Monthly Archives: March 2019

Bercow delivers a Googly

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Rafael Behr, writing in today’s Guardian on Commons Speaker John Bercow’s ruling that Theresa May cannot bring her Brexit proposal back to the House for a third time without significant changes to it.

That doesn’t mean his decision is capricious or unconstitutional. The relevant procedural scriptures seem pretty clear on the matter, so the Speaker is well within his rights to interpret them as he has done. But it is still a matter of interpretation, and so unavoidably a heavily political action. It blasts the prime minister’s plans for the week off course. It transforms the calculations that MPs make about what should happen next. It also retrospectively casts a darker, more terminal shadow over the decision a majority of them made to reject the deal last Tuesday. Might some Tories or members of the DUP have acted differently had they known it was May’s last shot at getting her deal through?

Certainly the prime minister’s strategy has depended on eliminating options, so that eventually MPs would conclude that the only feasible Brexit on the table was hers. For that to work, she needed to keep bluffing and keep raising the stakes. She didn’t realise that ultimately, in parliament, it’s the Speaker who runs the game. And now all bets are off.

Footnote: In cricket, a googly is a type of deceptive delivery bowled by a right-arm leg spin bowler.

Airborne!

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A kitesurfer off Brancaster beach takes to the air. Sunday, March 17, 2019. Lovely moment.
Click on image to see larger version.

Are fears about climate change a reason for not having kids?

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Absolutely not, says Tyler Cowen, in this usefully contrarian column. He concludes thus:

So if you are both worried about climate change and considering starting a family, I say: Put aside the unhelpful mess of emotions some participants in this debate are trying to stir up. Instead, focus on how your decision might boost future innovation. As a bonus, you might find that one of the better approaches to climate change is actually pretty fun.

His basic point is that your kids (given that you’re thinking about the problem) are more likely to be part of the solution than of the problem.

Zuckerberg’s latest ‘vision’

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This morning’s Observer column:

Dearly beloved, our reading this morning is taken from the latest Epistle of St Mark to the schmucks – as members of his 2.3 billion-strong Church of Facebook are known. The purpose of the epistle is to outline a new “vision” that St Mark has for the future of privacy, a subject that is very close to his wallet – which is understandable, given that he has acquired an unconscionable fortune from undermining it.

“As I think about the future of the internet,” he writes (revealingly conflating his church with the infrastructure on which it runs), “I believe a privacy-focused communications platform will become even more important than today’s open platforms. Privacy gives people the freedom to be themselves and connect more naturally, which is why we build social networks.”

Quite so…

Read on

The abandoned boat

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I’ve photographed this scene in Burnham Deepdale on the Norfolk coast before, but invariably towards the end of the day. This is how it looked yesterday morning.

Click on image for a larger version.

The Christchurch atrocity, extremism and the Internet

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Thoughtful and sombre commentary by Kevin Roose:

Now, online extremism is just regular extremism on steroids. There is no offline equivalent of the experience of being algorithmically nudged toward a more strident version of your existing beliefs, or having an invisible hand steer you from gaming videos to neo-Nazism. The internet is now the place where the seeds of extremism are planted and watered, where platform incentives guide creators toward the ideological poles, and where people with hateful and violent beliefs can find and feed off one another.

So the pattern continues. People become fluent in the culture of online extremism, they make and consume edgy memes, they cluster and harden. And once in a while, one of them erupts.

In the coming days, we should attempt to find meaning in the lives of the victims of the Christchurch attack, and not glorify the attention-grabbing tactics of the gunman. We should also address the specific horror of anti-Muslim violence.

At the same time, we need to understand and address the poisonous pipeline of extremism that has emerged over the past several years, whose ultimate effects are impossible to quantify but clearly far too big to ignore. It’s not going away, and it’s not particularly getting better. We will feel it for years to come.

So Facebook does exercise editorial control after all

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Senator Elizabeth Warren is running for President — or at any rate for the Democratic nomination. One of her policy proposals is to break up the tech giants. Like all other presidential hopefuls, her campaign advertises on Facebook. The ads included a video which pointed users to a petition on Warren’s campaign website urging them “to support our plan to break up these big tech companies.” “Three companies have vast power over our economy and our democracy”, said one ad that Warren’s campaign had placed on Friday. “Facebook, Amazon, and Google. We all use them. But in their rise to power, they’ve bulldozed competition, used our private information for profit, and tilted the playing field in their favor.”

Guess what happened next? Facebook removed the ads on the grounds that they violated the company’s terms and conditions for advertisers. Politico reported the takedown, after which Facebook hurriedly restored the ads. “We removed the ads because they violated our policies against use of our corporate logo,” explained a spokesperson. “In the interest of allowing robust debate, we are restoring the ads.”

Warren then tweeted

“Curious why I think FB has too much power? Let’s start with their ability to shut down a debate over whether FB has too much power,” she tweeted. “Thanks for restoring my posts. But I want a social media marketplace that isn’t dominated by a single censor.”

WhatsApp groups and Brexit extremism

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Charles Arthur has a perceptive piece in the Guardian asking whether WhatsApp is pushing UK MPs towards what Cass Sunstein calls “enclave extremism”.

Barely a week goes by without government ministers or MPs warning Facebook, Twitter, Google, YouTube (a subsidiary of Google), Instagram or WhatsApp (both owned by Facebook) that they must do more to prevent radical or dangerous ideas being spread. A “crackdown” is always just around the corner to protect users from harmful content.

Oddly, MPs never wonder whether they might be victims of the same effects of these tools that they, too, use all the time. Why not, though? We keep hearing that it’s a big problem for people to be repeatedly exposed to radical ideas and outspoken extremists. It’s just that for MPs, those tend to be within their own parties rather than on obscure YouTube channels.

Yep.

Quote of the Day

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Q: We’re now more than two years out from that experience, and obviously the controversies have not gone away — they’ve actually multiplied. Do you think Zuckerberg and Sandberg have made any progress on the stuff you warned about?

A: I want to avoid absolutes, but I think it’s safe to say that the business model is the source of the problem, and that it’s the same business model as before. And to the extent that they made progress, it’s in going after different moles in the Whack-a-Mole game. From the point of view of the audience, Facebook is as threatening as ever.

From an interview with Roger McNamee, an early investor in Facebook and apparently a recovering former mentor to Mark Zuckerberg. He’s also the author of Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe.