Thorny problems

Seen on our walk this afternoon.

Quote of the Day

”Organic life, we are told, has developed gradually from the protozoon to the philosopher, and this development, we are assured, is indubitably an advance. Unfortunately, it is the philosopher, not the protozoon, who gives us this assurance.”

• Bertrand Russell

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Peggy Seeger | The Invisible Woman

Link

What a woman! Born in 1935 and still going strong. Thanks to Andrew Ingram for spotting it.

Long Read of the Day

In a recent Observer column I argued that now that universities have demonstrated that at least a part of their teaching can be done online, there will eventually have to be a post-pandemic reckoning: institutions will have to come up with good arguments for why it’s essential to gather students expensively in a single place for long periods. What exactly is special and essential for face-to-face teaching and learning? And does it have to be done in the same way that has been conventional since the 12th century?

I wasn’t saying that no such arguments exist. In some cases — laboratory teaching, for example, or medicine — the case for physical presence is obvious. It’s just that I wasn’t hearing any really good cases to justify the huge costs involved in higher education.

But a post today in Andrew Curry’s terrific Just Two Things blog suggested that convincing justifications may exist. He points to Christina Lupton’s thoughtful review of The Teaching Archive, a new book by Rachel Buurma and Laura Heffernan. The review is really interesting, and it suggests that the book is also important. So I guess it has to go on my reading list.

But for today, if you have time, Lupton’s review is enough to be going on with.

Do you really need to fly?

Interesting piece by Farhad Manjoo, who begins in confessional mood:

I once flew round-trip from San Francisco to London to participate in an hourlong discussion about a book. Another time it was San Francisco-Hong Kong, Hong Kong-Singapore and back again for two lunch meetings, each more lunch than meeting. I went to Atlanta once to interview an official who flaked out at the last minute. And there was that time in Miami: three days, 5,000 miles, hotel, rental car — and on the way back a sinking realization that the person I’d gone to profile was too dull for a profile.

His general point in the piece, though, seems unanswerable to me. Much of the obsession with the necessity of face-to-face contact was overblown, but it took the pandemic and the need to communicate electronically to blow the gaff on the myth. There will always be a case for travel and F2F needs to be more nuanced. Sometimes, it still is essential. But often it isn’t. And we’ll all be better for it.

(And — responding in the spirit of Manjoo’s confessional mode…the most enjoyable flight I ever took was probably also the most environmentally damaging: I flew the Atlantic on Concorde once. It took two and a half hours and included a very good lunch. And I arrived before I’d left, as it were. Unforgettable but also mad.)

My answer to Manjoo’s question: I don’t really need to fly any more, because I gave up long-haul flights decades ago. But in pre-pandemic times I found short-haul flights (an hour or so) pleasant and useful (especially for keeping in touch with family and friends). Most of those trips are still possible by car (now an EV) or rail, though they will take longer. But sometimes slow travel, like slow food, is more enjoyable. That’s a lesson we learned when we decided to drive, rather than fly, to Provence every summer.

Another, hopefully interesting, link

• The Last Blockbuster Store. Trailer for a documentary about the last Blockbuster store in the world. Strange thing is that in 2000 Blockbuster turned down the chance to buy Netflix for $50m. By 2011, Blockbuster was bankrupt and down to 2400 stores while Netflix had gone public and today has a market cap of $223 billion. Link

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Music lovers

Quote of the Day

“We class schools, you see, into four grades: Leading School, First-rate School, Good School, and School.”

• Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall.

Musical alternatives to the radio news of the day

1. Pete Seeger | Waist-deep in the Big Muddy | live Link (h/t to Andrew Curry)
2. Bach | Cello Suite Sarabande and Gig | Patrick Dexter in the open air outside his house in Co Mayo. Link

Two alternatives today — to make up for the fact that I missed out one yesterday :-( Thanks to the readers who tactfully pointed this out.

Long Read of the Day

Interview: Patrick Collison, co-founder and CEO of Stripe

Interesting throughout.

The Collison brothers are an amazing pair of entrepreneurs — two Irish kids who have built a remarkable company. Patrick is also a wide-ranging intellectual — a rara avis among Silicon Valley tech billionaires, many of whom seem to be half-educated dropouts. This long interview gives a pretty good impression of what he’s like.

The road to electric vehicles is filled with tiny cars

Fascinating report on what’s happening with EVs in China. And it’s not about Teslas.

h/t to Benedict Evans

Amazon buys more wind and solar energy than any other company

Link

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• Winners of the 2020 World Nature Photography Awards Link
• Right Up Our Alley Amazing drone flight. Link

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Temptation

Big story of the day

From Politico:

Joe Biden has decided to nominate Lina Khan, a Columbia University legal scholar championed by anti-Big Tech activists, to the Federal Trade Commission. For those of us who study this stuff, this appointment looks like a really big deal.

Along with the recent hiring of Tim Wu as an economic adviser inside the White House … the addition of Khan signals that Biden is poised to pursue an aggressive regulatory agenda when it comes to Amazon, Google, Facebook and other tech giants.

An FBI agent this week was making calls to Khan’s associates for her background check, the final part of the vetting process before a major administration job is officially announced. Sources confirmed Khan is headed to the FTC if she survives Senate confirmation.

The addition of Khan and Wu represents a massive shift in philosophy away from the era of BARACK OBAMA, who proudly forged an alliance between the Democratic Party and Big Tech.

At the end of the 2008 presidential campaign, a top Obama adviser marveled that Google’s ERIC SCHMIDT, then the company’s CEO, had worked so closely with the Obama campaign on its tech infrastructure that the work and advice should have been considered a massive in-kind donation. In office the Obama White House and Silicon Valley had a symbiotic relationship.

The ascendance of Khan and Wu, two of the most important intellectuals in the recent progressive antitrust revival, signals a break with that past and hints that Biden is sympathetic to the left’s view that Obama’s laissez-faire policies helped engender the populist backlash that ended with DONALD TRUMP’S election.

