Monday 14 September, 2020

Cambridge: morning rush-hour

Trumpington Street, 09:10 this morning.


Quote of the Day



McJob: A low-pay, low-prestige, low-dignity, no-future job in the service sector. Frequently considered a satisfying career choice for people who have never held one”.

  • Douglas Coupland, Generation X.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Last Thing On My Mind, sung by Tom Paxton and Liam Clancy

Link

That must have been some evening.


Computers for Cynics 0 – The Myth of Technology

Link

If, like me, you’re interested in the history of computing, then Ted Nelson is almost a mythical figure. He’s an American pioneer of information technology, philosopher and sociologist. He coined the terms hypertext (the idea that text doesn’t have to be linear) and hypermedia (ditto for other media) and devoted much of his life to a utopian project called Xanadu — a global hypertext system that would store and display documents, together with giving users the ability to perform edits. On top of this basic idea, Nelson wanted to facilitate nonsequential writing, in which readers could choose their own paths through an electronic document. He outlined some of these ideas in a famous paper to the 1965 ACM national conference, calling the new idea “zippered lists” which would allow compound documents to be formed from pieces of other documents, a concept named Nelson called transclusion.

I first came on Nelson when writing my history of the Internet in the mid 1990s, and saw his work as a continuation of Vannevar Bush’s 1939 idea of ‘associative linking’ (which he published in a 1945 edition of The Atlantic) and as a precursor of Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web. Nelson was always very critical of the Web (and of its inventor) because Tim hadn’t built into it the possibility that a web page could be annotated or rewritten by a user. In other words, it was a one-way hypertext system rather than the multi-way concept of Xanadu. (We had to wait until Ward Cunningham invented the wiki for that to become possible.)

But although Nelson was firmly lodged in the collective unconscious of the Web I’d never actually seen him in action. Which is why coming on this video today was such a delight. He’s just as I imagined him — irrepressible and original to the core.


Some universities are doing admissions right

Universities that brought students back to campus have already seen a rough start to the fall, with more than 50,000 infections across the country. But some have seemingly cracked the code.

The big picture: A number of schools have managed to open up while quelling or even preventing outbreaks, either because they’re effectively testing and tracing or because they’ve got smaller student bodies and more rural locations.

Source

But, on the other hand, see this rant by Scott Galloway, an NYU professor who has been right on a lot of other issues (including tech power). He thinks it’s not only unwise but immoral for American colleges to be re-opening at the present time.

Fasten your seat-belts. Scott doesn’t do nuance.


America’s Plastic Hour Is Upon Us

This is the strange headline over the long read of the day — George Packer’s essay on whether American democracy is capable of revival. The country is at a low point, he says, “but we may be on the cusp of an era of radical reform that repairs our broken democracy”. He’s good on how American politics has degenerated into its current crisis, and very informative on how radical and far-reaching Biden’s policy platform is (much of it was — shamefully — new to me), but at the end I remained as pessimistic about the future of American democracy as I had been when I started reading.

Here’s how he concludes the essay, though:

I began writing this essay in a mood of despair. The mood had grown so familiar, really almost comfortable, that it made me sick of myself and my country. But because I can’t give up on either—suicide is too final, and expatriation is no longer possible—I tried to think about the future and the past. And this is what I’ve come to believe: We have one more chance—in Lincoln’s words, a “last best hope”—to bring our democracy back from the dead. It will be like a complex medical rescue that requires just the right interventions, in just the right sequence, at just the right speed: amputation, transfusion, multiple-organ transplant, stabilization, rehabilitation. Each step will be very hard, and we can’t afford to get any wrong or wait another hour. Yet I’ve written myself into a state of mind that I recognize as hope. We’ve made America before. Self-government still gives us the chance. Everything is in our hands.


Cambridge sans tourists

I lived in the centre of Cambridge from 1968 to 1989 (I now live three miles outside), and one of the things I most liked about the city was how it was in the month of September. The town was always crammed with tourists between Easter and the end of August, but once September arrived the tourists disappeared and the local inhabitants used to emerge from their hideouts and reclaim their town. So suddenly you’d run into people you hadn’t seen since before the Summer, rediscover cafes and delicatessens that were no-go-areas during the tourist season, and so on.

But then that all began to change in the 1990s — largely, I think, because of the increasing prosperity of China. So Chinese and other oriental tourists seemed to come almost the whole year round and there were times when the town reminded one of Venice. It got so bad, for example, that I stopped cycling up King’s Parade because of the risk of hitting oblivious, selfie-stick-wielding tourists trying to get a portrait with King’s chapel as a backdrop.

And now? There are no tourists. And precious few locals either: they’re mostly still cowering in their Covid-resistant bunkers. But this morning was beautifully sunny so we cycled in early and I parked my bike in the centre and went walkabout with a Leica, taking pictures and drinking in the place. I had breakfast in the open air from a stall in the half-deserted market (looks as though many stallholders have had to give up during the tourist-famine), and sat listening to the conversation of the chaps from local building sites as they gathered for their elevenses. It was absolutely heavenly. Just like it used to be in the 1970s and 1980s.

Here are a few of the pictures (as well as the ‘rush-hour’ one at the top. (A click on each should give you a larger image.)

The Fitzwilliam Museum is defiantly open!

At least one stallholder is hoping that someone will want ‘souvenirs’ of their visit to Cambridge.

Great St Mary’s still looms over the largely deserted market.

And on the pavement outside the door of the apartment that Maynard Keynes used after his marriage the council has stencilled “Keep Left” in white paint!


Cognitive dissonance rules OK?

Given the slogan, I wonder how many of the mask-refusniks also believe that it’s a woman’s right to choose?


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Thursday 10 September, 2020

Quote of the Day

“The battle for the mind of Ronald Reagan was like the trench warfare of World War I. Never have so many fought so hard for such barren terrain.”

  • Peggy Noonan, speechwriter for Reagan 1984-9

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Handel: Handel – Let The Bright Seraphim – Rowan Pierce and David Blackadder (5 minutes)

Link

Nobody sleeps at the back when this is on.


The power of a photograph to tell a story

Photograph by Fergus McGinn

Nice NYT article on the Coronavirus lockdown in Ireland.

A pint of Guinness. A half-eaten meal. And an alarm clock.

All are laid out on a table in front of an older man as he gazes out the window of a pub in Galway, Ireland, in a photo that has come to capture the nation’s coming to terms with coronavirus regulations.

The image has come to symbolize different things for different people: Some have used it to criticize the government’s restrictions on pubs, while others have applauded the man’s commitment to regulations on dining out.

Pubs that serve food have been allowed to open since the end of June. But new restrictions require that customers have a “substantial meal” costing at least 9 euros (about $10.60) if they also purchase alcohol. The rules also require patrons to leave within an hour and 45 minutes — hence the timer.

Like many countries across Europe, Ireland has seen a spike in coronavirus cases in recent weeks, with daily cases moving from the single digits during a lull in new infections in June and July to 307 new cases announced on Tuesday.

The photograph was taken by Fergus McGinn, the owner of the pub. His intention, he said, was to show a man enjoying the simple pleasure of a meal and a drink but he also hopes the picture will make people aware of the role the local pub plays for isolated members of the community in Ireland.

“Taking that away from people, that social outlet for that generation, it could be detrimental and savage on their mental health,” Mr. McGinn said.

Particularly in Ireland’s rural communities, pubs serve as a central place to connect socially, even for those who aren’t big drinkers. Yet pubs that don’t serve food have been closed since the lockdown began in March, though this week the government agreed to reopen them on September 21st.

And the significance of the timer? The government rules also require pub customers to leave within an hour and 45 minutes.


