Monthly Archives: October 2017

The camera always lies

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Lovely photograph of Abe, looking statesmanlike. It was taken by Mathew Brady, a celebrated photographer of the Civil War era. I found it in Errol Morris’s review of Peter Manseau’s The Apparitionists: A Tale of Phantoms, Fraud, Photography, and the Man Who Captured Lincoln’s Ghost. Here’s what Morris writes about the picture:

“Lincoln did not look much like a statesman as he stood in Brady’s posing room. The photographer drew up Lincoln’s collar to shorten the appearance of his neck, and determined that he could put his artists to work taming Lincoln’s hair after the image had been developed. They also might smooth the crags in his face — whatever might be done to make him appear more presidential. As a final touch, Brady placed Lincoln’s hand on a book, as if the senator were already taking the oath of office.”

Now, of what does this remind me? Oh yes, Emmanuel Macron and the care he took over his presidential portrait (the one that hangs in every Mairie in France.

Lovely analysis of the semiotics of this photograph here.

Facebook’s biggest ethical dilemma: unwillingness to acknowledge that it has one

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There are really only two possible explanations for the crisis now beginning to engulf Facebook. One is that the company’s founder was — and perhaps still is — a smart but profoundly naive individual who knows little about the world or about human behaviour. The other is that he is — how shall I put it? — a sociopath, indifferent to what happens to people so long as his empire continues to grow.

I prefer the former explanation, but sometimes one wonders…

Consider Free Basics — the program to bring Internet access to millions of people in poor countries. It works by having Facebook pre-installed on cheap smartphones together with deals with local mobile networks that traffic to the Facebook app will not incur any data charges.

The cynical interpretation of this is that it’s a way of furthering Zuckerberg’s goal of replacing the Internet with Facebook, creating the ultimate global walled garden. The charitable spin is the one Zuckerberg himself put on it — that Free Basics provides a way to connect people who would otherwise never go online.

Either way, the effects were predictable: new users in these countries think that Facebook is the Internet; and Facebook becomes the major channel for news. The NYT has a sobering report on what happened in Myanmar, where Facebook now has millions of users.

“Facebook has become sort of the de facto internet for Myanmar,” said Jes Kaliebe Petersen, chief executive of Phandeeyar, Myanmar’s leading technology hub that helped Facebook create its Burmese-language community standards page. “When people buy their first smartphone, it just comes preinstalled.”

But since the company took no editorial responsibility for what people used its service for, when it transpired that it was being used to stir up ethnic hatred and worse, it seemed unable to spot what was happening. “Facebook”, reports the Times,

has become a breeding ground for hate speech and virulent posts about the Rohingya. And because of Facebook’s design, posts that are shared and liked more frequently get more prominent placement in feeds, favoring highly partisan content in timelines.

Ashin Wirathu, the monk, has hundreds of thousands of followers on Facebook accounts in Burmese and English. His posts include graphic photos and videos of decaying bodies that Ashin Wirathu says are Buddhist victims of Rohingya attacks, or posts denouncing the minority ethnic group or updates that identify them falsely as “Bengali” foreigners.

It’s the same story as everywhere else that Facebook has touched. A company that built a money-making advertising machine which gets its revenues from monetising user activity finds that sometimes that activity is very unsavoury and inhumane. And when this is finally realised, it finds itself caught between a rock and a hard place, unwilling to accept responsibility from the unintended consequences of its wealth-generating machine.

What polarisation does to people

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Mueller’s first indictments brings him into the lower echelons of Trump’s entourage and the direction of travel is clear — upwards. Which leads me to speculate about how this will play out. My bet is that eventually Trump will ‘do a Nixon’, fire Mueller and pardon anyone he has indicted. But whereas Nixon’s dismissal of Archibald Cox turned out to be his fatal mistake, in Trump’s case, nothing much will happen because the Republicans control Congress and that’s that.

Which brings to mind Trump’s claim during the campaign that he can do anything he likes — shoot someone on Fifth Avenue I think is what he said — and get away with it. My hunch is that he was right.

Why is that? The US — like all societies — is made up of predominately decent, law-abiding people who should be repelled by many of the things that Trump does and says. Why is their tolerance for this moral cretin apparently infinitely elastic?

Political polarisation is one answer. It’s been growing in the US for decades. One of its consequences is that political differences turn into irreconcilable enmity, such that the idea of ‘agreeing to differ’ becomes unthinkable. And this has now become pathological.