Adding Khan to the FTC, a move that will likely be greeted with alarm by the tech industry, also suggests that the White House is already laying the groundwork for a second act that will include a big regulatory push once its early legislative agenda runs its course.

Watch that space.

Long Read of the Day

 The Consequences Of Radical Reform

Scott Alexander has been reading an intriguing NBER paper on the consequences of the French Revolution by Daron Acemoglu, Davide Cantoni, Simon Johnson and James A. Robinson that was published way back in 2009. In it, the authors argued that the Revolution had

a momentous impact on neighboring countries. The French Revolutionary armies during the 1790s and later under Napoleon invaded and controlled large parts of Europe. Together with invasion came various radical institutional changes. French invasion removed the legal and economic barriers that had protected the nobility, clergy, guilds, and urban oligarchies and established the principle of equality before the law. The evidence suggests that areas that were occupied by the French and that underwent radical institutional reform experienced more rapid urbanization and economic growth, especially after 1850. There is no evidence of a negative effect of French invasion.

Reading this paper has sparked a thoughtful and interesting essay by Scott Alexander. This is how it begins:

The thread that runs from Edmund Burke to James Scott and Seeing Like A State goes: systems that evolve organically are well-adapted to their purpose. Cultures, ancient traditions, and long-lasting institutions contain irreplaceable wisdom. If some reformer or technocrat who thinks he’s the smartest guy in the room sweeps them aside and replaces them with some clever theory he just came up with, he’ll make everything much worse. That’s why collective farming, Brasilia, and Robert Moses worked worse than ordinary people doing ordinary things.

An alternative thread runs through the French Revolution, social activism, and modern complaints about vetocracy. Its thesis: entrenched interests are constantly blocking necessary change. If only there were some centralized authority powerful enough to sweep them away and do all the changes we know we need, everything would be great. This was the vibe I got from Gabriel Over The White House (sorry, subscriber-only post), the movie exhorting FDR to become a fascist dictator. So many obviously good policies had built up behind the veto point that we needed a Great Man to come in, sweep them away, and satisfy the people’s cries for justice. Obviously at its worst this thread can lead to authoritarianism.

These threads don’t cleanly map to the modern left-right political spectrum…

In the end he comes to a rather tame conclusion: whether radical reform is good or bad depends on how intelligent and thoroughgoing it is. But sometimes, as Leonard Woolf (I think) once observed, the journey not the arrival matters — which is often the case with Scott Alexander.

Meghan and Harry Will Never Be This Interesting Again

As I observed yesterday, I don’t have a dog in this fight, so I’ve avoided all British media coverage of the spat between Harry and Meghan and the other Royals. But I thought this American perspective provided by Jack Shafer was interesting.

Haters of monarchies would have you regard “royal” families as marrow-sucking parasites on the public treasury. And they would be right. The Windsors being the exemplars of such parasitism, believe ancestry and divine endorsement gives them an automatic right to an opulent life and deference from commoners. We should probably give Meghan and Harry an attagirl and an attaboy for turning their backs on “The Firm,” the widely used nickname for the “royal” family, and striking out to earn their own keep through production deals. The taxpayers who funded Meghan and Harry’s lifestyle were victims. The media consumers who will partake of their films and podcast will be paying accomplices in the first season of The Liberation of Meghan and Harry.

But the media face through which the two will now encounter the world is not radically new for them. Instead of “the Firm” pulling the puppet strings on their bodies, they’ll do their own yanking as they switch from being human products of a company that markets their lives to the world to human products that they control. It’s just the same unscripted material moved to a new location. The biggest difference is how they’ve disintermediated the Windsors from profit participation and assumed complete image creation for themselves.

Shafer’s point is that if the escaping pair think that working for The Firm was bad, then they’re about to discover that working for the Netflix/Hollywood mob is just as bad.

In order to stay commercially relevant, they’ll have to produce great content for Netflix and Spotify before their novelty wears off. That’s no easy feat. They’ll be competing against the most brilliant filmmakers and podcasters in the world now, and conjuring content from nothing ain’t nothing. Not even Steven Spielberg can deliver what the public wants every time, and he’s the greatest mass entertainer of our times. Also, neither Meghan nor Harry have much experience in producing media. If not for their relationship with the “royals,” they couldn’t have gotten a meeting with a Netflix flunky, let alone a deal.

Yep.

How the tech world pivoted on a dime

Pandemics accelerate history, says the historian Yuval Noah Harari. One minute we all worked in offices. The next day we were working from home (or at any rate those of us fortunate enough to be able to do so). But how was that possible?

The Register (Which God Preserve) is running a series of memoirs from tech-support staff who made it happen. Here’s a sample from today’s recollections:

On the other side of the world, Chris Moriarty also had a busy day after he was given four hours to move his 250-person business into a new office and get it ready to work from home.

The day started well for Moriarty and Flat Planet, the business process outsourcer he owns and runs in Manila, capital city of the Philippines. Work on the company’s new office had finished ahead of schedule and while the fortnight of overlapping leases would be busy with all the minutiae and mess of a move, the old and new offices were just 150m apart so the job promised to be orderly.

But on this day, 16 March 2020, Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte ordered four weeks of “enhanced community quarantine” that would prohibit residents leaving home for 28 days other than to buy food or seek medical attention. An accompanying curfew came into effect at sundown.

Four hours away.

”I called in my wife, maids, the builders from the new office,” Moriarty recalled. “We were all just sprinting up and down the street. We moved the server cupboard, the filing cabinets, hundreds of PCs. We did it in four hours, without any trucks or anything.”

See what I mean?

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Reds

Seen in our greenhouse last Summer. And hopefully this coming Summer too.

Quote of the Day

“The great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like prostitutes.”

• Stanley Kubrick, 1963.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Aisling Gheal (Slow Air) and O’Farrell’s Welcome to Limerick (Slip Jig) | Traditional Irish tunes arranged and played by Steven Johnson.