Diana Rigg RIP

A wonderful actress has passed away. There’s a nice BBC obituary up today, but there will be lots more. As the BBC obit put it, “She excelled at playing sharp-witted female characters who carried steel fists in velvet gloves.” Spot on.

As a former TV critic, though, this book is what I will remember her for.

It’s a compendium of the most wicked things theatrical folk can say about one another. I found it an indispensable fountain of ideas when I was writing about a programme or a performer that I particularly disliked.

But the interesting thing is that Rigg also included in it some of the rude things critics said about her!

For example, she reprints John Simon’s crack in New York Magazine about her nude scene in Abelard and Heloise in May 1970: “Diana Rigg is built like a brick mausoleum with insufficient flying buttresses”.

“I remember”, Rigg wrote,

“making my way to the theatre the following day, darting from doorway to doorway and praying I wouldn’t meet anyone I knew. The cast behaved with supreme tact and pretended they hadn’t read the review.”

btw: I think Simon needed to have an eye-test. Rigg was a truly beautiful woman. But she disliked doing nude scenes. “I come from Yorkshire”, she said once, “and no-one from Yorkshire takes their clothes off except on a Friday night”.

May she rest in peace.


What Bob Woodward knew (but didn’t tell — until now)

The veteran Washington reporter Bob Woodward (he of Watergate fame) has made a small industry out of conducting long interviews of US presidents and their courts when he then turns into what are (IMHO) surprisingly dull books. He’s just published the latest tombstone in this series — on the first Trump presidency.

For a less jaundiced perspective, the Columbia Journalism Review has a more detached view of the volume by Pete Vernon.

In books about presidents from Nixon to Obama, Woodward has employed a similar approach, conducting exhaustive interviews on background and using the information he gathers to write from an omniscient perspective. Woodward and Carl Bernstein, his colleague at The Washington Post, used the most famous anonymous source in American history—FBI Associate Director Mark Felt a.k.a. “Deep Throat”—to expose the cover-up behind the Watergate burglary that unraveled Nixon’s presidency. This week, Woodward told Michael Schmidt of The New York Times that “you won’t get the straight story from someone if you do it on the record. You will get a press release version of events.” But as Axios’s Jonathan Swan, one of the current masters of Washington intrigue, noted, sources “also lie on background. A lot.”

And no group of officials in recent memory has proved as willing to bend the truth as those in the Trump administration. The recent controversy over Steve Bannon’s invitation (later rescinded) to appear at The New Yorker Festival led The Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan to declare, “Enough, already, with anything Steve Bannon has to say.” When Kellyanne Conway appears on CNN, critics question why the network gives a platform to the official who coined “alternative facts.” Yet for Woodward, reliance on the same sources is received differently: If it’s not OK for David Remnick to talk to Bannon in front of an audience, why is it OK for Woodward to use him, quite obviously, as a key source in the book?

Woodward’s approach hasn’t changed; the climate in which his sources are viewed has. Every administration is filled with people who have an agenda, who want to spin events in their favor, but the lines of credibility have shifted. In taking on the Trump presidency as his topic, Woodward is left to assemble a reliable book from unreliable sources….

Already, there are lots of controversies blowing up from specific parts of Woodward’s account. But one in particular has caught my eye. Here’s how Politico puts it:

President Donald Trump acknowledged the “deadly” nature of the coronavirus earlier this year in a series of recorded interviews with The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward, even as Trump publicly sought to dismiss the disease’s threat to Americans.

Recounting a conversation with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Trump told Woodward on Feb. 7 that the coronavirus is “more deadly than your, you know, your — even your strenuous flus.”

“This is more deadly,” he said. “This is five per — you know, this is 5 percent versus 1 percent and less than 1 percent, you know. So, this is deadly stuff.”

A few days later Trump was out in public basically claiming that this ‘Chinese flu’ was not such a big deal and he had it under control, or words to that effect.

There has been a huge hoo-hah about this, particularly the fact that Woodward knew that Trump had been lying through his teeth about the virus, but had decided not to tell anyone, let along the American people. Here’s a sample of the resulting indignation — Bess Levin in Vanity Fair:

When news broke on Wednesday that venerated reporter Bob Woodward’s forthcoming book had Donald Trump on record saying that he purposely downplayed the threat of COVID-19, despite knowing that it was “deadly stuff,” the outrage was deafening. The fury and disgust initially centered around the president’s decision to lie to the public about the fatal virus, proclaiming that it was nothing to worry about while knowing full well that it was. Later the conversation turned to Woodward’s decision to withhold crucial information, with some arguing that it was a dereliction of his duty as a journalist not to come forward and tell people, in real time, that the president was lying to their faces, as he instead saved it for his book. “There is no ethical or moral defense of Woodward’s decision to not publish these tapes as soon as they were made,” former BuzzFeed News Washington bureau chief John Stanton tweeted. “If there was any chance it could save a single life, he was obligated to do so. Bob Woodward put making money over his moral and professional duty.”

I don’t have a dog in this fight, but I was struck by Woodward’s reported response to this charge:

Speaking to the Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan, Woodward said he waited it out because (1) Trump is a habitual liar, and he hadn’t yet done the reporting necessary to know if the president was actually telling the truth in this instance, and (2) He wanted to put the statements into context and publish them closer to the election so that people didn’t forget about them on their way to the polls:

Who knows? That might have been a shrewd judgement.


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Monday 7 September, 2020

Quote of the Day

“The world is not black and white. More like black and grey.”

  • Graham Greene

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young – Teach Your Children

Link

I’ve always loved this song.


Michael Sandel on the dark sides of meritocracy

On Sunday, the Observer carried a remarkable interview by Julian Coman with the Harvard political philosopher Micheal Sandel based on The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?, his forthcoming critique of the doctrine of meritocracy that has been a cornerstone of both right and centre-left politics for several generations.

The Tyranny of Merit, says Coman,

is Sandel’s response to Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. For figures such as Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, it will make challenging reading. By championing an “age of merit” as the solution to the challenges of globalisation, inequality and deindustrialisation, the Democratic party and its European equivalents, Sandel argues, hung the western working-class and its values out to dry – with disastrous consequences for the common good.

Sandel says that ‘the rhetoric of rising’ touted by centre-left figures became

an article of faith, a seemingly uncontroversial trope. We will make a truly level playing field, it was said by the centre-left, so that everyone has an equal chance. And if we do, and so far as we do, then those who rise by dint of effort, talent, hard work will deserve their place, will have earned it.”

The whole idea of a meritocracy, in that sense, was pernicious, first of all because there never was a level playing field (as anyone who has sat on a Harvard or Oxbridge admission panel can testify), but also because only one kind of ‘merit’ was valued and valorised: academic success and the credentials that came with it. The message to every occupant of this non-level playing field, however, was: “better yourself or bear the responsibility for your own failure”.

In the end, is it any surprise that the ‘deplorables’ (to use Hilary Clinton’s vicious term) took their votes elsewhere. “The populist backlash of recent years”, says Sandel, “has been a revolt against the tyranny of merit, as it has been experienced by those who feel humiliated by meritocracy and by this entire political project.”

Great interview. I’ve ordered the book. It’s out on Thursday, I think.


How to fool an “AI” tutor: keyword mashing

Lovely story from The Verge*:

On Monday, Dana Simmons came downstairs to find her 12-year-old son, Lazare, in tears. He’d completed the first assignment for his seventh-grade history class on Edgenuity, an online platform for virtual learning. He’d received a 50 out of 100. That wasn’t on a practice test — it was his real grade.

