I’d never heard of this duo until this morning, where there was an interesting piece about them in the New York Times. So I went onto YouTube and what do you know?
What Jonty did next
My friend (and former BBC Business reporter and Wolfson Press Fellow) has a new blog. If you want an informed source on the implications of Brexit for the economy, then Jonty’s your man.
Long read of the Day
Ink-Stained Wretches: The Battle for the Soul of Digital Freedom Taking Place Inside Your Printer.
Wonderful essay by Cory Doctorow on how a legion of tech grifters, led by HP, turned printer ink into liquid gold. The basic idea is to ensure that the customer of a ‘smart’ device never actually gets to own — or control, or repair — it.
Here’s the opener…
Since its founding in the 1930s, Hewlett-Packard has been synonymous with innovation, and many’s the engineer who had cause to praise its workhorse oscillators, minicomputers, servers, and PCs. But since the turn of this century, the company’s changed its name to HP and its focus to sleazy ways to part unhappy printer owners from their money. Printer companies have long excelled at this dishonorable practice, but HP is truly an innovator, the industry-leading Darth Vader of sleaze, always ready to strong-arm you into a “deal” and then alter it later to tilt things even further to its advantage.
The company’s just beat its own record, converting its “Free ink for life” plan into a “Pay us $0.99 every month for the rest of your life or your printer stops working” plan…
Enjoy it. Nobody does this stuff better than Cory.
(It also provides a justification for my decision never, ever, to buy an ink-jet printer.)
The Efficient Markets Hypothesis
“The efficient-market hypothesis (EMH)”, says Wikipedia, “is a hypothesis in financial economics that states that asset prices reflect all available information. A direct implication is that it is impossible to “beat the market” consistently on a risk-adjusted basis since market prices should only react to new information.” It goes on to point out that since risk adjustment is central to the EMH, and yet the EMH does not specify a model of risk, the EMH is therefore untestable. But that doesn’t stop people believing it.
So the old jibe about economics being “the dismal science” is only partly accurate: it is dismal, but it ain’t science. As Karl Popper could have told you 50 years ago.
Brexit contradictions
A while back Michael Gove said that up to 50,000 people may be needed to manage the paperwork for the borders of the newly-‘liberated’ UK. This prompted George Packer and Daniel Thomas to observe (in the FT) that “By the time Britain exits the transition period, the private sector may have hired four times more people to fill in customs forms than the 12,000 people working as fishermen in the U.K. — the industry that is supposedly one of the big beneficiaries of Brexit.”
You couldn’t make this up. Unless you lived in Britain.
Other, hopefully interesting, links.
Betty Dodson, Women’s Guru of Self-Pleasure, Dies at 91. If ever a woman deserved a great obituary, she did. And now she’s got it: Link
New York Times Hits 7 Million Subscribers as Digital Revenue Rises.Link
The perfect tan corduroy suit. A meditation on Robert Redford in All The President’s Men. Link
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Yesterday’s post about the fact that Joe Biden’s ancestors came from Ballina, the town where I was born, prompted a flow of satirical comments in the WhatsApp channel of my extended family across the Irish Sea. The one I enjoyed most was this:
Trump may be leaving the White House, but he will always be with us. Alas.
While you watch Donald Trump’s presidency stagger to its ugly end, always keep in mind how it began: Trump entered the political world on the back of the “birther” conspiracy theory, a movement whose importance was massively underestimated at the time. Aside from its racist undertones, think about what a belief in birtherism really implied. If you doubted that Barack Obama was born in the United States—and about a third of Americans did, including 72 percent of registered Republicans—then that meant you also believed that Obama was an illegitimate president. That meant, in other words, you believed that everyone—the entire American political, judicial, and media establishment, including the White House and Congress, the federal courts and the FBI, all of them—was complicit in a gigantic plot to swindle the public into accepting this false commander in chief. A third of Americans had so little faith in American democracy, broadly defined, they were willing to think that Obama’s entire presidency was a fraud.
That third of Americans went on to become Trump’s base. Over four years, they continued to applaud him, no matter what he did, not because they necessarily believed everything he said, but often because they didn’t believe anything at all. If everything is a scam, who cares if the president is a serial liar? If all American politicians are corrupt, then so what if the president is too? If everyone has always broken the rules, then why can’t he do that too?
Applebaum’s argument is that while Trump’s current behaviour may seem pathetic or oathologically erratic, it is in fact part of a longer-term strategy:
Even if Trump is forced to make a grudging concession speech, even if Biden is sworn in as president on January 20, even if the Trump family is forced to pack its Louis Vuitton suitcases and flee to Mar-a-Lago, it is in Trump’s interest, and a part of the Republican Party’s interest, to maintain the fiction that the election was stolen. That’s because the same base, the base that distrusts American democracy, could still be extremely useful to Trump, as well as to the Republican Party, in years to come.
Certainly these voters can be used to discredit and demean Biden’s presidency. Just as Trump once helped convince millions of Americans that Obama was illegitimate, so he will now seek to convince Americans that Biden is illegitimate…
Sorry to make you choke on your muesli, but there might be something in this.
On the first news of a possible vaccine, what happens?
Zoom lied to users about end-to-end encryption for years, FTC says. Democrats blast FTC/Zoom settlement because users won’t get compensation.Link
Biden has a plan for tackling Covid-19.Link. Trouble is, he doesn’t yet have any authority to act.
Danny Kuo’s Staircase. How to build storage vertically. Clever and functional. Link
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Nobody who’s been to a Sharon Shannon concert will ever make the mistake of thinking that an accordion is merely a squeeze-box.
The sweet-bitter moment
Don’t get me wrong: I’m delighted — and relieved — that Joe Biden won. But I’m also afraid that his Presidency might be just a brief interlude in an inexorable downhill slide towards autocracy because he’ll be governing a polity that is fundamentally broken, and he will lack the levers needed to reverse the slide. It’s the sheer narrowness of his win that’s so alarming. 48m Americans voted for Trump. And this time they did not have the excuse that they didn’t know what he was like, or what he stood for.
1 But first, the sweet side of all this. Joe Biden and I have two things in common. The first is that we both hail from the same town in Ireland — Ballina in Co Mayo although his connections go back some distance in time — to the Great Famine of the 1850s in fact. His great-great-great grandfather, Edward Blewitt, had been a surveyor who had worked on the Ordnance Survey and, during the extremes of the famine, was employed to run schemes for alleviating the plight of the poor in the district. But eventually, dismayed by the futility of the exercise, he emigrated to the US and set himself up as a land-surveyor in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He died there, 20 years after he had left Ballina. The rest is now history. (Biden was born in Scranton.)
I was born in Ballina in 1946, and lots of my extended family still live there and thereabouts. Rightly, this momentous event is largely unrecorded — unlike the birth, two years earlier, of Mary Bourke who — as Mary Robinson — became Ireland’s first woman President (and who I met when Cambridge was the first university to give her an honorary degree after she became President. She and I had a very funny conversation about Ballina at a tea-party after the degree ceremony, but that’s a story for another time.) So I look forward to the moment when those two Presidents — one former, the other new, finally get to meet.
The other thing we have in common is that we both love the poetry of Seamus Heaney. During the campaign, Biden remembered the appositeness of Heaney’s great poem, The Cure at Troy. Here’s a snatch of him reading from it:
2 Now the bitter side. Unless something unexpected happens — for example, the Democrats managing to scrape a majority together in the Senate — Biden will be completely hamstrung by Mitch McConnell. Not a single piece of significant legislation will make it onto the Statute Book. It will be like Obama all over again — although the mood music will be very different.
But the most worrying thing is the number of people who voted for Trump, and what they might represent for the future.
One hot evening in late June 1996, the telephone on my desk in Beirut rang with one of the more extraordinary messages I was to receive as a foreign correspondent. “Mr Robert, a friend you met in Sudan wants to see you,” said a voice in English but with an Arabic accent. At first I thought he meant another man, whose name I suggested. “No, no, Mr Robert, I mean the man you interviewed. Do you understand?” Yes, I understood. And where could I meet this man? “The place where he is now,” came the reply. I knew that Bin Laden was rumoured to have returned to Afghanistan but there was no confirmation of this. So how do I reach him? I asked. “Go to Jalalabad – you will be contacted.”
A month later. “CLACK-CLACK-CLACK.” It was as if someone was attacking my head with an ice-pick. “CLACK-CLACK-CLACK-CLACK-CLACK-CLACK-CLACK.” I sat up. Someone was banging a set of car keys against the window of my room in the Spinghar Hotel. “Misssster Robert,” a voice whispered urgently. “Misssster Robert.” He hissed the word “Mister.” Yes, yes, I’m here. “Please come downstairs, there is someone to see you.” It registered only slowly that the man must have climbed the ancient fire escape to reach the window of my room. I dressed, grabbed a coat – I had a feeling we might travel in the night – and almost forgot my old Nikon. I walked as calmly as I could past the reception desk and out into the early afternoon heat…
The fractures were there from the start. Trump insisted on wearing the pants in the family, and when supplication didn’t flow from Fox News Channel he would make eyes at OAN and Newsmax, which rankled Murdoch. Trump also demands loyalty for the pleasure of his intimacies, and Murdoch couldn’t abide. He has famously called Trump a “phony“ and “fucking idiot,” and as early as the summer of 2017 was not deterring his many journalistic outlets from sniping at Trump and his family. One of the biggest anti-Trump stories, about the president’s mistresses, was broken by Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, and Fox’s Chris Wallace bedeviled the president during the reelection campaign with a slashing interview.
The final cause for separation, if you want to call it that, came on Election Night, when Fox became the first to call Arizona for Joe Biden, the New York Times reported, prompting Jared Kushner to contact Rupert Murdoch and a Trump aide to demand a retraction. For the Trump team, this had to be a bigger betrayal than finding Rupert in bed with Bernie Sanders. As liberals blinked hard in astonishment and began discovering a sudden, unfamiliar respect for Fox over its projection, there wasn’t much marriage left to save. Trump and Fox had only the details of the split to resolve.
Trump was useful to Murdoch and Fox for a while. Now he isn’t.
The ‘Crown Consultancy’ idea: stop outsourcing thinking
From the FT…
Boris Johnson’s government is quietly working on creating its own in-house consultancy arm — dubbed “Crown Consultancy” — to cut its dependence on high-charging private sector firms.
The idea, driven by efficiency minister Theodore Agnew and championed by Downing Street adviser Dominic Cummings, would bring bright civil servants and graduates together in a new division to improve delivering policies across Whitehall.
There’s a lot of reliance on consultancies,” said one official close to the project. “It would be sensible to look at what we can do internally, rather than externally.”
There have long been concerns over the spiralling costs spent on consultants by the government. According to the research firm Tussell the UK government spent £2.6bn on just eight consultancies between 2016 and 2020. These were: the UK firms PwC, KPMG, Deloitte, EY and PA Consulting; the US firms McKinsey, Bain, and Boston Consulting Group. Once, when I was working on a small consultancy gig in Whitehall, I was in the same office as a group of ‘consultants’ from one of the big firms. They had been drafted in at short notice because one of the Department’s junior ministers was pathologically unable to sign off any proposal unless he could cover his ass by having it vetted beforehand by one of the big consulting firms. They sent in a bunch of fresh-faced graduates who seemed to know very little about government. These kids beavered away for a week, mostly just interviewing the civil servants involved in the decision, and then wrote up the interviews into a ‘report’ (no doubt accompanied by a slide deck). They were billed at £2,500 per day, which in those days was real money. The whole thing was clearly an established kind of racket: the firms were security blankets for ministers — and, sometimes, for civil servants. For the firms, the government was the gift that kept on giving.