Link

Beautiful piping.

Harry and Meghan expose a ruthless, racist anti-fairytale in their primetime Oprah interview

That’s the headline on the Independent story. As an Irish citizen rather than a British subject (contrary to popular belief, monarchical states don’t have citizens), I don’t have a dog in this fight. But the interview confirms two things we knew already. One is that the British Royal family is a dysfunctional tribe on an Olympic scale. The other is that British tabloid culture is vicious, racist, and xenophobic to a pathological degree. Poor Meghan is in the same boat as Diana Spencer was in all but one respect: she has been able to persuade her husband to dump the charade before it was too late.

‘This could be dangerous’: Why Tim Wu’s appointment has Big Tech rattled

As this Protocol piece points out, Biden’s appointment of the Columbia lawyer Tim Wu to the National Economic Council is “the most ominous sign yet that Wu’s signature warning is correct: The ‘antitrust winter’ is over”.

As special assistant to the president for technology and competition policy, a newly-created position under Biden, he will work across the federal government to identify policies that could loosen the grip the major tech companies hold on the economy and encourage competition in the tech industry.

This is the first piece of unambiguously good news in this area that’s come out of the Biden administration. Up to now, those of us who watch this stuff closely have been increasingly concerned by the numbers of refugees from the tech companies who have found comfortable and sometimes powerful perches in the new administration. And of course the Vice President, during her time as Attorney General in California, took a relaxed view of the tech companies’ preemptive acquisition policies and never challenged them.

Wu is definitely smart. His book The Master Switch was a gem. But I wonder if he’s tough enough to make a difference. The New York Times seems to think that he might be.

How can Clubhouse stay ‘clubby’?

Idiotic question, discussed on Sifted by Ronjini Joshua.

I’ve been on Clubhouse since October; I was invited by an early member who was even the face of the app. But even in those five months, I feel the slow creep of the internet troll seeping into the platform. Clubhouse’s intimacy can create overfamiliarity or inappropriate behaviour. There are some users who have already become infamous for being provocative and offensive about sensitive racial, political or religious issues. Others have tried to use it as a pick-up platform, inviting women on stage only to proposition them.

If Clubhouse and others want to preserve and scale the magic of the early days, they should start treating online spaces more like physical ones: creating some filter over what people and behaviours are acceptable, and allowing the community to hold itself accountable.

Clubhouse is a tech business. That means it needs to grow fast, to achieve the powerful network effects that kick in when you’ve got a big network. It’s called the scalability problem in the business. But, writes Ms Joshua,

This scalability problem is already breaking Clubhouse. The more I use it, the more I see people ejected from rooms for either spurting out racist or sexist comments, or for shameless self-promotion.

When will tech commentators ever learn? Nothing that expands at Internet scale stays intimate. Period. Intimacy at scale is an oxymoron — like ‘military intelligence’.

Long Read of the Day

 Tech spent years fighting foreign terrorists. Then came the Capitol riot.

This is good and quite detailed. The TL;DR version — as seen by me, anyway — is that the social media companies discovered that they could be quite efficient and effective in controlling content that was either spectacularly illegal (child porn) or defined by the political establishment as hostile to the US (e.g. ISIS). But when it came to dealing with content produced by white domestic terrorists — ah, that was a different matter. Especially when one of them wound up being elected President.

But that’s just my summary. Do read the whole thing if you have the time.

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• Needledrop: listen to YouTube audio using a virtual vinyl turntable. Analog nostalgia gone mad. But also sweet: proof that if someone smart wants to code something, they can. Link.
• Earthrise — as seen from our moon. Eerie and lovely. Link.

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Pre-dinner drink in Provence in ye olde days.

Quote of the Day

”It is actually one of Tom’s achievements that one envies him nothing, except possibly his looks, his talents, his money and his luck. To be so enviable without being envied is pretty enviable, when you think about it.”

• Simon Gray, a fellow-playwright, on Tom Stoppard

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Regina Spektor | “Better”

Link

Long-time favourite of mine.

Long Read of the Day

O Lucky Man

Anthony Lane’s masterly New Yorker review of Hermione Lee’s biography of the playwright Tom Stoppard. A good friend of mine, who has very good judgement in these matters, has been encouraging me to read the biography for ages, but I held off partly because it’s a massive tome but also because I have too much else that needs to be read first. In the end, I caved in and ordered it. And then came on Anthony Lane’s lovely review. This is how it opens:

In 2007, the playwright Tom Stoppard went to Moscow. He was there to watch over a production of his trilogy—“Voyage,” “Shipwreck,” and “Salvage,” collectively known as “The Coast of Utopia.” The trilogy had opened in London in 2002, and transferred to Lincoln Center in 2006. Now, in a sense, it was coming home. The majority of the characters, though exiled, are from Russia (the most notable exception being a German guy named Karl Marx), and, for the first time, they would be talking in Russian, in a translation of Stoppard’s text. Ever courteous, he wanted to be present, during rehearsals, to offer notes of encouragement and advice. These were delivered through an interpreter, since Stoppard speaks no Russian. One day, at lunch, slices of an anonymous meat were produced, and Stoppard asked what it was. “That is,” somebody said, seeking the correct English word, “language.”

The meat, of course, was tongue, and the anecdote—one of hundreds that Hermione Lee passes on to us in her new biography, “Tom Stoppard: A Life” (Knopf)—is perfect to a fault. If any writer was going to be on the receiving end of so deliciously forgivable a mistake, it had to be Stoppard. Likewise, at a performance of his 1974 play, “Travesties,” how was he to know that the handsome fellow he was chatting with was not, as he believed, his French translator but was, in fact, Rudolf Nureyev? Is it somehow in Stoppard’s nature that Stoppardian events befall him, or is it only in his telling that they come to acquire that distinctive lustre? He emerges from Lee’s book as a magnetic figure to whom others cluster and swarm, and around whom happy accidents, chance encounters, new loves, and worldly goods are heaped like iron filings.

