haidt writes of a “tidal wave” of increases in mental illness and distress beginning around 2012. Young adolescent girls are hit hardest, but boys are in pain, too, as are older teens. He sees two factors that have caused this. The first is the decline of play-based childhood caused by overanxious parenting, which allows children fewer opportunities for unsupervised play and restricts their movement. This translates into low-risk childhoods in which kids don’t have the opportunity to make mistakes and learn from them. The second factor is the ubiquity of smartphones and the social media apps that thrive upon them. The result is the “great rewiring of childhood” of his book’s subtitle and an epidemic of mental illness and distress.

Haidt’s prescriptions for these ills include banning smartphones from schools…

Read on

My commonplace booklet

If it’s true that journalism, as the cliché puts it, is “the first draft of history”, then podcasting is the second draft. When used well, it’s an extraordinary medium for journalists because: it gives them time and space to tell complicated stories; has much more intellectual bandwidth than broadcast media (which always have to cater for the lowest common denominator); and harnesses a more intimate channel to the listener (most people listen on headphones).

All of these features were in evidence last week as I listened to The Belgrano Diary, Andrew O’Hagan’s riveting podcast series on what some people regard as ‘Britain’s Watergate’ — the Thatcher government’s attempts to conceal the truth about the sinking of an Argentinian warship during the Falklands War.

(The Watergate metaphor isn’t really accurate, though: that scandal drove Richard Nixon from office, whereas the Belgrano cover-up rescued Margaret Thatcher from electoral oblivion. So even if history rhymes, it certainly doesn’t repeat itself.)

In memoriam

My first thoughts on hearing of the assassination attempt on Trump and then seeing Evan Vucci’s remarkable photograph, with its Iwo Jima overtones, is that the American Republic’s experiment with democracy is ending. Trump, the Vietnam draft-dodger, will now metamorphose into Trump, the indomitable battle-torn hero, and the rest, sadly, will be history.

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Deux Amis

Neither of the friends were around when I called, alas.

Quote of the Day

We forget most of our past but embody all of it.

• John Updike

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Michael Hedges | Aerial Boundaries

Link

An amazing musician who died tragically young.

Long Read of the Day

Does Social Media cause anything?

Fabulous essay by Kevin Munger on the Crooked Timber blog.

In the 18 months since I quit Twitter, I can feel the atrophy of my vibe detector. I’m reading more than ever, on Substack and the FT, Discord and group chats — much of the same “content” I would’ve encountered on Twitter, in fact, but without the ever-present spiderweb of the social graph, the network of accounts, RTs and likes that lets me understand not only what someone thinks but what everyone else thinks about them thinking that.

So while I know that I’m missing the vibes, I cannot, of course, know which vibes I’m missing. Knowledge of vibes means never being surprised when someone says something: I know what kind of person they are, and I know what those kinds of people say. This is why Twitter users participate in The Discourse rather than in human-to-human dialogue: given the unknowability of another person, when we openly converse with them, we can always be surprised by what they say.

Although various Discourses now take place both on and between other platforms, the architecture of Twitter is ideal for textual Discourse and it seems to remain the hub.

The first time I was realized I was way off of the main vibe came from the response to Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation…

Read on, it’s very insightful. I came across it because I was thinking about Haidt’s book for my Observer column. Munger’s observation about Twitter/X being all about vibes rather than thoughtful discourse is spot on, IMO.

Books, etc.

I’m reading Woolf’s Selected Essays and enjoying them. No. 6 is “Evening over Sussex: Reflections in a motor car”. Here’s how it opens:

Evening is kind to Sussex, for Sussex is no longer young, and she is grateful for the veil of evening as an elderly woman is glad when a shade is drawn over a lamp, and only the outline of her face remains. The outline of Sussex is still very fine. The cliffs stand out to sea, one behind another. All Eastbourne, all Bexhill, all St. Leonards, their parades and their lodging houses, their bead shops and their sweet shops and their placards and their invalids and chars-á-bancs, are all obliterated. What remains is what there was when William came over from France ten centuries ago: a line of cliffs running out to sea. Also the fields are redeemed. The freckle of red villas on the coast is washed over by a thin lucid lake of brown air, in which they and their redness are drowned. It was still too early for lamps; and too early for stars…

I’m sure I would have detested Woolf had I met her in person. But I do love her writing.

My commonplace booklet

”AI Finds That AI Is Great In New Garbage Research From Tony Blair Institute”

This was the headline on a report by the 404 site.