“He was like, I’m gonna have to get a 100 on all the rest of this to make up for this,” said Simmons in a phone interview with The Verge. “He was totally dejected.”

At first, Simmons tried to console her son. “I was like well, you know, some teachers grade really harshly at the beginning,” said Simmons, who is a history professor herself. Then, Lazare clarified that he’d received his grade less than a second after submitting his answers. A teacher couldn’t have read his response in that time, Simmons knew — her son was being graded by an algorithm.

Simmons watched Lazare complete more assignments. She looked at the correct answers, which Edgenuity revealed at the end. She surmised that Edgenuity’s AI was scanning for specific keywords that it expected to see in students’ answers. And she decided to game it.

Now, for every short-answer question, Lazare writes two long sentences followed by a disjointed list of keywords — anything that seems relevant to the question. “The questions are things like… ‘What was the advantage of Constantinople’s location for the power of the Byzantine empire,’” Simmons says. “So you go through, okay, what are the possible keywords that are associated with this? Wealth, caravan, ship, India, China, Middle East, he just threw all of those words in.”

Before we know it, people will be using this trick to compose blogs. HT to Charles Arthur for spotting it.


The end of democracy as we’ve known it

Like many people, I’ve been brooding on what’s happening. Some thoughts, in no particular order;

  1. It’s very disconcerting and disturbing to have to confront the possibility that the system which has shaped our collective lives for so long may be running out of steam. What has hitherto been unthinkable suddenly seems thinkable, or even possible.

  2. As my colleague David Runciman pointed out in his terrific book, How Democracy Ends, democracy (or at any rate the versions of it that we have experienced) will eventually come to an end, if only for the reason that nothing lasts forever. (Just ask the Romans, or the Ottomans, or indeed the British.) In other writings, David has pointed out that American democracy is now middle-aged and he used the metaphor of the daft or dangerous things that middle-aged men do when they start to realise the fact of their own mortality — like buying a powerful motorbike. In that sense, Trump could be seen as American democracy’s motorbike.

  3. But men buy motorbikes in the knowledge that if they do come off there will be an ambulance service and an A&E Unit in a local hospital to rescue them from their fate. And there’s an insurance company that will pay for the damage to the bike or to other people’s lives or property.

  4. So the US electorate may have felt safe in taking a punt on Trump, on the grounds that if it turned out badly, well, then, the system would take care of them. In a way, that was also the thinking of my many liberal American friends who told me that, while Trump would be terrible, “we are a Republic of Laws” and the Constitution, the separation of powers and the court system would keep him under control and limit the damage, pending restoration of normalcy.

  5. What American electors didn’t know (although they might have guessed) is that this particular metaphorical motorbike had the intention — and the capacity — to eliminate ambulances, A&E units and insurance services. Trump’s evisceration of the capacity of the federal government is a thing to behold — as Michael Lewis memorably chronicled in his book The Fifth Risk. Likewise his capture of the Senate (and, initially, the House), his stacking of the Supreme Court and his raft of lesser judicial appointments.

  6. In his book, Runciman also made the point that democracy won’t fail backwards, but forwards. Looking back to Weimar Germany, for example, is a waste of time. The failure, when it comes, will take unexpected forms. One of the things we learned early from Trump (and, later, from Boris Johnson) is how norms and conventions play a key role in maintaining the democracy we have become used to.

  7. For example: the idea that it’s unacceptable for a holder of high office to use the office as a way of enriching himself and his family and associates; the convention that if you lose an election you accept the verdict of the electorate rather than declaring it rigged; the norm that you don’t use the machinery of the Deep State as a way of settling personal or political scores; the convention that you do not ally with foreign adversaries in order to buttress your domestic position; and so on. (Analogous norms in the UK are ideas like: that you don’t prorogue Parliament simply to curtail debate; that ministers take responsibility for mistakes and incompetence or corrupt behaviour and resign; that you provide government spokespersons to responsible media organisations to enable them to provide ‘balanced’ coverage of public issues; that you do not give large contracts to favoured companies run by cronies; and so on.) What we are seeing, in these two supposedly mature democracies, is their versions of democracy being hollowed out by the flouting of hitherto respected conventions and norms. And there seem to be no legal ways of preventing this.

  8. Adherents of the notion that democracy will fail backwards often identify the failure to hold free elections as the mechanism by which the collapse into authoritarianism (or worse) happens. The opposite seems to be becoming the case. Free, or relatively free, elections will continue to be the norm. But political polarisation, extremism, control of mainstream media and exploitation of social media will ensure that authoritarian candidates come out on top or — if they do not — that the legitimacy of the elections will be questioned. Orban in Hungary and Erdogan in Turkey are the paradigmatic examples of autocrats who have been freely elected by ‘the people’. And even if their majorities are relatively small, they rule as though they had received 99.9 per cent of the vote.

  9. Consequently, a better litmus test for the existence of democracy in the future will not be whether free elections are routinely held, but whether peaceful transfers of power happen. Interestingly, this is one of the questions now beginning to trouble those American friends of mine who were so sanguine about the restraining power of democratic institutions in the pre-Trump era.

  10. And none of this thinking involves exploring an equally important question, namely what’s so great about the kind of democracy under which we have apparently being living so contentedly. (See the earlier post about Michael Sandel’s new book.)


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Sunday 6 September, 2020

Quote of the Day

“Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment.”

  • Norman Mailer, 1966

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Liam O’Flynn & Mark Knopfler – An Droichead (the Bridge)

Link

Liam O’Flynn was the greatest uileann piper of his generation. Here he teams up with Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits fame.


Why we liberals simply cannot understand Trump

Insightful essay by Matt Taibbi arguing that most of us view Trump’s language and behaviour though the wrong lens.

The elite misread of Trump is egregious because he’s an easily familiar type to the rest of America. We’re a sales culture and Trump is a salesman. Moreover he’s not just any salesman; he might be the greatest salesman ever, considering the quality of the product, i.e. himself. He’s up to his eyes in balls, and the parts of the brain that hold most people back from selling schlock online degrees or tchotchkes door-to-door are absent. He has no shame, will say anything, and experiences morality the way the rest of us deal with indigestion.

Pundits keep trying to understand him by reading political scare-tracts like The Origins of Totalitarianism or It Can’t Happen Here, but again, the books that explain Trump better tend to be about things like pro wrestling (like Controversy Creates Cash or The Business of Kayfabe) or the psychology of selling (like Pre-Suasion or Thinking Fast and Slow). The people howling about outrageous things Trump says probably never sat in a sales meeting.

This is spot on. Trump is so unlike most people, and so especially unlike anyone raised under a conventional moral framework, that he’s perpetually misdiagnosed. (I’ve often though that the same applies to people like Boris Johnson and Jeffrey Archer). “The words we see slapped on him most often”, writes Taibbi,

like “fascist” and “authoritarian,” nowhere near describe what he really is, and I don’t mean that as a compliment. It’s been proven across four years that Trump lacks the attention span or ambition required to implement a true dictatorial regime. He might not have a moral problem with the idea, but two minutes into the plan he’d leave the room, phone in hand, to throw on a robe and watch himself on Fox and Friends over a cheeseburger.”

Great essay. Thanks to Jonathan Holland for pointing it out.


The manipulation of the market in tech stocks

The gap between the stock market and the real economy has become fantastic (in the literal sense), but when the NASDAQ experienced that massive recent reversal in tech stocks one didn’t need to be Einstein to realise that something weird was going on. And indeed there was: Softbank, the huge investment fund which enables authoritarians (among others) to launder their sovereign wealth, had embarked on the biggest buying spree of options ever seen.