The FT piece has a nice quote, which rings true to me:
Lord Agnew, a former businessman now based in the Cabinet Office, last month claimed in a leaked letter that Whitehall had been “infantilised” by “an unacceptable” reliance on expensive consultants.
Precisely. This is just about the only thing on which Dominic Cummings and I agree.
The gig economy is here to stay. Now let’s humanise it
the gig economy might provide a useful case study. At the moment, most of the challenges to platform-based enterprises such as Uber and Deliveroo have involved trying to shoehorn them into legal frameworks that were designed for a pre-platform age. This is a piecemeal approach that has so far produced erratic results. In February, for example, a French court ruled that a Deliveroo courier should be treated as an employee rather than a contractor. In September, Spain’s supreme court made a similar ruling about another delivery startup, Glovo, after lower courts had made a series of contradictory rulings.
We can’t go on like this. A better way of thinking about it would be to recognise that we’re in a position analogous to that of Britain in the 1830s and 1840s when parliament passed the Factory Acts to regulate the conditions of novel kinds of employment as the Industrial Revolution roared ahead. The Factories Act of 1847, for example, colloquially known as the 10 Hours Act, met a long-standing demand by mill workers for a 10-hour day. Other legislation regulated the use of child labour and other practices.
We need that kind of comprehensive approach to the gig economy because, as other kinds of employment get automated away, it will be what provides employment for an increasing number of people (just as the factories of industrialising Britain provided jobs for people coming off the land)…
Other, possibly interesting, links
Books to read in lockdown. From the Irish TimesLink
QAnon Followers Frustrated After Q Calls For Respecting Election Results, Uniting Behind Biden. Yes, you read that correctly. But remember, it’s from The Onion. Link.
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Fabulous essay by Ben Ehrenreich. He uses the pandemic as a jumping-off point for a dive into the work of Joseph Tainter, the pre-eminent scholar of civilisational collapse.
The ‘Social Dilemma’ and the Prodigal techbro
Sheila Hayman (Whom God Preserve) has been watching The Social Dilemma and is Not Impressed:
So we come to ‘The Social Dilemma’, which after telling us the same thing for ninety minutes (‘They want you to stay online! They’ve figured out how to do it! That’s how they make their money!’ Really? Well, blow me down…) follows recent convention in using the credits to revisit the various interviewees for an informal moment; in this case, asking them for their suggested solution.
And, with the slightly ironic exception of the fabulous Jaron Lanier, every single one of these highly educated, scarily motormouthed and clearly very concerned people, all of whom have evidently thought of little else ever since switching sides — every single one of them could think of no answer beyond, ‘Do less social media’. In various forms: ‘Turn off notifications’, ‘Don’t let your children have smartphones’, ‘Delete your accounts’ — but all with the same message of doing less — even less — than you do already.
I waited and waited for somebody to say: ‘Build something! Plant something! Teach, or learn something. Grow something, or demolish something. Bake, boil, or broil something, Start a movement, or join one somebody else has started. Better yet, find out what’s right under your nose that needs your attention. Read with schoolkids. Spend a day digging stones and stumps out of an abandoned building plot. Take a hot meal to an isolated older person — you never know, their eighty-five years may have taught them something you could learn from.’
But nobody did…
As I read this literary Exocet, what came to mind was Maria Farrell’s splendid blast about the current epidemic of what one might call Innovator’s Remorse, when guys (and, let’s face it, they’re always male) who obeyed the Zuckerberg call to “Move Fast and Break Things” (and in some cases made a tidy pile in the process) — but who then, one day, had their personal ephiphanies and became remorseful for all the damage they had inadvertently done.
Here’s a snippet from Maria’s “The Prodigal Techbro” that conveys the message succinctly:
The Prodigal Son is a New Testament parable about two sons. One stays home to work the farm. The other cashes in his inheritance and gambles it away. When the gambler comes home, his father slaughters the fattened calf to celebrate, leaving the virtuous, hard-working brother to complain that all these years he wasn’t even given a small goat to share with his friends. His father replies that the prodigal son ‘was dead, now he’s alive; lost, now he’s found’. Cue party streamers. It’s a touching story of redemption, with a massive payload of moral hazard. It’s about coming home, saying sorry, being joyfully forgiven and starting again. Most of us would love to star in it, but few of us will be given the chance.
The Prodigal Tech Bro is a similar story, about tech executives who experience a sort of religious awakening. They suddenly see their former employers as toxic, and reinvent themselves as experts on taming the tech giants. They were lost and are now found. They are warmly welcomed home to the center of our discourse with invitations to write opeds for major newspapers, for think tank funding, book deals and TED talks. These guys – and yes, they are all guys – are generally thoughtful and well-meaning, and I wish them well. But I question why they seize so much attention and are awarded scarce resources, and why they’re given not just a second chance, but also the mantle of moral and expert authority.
I’m glad that Roger McNamee, the early Facebook investor, has testified to the U.S. Congress about Facebook’s wildly self-interested near-silence about its amplification of Russian disinformation during the 2016 presidential election. I’m thrilled that Google’s ex-‘design ethicist’, Tristan Harris, “the closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience,“(startlingly faint praise) now runs a Center for Humane Technology, exposing the mind-hacking tricks of his former employer. I even spoke — critically but, I hope, warmly — at the book launch of James Williams, another ex-Googler turned attention evangelist, who “co-founded the movement”of awareness of designed-in addiction. I wish all these guys well. I also wish that the many, exhausted activists who didn’t take money from Google or Facebook could have even a quarter of the attention, status and authority the Prodigal Techbro assumes is his birth-right.