The story reads:

A new paper from the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, presented yesterday by the former Prime Minister himself, predicts that more than 40 percent of tasks performed by public-sector workers could be partly automated, saving a fifth of their time in aggregate, and potentially leading to a huge reduction in workforce and costs for the government.

The problem with this prediction, which was picked up by Politico, Techradar, Forbes, and others, is that it was made by ChatGPT after the authors of the paper admitted that making a prediction based on interviews with experts would be too hard. Basically, the finding that AI could replace humans at their jobs and radically change how the government works was itself largely made by AI…

Why is this interesting? Two reasons:

1. It makes me even more suspicious about Blair’s multi-million ‘think tank’ — especially given that Blair has, from the outset, been idiotically bullish about ‘AI’.
2. And it raises worries that Keir Starmer’s tech team might be getting ‘advice’ about technology from Blair’s gaggle of high-priced consultants/ChatGPT prompters.

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Medieval laundry

In a Provencal village

Quote of the Day

“One thing about which fish know exactly nothing is water, since they have no anti-environment which would enable them to perceive the element they live in.”

• Marshall McLuhan

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Wagner | Prelude to Lohengrin

Link

Long Read of the Day

Effects of Aging

David Friedman is Milton’s son, and described by Wikipedia as “an American economist, physicist, legal scholar, and anarcho-capitalist theorist”. He’s inherited some of his old man’s qualities — particularly a libertarian streak, curiosity about ideas, and an argumentative temperament. All of which makes for a nice, readable Substack blog. I was struck by this recent post on the effects of ageing, not least because he and I are near contemporaries.

The peg for the piece is that “the effect on the presidential candidates of aging is currently a hot political topic”.

Almost everyone commenting on the subject has an axe to grind, a conclusion he wants people to reach, which makes it hard to know what claims to believe. I, however, have a source of information on the subject that, though limited — my sample size is one — I can at least trust, since it is my own experience. I am a year older than Donald Trump, two years younger than Joe Biden, so my first hand evidence of the effect of aging on me may be at least relevant to the effect on them.

Interesting and readable throughout. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

My commonplace booklet

Happy Finns

According to the Economist, Finland has roughly 3.5m saunas, more than one for two Finns. All government buildings have saunas.

To which Stowe Boyd attaches the comment:

Perhaps that is one of the reasons that the UN — for seven years in a row — has declared Finland the happiest country in the world. That, and gender equality, free education, universal affordable health care, trust in government institutions, and family-centric social policies.

Errata

Many thanks to the readers who wrote tactfully that the date on Monday’s edition (7 July) was wrong. Monday was, in fact, the eighth day of the month. One reader inquired if my difficulty with dates might be a reflection of drinking too much Rosé in a hot climate. Naturally, I couldn’t possibly comment.

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Washing up

Provence, June 2024.

Quote of the Day

“Loneliness as a situation can be corrected, but as a state of mind it is an incurable illness”

• Vladimir Nabokov

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Wagner | Tannhäuser Overture | Klaus Tennstedt with the London Philharmonic Orchestra

Link

Wonderful, and it made me think of Thomas Beecham, who founded the LPO and in 1936 took the orchestra to Germany, where Hitler was in the audience. A piece in the Guardian (possibly from an obituary) tells the story:

Why did they go? “He was proud of them,” says Lady Beecham, “and he wanted to take them to a country where there were many fine orchestras, to show them what a fine orchestra it was.” The story rings of an extraordinary figurative nose-thumbing that only Beecham could have carried off. Dr Berta Geissmar, personal assistant to conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, was Jewish and had fled the Nazi regime for London, where Beecham promptly employed her as his secretary. “And he took her with him to Germany,” says Lady Beecham. “She was absolutely terrified for the whole tour that they’d take her away. But with him beside her, they could do nothing at all.” At the Berlin concert, when he saw Hitler applauding, Beecham turned to the orchestra and said, “The old bugger seems to like it!” The remark went out on the radio across Europe. Had Beecham really forgotten that the concert was being broadcast?

Long Read of the Day

The Bluestocking, vol 325

Helen Lewis is one of the sharpest writers on politics and technology around, and her weekly Substack is invariably striking. Saturday’s edition was a joy, not least because she articulated thoughts that many of us were having on Friday morning:

Keir Starmer is prime minister, and that means more than getting to stand behind the lectern and do PMQs. I just read a piece saying the Rwanda plan was “dead” and my brain went: oh, yeah! When you’re in government, you can just . . . do things! The legislative agenda will no longer be plotted around “what will make Suella Braverman and the other Telegraph columnists leave us alone for a bit”. We don’t have a prime minister who would need to be put behind a puppy gate if he caught an infectious disease. Never again will I hear breathless whispers about “how many letters Graham Brady has”. We might even . . build some bloody houses. A new dawn has broken, has it not?

For me, one of the nicest things about this election is the sheer luxury of remembering all the people whose opinions no longer matter. Sorry, Grant Shapps, but your much vaunted “ability to count” will now be inflicted on the private sector. Farewell, Jacob Rees-Mogg, have fun on the witness-protection programme that is your GB News show. Liz Truss, I will see you at CPAC, where absolutely no one will understand why you are there…

Great stuff. Personally, I’ve always seen Rees-Mogg as an unctuous Savile Row tailor who can only do double-breasted suits. The trouble is, to be a tailor you have to have some special skills, and being unctuous is the only one that Mogg possesses.

(His old man William — or ‘Pater’, as Mogg probably called him) was more interesting than most people realise — and not just because he was Editor of The Times from 1967 to 1981. With James Dale Davidson he wrote The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age  about “the fourth stage of human society,” which will apparently liberate individuals as never before, irrevocably altering the power of government. It became required reading for Peter Thiel and the wilder fringes of the Silicon Valley libertarian crowd.)

Microsoft’s Recall feature wasn’t that intelligent

Yesterday’s Observer column:

On 20 May, Yusuf Mehdi, a cove who rejoices in the magnificent title of executive vice-president, consumer chief marketing officer of Microsoft, launched its Copilot+ PCs, a “new category” of Windows machines that are “designed for AI”. They are, needless to say, “the fastest, most intelligent Windows PCs ever built” and they will “enable you to do things you can’t on any other PC”.

What kinds of things? Well, how about generating and refining AI images in near real-time directly on the computer? Bridging language barriers by translating audio from 40-plus languages into English? Or enabling you to “easily find and remember what you have seen in your PC”.

Eh? This remarkable memory prosthesis is called Recall. It takes constant screenshots in the background while you go about your daily computer business. Microsoft’s Copilot+ machine-learning tech then scans (and “reads”) each of these screenshots in order to make a searchable database of every action performed on your computer and then stores it on the machine’s disk. So not only will you be able to search for a website you had previously visited, but you can also search for a very specific thing that you read or saw on that site. That jacket you saw on a tab a few weeks ago but you simply cannot remember who was selling it. The AI, though, knows about jackets and can find it…

Read on

UK politics

TheyWorkForYou – now with (almost) all new MPs

mySociety is a terrific example of public-interest technology. It provides digital tools that make it easy for British residents to communicate with, and monitor, their public representatives. One of these is their “They Work for You” service, which makes it easy to find your MP and send an email to her or him. What amazed me on Friday morning was to find that they had already updated the site as new MPs were confirmed as election results were coming in.

It was an impressively agile response. Shows how this tech can revitalise democratic institutions.

My commonplace booklet

Have you been Kodaked?

An interesting Smithsonian essay on “How the Rise of the Camera Launched a Fight to Protect Gilded Age Americans’ Privacy”. The Box Brownie was the Instagram of its age.

Feedback

On quotations about old age, Gally Maxwell reminded me that Lewis Wolpert included many quotable comments in his book, You’re Looking Very Well: The Surprising Nature of Getting Old.

For example:

”One understands the viewpoint of Agatha Christie: ‘I married an archaeologist because the older I grow, the more he appreciates me.'” (p197)

And

”Edward Grey put it: ‘I am getting to an age when I can only enjoy the last sport left. It is called hunting for your spectacles.’” (p37)

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Custodian of the Square

Every morning, when we come down to the village, we find this black cat in his observation post, keeping an eye on things.

Quote of the Day

“An elderly friend once told me there were four ages to life: youth, middle age, old age, and ‘You look great’.”

• Robert Reich, who turned 78 the other day (and seems in good shape!)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

D:Ream | Things Can Only Get Better

Link

Here’s hoping!

Long Read of the Day

Israel’s Two Front War

If the British Academy had a category for academia’s national treasures then Lawrence Freedman would be my nominee. He’s the most knowledgeable and astute commentator on contemporary warfare. In his Substack blog (cheekily entitled Comment is Freed, a poke at the Guardian, I guess), he now turns his attention to what’s happening in the Middle East.