This is a great read and a very perceptive review.

But now I have to go back to what I was reading before I wrote this — Kazuo Isiguro’s Klara and the Sun which I’m reading in an attempt to escape from the poverty of imagination that strikes us ordinary mortals when we try to think about what living with (or under?) intelligent machines might be like.

The US’s latest outbreak of hegemonic anxiety

This morning’s Observer column:

This week the American National Security Commission on artificial intelligence released its final report. Cursory inspection of its 756 pages suggests that it’s just another standard product of the military-industrial complex that so worried President Eisenhower at the end of his term of office. On closer examination, however, it turns out to be a set of case notes on a tragic case of what we psychologists call “hegemonic anxiety” – the fear of losing global dominance.

The report is the work of 15 bigwigs, led by Dr Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Alphabet (and before that the adult supervisor imposed by venture capitalists on the young co-founders of Google). Of the 15 members of the commission only four are female. Eight are from the tech industry (including Andy Jassy, Jeff Bezos’s anointed heir at Amazon); two are former senior Pentagon officials; and the tech sector of the national intelligence community is represented by at least three commissioners. Given these establishment credentials, the only surprising thing is that the inquiry seems to have been set up during Trump’s presidency, which suggests that it was organised by the “deep state” during the hours of one to four AM, when Trump was generally asleep…

Read on

Putting things in perspective

Matt Webb has been reading Tracy Kidder’s lovely book, The Soul of a New Machine, published in 1981, about the creation of a new minicomputer by Data General. This led to an interesting reflection on change and progress.

It starts with a paragraph from the book about strange things called ‘transistors’.

“Transistors, a family of devices, alter and control the flow of electricity in circuits; one standard rough analogy compares their action to that of faucets controlling the flow of water in pipes. Other devices then in existence could do the same work, but transistors are superior. They are solid. They have no cogs and wheels, no separate pieces to be soldered together; it is as if they are stones performing useful work.”

Reading that, says Matt,

it’s so clear that 1981 is closer to 1947 (when the transistor was invented) than today.

Matter, without movement, can perform useful work! Solid state. This idea is insanity when you think about it, and Kidder in 1981 was able to call that out.

Two transistors make a NAND gate, and a NAND gate is both a physical thing and a mathematical operation and – with many connected together – can store numbers, add numbers, discriminate between numbers, and so on, numbers being both data and instructions to perform more operations.

The solution takes the material form of a circuit called a NAND gate, which reproduces the “not and” function of Boolean algebra. The part costs eight cents, wholesale.

The latest iPhone has 11.8 billion transistors. So the chip at the heart of each phone is $1.4 billion in parts, no margin. That’s 1981 prices, 2021 money accounting for inflation.

Matt thinks that Kidder’s book is “a terrifically told story mainly about personalities and teams, and also about computers”. It is.

As a kid building radios by hand in the 1950s, I bought a transistor for a circuit I was making. Yes, you read that correctly, “a transistor”. A single one. This is what it looked like.

And now my iPhone has 11.8 billion of the things. How did that happen?

I am a Neanderthal and I resent being compared to incompetent Republican governors

Lovely piece by Anna Book triggered by a report that the White House Press Secretary on Thursday defended President Biden calling the decision of two GOP governors to lift mask mandates as ‘Neanderthal thinking’ after some conservatives took offence to the criticism.

Look, this is nothing new. We’re used to it. There’s a long history here. We let you modern Homo sapiens romanticize our culture for your kids’ entertainment (Croods), appropriate our hard-earned achievements (controlling FIRE!), and relegate us to history as uncivilized brutes who lack intelligence and language (take a bow, H.G. Wells). But comparing us to someone like Texas Governor Greg Abbott is a step too far, Mr. President. You just crossed the line we drew in the sand, or more accurately, etched into the ice with our hand-crafted tools.

To describe the lifting of mask mandates as “Neanderthal thinking” is misleading and, quite frankly, insulting. It’s true that we didn’t have modern-day essentials like vegetable spiralizers and Pelotons, but we were never willfully ignorant. Is this a good time to mention the wind turbines?

See, contrary to popular belief, stupidity didn’t kill us. We probably died from a lack of immunity to new diseases, or as a result of climate change. Now, are we still the morons in this scenario? Because if you people are so intellectually superior, in the 40,000 intervening years, why haven’t you learned anything, like, gee, I don’t know, how not to flirt with extinction?

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Nabokov’s view

Trinity Lane, Cambridge, in winter. I think Vladimir Nabokov had a room looking out on the lane when he was a student here.

Quote of the Day

”The basic difference between classical music and jazz is that in the former music is always greater than its performance — whereas the way jazz is performed is always more important than what is being played.”

• André Previn

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart | “Ch’io mi scordi di te… Non temer, amato bene | K. 505 | Magdalena Kožená | Orchestra Of The Age Of Enlightenment | Simon Rattle | Jos Van Immerseel

Link

Wait until you’re two minutes in and then stop everything.

Long Read of the Day

The Frontiers Of Digital Democracy

If you’re interested — as I am — in using digital technology as a means of revitalising democracy rather than as a method of undermining it while making a few moguls insanely rich, then Audrey Tang is a really interesting figure — a talented Taiwanese free software programmer who is also minister without portfolio in the Taiwanese government. This must be the first time a serious geek has held such an important public office. This conversation gives a fascinating insight in the attempts Taiwan is making to use tech to enrich deliberative democracy. You might describe as an attempt to reinvent the consent of the governed.

Love persevering

Scott Galloway is an amazing man — prominent business academic, wealthy tech investor, expert on branding and marketing, opinionated as hell, often noisy. Like me, he thinks Facebook is a toxic corporation. He’s also wonderfully frank about what’s going on in his head. But the current edition of his weekly blog really brought me up short. The trigger for it was that earlier in the week, his family had to have their beloved dog Zoe put down. The post is about the impact this has had on the family — and on Scott himself.