Today, when the tide of public opinion on Big Tech is finally turning, the brothers (and sisters) who worked hard in the field all those years aren’t even invited to the party. No fattened calf for you, my all but unemployable tech activist. The moral hazard is clear; why would anyone do the right thing from the beginning when they can take the money, have their fun, and then, when the wind changes, convert their status and relative wealth into special pleading and a whole new career?
And, also, why would any of us take advice from these dudes about what should be done to bring the tech companies under democratic control?
More on ‘suppression’ vs elimination of Covid-19
One of our (Wolfson College’s) former Press Fellows, Nic Stuart, read Tim Harford’s blog post about the arguments in the UK about how to deal with the pandemic and sent me some interesting reflections on what’s happening in the Australian state of Victoria:
Poor procedure and a lack of infection control had seen the case load explode out of the hotels where people returning from overseas had been quarantined; Covid had escaped into the community and was reproducing exponentially. It seemed as if the genie was out of the bottle.
The state’s Labor Premier, Dan Andrews, attempted first to lock-down in nine large Housing Commission flats, later extending this ring to other nearby areas. Unsurprisingly this attempt failed because the restrictions were one step behind the escaping virus.
Then he bit the bullet and closed the state. Seriously. Cops on the beat; the army in the streets; telephoning people meant to be quarantining at random hours to check they were where they said they were; nobody other than those preforming vital services allowed to go to work.
As of yesterday Victoria had gone nine straight days without the disease spreading by community transmission.
New South Wales has, however, adopted suppression as a strategy. Along with detailed contact tracing this has served to dramatically slow the spread to (about) five a day, but there’s no end in sight to this.
As a result, people are warming, significantly, to elimination.
I’ve just checked the population of Victoria. It’s 6.28 million, i.e. roughly a tenth of the UK’s population. The problem (for Britain) is that a proper lockdown of the kind achieved in Victoria isn’t feasible in such a populous country.
Other, possibly interesting, links
Hockney On Photography. Lovely film. Wish I’d known about it years ago. Link
It Looks Like Nigel Farage Just Lost a £10,000 Bet On the US Election. I hope that’s true. He put £10k on Trump to win. Wonder what odds he got. Couldn’t happen to a nastier guy. Link
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America’s Next Authoritarian Will Be Much More Competent
Sobering and insightful essay by Zeynep Tufecki, who is one of the sharpest minds writing about our current catastrophes.
TL;DR summary: Trump was ineffective and easily beaten. A future strongman won’t be.
Trump is just one more example of the many populists on the right who have risen to power around the world: Narendra Modi in India, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Vladimir Putin in Russia, Jarosław Kaczyński in Poland, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, my home country. These people win elections but subvert democratic norms: by criminalizing dissent, suppressing or demonizing the media, harassing the opposition, and deploying extra-legal mechanisms whenever possible (Putin’s opponents have a penchant for meeting tragic accidents). Orbán proudly uses the phrase illiberal democracy to describe the populism practiced by these men; Trump has many similarities to them, both rhetorically and policy-wise.
But there’s one key difference between Trump and everyone else on that list. The others are all talented politicians who win elections again and again.
In contrast, Trump is a reality-TV star who stumbled his way into an ongoing realignment in American politics, aided by a series of events peculiar to 2016 that were fortunate for him: The Democrats chose a polarizing nominee who didn’t have the requisite political touch that can come from surviving tough elections; social media was, by that point, deeply entrenched in the country’s politics, but its corrosive effects were largely unchecked; multiple players—such as then–FBI Director James Comey—took consequential actions fueled by their misplaced confidence in Hillary Clinton’s win; and Trump’s rivals in the Republican primaries underestimated him. He drew a royal flush.
But ‘Trumpism’ is now a powerful force in American democracy — a contemporary kind of Peronism. And soon or later a really astute demagogue in the Orban/Erdogan league will spot its potential.
Interesting also to see the signs that the Republicans are done with Trump. When Fox called Arizona for Biden and Trump phoned Rupert Murdoch to demand a retraction, Murdoch curtly refused. For him and Mitch McConnell and the others Trump has been a useful idiot. He delivered what they wanted — tax cuts, umpteen Conservative senior judges and a stacked Supreme Court. So he’s now surplus to requirements — and becoming a real embarrassment, even to them. So he’s toast. He just doesn’t know it yet.
Lockdown sceptics vs zero-Covid: who’s got it right?
Tim Harford has a really good post on his blog, bringing his customary tone of good sense and rationality to a debate that has become vicious (especially in the Tory party):
Some lockdown sceptics have advanced a variety of dishonest or deluded views over the course of the pandemic. Months ago, one correspondent wrote to assure me that the infection fatality rate was just one in 2,000. This implies 33,500 deaths if the whole UK population was infected. We have suffered 67,500 excess deaths; am I to conclude that we have all had the virus twice? Then, in what now looks like a line from a Shakespearean tragedy, there is Donald Trump’s early declaration: “One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”
But there is an honest argument against lockdowns — namely that while the disease is dangerous, the lockdown cure is worse. The virus has the power to kill many more people than died in the first wave. Yet in England and Wales, the vast majority of those who have died were 65 or over, with two-thirds of them aged 75 or over. The honest lockdown sceptic asks, is it wise or fair to impose radical limits on the freedom of all with no apparent end in sight? Thousands of lives are being saved — but millions of young people are seeing their prospects sacrificed. Is their sacrifice worthwhile?