What makes the situation now even more dangerous is the role of the Iranian regime with its slogan of ‘Death to Israel.’ It is the Iran factor which turns a conflict which was already difficult enough, but might have been contained, into something that has already gone much wider. It has done its utmost to ensure that Hamas can sustain and develop its military capabilities, works with the Houthis in Yemen and Hezbollah in Lebanon, and promotes radical Shia groups throughout the region. The Arab monarchies have always been fearful of Iranian-inspired radicalism. This is one reason why they have got closer to Israel. But prior to the Gaza War they had also been trying to find some modus vivendi with Iran. The same was true with the Biden Administration, as it tried to rescue the nuclear deal with Iran which had been agreed under Obama but then abandoned by Trump. But the clerical Iranian regime has become more and not less hard-line, including supporting Russia in its aggression in Ukraine. It is pressing on with its nuclear programme. It presents itself as a key player in an anti-Western coalition. Its other slogan is ‘Death to America.’

The Gaza war began with a breakdown of deterrence. Israel had believed that Hamas to its south and Hizballah to its north understood that however much they hated Israel they could not do much about its continuing existence. But Hamas was not deterred and found a way through Israeli defences. Having concluded that Hamas cannot be either appeased or deterred, from the Israeli perspective the only option left was its elimination. But it also can’t be eliminated…

Israel is now gearing up for an incursion into Lebanon to push Hizballah back from its current positions, and to this end is redeploying forces from the south to the north. Netanyahu has dismissed the idea that an unfinished war in the south makes it unwise to take on a new one in the north: ‘We can fight on several fronts. We are prepared for this.’

There’s no good news here, which is why Freedman’s analysis is sobering.

Books, etc.

I’ve read Dan Davies’s book and have been deeply impressed by it, not just because it’s the first time I’ve seen an economist write insightfully about cybernetics and the work of Stafford Beer, but also because it suggests a way of looking at corporations (and other large organisations) as artificial superintelligences (what Charlie Stross called “Slow AIs”).

I was incubating a review of the book when what should pop up but a terrific long essay by Brad DeLong, who is a great economist and a lot smarter than me. Funnily enough, he also set out to write a brief review of Dan’s book and wound up writing 5,000 words. So, rather than try inventing that wheel, I’m happy to hand over to him!

Here’s how he sets the scene:

By reviving the ideas of cybernetics pioneer Stafford Beer, Davies suggests we can build organizations that are not just efficient, but truly accountable. In an age of AI anxiety and institutional mistrust, The Unaccountability Machine offers a timely reminder: the machines we fear most are the ones we’ve already built.

We have built a world of vast, interlocking systems that no one can fully understand. From corporate behemoths to government bureaucracies, these leviathan-like societal machines with human beings as their parts make decisions that shape our lives—often with disastrous consequences. Can there be a way to tame these monsters of our own creation, to give them human faces? Dan Davies thinks the forgotten discipline of “management cybernetics” might provide a way. That is the crux of his brand-new The Unaccountability Machine. Our societal woes stem not from individual failings, but from the opaque workings of large-scale decision-making structures—hence the need for better system design, better feedback loops, and more and better chosen variety of information, state, and action in these machines’ control mechanisms. Cybernetics was the discipline to help us understand communication and control in complex systems. The steersmen all ran aground, But we can try again…

It’s worth your time because, as Brad puts it, “it sheds light on one of the most pressing issues of our time: why big systems make terrible decisions”.

My commonplace booklet

OpenAI Co-founder Andrej Karpathy explains the new computing paradigm: LMOS

“We’re entering a new computing paradigm with large language models acting like CPUs, using tokens instead of bytes, and having a context window instead of RAM.

This is the Large Language Model OS (LMOS)”

Link

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

The ‘poetic AI camera. Intriguing idea (and story) from Om Malik’s blog.

It is essentially a 3D-printed camera body that houses a Raspberry Pi and a small printer typically used for printing receipts. It uses a Raspberry Pi’s visual module to capture a “photo,” then sends it to the internet, uses “AI” to analyze the image, and returns with a poem based on what it sees.

In other words, it’s an AI camera. It consistently generates short, cute poems that you can print out to share with others or paste into your journal. It is quite fun. This device perfectly encapsulates what I believe is inspired tinkering that will lead to new products and breakthroughs.

The Raspberry Pi is one of the wonders of the digital world.

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