David French has an interesting OpEd piece in today’s NYT on why “Mueller’s Investigation Won’t Shake Trump’s Base”. His argument is that Trump diehard supporters have two cognitive strategies that insulate them from the reality of how the President Is behaving. The first is the “fake news” meme: information that is critical or revealing about Trump is corrupt propaganda and therefore ignorable. The second strategy is to fall back on the most insidious symptom of long-term polarisation: the proposition that no matter how badly Trump behaves “the other side is worse”.

French illustrates this nicely with an anecdote:

I’m reminded of an encounter at my church. People know that I opposed both Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton. They often ask what I think of the president’s performance. My standard response: I like some things, I dislike others, but I really wish he showed better character. I don’t want him to lie. I said this to a sweet older lady not long ago, and she responded — in all sincerity — “You mean Trump lies?” “Yes,” I replied. “All the time.” She didn’t answer with a defense. She didn’t say “fake news.” We’d known each other for years, and she trusted my words.
For a moment, she seemed troubled. I wanted to talk more — to say that we can appreciate and applaud the good things he does, but we can’t ignore his flaws, we can’t defend his sins, and we can’t let him define the future of the Republican Party.
But just then, her jaw set. I saw a flare of defiance in her eyes. She took a sip of coffee, looked straight at me, and I knew exactly what was coming next:
“Well, the Democrats are worse.”

Challenging earthly powers

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From this morning’s Observer: the Introduction to my 95 Theses project.

A new power is loose in the world. It is nowhere and yet it’s everywhere. It knows everything about us – our movements, our thoughts, our desires, our fears, our secrets, who our friends are, our financial status, even how well we sleep at night. We tell it things that we would not whisper to another human being. It shapes our politics, stokes our appetites, loosens our tongues, heightens our moral panics, keeps us entertained (and therefore passive). We engage with it 150 times or more every day, and with every moment of contact we add to the unfathomable wealth of its priesthood. And we worship it because we are, somehow, mesmerised by it.

In other words, we are all members of the Church of Technopoly, and what we worship is digital technology. Most of us are so happy in our obeisance to this new power that we spend an average of 50 minutes on our daily devotion to Facebook alone without a flicker of concern. It makes us feel modern, connected, empowered, sophisticated and informed.

Suppose, though, you were one of a minority who was becoming assailed by doubt – stumbling towards the conclusion that what you once thought of as liberating might actually be malign and dangerous. But yet everywhere you look you see only happy-clappy believers. How would you go about convincing the world that it was in the grip of a power that was deeply hypocritical and corrupt? Especially when that power apparently offers salvation and self-realisation for those who worship at its sites?

Read on

Why Rocket Man may be smarter than we think

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This morning’s Observer column:

Rule No 1 in international relations: do not assume that your adversary is nuts. Rule No 2: do not underestimate his capacity to inflict serious damage on you. We in the west are currently making both mistakes with regard to North Korea. Our reasons for doing so are, at one level, understandable. In economic terms, the country is a basket case. According to the CIA’s world factbook, its per-capita GDP is $1,800 or less, compared with nearly $40,000 for the UK and $53,000 for the US. Its industrial infrastructure is clapped out and nearly beyond repair; the country suffers from chronic food, energy and electricity shortages and many of its people are malnourished. International sanctions are squeezing it almost to asphyxiation. And, to cap it all, it’s led by a guy whose hairdo is almost as preposterous as Donald Trump’s.

And yet this impoverished basket case has apparently been able to develop nuclear weapons, plus the rocketry needed to deliver them to Los Angeles and its environs. Given the retaliatory capacity of the US, this is widely taken as proof that Kim Jong-un must be out of what might loosely be called his mind. Which is where rule No1 comes in…

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LATER: The NYT has an editorial that says, in part:

“Kim Jong-un is ruthless in his quest for power and survival, and hacking, even more than the nuclear power North Korea is rapidly developing, is the perfect weapon for a small, impoverished, isolated, totalitarian state.”

Yep.

You pays your money and takes your choice (of filter bubble)

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This morning’s Observer column:

The only problem is that outside the Washington Beltway – DC’s version of the M25 – few people seem terribly excited about the supposed evils of Facebook, Google and co. (That’s not entirely true: lots of intellectuals and commentators not in the United States, including this columnist, are concerned about these companies, so for current purposes we can think of the “Beltway” as a metaphorical filter bubble.) But outside that bubble, life goes on. People log on to Facebook every day and use Google to find recipes or train timetables, regardless of whether these platforms might be playing a role in undermining democracy.

One can see why people don’t care. Antitrust lawyers and European commissioners may be concerned about the monopoly powers of internet companies, but it’s very difficult to persuade the average internet user that s/he is being gouged by outfits whose services are free. Given that, the prospect of a popular uprising against Google and Facebook seems pretty remote…

Read on

Keeping calm and carrying on, Cringely style

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From Bob Cringely:

This is probably the last picture ever taken of our house in Santa Rosa, California. The time was 11:30PM Sunday and a neighbor had just pounded on our door. Fifty mph winds had been blowing all day but nobody expected fire. Yet the glow you see is from burning houses behind and beside ours. They, too, are gone.