Here’s an excerpt:

Zoe’s death has rocked our household. The other dog won’t come out of his crate, the nanny won’t stop crying, my oldest doesn’t want to come out of his room, and (most disturbingly) his 10 year-old brother is doing what we ask him to. We’ve been a bit self-conscious about our grief as we recognize that 500,000+ U.S. households haven’t lost a pet, but a dad, aunt, or other loved one in the last 12 months. But our grief persists.

At first, I was fine playing the role of the stoic dad: “She lived a great life,” “This is what’s best for her,” etc. Then yesterday, on a livestream with Verizon and 60 of its communications agency partners, I started sobbing while describing the harm Facebook is doing to society. Despite all the macho and strength I aspire to project, there I was, 56 years old and a chocolate mess on a Zoom call with dozens of people who want confirmation that they should serve ads on Yahoo.

I think that most people who’ve had a pet over a long time will understand how one can experience grief when the animal passes away. Most of us try to put a brave face on it (certainly I have in my time), but the grief is real — especially when one has had to ask for a termination to put the pet out of agony. And so I admire Scott Galloway’s honest empathy.

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• Stephen Fry on his writing process. Interesting video. He uses the same software as I do (Ulysses) — not that that means anything. Link
• Walker ‘stunned’ to see ship hovering high above sea off Cornwall.. Wonderful story. The moral: if you see something really weird, take a photograph before it disappears. Otherwise people will think you’re losing your marbles. Link

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Bob Satchwell RIP

It’s been one of those weeks. Bob Satchwell, another old friend, has died. In one way he was the archetype of the old-style British hack, schooled in the ways of ‘Fleet Street’, when that was a synonym for Britain’s print newspapers and not much had changed since Evelyn Waugh wrote Scoop. He had even been Deputy Editor of the News of the World in its heyday and, believe me, you can’t get more downmarket than that. And he had the bluff, boisterous style to go with it.

It was all on the surface, though. Beneath that hard carapace was a shrewd, intelligent, thoughtful and very nice man. He had been a student at LSE in the heyday of the student revolution. And he had in his time been a gifted and determined investigative journalist: his reporting as a youthful hack on a provincial paper, for example, brought down a corrupt Chief Constable in the north of England. Not quite Watergate, perhaps, but still a hell of an achievement in a society where Establishment villains are hard to unseat.

I got to know him when he was Editor of the local paper, the Cambridge Evening News. He became a great supporter of the Press Fellowship Programme that I run at my college (Wolfson) and eventually became a Senior Member of the college. I used to be puzzled by the fact that many of our overseas Press Fellows seemed to have an inordinately high opinion of British journalism and eventually twigged that it was because none of them ever read the tabloids. And so from then on, one anchor-point of the Programme was a breakfast seminar to which I brought all the newspapers of the day and Bob conducted a bravura analysis of the content and the machinations that underpinned it. The Press Fellows were simultaneously charmed by him and appalled by what they were learning about the realities of the British media landscape.

He and I argued all the time about those newspapers. As Director of the Society of Editors, the association of 400-odd British editors, he became the public advocate for the right of newspapers of whatever stripe to print whatever they wanted within the laws of libel and public order. He was also a fierce opponent of judges and lawyers who thought that injunctions were a legitimate weapon to use against inquisitive reporters. He had a Menckenian disdain for politicians of all parties, and always laughed when I accused him of defending the indefensible. And yet, however fierce our disagreements, we were good friends because we both respected what the other was trying to do. And he was terrific, rumbustious company, not least because he enjoyed a drink or three. May he rest in peace.

Quote of the Day

”I’m all for bringing back the birch. But only between consenting adults.”

• Gore Vidal

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Salieri: La Fiera di Venezia | Act 3 – Vi sono sposa e amante | Cecilia Bartoli · |Rachel Brown

Link

I’ve always thought that Salieri was given a bum deal by Peter Shafer.

Long Read of the Day

Death is a feature, not a bug

This is Doc Searls’s astonishingly vivid meditation on the planetary impact of our species. He sent me the link after he read my rant the other day about billionaires wanting to colonise Mars rather than sort out the problems of planet earth.

Elon Musk wants to colonize Mars. This is a very human thing to want. But before we start following his lead, we might want to ask whether death awaits us there. Not our deaths. Anything’s. What died there to make life possible for what succeeds it? From what we can tell so far, the answer is nothing. To explain why life needs death, answer this: what do plastic, wood, limestone, paint, travertine, marble, asphalt, oil, coal, stalactites, peat, stalagmites, cotton, wool, chert, cement, nearly all food, all gas, and most electric services have in common? They are all products of death. They are remains of living things, or made from them.

It’s a sobering piece, written in 2018. Here’s the payoff line:

But why fuck up Mars before we’re done fucking up Earth, when there’s still some leverage with the death we have at home and that Mars won’t begin to have until stuff dies on it?

Like I said, sobering.

The legal SWAT team that prepared for anything Trump & Co might throw at democracy

An absolutely riveting New Yorker piece by Jane Meyer about Seth Waxman and two other former former Solicitors General of the United States who teamed up to anticipate — and combat — the worst that could happen before, during and after the Presidential election. They only thing they didn’t anticipate was the ‘insurrection’ of January 6.

Night after night, Waxman tabulated every possible thing that could go wrong. Having advised several Democratic Presidential campaigns, he was familiar with the pitfalls. But none of the nightmares conjured by Trump “corresponded with anything I’d worried about in earlier campaigns,” he said. He ended up with a three-and-a-half-page single-spaced list of potential catastrophes.

Eleven months before the Senate impeachment trial exposed an unprecedented level of political savagery, Waxman quietly prepared for the worst. He reached out to two other former Solicitors General, Walter Dellinger and Donald Verrilli, who served as the Clinton and the Obama Administrations’ advocates, respectively, before the Supreme Court. By April, they had formed a small swat team to coördinate with the Biden campaign. They called themselves the Three Amigos, but the campaign referred to them as SG3. Their goal: safeguarding the election.