John Thornhill had a lovely piece — “Tesla and the Audacity of Hype” — about this in the FT on Saturday in which he pointed out that Tesla’s share price has more than quadrupled this year. Elon Musk’s company is currently valued at about $379bn, which is “one and a quarter times more than Toyota and Volkswagen combined”.

Which reminds me of an exchange I had recently with one of my grandsons. I’m planning to get an electric car soonish and he’s very keen that I should buy a Tesla. When quizzed about his approval of that particular marque, it turns out that his school class had been engaged in a stock-market simulation game. Each pupil was given ‘$100,000’ in monopoly money to invest in equities over a certain period, after which the gains and losses were totted up. He had come out top of the class by a large margin. How had he done it? “I just put it all into Tesla stock, grandad”, he replied.

That lad will go far. He’s ten years old.


Apple’s iOS update will be bad news for advertisers, but a boon for users

This morning’s Observer column:

On the other hand, users (as distinct from developers) are about to see an upside of Apple’s monopoly power. The next update of its mobile operating system, iOS14, includes a change that should have a dire impact on many online advertisers. The industry assigns a unique code to each device called an IDFA. Knowing your IDFA can help advertisers tell whether their ads are effective, particularly when they’ve shown you the same ad in multiple places. Facebook uses the IDFA as part of Audience Network, its ad network for developers.

But with iOS14, Apple will require developers to show you a warning that they are collecting your IDFA – and you’ll have to opt in to sharing it. So iPad and iPhone users can expect an initial blizzard of requests for permission to share your device’s IDFA – requests for which there is a simple, two-letter, answer: no.

This prospect had many stalwarts of the business memorably described by George Orwell as “the rattling of a stick in a swill bucket” changing their underpants twice a day. So loud were their screams of pain that Apple announced on Thursday that it would delay the switch to 2021 to give the poor dears time to adjust. The corporate world will see this as a pragmatic decision, given current attitudes to tech monopolists. The rest of us see it as a wasted (or at least deferred) opportunity to do some good.


Algorithmic dystopia

“From viral conspiracies to exam fiascos, algorithms come with serious side effects” is the headline over a long essay of mine about machine-learning in today’s Observer.

Here’s how it concludes…

In the end the question we have to ask is: why is the Gadarene rush of the tech industry (and its boosters within government) to deploy machine-learning technology – and particularly its facial-recognition capabilities – not a major public policy issue?

The explanation is that for several decades ruling elites in liberal democracies have been mesmerised by what one can only call “tech exceptionalism” – ie the idea that the companies that dominate the industry are somehow different from older kinds of monopolies, and should therefore be exempt from the critical scrutiny that consolidated corporate power would normally attract.

The only consolation is that recent developments in the US and the EU suggest that perhaps this hypnotic regulatory trance may be coming to an end. To hasten our recovery, therefore, a thought experiment might be helpful.

Imagine what it would be like if we gave the pharmaceutical industry the leeway that we currently grant to tech companies. Any smart biochemist working for, say, AstraZeneca, could come up with a strikingly interesting new molecule for, say, curing Alzheimer’s. She would then run it past her boss, present the dramatic results of preliminary experiments to a lab seminar after which the company would put it on the market. You only have to think of the Thalidomide scandal to realise why we don’t allow that kind of thing. Yet it is exactly what the tech companies are able to do with algorithms that turn out to have serious downsides for society.

What that analogy suggests is that we are still at the stage with tech companies that societies were in the era of patent medicines and snake oil. Or, to put it in a historical frame, we are somewhere between 1906, when the Pure Food and Drug Act was passed by the US Congress, and 1938, the year Congress passed the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, which required that new drugs show safety before selling. Isn’t it time we got a move on?

Yes it is.


Robert McCrum bids farewell to his American dream

“A ‘tyrant-clown’ has destroyed my love affair with America”, he writes.

My own long affair with America, as an idea as much as a reality, began in the bicentennial year, 1976, with a graduate scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania. Among the lovely red brick of old Philadelphia, I maxed out on the promise and possibilities of the American revolution, its majesty, optimism and rhetoric. Those pioneers of radical political self-expression, Jefferson, Franklin, et al, became idols of deep faith. For instance, years later, on a return visit to the Constitution Center, I was brought to tears by a video devoted to that love letter to democratic principles, the US constitution, and the eternal magic of “We, the people”.

Today, after the pre-election convention season, it’s almost impossible to imagine such emotions. Like many Europeans who once looked across the Atlantic at a great democratic experiment, I’ve quit. Somehow, I must cultivate indifference to disguise the end of a long love affair. It’s become an agony to express this disillusion, but I have to try.

The first intimations of this crisis probably occurred when, visiting New York in 2017, I attended a famous Public Theater production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in Central Park. From the moment a strawberry blond Caesar (Gregg Henry in a Maga baseball cap) bounded on stage in a white shirt and a long red tie, this was a polemical interpretation that set cultivated New Yorkers at odds with the culture warriors of Fox News. Now, it seems eerily prescient of America’s nightmare: the disintegration of a great society under the leadership of an orange monster, half-clown, half-tyrant.

Like many US admirers, I’ve made allowances for a necessary disruption. I’ve argued with sceptical friends that America is not “broken”, the federal system remains resilient, and the grip of the constitution still sure. But once my admiration for the United States choked and died this year, bludgeoned by the racism, cruelty, corruption and outright stupidity of the current administration, this loss of faith became desolating.

I know from emails from readers that many subscribers to this blog feel the same. The Vietnam war ended my own romantic view of the US, though for a time I hoped that Obama’s presidency might rescue it. Alas.


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Monday 31 August, 2020

Quote of the Day

”There’s only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.”

  • Aldous Huxley, 1945

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Rachmaninov plays Händel ~ The Harmonious Blacksmith

Link


Why Jeff Bezos’s net worth is $200 billion

Matt Stoller is a determined campaigner for regulation of tech monopolies. He’s particularly sharp on Amazon’s strategies and tactics. This time he has a terrific analysis of the company’s ingenuity in responding to the loss of an important court case.

The background is this: An Amazon customer bought a laptop battery from a Chinese third-party seller on Amazon. The battery exploded, injuring her. She sued Amazon. The company tried to deny liability — including trying a preposterous legal stunt saying that it was protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act which exempts online platforms from liability for speech published on their platforms. The Judge declined to accept that selling an exploding battery constituted “speech”.

Anyway, the case went all the way in the Californian courts, and Amazon lost. So what did it do next? Stoller takes up the story:

What speaks to the savvy of Amazon is how the corporation reacted to its loss. After the court ruled, Amazon public policy lead (and former FTC and DOJ Antitrust official) Brian Huseman then swung into action. Last Friday, he published a blog post reversing Amazon’s position.

Not only did Amazon support legislative action to hold itself strictly liable for products sold on its platform, Huseman wrote, but it would support legislation to go beyond the court’s decision. Huseman said Amazon supported Stone’s bill on online marketplace liability, but Amazon wanted it to be even stronger and broader. Amazon, after being held liable in court for hurting someone by selling defective products, would pose in a legislative fight as the consumer’s biggest champion.

Huseman is an increasingly important player in the Amazon public policy shop, and as Amazon is a creature of public policy, it makes him one of the more important executives at the corporation. Former Obama press secretary Jay Carney, who ostensibly runs global affairs for Amazon, is a public relations guy and glad-handler of political VIPs, whereas Huseman, though behind the embarrassing HQ2 fiasco, does understand law.

The California bill, AB 3262 in its original form [which Stoller’s organization endorsed in its report on Amazon], would have forced Amazon to take responsibility for what merchants sold on its platform, but the court decision essentially took care of this problem for the legislators. .