We left with what clothes we could grab. I forgot my computer. I’m still blind and awaiting surgery so Mary Alyce drove one car and we left the other to burn.

By 8AM we were on the Mendocino coast with crappy Internet service and this iPhone. But we were all safe.

Certainly I’d been stupidly feeling a bit sorry for myself, but that ends now.

The schools are closed so with Fallon at my side we’ll buy a notebook and resume writing. Look for my next column as early as tomorrow.

The heading on this blog post is what caught my attention. “I Have No Boils” it read. Bob explains:

Finally, about the headline, my old neighbor Ella Wolfe complained to her doctor once that she was suffering all the trials of Job from the Bible (Ella was approaching 100). “You have no boils,” said her doctor.

Neither do I.

Heartwarming stuff. The good news is that he and his family are safe.

Intellectual imperialism and the behavioural turn in economics

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Further to the decision of the Nobel committee to give Richard Thaler this year’s prize for economics (about which I bloggeda few days ago), Frank Pasquale pointed me to an interesting critique by Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra, who picks out “three problems in economics and its relation to the ‘real world’ it inhabits”.

Firstly, it skates over the fact that what Thaler is being rewarded for — realising “that people can be influenced by (mostly social) prompts to alter their behavior” — was, well, rather old-hat in other social science disciplines. So the Swedish recognition of behavioural economics is really just “a legitimation of economic imperialism: a finding is only truly relevant if published by an economist (corollary: being an economist from Chicago helps).” Ouch!

Secondly, though Thaler’s contribution might make economics “more human—and real”, the behavioural turn “doesn’t make away with the ontological commitments of discipline, privileging market processes and individual action as the fundamental sources of virtue.” Take the metaphor of the ‘nudge’, as articulated by Thaler and Sunstein. “Rather than questioning the economics of general equilibrium”, says Pardo-Guerra, “‘nudging’ is a proposal in calculated engineering: we can build policies that create outcomes similar to those of theory by gently walking slightly irrational, bounded economic agents through the correct ‘architectures of choice’”. But who conceptualises those architectures? And within what ideological constraints?

And finally, this year’s prize confirms that to win a Nobel prize in economics, it really helps to be male and white. To date, only one woman — Elinor Ostrom — has been recognised, and Amaryta Sen is the only non-white laureate so far. I don’t know much about the overall demographics of the economics discipline, but if the Nobel list is representative then one can see why it might be more problematic than the Swedes recognise.

Sarcasm works — but will May & Co get the joke?

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Lovely summary (from eiDigest) of a column in the independent:

UK politics

The Independent’s Mark Steel argues that to understand the success of the Universal Credit scheme that benefit claimants now depend on, you only have to look at the wise people who created it. The scheme was devised by Lord Freud, a city banker, and therefore ideally placed to understand the trials of living on benefits. It was carried forward by Iain Duncan-Smith, who had to struggle himself – but instead of wallowing in self-pity, he got off his backside and was given use of a Tudor mansion by his father-in law, the fifth Baron Cottesloe, which proves rewards come to those prepared to make an effort. Now that the scheme has run into trouble, the government should put together a team who similarly comprehend the emotions at the heart of poverty in modern Britain, such as Prince Harry, Simon Cowell and the Sultan of Brunei.

Hey — what about Jacob Rees-Mogg, the Hon Member for the 18th century?

Why do we allow Trump to play on our indignation?

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IMHO, we liberals are paying far too much attention to Trump’s tweeting. In doing so we are allowing him to lure us into following his news agenda. So it was good to find that Jack Shafer sees it that way too. For example:

As cognitive linguist George Lakoff explained to On the Media’s Brooke Gladstone in January, Trump primarily uses his tweets to divert and deflect attention from news that threatens him, or to launch a trial balloon for one of his proposals. He also tweets to pre-emptively frame a topic before his opponents get a chance to comment, the best example being his categorization of news he doesn’t like as “fake news.” Consider the empty tweets he’s posted recently: He’s beefed about the fact that the late-night hosts ridicule him, demanding equal time to respond, even though equal time doesn’t apply to jokes about the president; he ordered NBC News to apologize to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson for reporting that Tillerson had called him a “moron,” even though Tillerson never denied it; he called critical coverage of his Puerto Rico response “Fake“ when anybody with a TV set and a pair of eyeballs knows he’s lying.

Spot on.

The interview with Lakoff is worth listening to, btw.