The squads of lawyers the trio had assembled “produced thousands of pages of legal analysis, and what I call ‘template pleadings,’ ” in preparation for every conceivable kind of breakdown in the democratic system. “Some of these scenarios were beyond unlikely, such as federal marshals seizing ballot boxes, and federal troops at polling places. But we had to game out what someone of Trump’s ruthlessness and lack of concern for the law would do.”

Even before the Capitol riot, the group had prepared Supreme Court pleadings in case Trump strong-armed Vice-President Mike Pence into rejecting the certification of the Electoral College votes. “We were fully prepared to go to the Supreme Court by nightfall,” Dellinger said by phone from North Carolina, where he teaches at Duke Law School. “We had paper filed and ready.”

And Waxman’s reflections now?

“The lesson we learned, is that the state of our democracy is perilous—even more so than we thought. I am very, very worried.”

He’s right to be. See the post below.

The Facts of Life

Remarkable column by William Kristol, normally the most conservative you could meet in a month of Sundays. He has come to the conclusion that the Republican Party has basically given up on democracy.

When Margaret Thatcher commented that “the facts of life are conservative,” she wasn’t adding “the facts of life” to a list of arguments for conservatism. She was saying she was conservative because the facts of life are what they are.

And one of those facts of life is that a dangerous, anti-democratic faction—which pretty clearly constitutes a majority—of the nation’s conservative party is not committed in any serious way to the truth, the rule of law, or the basic foundations of our liberal democracy.

My only question is: what took him so long?

Many thanks to Hamid, who alerted me to the piece.

Another, hopefully interesting, link

• A murmuration of starlings briefly create the image of a giant bird. Yes, you read that correctly. According to a reputable dictionary a murmuration is “starlings returning to their winter roost in a swirl after feeding”. The video is extraordinary. Link

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Jonathan Steinberg RIP

Jonathan (centre), on his 80th birthday with his brother and fellow-historian Chris Clark

Jonathan died today. He was suffering from Alzheimer’s, so I suppose it was a relief because he hated getting old and it must have been agonising for someone who had the sharpest, most retentive memory of anyone I knew, to lose it. A mutual friend wrote to me the other day about spending a day with him last summer:

We spent the first hour and a half watching a video of him delivering a lecture about Bismarck [of whom he wrote a magisterial biography] and handling questions with great verve and wit. He was transfixed by it. When it was finished, he said, looking at me intensely, “That man, Jonathan Steinberg, no longer exists. He belongs to the past. And Bismarck belongs to the past. They both belong to history.”

Theres a great sadness implicit in that story, but also a great consolation: it was Jonathan at his succinct best, able to say things that more fastidious scholars would habitually avoid.

He was a great historian but also a very dear friend whom I’ve known and loved for decades. It’s impossible to succinctly sum up his life or even his career(s). He came from a German Jewish family in New York, where his father was a celebrated Rabbi who I think expected Jonathan to follow in his footsteps. But the draft stopped that idea and he served in the US army during the war, coming home home determined to live in Europe. Sigmund Warburg, the great banker, spotted his talent and brought him into the bank and I think thought of him as his possible successor. But history claimed him in the end, and for most of his life he taught in Cambridge, where he was a Fellow of Trinity Hall and a member of the History Faculty which — in my opinion — never properly appreciated him. In the end it was the University of Pennsylvania that gave him the professorial Chair he deserved.

Mostly, our friendship revolved around lunch, which started around 12:30 and often went on until 3 or 3:30, after which I would come away with a long list of things I should read, because he seemed to have read everything, in several languages. I never came away from those long conversations without learning something. I think that one of the reasons we got on so well was that we were both ‘insider-outsiders’ as he put it. That is to say, we both liked and valued Cambridge, but were never entirely ‘of’ Cambridge. Which meant that we were able to properly enjoy the more comical aspects of an ancient institution while appreciating its many good sides. In one famous episode, a tramp had wandered into the Senior Combination Room of his college and the other Fellows didn’t quite know what to do about the intruder — who had settled himself in an armchair and was enjoying a cup of coffee. It was Jonathan who solved the problem by indicating in best New Yorker style that the guy was out of order and had better scram while the going was good. Whereupon he did. Afterwards everyone relaxed, but nobody said anything. It was a case-study, Jonathan said, on the English disease of politeness and the avoidance of embarrassment. “If I hadn’t done something”, he said afterwards, “they’d have elected him Master before they’d have kicked him out.”

He wrote like an angel, with a lovely pellucid style. For years he had a delightful column in New Society. And he occasionally wrote for the London Review of Books. If you want to get a flavour of what he was like, see this lovely LRB diary piece he wrote in 1984.

He was a wonderful, life-enhancing, generous friend. I was lucky to have known him. May he rest in peace.

Quote of the Day

“I can’t see the sense of making me a Commander of the British Empire (CBE). They might as well make me a Commander of Milton Keynes. At least that exists.”

• Spike Milligan

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Fleetwood Mac | Man of the World | 1969

Link

He doesn’t half sound gloomy about his condition, though. Thanks to John Darch for suggesting it.

Long Read of the Day

How Law Made Neoliberalism

Insightful long essay by Yale scholars Jedediah Britton-Purdy, Amy Kapczynski, and David Singh Grewal.

These crises are often analyzed in terms of the political economy of neoliberalism, an ideology of governance that came to predominate in the 1970s and ’80s. Neoliberalism is associated with a demand for deregulation, austerity, and an attempt to assimilate government to something more like a market—but it never was as simple as a demand for “free markets.” Rather, it was a demand to protect the market from democratic demands for redistribution.

This analysis of neoliberalism too often overlooks the critical role that law plays in constituting neoliberalism. Law is the essential connective tissue between political judgment and economic order.