Huseman, recognizing that Amazon will have take responsibility for what it sold, in turned asked the legislature to apply strict liability to anyone remotely connected to selling things online. Not only should Amazon be held liable for products its merchants sell, wrote Huseman, but all online platforms or websites should be liable, not just for helping to place products into the marketplace but under any business model. The ultimate language of the legislation included not only placing products into the marketplace, but ‘facilitating’ the placing of such products into the marketplace.

Note the significance of this. If this were enacted it would means that every dog and pony selling anything online would be subject to strict liability. And guess what that would do to the dogs and ponies? The outfit with the deepest pockets and the best lawyers (aka Amazon) would finally be the only game in town.

Which is why Bezos winds up with a net worth of $200B.


George Packer: How Biden can lose

Grim — really grim — and perceptive piece. The nub of it is that protests about police violence against black citizens creates a no-win trap for the Democrats.

The day before, on Monday, the Republicans began their remote convention. The simultaneous mayhem in Kenosha seemed like part of the script, as it played into their main theme: that Biden is a tool of radical leftists who hate America, who want to bring the chaos of the cities they govern out to the suburbs where the real Americans live. The Republicans won’t let such an opportunity go to waste. “Law and order are on the ballot,” Vice President Mike Pence said on Wednesday night. Other speakers were harsher.

It’s no use dismissing their words as partisan talking points. They are effective ones, backed up by certain facts. Trump will bang this loud, ugly drum until Election Day. He knows that Kenosha has placed Democrats in a trap. They’ve embraced the protests and the causes that drive them. The third night of the Democratic convention was consumed with the language and imagery of protest—as if all Americans watching were activists.

On Monday, the day after Blake’s shooting, Biden and his vice-presidential nominee, Senator Kamala Harris, released statements expressing outrage. The next day, Biden’s spokesperson released a statement opposing “burning down communities and needless destruction.” And on Wednesday, Biden, after speaking with the Blake family, condemned both the initial incident and the subsequent destruction. “Burning down communities is not protest,” he pleaded in a video. “It’s needless violence.” He said the same after George Floyd’s killing.

How many Americans have heard him?


The Irish Passport podcast on #golfgate

This episode is an hour long, but worth a listen: it provides a really good insight into why the flouting of social-distancing rules by some of the Irish Establishment figures (who had promulgated the said rules) has caused such outrage in Ireland.


Seeing like a city: how tech became urban

This scholarly — and open access academic article, by the prominent urban sociologist Sharon Zukin, is the best survey article I’ve seen on the complicated infatuation of city planners and urban elites with tech companies. It asks why so many cities have failed to resist the allure of Big Tech and digital capitalism (i.e. lost their marbles). And it examines what is lost as city administrations keep genuflecting before the gods of “innovation and entrepreneurship.”

The Abstract reads:

The emergence of urban tech economies calls attention to the multidimensional spatiality of ecosystems made up of people and organizations that produce new digital technology. Since the economic crisis of 2008, city governments have aggressively pursued economic growth by nurturing these ecosystems. Elected officials create public-private-nonprofit partnerships to build an “innovation complex” of discursive, organizational, and geographical spaces; they aim not only to jump-start economic growth but to remake the city for a new modernity. But it is difficult to insert tech production space into the complicated urban matrix. Embedded industries and social communities want protection from expanding tech companies and the real estate developers who build for them. City council members, state legislators, and community organizations oppose the city government’s attempts to satisfy Big Tech companies. While the city’s density magnifies conflicts of interest over land-use and labor issues, the covid-19 pandemic raises serious questions about the city’s ability to both oppose Big Tech and keep creating tech jobs.

Longish read. Not for everybody, but if you’re interested in tech and society (as I am) it’s good stuff.


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5:

Wednesday 26 August, 2020

Quote of the Day

“In the short-run, the stock market is a voting machine; in the long-run, it’s a weighing machine.”

  • Warren Buffett, whose 250 million Apple shares currently weigh about $118B.

(A single Apple share purchased at the 1980 IPO price – $22 – would be worth $27,859 today.)


Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bach: Cello Suite No 1 in D played on the guitar by John Feeley (19 minutes)

Link


What is it about Uber and Chinese students?

A friend who lives in Cambridge and uses Uber reports a common theme in his current conversations with drivers. When he asks them the standard “how’s business?” question the common refrain is “terrible”. And the reason? There are no Chinese students around at the moment. It seems that they are the biggest users of the service when they’re in residence. They even use Uber to take them to lectures (this in a town where everything is within easy walking distance.)

Why is this, I wonder? Could it be that they have more money than sense? Or that they don’t like walking or cycling? Or that they feel vulnerable on the street? Weird.


Fixing capitalism

Quartz has a series of articles on this general theme. It’s a mixed bag, but some of them — for example the one about regulating Amazon like a railroad — is interesting.


e-Scooters: drowning not waving

Sifted story

Hundreds of e-scooters are picked up from waters around European cities every year. In Stockholm, the lake cleaning organisation Rena Mälaren has picked up 355 in total in the last couple of years. In Paris another organisation, Guppy, has picked up 235 over seven excursions.

Each e-scooter is worth a few hundred euros and the newer models have a predicted lifespan of three to five years. Apart from lost earnings, every time one is lobbed into a canal or river it also damages the scooter operator’s relationship with the local authorities.

But one scooter startup has come up with a new plan to tackle the problem: a drowning button.

Voi, the Stockholm-based scooter operator, is in the process of unveiling a new scooter with features such as indicators. It is also likely to have a feature which is the scooter equivalent of an SOS signal.

“That is the plan. We just have to work out the functionality,” says Kristina Hunter Nilsson, communication manager at Voi. She hopes the feature could also be retrofitted to Voi’s older scooters too. “Some of these things are software-driven which means that we can add it to the older models as well. And it is in everyone’s interest that we have that.

When an electric scooter ends up in the water it loses its connectivity and is therefore difficult to find. The drowning feature will alert Voi when a scooter ends up underwater and the hope is that, in many cases, it can then be rescued before too much damage has been done.

But exactly how long a scooter survives underwater is something that Hunter Nilsson cannot say for sure. “That really depends on a lot of things and I wouldn’t want to give you an exact number of days,” she says.

What have these people been smoking?


The US is facing the possibility of an illegitimate election

David Litt (author of Democracy In One Book Or Less) writing in The Atlantic:

“A sitting president trying to undermine the postal service so he might win an election is not something that happens in rich, developed democracies,” says University College London’s Brian Klaas, the co-author of How to Rig an Election. “It’s the kind of thing that happens in post-Soviet countries, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Middle East.” In the language of political science, President Donald Trump is hoping to take America from “self-enforcing democracy”—a system of government in which leaders allow fair elections and accept the results—to “competitive authoritarianism,” in which rulers allow elections, but those elections are neither fair nor free.

The good news, or at least the 2020 version of good news, is that Americans can protect the integrity of their elections without appealing to the better angels of Trump’s nature. Would-be autocrats are unlikely to be persuaded, but they can be deterred. By making it far less likely that stealing an election would work—and far more likely that those who try to would face consequences for their actions—the United States can preserve democracy this year and beyond.

Defending American democracy starts with taking advantage of one of its greatest existing strengths: its decentralized nature. Each state, territory, and district administers its own local contests with near-total independence. The federal government sets certain rules for federal elections; that authority falls to Congress, not the White House. This makes it hard for the president to undermine an election’s integrity, and easier for local officials to uphold it. Already, some states are adding secure drop boxes for ballots, recruiting additional election staff, and finding room in their budgets to ensure that the casting and collection of ballots runs as smoothly as possible during the pandemic. The less chaos that takes place on November 3, the fewer excuses the president will have to interfere with vote counting.

Even in places—including some swing states—where officials are all too happy to help the president undermine the democratic process, individual Americans can do a great deal to protect the integrity of the election…

The most astonishing thing is that such a piece doesn’t seem outrageous in a serious magazine nowadays. It’s a measure of how serious the risks to democracy even in mature states are becoming.


Stefan Collini on the enigma of Frank Kermode

Lovely essay by Stefan Collini in the London Review of Books on a critic we were both fortunate enough to have known. Sample:

So when and how, I wondered, not for the first time, did the ‘Frank Kermode’ we admired come into being, il capo di tutti capi in the world of reviewing and criticism for more than half a century? During another of my trudges along the forgotten caravan routes of criticism (now undertaken electronically, thanks to lockdown), I chanced upon, in the online archive of the Listener, a review by John Gross of Frank’s Puzzles and Epiphanies: Essays and Reviews 1958-61, published in 1962. The very existence of such a collection of reviews – and the brazen proclamation of its origin in such a brief period – itself suggested the dramatic transformation which must have overtaken Frank’s career by this point. Gross, then a 27-year-old up-and-coming reviewer-academic who was later to write The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters and to become editor of the Times Literary Supplement, had evidently been attending to Frank’s presence on the literary scene for some time. He noted that the contents of the book were all products of a three-year period, and then went on: ‘Reading them as they appeared, one became aware of Professor Kermode as the most interesting reviewer to emerge for a long time.’ The reviews had been published in a variety of periodicals, including the Listener, Partisan Review and the London Magazine, but the majority were from either the Spectator or Encounter. So when had all that started to happen, when did the smart London weeklies and monthlies begin to commission reviews from the little-known young lecturer who, recruited by Gordon, had moved to the University of Reading in 1949?


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Tuesday 25 August, 2020

When Britain was a world power

Inside page of a British passport in the late 1940s.

It reads:

We, Ernest Bevin, a Member of His Britannic Majesty’s Most Honourable Privy Council, a Member of Parliament, etc.etc. His Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Request and require in the name of His Majesty all those whom it may concern to allow the bearer to pass freely without let or hindrance, and to afford her every assistance and protection of which she may stand in need.

Those were the days. I wonder what the Brexit version says.


Quote of the Day

“An acre in Middlesex is better than a Principality in Utopia”.

  • Thomas Macaulay

(Especially now, given London property prices.)


Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Grieg – Piano Concerto II. Adagio | Arthur Rubinstein (7 minutes)

Link

Rubinstein in the finest white tie I’ve ever seen. Olympic-class sharp dressing. Conducted by a youthful Andre Previn.


US Air Force shows off latest all-electric flying car, says it ‘might seem straight out of a Hollywood movie’

Er, not if it’s an action movie.

From The Register

The US Air Force has revealed a prototype of a flying car, something the American military has desired for at least a decade.

The latest build is single-person aircraft – specifically, a version of the Lift Hexa copter, which uses 18 electric motors that allow it to take off and land vertically. The vehicle was put through its paces last Friday at the Texas State Guard’s Camp Mabry base.

The craft is part of a project the Air Force is running called Agility Prime, which has tapped up Lift and other manufacturers to develop single-person “flying car” aircraft for field tests within the next three years. Other prototypes will be showcased in the coming weeks.


Picking locks with audio technology

This is interesting or alarming, depending on your point of view. From an article by Paul Marks in the August 13 edition of Communications of the ACM:

The next time you unlock your front door, it might be worth trying to insert your key as quietly as possible; researchers have discovered that the sound of your key being inserted into the lock gives attackers all they need to make a working copy of your front door key.

It sounds unlikely, but security researchers say they have proven that the series of audible, metallic clicks made as a key penetrates a lock can now be deciphered by signal processing software to reveal the precise shape of the sequence of ridges on the key’s shaft. Knowing this (the actual cut of your key), a working copy of it can then be three-dimensionally (3D) printed.

This discovery of a major vulnerability in the physical keys that millions of us use to secure domestic and workplace doors and lockers was made by cyberphysical systems researcher Soundarya Ramesh and her team at the National University of Singapore.

What’s being attacked by the NUS team are the keys to pin-tumbler locks, best known as Yale or Schlage keys, though those are just the market leaders and a whole host of other firms make them, too. Inside such locks, six metal pins, affixed to springs, are pushed up to different heights by the ridged teeth on the key, or kept low by the voids between the ridges. When all six spring-loaded pins are pushed to the correct height by the right key, the tumbler containing them is freed to turn, allowing the lock to be opened. Such a lock typically has something of the order of 330,000 possible key shapes.

Of course, these locks can be picked by a skilled operator armed with the right tools. But if s/he wants to burgle the premises again, the same painstaking procedure needs to be repeated, with a corresponding risk of detection. The 3D printing approach enables the bad actor to acquire a duplicate which if good for multiple entries.

It’s a fascinating article IMO which covers the really tricky questions — for example, how one might obtain the audio recording needed to crack the profile of the key.


Summer books #13

The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth, Penguin Modern Classics.

Joseph Roth’s masterpiece about the Austro-Hungarian empire was published in 1932. Shortly after it came out he was forced into exile by the Third Reich, after which he lived mostly in Paris and drank himself to death. It was recommended it to me by Helen Thompson, and I owe her a debt of gratitude for that. It’s one of the best novels I’ve ever read. There’s a very good New Yorker essay about him and the way his work was rediscovered by post-war generations.


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Monday 24 August, 2020

Quote of the Day

The mystery which surrounds a thinking machine already surrounds a thinking man.”

  • B. F. Skinner

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Claudio Abaddo conducting the Berlin Phil. And I mean conducting.

Link


“Years of photos” permanently wiped from iPhones, iPads by bad Lightroom app update

From The Register:

Adobe is offering its condolences to customers after an update to its Lightroom photo manager permanently deleted troves of snaps on people’s iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touches.

First reported by PetaPixel, the data annihilation was triggered after punters this week fetched version 5.4 of the iOS software. Netizens complained that, following the release and installation of that build, their stored photos and paid-for presets vanished. Adobe acknowledged the issue though it didn’t have much to offer punters besides saying sorry.

Of course this is really just a (relatively rare) glitch in cloud storage. But I stick by my conviction that if you want your grandchildren to see your photos, print them off now on photographic paper (using a company like Photobox) and put them in shoeboxes (or, better still, Tupperware-type boxes) in the attic!


If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich? Turns out it’s just chance.

The most successful people are not the most talented, just the luckiest, a new computer model of wealth creation confirms. Taking that into account can maximize return on many kinds of investment.

MIT Tech Review has a good summary of a fascinating piece of agent-based simulation modelling.

The Abstract for the research report reads:

The largely dominant meritocratic paradigm of highly competitive Western cultures is rooted on the belief that success is due mainly, if not exclusively, to personal qualities such as talent, intelligence, skills, efforts or risk taking. Sometimes, we are willing to admit that a certain degree of luck could also play a role in achieving significant material success. But, as a matter of fact, it is rather common to underestimate the importance of external forces in individual successful stories. It is very well known that intelligence or talent exhibit a Gaussian distribution among the population, whereas the distribution of wealth – considered a proxy of success – follows typically a power law (Pareto law). Such a discrepancy between a Normal distribution of inputs, with a typical scale, and the scale invariant distribution of outputs, suggests that some hidden ingredient is at work behind the scenes. In this paper, with the help of a very simple agent-based model, we suggest that such an ingredient is just randomness. In particular, we show that, if it is true that some degree of talent is necessary to be successful in life, almost never the most talented people reach the highest peaks of success, being overtaken by mediocre but sensibly luckier individuals. As to our knowledge, this counterintuitive result – although implicitly suggested between the lines in a vast literature – is quantified here for the first time. It sheds new light on the effectiveness of assessing merit on the basis of the reached level of success and underlines the risks of distributing excessive honors or resources to people who, at the end of the day, could have been simply luckier than others. With the help of this model, several policy hypotheses are also addressed and compared to show the most efficient strategies for public funding of research in order to improve meritocracy, diversity and innovation.