The zero-Covid position reaches the opposite conclusion from the same starting point: since there will be no end to the suffering as long as the virus is circulating, the answer is to eliminate the virus in the UK and Ireland. We are island nations, like New Zealand. If community transmission can be stopped, then border controls — plus contact tracing for the occasional outbreak — can keep the virus out.
The most prominent British advocates of the zero-Covid approach are the scientists calling themselves “Independent Sage”. In July, they explained that the first step would be to apply lockdowns until we reached “control”, defined as one new case per million people per day. Thereafter, a contact- tracing system, plus support for people in isolation, would eliminate the virus on these shores.
Both sides of this debate hold out tempting rewards if only we are willing to suffer now. But both are mistaken. Zero-Covid looks prohibitively costly for European countries. A relentless lockdown would be needed even to reach the “control” step, with no guarantee against backsliding.
And his conclusion. There’s no magic bullet, just hard slog and competence, bot alien concepts to the Johnson administration.
Germany has learnt to live with the virus as a constant yet contained threat. The secret is no secret: lockdown suppressed the virus enough to allow contact tracing, mask-wearing and general vigilance to take over. In July, at a time when the British were still emerging from their homes, blinking in the sunlight, I visited Bavaria. Masks and sanitisers were everywhere, but it was thriving.
The UK had the same opportunity but we are squandering it. Our contact-tracing system was slow to grind into action, our testing capacity was overwhelmed by the predictable surge in demand as schools reopened and, most recently, a technical error led to many thousands of positive test results not entering the contact tracing system promptly.
Forget the clash of grand ideas, of Sweden versus New Zealand. Just stop bungling the basics. It is not much of a slogan. But it might just be a solution.
Great post.
How introducing friction into a communications system improves things
The holy grail of geeks is to make things “frictionless” — to do away with all the cumbersome blockages and delays of analog life. And, to a great extent, they have achieved their goal — to make everything just a click away — in the process achieving what the economist Ronald Coase envisaged in his great 1937 article, “The Nature of the Firm”. In that, he explained why it is that people choose to form partnerships, companies and other business entities rather than trading bilaterally through contracts on a market. (It was all about whether the ‘transaction costs’ of contracting out were higher than the costs of doing it inside the organisation: that’s why the great US automobile firms wound up running rubber plantations in tropical countries.) One of the most important affordances of the Internet was that it often dramatically reduced transaction costs, and therefore changed the shape of corporations.
As the so-called “marketplace of ideas” was inexorably sucked into social media, the same affordance was deployed. The transaction cost of having to copy and paste a piece of information before passing it on to someone else was retuced to zero with a simple ‘Like’, ‘Share’ or re-tweet button. Which meant that ideas, lies, information (and disinformation) started to circulate with the speed of light. When feedback loops operate at that speed, any control engineer can tell you what happens to systems whose behaviour is determined by that feedback.
All of which is by way of background to an interesting piece by Kevin Roose in today’s New York Times. The TL;DR summary is “On Election Day, Facebook and Twitter Did Better by Making Their Products Worse”. What happened is that the social media platforms effectively introduced some friction into the feedback loops.
For months, nearly every step these companies have taken to safeguard the election has involved slowing down, shutting off or otherwise hampering core parts of their products — in effect, defending democracy by making their apps worse.
They added friction to processes, like political ad-buying, that had previously been smooth and seamless. They brought in human experts to root out extremist groups and manually intervened to slow the spread of sketchy stories. They overrode their own algorithms to insert information from trusted experts into users’ feeds. And as results came in, they relied on the calls made by news organizations like The Associated Press, rather than trusting that their systems would naturally bring the truth to the surface. ImageAn alert on the Facebook newsfeed notifying users that votes are still being counted. An alert on the Facebook newsfeed notifying users that votes are still being counted.
Nowhere was this shift more apparent than at Facebook, which for years envisioned itself as a kind of post-human communication platform. Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s chief executive, often spoke about his philosophy of “frictionless” design — making things as easy as possible for users. Other executives I talked to seemed to believe that ultimately, Facebook would become a kind of self-policing machine, with artificial intelligence doing most of the dirty work and humans intervening as little as possible.
But in the lead-up to the 2020 election, Facebook went in the opposite direction. It put in place a new, cumbersome approval process for political advertisers, and blocked new political ads in the period after Election Day. It throttled false claims, and put in place a “virality circuit-breaker” to give fact-checkers time to evaluate suspicious stories. And it temporarily shut off its recommendation algorithm for certain types of private groups, to lessen the possibility of violent unrest. (On Thursday, The New York Times reported that the company was taking other temporary measures to tamp down election-related misinformation, including adding more friction to the process of sharing posts.)
I don’t like the “marketplace of ideas” metaphor but it does provide a way of thinking about how a market operates. We saw what happened when stock markets were effectively automated — when trading is mostly done by machines. And then we saw how that led to the epidemic of so-called High Speed Trading described by Michael Lewis in his book, Flash Boys — and the instabilities that introduced into what was once a marketplace for investors valuing companies on the basis of long-term prospects as well as short-term gains. Similarly, our marketplace of ideas has become a space also distorted by high-speed ‘trading’ in every kind of information, good, bad and indifferent. So we shouldn’t be surprised at where we’ve got to. Going frictionless is great — until it isn’t.
Other, possibly interesting, links
FDR’s 1994 State of the Union address. This is what politicians used to be like. Link
Bentley will ditch internal combustion engines by 2030. Don’t all rush to buy a collector’s item. Link.
This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if you decide that your inbox is full enough already!
“Really I suppose what I hate myself most on is showing other people where to dig, not having time to do intensive and exclusive digging myself. I am a dowser and not a navvy.”