Many people recognize that the law has changed in anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic ways in recent decades—for example, that Citizens United amplified the role of money in politics, or that the construct of “colorblindness” has become entrenched in constitutional doctrine and helps sustain structural racism. In our view these are not isolated changes, but part of an orientation—an ideology about markets, governments, and law that has become foundational to our legal infrastructure. We call this orientation the “Twentieth-Century Synthesis” in legal thought.

Under the Twentieth-Century Synthesis, areas of law that concern aspects of “the economy”—for example, contracts, corporations, and antitrust—were given over to a “law and economics” approach that emphasized wealth maximization. Meanwhile, other values—such as equality, dignity, and privacy—were supposed to be realized in constitutional law and areas of public administration. Shaped by these ideological currents, constitutional law turned away from concerns of economic power, structural inequality, and systemic problems of racial subordination. Other “public law” areas did the same. The result was that deep structures of power at the meeting place of state and economy were shielded from legal remedy and came to seem increasingly natural… En passant: I’ve often thought that tech companies are what the wet dreams of neoliberals must be like. Take those End User Licence Agreements (EULAs) for example. Although you’re supposed to belong to a ‘community’ (e.g. Facebook’s 2.2B users), actually you’re being treated as an atomised individual for whom everything in your feed is ‘personalised’ (i.e. targeted). Which brings to mind Margaret Thatcher’s famous observation about there being “no such thing as society — only individuals and their families”.

Another, hopefully interesting, link

•  How to have an (indoor) exercise bike without breaking the bank. Helpful piece. I have an exercise bike in the old-fashioned sense — it goes on roads. And isn’t networked. But then I’m lucky to live where that’s easy and safe. Just checked the other day and I’ve done nearly 5,000 miles on it. Link

Errata

Apologies to Andrew Curry for getting his first name wrong yesterday. Unforgivable, especially given that I read his blog every day. And thanks to Doc Searls for alerting me.

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Bath time, West London

Quote of the Day

”I played the young Earl of Dudley and was beheaded in the third reel — not, in my opinion, a moment too soon.”

• John Mills, on his role in the 1936 film, Tudor Rose.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bob Dylan | Like A Rolling Stone | Live at Newport 1965

Link

Long Read of the Day

Critical Thinking isn’t Just a Process: Authoritarian muscle memory and the twists and turns of lying

Another fabulous essay by Zeynep Tufecki in which she uncovers the ambiguities in the accounts of Trump’s brush with Covid.

One of the things I noticed throughout the past year has been that a lot of my friends who had grown up in authoritarian or poor countries had a much easier time adjusting to our new pandemic reality. My childhood was intermittently full of shortages of various things. We developed a corresponding reflex for stocking up on things when they were available, anticipating what might be gone soon. That was quite useful for the pandemic. So was trying to read between the lines of official statements—what was said and what was not, who was sitting with whom on the TV, and evaluating what the rumor networks brought in. It turns out those are really useful skills when authorities are lying at all levels.

Terrific from beginning to end.

What is it with billionaires and Mars?

Adam Curry has a nice post about this.

It is hard to talk about Mars these days without noticing that it has become a fixation for those Silicon Valley billionaires who seem to think it’s going to be a solution to the pressing questions of the ‘Grand Problematique’ that we have here on our current planet. Elon Musk is probably the poster child here, although Bezos and Branson are also playing around with space. Musk’s SpaceX corporation explicitly talks about colonising Mars. (Its four minute promotional video is here). If a goal is a dream with a deadline, SpaceX has even set some pretty aggressive deadlines: sending a cargo ship to the planet by next year, humans by 2024.

That’s not going to happen, of course: the launch window only comes round every 26 months, for one thing, and there is a huge range of technological issues still to overcome. But even more cautious observers think we might only be 10-15 years away from a manned flight to the planet. And in the meantime the Off-World project, run by Proudly Human, is conducting a series of extreme habitation experiments on earth to learn about how best to prepare for extreme conditions on the Moon and Mars.

Adam also quotes Jim Adams (ex-NASA) comparing where we are with space exploration at present with the early days of global exploration:

“The best way to look at it is, if we were to compare where we are in terms of space travel to the days when Europe was dominating the oceans, you know, the Spanish galleons and that sort of thing; we’re still looking at how to build good canoes.”

I have a theory about this hubris. Great wealth does strange things to people — and to those around them. It’s a combination of aphrodisiac and reality-distortion field. Immensely rich (or powerful) people think they are rich (or powerful) because they’re very special. And the people around them think that if someone is immensely rich or powerful they must be smart. And so there’s a kind of positive feedback loop that intensifies with time.

That’s bad enough when the wealthy are middle-aged. But when the money arrives at a point when the recipient is barely out of short trousers — as, for example, with some of the Silicon Valley crowd, then not only do they think they’re geniuses, but so too do those around them, not to mention the journalists who fawn upon them. Live like that for a while and you go bananas.

That’s why political leaders go crazy after a while. They’re surrounded by people who admire them, or look as if they do.

I once had an interesting demonstration of this.

In early 1996 I was given the job by my university of explaining the World Wide Web to the then UK Prime Minister, John Major. We set up a networked computer in the bowels of the Department of Trade and Industry in London and at the appointed hour the swing doors opened and in came the PM, flanked by four cabinet ministers and a cohort of minders, personal assistants and sundry satraps. (The government was launching some daft IT initiative later in the morning.) I greeted him and explained what we’d been asked to do, answered his questions about what one could do with the web (charmingly, he wanted to see if you could find furniture on it) and so on. While one of my colleagues guided him through the idea of a search engine etc. I noticed that everyone around was smiling. And I remember thinking that this is how every day is for him. Same goes for the super-rich. No wonder they go nuts.

The amazing thing about Major, though, is that he didn’t go crazy (unlike Thatcher before him and Blair afterwards). In fact he remained a perfectly normal person. On the day after his 1997 defeat, for example, he went off to watch cricket at the Oval.

Australia vs Facebook: Who won?