New Yorker profile of Joe Biden

Long read of the day.

Marvellous piece by Evan Osnos, one of the best writers on the magazine. It’s realistic, serious, unsentimental. But also sympathetic. Here’s a sample:

Every day, Biden’s aides try to get him on the phone with a regular person. One afternoon in April, he was patched through to Mohammad Qazzaz, in Dearborn, Michigan. Three weeks earlier, Qazzaz, who runs a coffee-roasting business, had tested positive for covid-19. When Biden called, he was quarantined in his house, trying to protect his wife and two children.

Qazzaz, who recorded the call and played it for me, told Biden that his daughter, who is two, did not understand why he would not come out of his bedroom: “She keeps telling me, ‘Baba, open the door. Open the door.’ ” As he described his situation, his voice broke, and he tried to steady himself. “I’m sorry, Mr. Vice-President,” he said.

“Don’t be sorry,” Biden said. “I think your emotional state is totally justified. And, as my mom would say, you have to get it out.”

Biden told Qazzaz that he, too, once had children too small to understand a crisis unfolding around them. “Nothing is the same, but I have some sense of what you’re going through,” Biden said. He suggested that Qazzaz play a simple game with his daughter through the door, asking her to guess a number or a color. “Tell her stories about what it’s going to be like when Daddy gets better,” he said. They talked for a while about Qazzaz’s father, who emigrated from Jerusalem. “Look, you’re going to get through this,” Biden said. “We are the nation we are because we’re a nation of immigrants.” The call was supposed to last five minutes; they talked for twenty-two.

Listening to Qazzaz’s call was reminiscent of Roosevelt’s famous line: “The Presidency is not merely an administrative office. . . . It is preëminently a place of moral leadership.” Joe Biden’s life is replete with mistakes and regrets. And, if he comes to the Presidency, he is unlikely to supply much of the exalted rhetoric that reaches into a nation’s soul. But, for a people in mourning, he might offer something like solace, a language of healing.

This is the kind of piece that reminds me why I subscribe to the New Yorker.


How Zeynep Tufekci Keeps Getting the Big Things Right

Zeynep Tufecki has for years been one of the sharpest and most perceptive academic commentators on the tech industry. This NYT piece explains why.

In 2011, she went against the current to say the case for Twitter as a driver of broad social movements had been oversimplified. In 2012, she warned news media outlets that their coverage of school shootings could inspire more. In 2013, she argued that Facebook could fuel ethnic cleansing. In 2017, she warned that YouTube’s recommendation algorithm could be used as a tool of radicalization.

And when it came to the pandemic, she sounded the alarm early while also fighting to keep parks and beaches open.

“I’ve just been struck by how right she has been,” said Julia Marcus, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School.

I was curious to know how Dr. Tufekci had gotten so many things right in a confusing time, so we spoke last week over FaceTime. She told me she chalks up her habits of mind in part to a childhood she wouldn’t wish on anyone…

Her book, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest is terrific btw.


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Sunday 23 August, 2020

Quote of the Day

”To the ordinary working man, the sort you would meet in any pub on Saturday night, Socialism does not mean much more than better wages and shorter hours and nobody bossing you about.”

  • George Orwell

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Pete Seeger: Where have all the flowers gone?

Link

It’s magical sometimes when — as happens here — an artist in a live concert embarks on a well-known and much-loved song and the audience joins in.

I’ve been to a few concerts where this happened. The most vivid memory I have is of a concert given by the Irish folk group Altan. They come from a small village in Co Donegal, but even after they became world-famous they used to come back home once a year to give a concert for the locals. I was lucky to go to one of these events on a glorious Summer evening in an hotel just outside the village of Glencolumbkille. The connection between the band and the audience was positively visceral. Everybody knew everybody else. Half-way through, Mairéad Ní Mhaonaigh, the lead singer and co-founder of the group, embarked on Green Grow the Rushes-oh. Here’s a sample from a studio recording…

Link

After a few bars, the next time she came to the chorus, Mairéad went quiet, and the audience, without missing a beat, kept it going, softly, with the odd bit of harmony. It was an electrifying moment that I will never forget.

Thanks to Janet Cobb for suggesting Pete Seeger.


All hail the California court that put the brakes on Uber and co

This morning’s Observer column:

Last Monday, the superior court of California handed down a landmark judgment that looks like taking the wind out of the sails of at least some parts of the “gig economy”. The case was brought by the attorney general of the state of California, together with the city attorneys of Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco, on the basis that the ride-hailing companies Uber and Lyft have “misclassified their drivers as independent contractors rather than employees” in violation of a Californian law that took effect in January. This statute is intended to ensure that all workers who meet its criteria receive the basic rights and protections guaranteed to employees under California law.

The companies opposed this idea, for the understandable (but of course unstated) reason that complying with the law would blow their business models to smithereens. In submissions concealed under three coats of prime legal verbiage, they sought to have the hearing delayed until after the November presidential election, complained that the attorneys general should not have lumped them together (they are, after all, commercial rivals) and that judgment should be deferred until all the other cases concerning them in the US and elsewhere should be decided. Guardian Today: the headlines, the analysis, the debate – sent direct to you Read more

Judge Ethan Schulman was not impressed by these arguments…

Read on


Reflections on the Democratic National Convention…

On Thursday I blogged about Obama’s speech, and on Friday I wrote about Kamala Harris. I think she was a shrewd choice of running-mate for lots of reasons, but her record of being close to the Silicon Valley crowd bothered me because I think it’s important that a Biden administration should tackle the problems for democracy posed by these unaccountable tech giants. On the other hand, as Obama warned, there is a bigger problem looming than tech monopoly — the future of democracy itself in the US, and that should, er, trump all other concerns just now. What matters most is that Trump should not get a second term.

Looking back on the week, and the convention, I’ve been reading lots of commentary. A few things stood out…

Russell Berman is right about Obama’s speech: he’s switched from hope to fear as the motivating factor:

As Obama railed against the “cynicism” that he said Trump was relying on to win, and then as he recalled the sacrifices of those who were spit on and beaten as they fought for the right to vote, he seemed almost on the verge of tears. It didn’t seem like an act. If the former president hadn’t previously seen the need to tear into Trump for the sake of the country, what are Democrats to make of the fact that now, apparently, he does? Obama, suddenly a gray-haired father figure to his party, no longer sounded merely disappointed—he seemed frightened.

Spot on. Obama was no longer in his customary ‘professorial’ mode: he sees a second Trump term as an existential threat to democracy in America. And he’s right.