Queenie Leavis
A bit like a blogger, really.
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
I struggled with this today, given the thoughts below.
What I kept thinking of was the famous reply that Ben Franklin gave to the woman who accosted him as he emerged from the final day of deliberation of 1787 with the question,”Well Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”
Franklin answered, “A republic… if you can keep it.”
In the end, I came up with this:
Joan Baez singing The Battle Hymn of the Republic in 1963.
The inescapable reality of the election results is that Trumpism remains a powerful current in American politics. It’s akin to political tendencies in other parts of the world where strongmen have co-opted democracies. The president’s brand of demagogic nationalism, his ceaseless campaigning through every year of his term and his unrepentant embrace of divisive messaging and tactics have clearly mobilized tremendous support.
“Trump over-performed in myriad polling measures. There would be no landslides, only squeakers and clenched jaws — and, possibly, court fights,” wrote my colleague Monica Hesse. “Win or lose, Trumpism will not have been swept into the dustbin of history; it will remain all over the furniture. It’s part of the furniture.”
Indeed, it may wholly define right-wing politics in the United States for years to come. “Trumpism might be becoming America’s version of Peronism,” tweeted Dan Slater, director at the Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies at the University of Michigan, referring to Argentina’s own legacy of populist nationalism. “Highly mobilizing, highly polarizing, not always in power, but never going away.”
And this from Janan Ganesh of the Financial Times…
Naturally, a Biden win, even a slight one, is a better outcome for liberalism than Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016. But the absence of a landslide and a strongly Democratic Senate will sting. Four years ago, the party could cite excuses and circumstances: an unpopular candidate, an opponent with no political history to attack.
This time, they have no such solace. Democrats nominated a seasoned and unobjectionable moderate. They ran on the fundamentals of public health and prosperity. They amassed a Fort Knox of campaign money. They had the encouraging precedent of the 2018 midterm elections. Above all, they had Mr Trump’s ethical and administrative record to go after. All the raw materials were there for a crushing victory that would double as a purgative moment for the republic: a clean-up of sorts.
Yes, a Californian running mate was never ideal — the election hinges on the Midwest and the south-east — but there was no clear alternative to Kamala Harris. As for his avoidance of mass political rallies, Mr Biden could hardly run as a slayer of the coronavirus pandemic while holding them.
At this point in the search for unforced errors, the trail runs cold. Liberals are left to accept a deeper fact about the US. Far more than when the phrase started doing the rounds a generation ago, this is a 50-50 nation, or thereabouts.
And so the question is: how did that come to pass? That’s a long story, and some of it is peculiarly American (particularly the racism that runs through that society like the message in a stick of Blackpool rock). But not all of it; there’s an element of it also that other Western democracies share, namely that this pathological polarisation has been a long time building — by my reckoning since the collapse of the post-war Keynesian order from 1971 onwards, and the subsequent ideological infection of ruling elites in most democracies by neoliberalism. We are now reaping the whirlwind of what we sowed in those decades.
And Trumpism isn’t going away. It’s the new Peronism. Time to brush up on Argentinian history.
Other, possibly interesting, links
How Stanford voted. Interesting (and, to me, surprising). Very few Republicans there, it seems. Link
First words spoken or sent on various communication systems. Link
So who emptied that Bitcoin wallet of nearly a billion dollars? Now we know — or at any rate Uncle Sam does: the hacker who did it (“Individual X”, if you please) panicked after being threatened by the original owner of the wallet (now behind bars) and handed the loot over to the Department of Justice. Link.
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About last night… After what felt like a few hundred hours of watching election results trickle in, I assumed the fetal position on my couch and moan-cried for about thirty minutes. It was a combination of things. Part of it was personal: I just spend so much time thinking, writing, tweeting, and distracting myself with this all-encompassing political story that I may have been momentarily overwhelmed. Maybe I was just considering how much dough I spent on various races around the country (I don’t want to overstate how invested I am in this election, but I think ActBlue just repossessed my car). The bigger part was less personal: Trump has been basically the same guy since he’s been president, and knowing this, tens of millions of Americans still voted for him. On some level, we are broken. I get the national divide and I frankly agree with many of the complaints coming from rural America. I understand some of the anger, but I’ve never understood expressing that anger through Trump. And watching him go full authoritarian as the votes were still being counted made me especially sad for my parents who had to watch the rise of a strongman during the buildup to WWII in Poland and Germany when they were kids, and who now have to watch half of America embrace a guy who deploys the same political tactics. But then I stopped crying. Partly because no one owns this lib! Partly because I realized that among the challenges my parents have faced, nothing about this election ranks in the top thousand. And partly because, regardless of the premature self-coronation of the mad king, in America, no election is over until every last Retweet is counted. And while there are very fine people on both sides, I have a feeling Biden’s side is going to have enough electoral votes to win. But it’s gonna be damn close. If my math is right, Biden got more votes than any candidate in history and Trump got more votes than he did in 2016. Stress and confusion in 2020. Who saw that coming? And one can safely assume, there’s much more to come between now and the end of this election season. (One irony of presidential elections is that each one takes four years off my life.)
That resonates with me, and I’m sure with may other people. It’s the size of Trump’s vote, after four years of his criminality, that’s the most depressing part of it all.
Long read of the day
Code, on wheels. Software will play a central role in the automobiles of the future by Frederic Filloux.
If Biden ultimately wins, pollsters and the data journalists who rely on them will claim some vindication. To be fair, FiveThirtyEight’s final projections gave Biden less than a 1-in-3 chance of a landslide. The popular vote projections are likely to be pretty accurate. Yet, frustratingly, pollsters can also marshal a defense of their methods if Trump manages a surprise win. After the polling misfires of 2016, Silver and other data journalists went to great lengths to remind readers that no matter how promising the polls looked, a Trump victory could not be ruled out. “A 10 percent chance of winning is not a zero percent chance. In fact, that is roughly the same odds that it’s raining in downtown Los Angeles. And it does rain there,” noted FiveThirtyEight’s final projection.