Nic Stuart (one of our Press Fellowship’s alumni) has a pretty good answer in his column in the Canberra Times: What’s most important, he writes, is that the ‘agreement’ between the government and Facebook

sets an atrocious precedent: Facebook chooses the news you see and Zuckerberg will decide how it distributes the pittance it decides is “appropriate”.

Labor’s hitching a ride because it’s not interested in real reform. The last thing it wants is to get Facebook, or big media, offside before the coming election. But the biggest joke of all is hidden in plain sight. This legislation allows the Treasurer to decide if the deals between Facebook and the media companies represent “a significant contribution” to the sustainability of news.

That’s why Facebook’s on top of the winners podium. Its business model is secure and untouched. Shuffling in second are the lethargic, old media; behemoths getting money for nothing. Third is the government with Frydenberg [Australia’s Treasurer] given the chance to regale everyone at dinner parties about how he “faced down” Zuckerberg over six telephone conversations.

So who’s lost? Well you, obviously, but at least you’re not coming last. That place is reserved for journalism.

Great column.

Incidentally Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, Director of the Reuters Institute at Oxford, has a very good analysis of this on the The Lawfare podcast. Well worth a listen.

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• Who is still buying VHS tapes? Link
• Zadie Smith’s 10 rules of writing. Link

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Not Suitable

Seen on a favourite Donegal beach

Quote of the Day

”Man appears to be the missing link between anthropoid apes and human beings.”

• Konrad Lorenz, 1965.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Piano Quintet, Op. 44 in E-flat | In modo d’una marcia | Un poco largemente | Agitato

Link

Long Read of the Day

Touching the future: Stories of systems, serendipity and grace

Lovely essay by Genevieve Bell. Here’s how it begins:

The future is not a destination. We build it every day in the present. This is, perhaps, a wild paraphrasing of the acclaimed author and futurist William Gibson who, when asked what a distant future might hold, replied that the future was already here, it was just unevenly distributed. I often ponder this Gibson provocation, wondering where around me the future might be lurking. Catching glimpses of the future in the present would be helpful. But then, I think, rather than hoping to see a glimpse of the future, we could instead actively build one. Or at the very least tell stories about what it might be. Stories that unfold a world or worlds in which we might want to live – neither dystopian nor utopian, but ours…

Long read; and worth it.

How one US state is regulating facial recognition technology.

Massachusetts is one of the first states to put legislative guardrails around the use of facial recognition technology in criminal investigations.

Link

Though police have been using facial recognition technology for the last two decades to try to identify unknown people in their investigations, the practice of putting the majority of Americans into a perpetual photo lineup has gotten surprisingly little attention from lawmakers and regulators. Until now.

Lawmakers, civil liberties advocates and police chiefs have debated whether and how to use the technology because of concerns about both privacy and accuracy. But figuring out how to regulate it is tricky. So far, that has meant an all-or-nothing approach. City Councils in Oakland, Portland, San Francisco, Minneapolis and elsewhere have banned police use of the technology, largely because of bias in how it works. Studies in recent years by MIT researchers and the federal government found that many facial recognition algorithms are most accurate for white men, but less so for everyone else.

That’s why a new law in Massachusetts is interesting: It’s not all or nothing. The state is trying to strike a balance between allowing law enforcement to harness the benefits of the tool, while building in protections that might prevent the false arrests that have happened before.

A police reform bill that goes into effect in July creates new guardrails: Police first must get a judge’s permission before running a face recognition search, and then have someone from the state police, the F.B.I. or the Registry of Motor Vehicles perform the search. A local officer can’t just download a facial recognition app and do a search.

It’s a start, but not enough. I think public authorities need a statutory body that will decide whether, and under what conditions, they are allowed to procure this technology.

News site Stuff left Facebook. Seven months later, traffic is just fine and trust is higher

Link

Very interesting talk by Sinead Boucher, an alumna of my college’s Press Fellowship Programme and now CEO of Stuff, New Zealand’s top-ranking news and media site. In July 2020, she decided that Stuff would walk away from its audience of over a million followers on Facebook and Instagram. This followed a move to stop advertising on the platform the year before after the Christchurch shootings. It was meant to be a quiet, internal experiment, but word of the decision was leaked to the public. The response has apparently been overwhelming public support, but what’s even more interesting is that Stuff’s unique visitors are up 5% year-on-year. However, she reckons that, given it was a strong news year, it would probably be more accurate to consider this as flat — i.e.no change either way.

“If we said, look, there was an election and a pandemic, we think we could have expected to grow more, then we think being off Facebook has probably cost us between 5% and 10% growth. But it hasn’t been disastrous by any means.” Instead, the site’s direct and search traffic has gone up. They’re still seeing between 10-11% of their social traffic being referred organically by Facebook because readers still share story links on their own news feeds.

This is interesting and puzzling. You may remember that a couple of weeks ago Facebook caused a stir when the Australian government pushed ahead with a Bill that would force social-media companies to engage in negotiations with conventional publishers about payment for their use of conventional news content. FB abruptly pulled all news content from its site, a move which attracted worldwide attention. After a few days, though, the company restored news content after some secret conversations with the government. It’s not clear (to me anyway) who blinked first. Were Australian politicians getting too much heat from constituents pissed off by not being able to access news on their Facebooks? Or were conventional media outlets panicked by seeing their ratings drop off a cliff? I think it’s unlikely that Facebook was much impacted by dropping news from their service: the revenue loss would have been loose change to them. Or could it be that the company was spooked by world reaction to this revelation of their untrammelled power, especially with the various actions and inquiries going on in the US, the EU and the UK? Personally I think that unlikely. Facebook has been a pathologically sociopathic organisation from the beginning: it’s never shown any sign of being really moved by public reaction to anything it’s done before.

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• How famous economists might have looked — according to an AI image analysis tool. Link
• Fisher-Price: My Home Office. Toddler’s WFH kit. Truly, you couldn’t make this stuff up. Link
• The Mars Perseverance Rover is powered by a hardened version of the same processor that powered the first iMac. 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!