And Dave Winer had this sobering reflection:

Racism and misogyny are on the ballot this year. Even white men can now feel the effects. I think that’s what the last twelve years in the US have been about. Here’s the story. George W. Bush was so awful, we needed an antidote, and we liked Obama. We liked how sassy he was, and smart, and how well he spoke, his confidence and ambition. The whole package. It was his moment. Trump is the reaction because there were a lot of Americans who felt tremendous fear and resentment in having a young sassy (they’d probably say uppity) black man as president, no matter that he brought the economy back from the wreck that the Repubs left us. Remember how they drove it into a ditch. #

So in 2016 it was Trump vs HRC. But before that it was Sanders vs HRC. That’s where I, a white man, learned how men keep women down. In the debates I was so angry that Sanders interrupted and screamed over HRC, his arms waved into her space. She had to take it. Could she respond in kind? No way. Not sure what the women’s equivalent of uppity is, but it’s a real thing. And because she was my candidate, I felt it, felt it in a way I had never felt it before. I was enraged by it. But it seems most people couldn’t even see it. #

The people who hated that a black man was president sure as hell weren’t going to follow him with a woman president. No matter that she’s smart as a whip, would have been a great president, and look who she was running against. What a slap in the face for women as equals — that so many people chose a huckster, buffoon, Putin surrogate, man-child, tax evader, draft dodger, rich kid, criminal, instead of HRC. It really says something.#

This morning while getting ready to write it hit me. The last four years have been a symbolic lynching of Barack Obama. Anyone who still approves of Trump, if they have a mind, must be driven by rage, the kind of rage that results in a young confident black man being strung up on a tree. They’re willing to let a virus decimate the country in order to express their rage. Anyone who votes for Trump this time, imho, should lose the right to call themselves an American.

In today’s Observer, Edward Helmore spotted something really interesting in Biden’s speech — his adoption of a few lines from Seamus Heaney, specifically from The Cure at Troy, Seamus Heaney’s free translation of Sophocles’s Philoctetes.

History says,
Don’t hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.

Helmore’s piece consulted Roy Foster, who is currently writing a book about Heaney (and who has written a magisterial two-volume biography of W.B. Yeats).

“Biden apparently is a reader of poetry, and read Yeats and Heaney to improve his stutter,” Foster said. “He has spoken about his admiration for Irish poetry. So he was coming from a background of literacy. Coming up against a functionally illiterate president, it is quite a contrast.”

Sophocles’ play, first performed in 409BC, is about how a bitter division was overcome between the archer Philoctetes, left on Lemnos with a festering wound – a snake bite – and Odysseus, who needed his help in the Trojan War. Heaney’s 1991 translation speaks directly to Northern Ireland – his birthplace – and its conflicts.

“Heaney altered the weight of the play to place great emphasis on Neoptolemus, the go-between figure, an honourable, decent man, so the play is in many ways about negotiation,” Foster said. The former senator has quoted it at least five times before, including at the tail end of his nomination campaign, when he again turned to Heaney’s “longed-for tidal wave of justice”.

Biden was deliberately using it as a reconciliatory metaphor, Foster said, adding: “America is an immensely divided society at the moment. So for him to use it as what – for some Americans – will be an arcane poetic tag is an interesting, highly literate and culturally ambitious approach. It was unexpected from him.”

One interesting thing is that Trump seemed unable to respond to this literary reference. Presumably he has no idea who Heaney was, never mind Sophocles.


Summer books #12

Humankind: a Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman,

If ever there were a book for the pandemic, then this is it. The paradox it addresses is how a pervasive conviction that people are intrinsically selfish, vindictive and untrustworthy can be squared with the fact that in most situations of crisis humans behave sensibly, cooperatively and often generously. Why is it that we assume that William Golding’s Lord of the Flies provides a perceptive and accurate insight into human nature, when the evidence — even in a real-life case of schoolboys marooned on a desert island — says exactly the opposite? This is the “veneer theory” of human nature: the view that civilised behaviour is just a thin veneer which when shattered by events reveals a dark underside. Rutger argues that this cognitive dissonance can be — and often is — viciously circular. If we expect people to be evil, then we will treat them accordingly, and things spiral downwards from there.

I’m only part-way through the book, but am finding it immensely readable and stimulating. The work it most reminds me of is Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined, which similarly challenged another pervasive (and erroneous) conviction. My personal experience of local responses to the Coronovirus pandemic has corroborated Rutger’s argument. Most people I know have behaved calmly, generously and supportively. Sure, there have been incidents of panic-buying (remember the toilet-paper shortage), irresponsible partying, etc. But on the whole the crisis seems to confirm an optimistic view of human nature.


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Thursday 20 August, 2020

Clean break?


Quote of the Day

“Hypocrisy is the most difficult and nerve-wracking vice that any man can pursue; it needs an unceasing vigilance and a rare detachment of spirit. It cannot, unlike adultery or gluttony, be practised at rare moments; it is a whole-time job.”

  • Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale, chapter 1.

Now why does this remind me of Boris Johnson?


Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Andres Segovia Plays Minuet and Trio by Joseph Haydn

Link


Apple is now a $2 trillion company

Which only goes to show the disconnect between the stock market and the real world. More evidence is provided by the Tesla market cap.


Text and video of Barack Obama’s speech to the 2020 Democratic Convention

Text can be found here

Link to video


Truth decay: when uncertainty is weaponized

Terrific review in Nature by Felicity Lawrence of David Michaels’s new book, The Triumph of Doubt: Dark Money and the Science of Deception. Sample:

These are indeed upside-down times, as epidemiologist and former safety regulator David Michaels demonstrates in his excoriating account of the corporate denial industry, The Triumph of Doubt. Unwelcome news is automatically rebranded fake news. Inconvenient evidence from independent sources — say, about climate breakdown and fossil fuels, or air pollution and diesel emissions — is labelled junk science and countered with rigged studies claiming to be sound.

But it would be wrong to see truth decay solely as the preserve of today’s populist politicians. Normalizing the production of alternative facts is a project long in the making. Consultancy firms that specialize in defending products from tobacco to industrial chemicals that harm the public and the environment have made a profession of undermining truth for decades. They hire mercenary scientists to fulfil a crucial role as accessories to their misrepresentations.

Michaels was among the first scientists to identify this denial machine, in his 2008 book Doubt is Their Product. His latest work combines an authoritative synthesis of research on the denial machine published since then with his own new insights gleaned from battles to control the toxic effects of a range of substances. He takes on per- and polyfluoroalkyls, widely used in non-stick coatings, textiles and firefighting foams; the harmful effects of alcohol and sugar; the disputed role of the ubiquitous glyphosate-based pesticides in cancer; and the deadly epidemic of addiction to prescribed opioid painkillers. In each case, Michaels records how the relevant industry has used a toolbox of methods to downplay the risks of its products, spreading disinformation here, hiding evidence of harm there, undermining authorities — all tactics from the tobacco industry’s playbook…


How to fix a lethal aircraft

Step 1: Get advice from the President

Step 2: Implement it

Boeing Press Release issued today:

WARSAW, Poland, Aug. 19, 2020 – Boeing [NYSE: BA] and Enter Air today announced the Polish airline is expanding its commitment to the 737 family with a new order for two 737-8 airplanes plus options for two more jets.

No mention of the 737 MAX. Yet that’s what Enter Air is actually buying.

HT to Cory Doctorow for spotting it.

Remind me never to fly Enter Air.


Summer books #9

The Odyssey, translated by Emily Wilson, Norton, 2018.

A truly extraordinary and beautiful book: Homer’s epic translated in vigorous, pellucid prose. It has exactly the same number of lines as the original. And the pages are rough-cut to encourage the suspension of disbelief. Here’s how it begins:

Tell me about a complicated man.
Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost
when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy,
and where he went, and who he met, the pain
he suffered on the sea, and how he worked
to save his life and bring his men back home.
He failed, and for their own mistakes, they died.
They ate the Sun God’s cattle, and the god
kept them from home. Now goddess, child of Zeus,
tell the old story for our modern times.
Find the beginning.

Wonderful.


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