It’s not all that comforting to Democrats today to know that 9 out of 10 times this election happens in the greater multiverse, Biden will win it. As former FiveThirtyEight writer Mona Chalabi put it, assuming the voice of FiveThirtyEight’s much-derided Fivey Fox mascot, “No matter what happens, I will find a way to say ‘I told you so! That’s how probabilities work!’ ”
It’s not that we should stop trusting polls entirely. They are a flawed but vital tool for campaigns to know where to devote resources, and for campaign journalists to use in reporting. But an entire industry of pundits and soothsayers have turned polling analysis into something more like a religion while proclaiming it a science. Meanwhile, it is increasingly unclear why these projections are useful at all.
Other, possibly interesting, links
How the F@!# Did This Giant Whale Tail Save a Derailed Train?. A rail investigator explains how the Dutch train was saved by a sculpture. Is it any wonder I love Popular Mechanics? Link.
Someone Just Emptied Out a Bitcoin Wallet With $964,000,000 In It. It’s not yet clear if a hacker made off with a gigantic payday, or if the wallet’s long-dormant owner just came out of retirement. Link.
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“Eat Butterfiles with Me”, Patricia Lockwood’s stunning essay on Vladimir Nabokov in the London Review of Books
More on Gordon Parks
The brief video on Gordon Parks’s photography in yesterday’s edition prompted a lovely email from Pete Ashton pointing me to Half Past Autumn, the HBO documentary on Parks, the full version of which is on Vimeo here. It’s an hour and a half and wonderful. Cancel Netflix for an evening and watch it instead. Parks was such an amazing and gifted individual.
What it was like to work in a Covid ICU
This is the most vivid, most moving thing I’ve read about what it’s like not to be able to save people who are dying from Covid.
My eye was caught first by this:
We leaned forward and bowed our heads in order to redirect the flow of tears. We couldn’t risk touching our faces and we need them to fall onto our scrubs. We couldn’t ruin our masks.
The longer the session went on, the more confused Johnson’s answers became. He was adamant the country would return to regional lockdowns on 2 December, even though he could give no guarantees the rate of infection would have come down sufficiently over the course of the next month.
He guessed it would be down to parliament what happened next, he said unhappily. So that was a yes and a no.
“The country wants politicians to act together,” he shrugged sadly, apparently unaware of his own failure to act on scientific evidence and work with Labour a month ago – and of the fact that the MPs least inclined to work together were his own. Some wanted golf courses reopened, others were happy to compromise on pitch and putt. The DUP’s Sammy Wilson said that he had come to hear Churchill but had only got Halifax-style appeasement instead.
What became more and more evident the longer the session went on was that Boris was out of ideas. Other than to do too little too late. He wasn’t even sure what he had and hadn’t promised Scotland by way of bailout. Starmer slumped back in his seat.
He knew what we all knew: that we would be back in the Commons on 2 December with little change in the nation’s health, to have the same arguments over lockdowns and the failure of test and trace all over again. You can cancel Christmas now.
We have four more years of this.
Other, maybe interesting, links
A selfie set in stone: hidden portrait by cheeky mason found in Spain 900 years on. Link
What it was like to work with Sean Connery. Lovely Twitter thread. Link.
A room, a bar and a classroom: how the coronavirus is spread through the air. Terrific animated explanation by El Pais. Link
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If you watch nothing else today, watch this. Gordon Parks was a novelist, poet, musician, composer, painter, and film director, but he was best known for his photography.
Thanks to Jason Kottke for spotting it.
Quote of the Day
“Many Things that have been printed and published, as true Relations, were only by Artifice and Imposture, Impositions upon credulous Persons.”
What kind of country do we want? Terrific NYRB essay by Marilynne Robinson. Snippet:
Without an acknowledgment of the grief brought into the whole world by the coronavirus, which is very much the effect of sorrows that plagued the world before this crisis came down on us, it might seem like blindness or denial to say that the hiatus prompted by the crisis may offer us an opportunity for a great emancipation, one that would do the whole world good. The snare in which humanity has been caught is an economics—great industry and commerce in service to great markets, with ethical restraint and respect for the distinctiveness of cultures, including our own, having fallen away in eager deference to profitability. This is not new, except for the way an unembarrassed opportunism has been enshrined among the laws of nature and has flourished destructively in the near absence of resistance or criticism. Options now suddenly open to us would have been unthinkable six months ago. The prestige of what was until very lately the world economic order lingers on despite the fact that the system itself is now revealed as a tenuous set of arrangements that have been highly profitable for some people but gravely damaging to the world. These arrangements have been exposed as not really a system at all—insofar as that word implies stable, rational, intentional, defensible design.
Here is the first question that must be asked: What have we done with America? Over the decades we have consented, passively for the most part, to a kind of change that has made this country a disappointment to itself, an imaginary prison with real prisoners in it. Now those imaginary walls have fallen, if we choose to notice. We can consider what kind of habitation, what kind of home, we want this country to be…
Trustbusting Google
Cory Doctorow’s OpEd for The Daily Beast is, finally, published — and very good it is too. Here’s a sample:
When Microsoft came to dominate 95% of the desktop, the DoJ stepped in again to punish it, and if they failed in their breakup bid, at least they cowed the Beast of Redmond so that it stopped killing startups the way it had with Netscape, allowing Google to rise.
What we didn’t understand was that Ronald Reagan had gutshot US antitrust enforcement and these were its last gasps, as it bled out over two decades.
We didn’t understand how thoroughly Reagan’s court sorcerer, Robert Bork, had transformed the consensus on monopolies.
We didn’t understand that every president that came after Reagan, right up to today, would continue to encourage monopolization under cover of the doctrine of Robert Bork, creating a world where every industry has collapsed into oligarchy.
Five publishers
Four studios
Three labels
Two brewers
One eyewear company
and falling.
Which is why the federal Google antitrust action is exciting – not merely because the complaint threads the impossible narrow eye of Robert Bork’s needle for anti-monopoly enforcement; but because it made so many people recognize that getting Google for search dominance is like getting Capone on tax-evasion. The pretense that monopolies are good, actually, is wearing so thin that even its beneficiaries are doubting it.
Other, possibly interesting, links
The AI Which Mistook a Bald Head for a Soccer Ball. An AI controlled camera which was supposed to follow the ball, kept following the bald pate of a linesman. Link
Who are the most influential academics?. This websiteclaims to have objective measures for ranking scholars. Funnily enough, most of them appear to be Americans. Now isn’t that interesting.
A new Raspberry Pi built into a keyboard.. Neat idea. There’s an informative and fair review on ArsTechnica. I’ve ordered one, out of curiosity to see how it compares with an earlier 4GB Pi I’ve been running.
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This week’s Economist cover (with my annotation). Neat graphic.
Quote of the Day
Once, censorship worked by blocking crucial pieces of information. In this era of information overload, censorship works by drowning us in too much undifferentiated information, crippling our ability to focus. These dumps, combined with the news media’s obsession with campaign trivia and gossip, have resulted in whistle-drowning, rather than whistle-blowing: In a sea of so many whistles blowing so loud, we cannot hear a single one.
The researchers had built a plug-in extension for the Google Chrome browser that, they explained, “copies the ads you see on Facebook, so anyone, on any part of the political spectrum, can see them in our public database. If you want, you can enter basic demographic information about yourself in the tool to help improve our understanding of why advertisers targeted you. However, we’ll never ask for information that could identify you. It doesn’t collect your personal information. We take your privacy very seriously.”
So what was the problem? Basically this: the extension has access to not simply public posts on Facebook but also to whatever content the user accessed while logged in. This would include their personal data, of course, but, as is likely in the case on many Facebook pages, also some data from the user’s friends.
A lot of commentary has followed the launch of the iPhone 12, some of it praising Apple for going back to the old design and some complaining about Apple’s inability to do something different from a design perspective. Both sides miss the point: Enduring design doesn’t need constant reinterpretation. It needs tweaking, polishing, and subtle improvement. I think of the iPhone and its design language very similar to Porsche’s design language. Or, for that matter of a classic Leica camera…”.
A win for Joe Biden would only scratch the surface of America’s afflictions
Sobering piece by John Mulholland, the Guardian‘s US Editor.
If the president loses, there will be much talk of a new normality and the need for a democratic reset. Hopes will be voiced for a return to constitutional norms. There will be calls for a return of civility in public discourse and a healing of the partisan divide that scars America. All of that is as it should be. But it ought to come with a recognition that America was broken long before it elected Trump and his departure would be no guarantee that the country will be mended. Many of the systemic issues that afflict the US predate Trump.
His ugly and dysfunctional presidency has distracted from many of the fundamentals that have beset America for decades, even centuries. But they remain stubbornly in place. If he does lose, America will no longer have Trump to blame. Two two-term Democratic presidents over the past 30 years have not significantly affected the structural issues that corrode US democracy and society, and race is always at their heart. The past few months have drawn further attention to the systemic racism and brutality that characterise much policing. But racism in the States is not confined to the police. In fact, it is not confined at all.
When Barack Obama was elected in 2008, there was talk about a post-racial America. But in 2016, at the end of Obama’s eight-year term, the non-partisan thinktank the Pew Research Center estimated that the median wealth of white households in the US was $171,000 (£132,000). This was 10 times the median wealth of black households ($17,100). This was a larger gap than in 2007, the year before Obama was elected.
Trump can be blamed for exacerbating racial tensions and giving succour to white supremacists but the racial wealth gap runs deeper than his term of office. As the non-aligned Brookings Institution said this year: “Gaps in wealth between black and white households reveal the effects of accumulated inequality and discrimination, as well as differences in power and opportunity that can be traced back to this nation’s inception.”
There’s also the matter of what happened to Native Americans.
We’re all prisoners of our histories. Back to my General Theory of Incompetent Systems.
Keys to the White House…
… is the name of a forecasting system, developed by political scientist Allan Lichtman for predicting the winner of American presidential elections, based upon the theory of pragmatic voting. (America’s electorate, according to this theory, chooses a president, not according to events of the campaign, but according to how well the party in control of the White House has governed the country.) It’s claimed that the system has correctly forecast the winner of all eight presidential elections from 1984 to 2016, usually months or even years prior to Election Day.
At the moment it’s predicting a Biden victory of 52.2% over 47.8% in the popular vote and 336 to 202 in the Electoral College.
Other, possibly interesting, links
25 Feel-Good Films You’ll Want to Watch Again—and Again. Might be useful for lockdown. Link
Ireland Mourns for Missing Dolphin Fungie – The New York Times. Link Might seem daft, but accurate. Dingle is one of my favourite places in all the world, and this Dolphin was one of its many delights. I still remember the joy on my daughter’s face one day in 1995 when, aged 4, she was able to reach out of the boat and stroke his dorsal fin.
Taiwan marks 200 days without domestic Covid-19 infection. It can be done. You just need a government that knows what it’s doing. Link
This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if your decide that your inbox is full enough already!
