Art paying homage to Technology

Steve Russell’s Zoom-gallery portrait

My friend and former colleague, Joe Smith, who is now Director of the Royal Geographical Society, sent me a link to this innovative way of using an ancient medium to pay homage to a modern one. It’s a Zoom meeting portrait of nine people who, Joe says, have helped keep the RGS show on the road during COVID. “In an institution that has quite a few moustachio’d 19th-century bloke portraits on the walls”, he writes, “this is a refreshing expression of who we are today”. It’s also one answer to the question of how a venerable institution can hold a memory of COVID, and show gratitude to the people who ‘got us through’.

Quote of the Day

”His pictures seem to resemble, not pictures, but a sample book of patterns of linoleum.”

• Cyril Asquith on Paul Klee

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Franz Schubert | Moment Musical Op.94 (D.780) No.2 in A flat Major | Alfred Brendel

Link

Nobody plays Schubert like Brendel.

Long Read of the Day

Operation Yellowhammer

Operation Yellowhammer was the government’s contingency planning for its response to the most severe anticipated short-term disruption under a no-deal Brexit – which is called the ‘reasonable worst case’ scenario. This interesting summary by the Institute for Government covered 12 key areas of risk, including food and water supplies, healthcare services, trade in goods and transport systems.

The really interesting thing about it, looking at it now, is how accurate it was.

Truly, we are governed by imbeciles. Not entirely surprising, given that the main criterion for membership of the Cabinet is to have been wrong about the biggest issue facing the UK since 1973.

Thanks to Janet Cobb for the link.

Takeaways from Frances Haugen’s star turn in Congress

She looks like a formidable whistleblower — as you can tell from Facebook’s scrambling to do damage limitation.

The NYT reporter came away with three ‘takeaways’:

1. Republican and Democratic lawmakers are united on taking action to stop the harms caused to teenagers on Facebook.
2. Lawmakers have gotten smarter about tech. (Hmmm… that wouldn’t have been hard, given their previous showings.)
3. Facebook is sitting on an even larger mountain of internal research. (So there’s much more to be unearthed. Thie is rich subpoena territory.)

For his part, the Bloomberg reporter confessed that he was

”pleasantly surprised by how thoughtful the whistle-blower, Frances Haugen, was in her testimony and answers. I was even more surprised at how thoughtful our elected officials were in their questions.

The Hearing, he said, didn’t have the usual cadence of tech bosses hauled in to be shouted at by legislators looking for social-media soundbytes.

Tuesday’s hearing felt refreshingly different. The discussion primarily focused on Facebook’s actual problems, including its feed ranking algorithms, its impact on teens and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s power. Haugen was helpful in understanding some of Facebook’s internal thinking, like its desire to reach teenagers because that’s the cohort it needs to maintain its growth.

She also helped identify major problems for future discussion, like the claim that Facebook’s efforts to fight misinformation predominantly center around English-language news, but most of its users don’t speak English. Haugen even offered up some potential solutions, like the idea of organizing user feeds based on the most recent posts, not a ranking algorithm. It’s not exactly a new idea, but it was an idea nonetheless.

Most importantly, it felt like a discussion, not a firing line.

(The Bloomberg stuff comes from their Fully Charged newsletter, for which I can never find a web-link.)

The Times had an interesting OpEd by Roddy Lindsay, a former Facebook data scientist who worked on the feed-curation algorithms and picked up on Ms Haugen’s view that those algorithms are one of the roots of Facebook’s societal toxicity.

When data scientists and software engineers blend content personalization and algorithmic amplification — as they do to produce Facebook’s News Feed, TikTok’s For You tab and YouTube’s recommendation engine — they create uncontrollable, attention-sucking beasts. Though these algorithms, such as Facebook’s “engagement-based ranking,” are marketed as increasing “relevant” content, they perpetuate biases and affect society in ways that are barely understood by their creators, much less users or regulators.

In 2007, I started working at Facebook as a data scientist, and my first assignment was to work on the algorithm used by News Feed. Facebook has had more than 15 years to demonstrate that algorithmic personal feeds can be built responsibly; if it hasn’t happened by now, it’s not going to happen. As Ms. Haugen said, it should now be humans, not computers, “facilitating who we get to hear from.”

I like the “attention-sucking beasts” metaphor, but while neutering said beasts would be useful, there’s no silver bullet for fixing corporations like Facebook.

As HL Mencken famously observed: “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong”.

Tech corporations are part of a bigger regulatory challenge, which we’re not even beginning to contemplate yet.

My Commonplace booklet

(Eh? See here)

• A random conversation today about how smart women are often underestimated or ignored by dumber men reminded me of a lovely story about Cass Sunstein, the Uber-smart Harvard prof and Samantha Power, his equally smart wife. When she was Obama’s Ambassador to the UN, the couple lived in a suite in a fancy New York hotel when the UN was in session, and the staff immediately assumed that her husband was ‘Mr Power’. One morning he went down on his own to the lobby and asked the concierge to call him a cab. When the car arrived the concierge said “Your cab’s here, Mr Power.” At this point Cass said mildly, “Actually my name is Sunstein” — to which the concierge replied “Wow! You look just like Mr Power.”

• My relay yesterday of criticisms of the UK electricity system by Greg Jackson, CEO of the disruptive supplier Octopus, did not impress one reader of this blog, who writes that he would be “a little more impressed with Mr Jackson if Octopus hadn’t just helped itself to all of my daughter-in-law’s salary to pay a fabricated bill for a fabricated meter – having told her only days previously that it recognised the meter was non-existent. Just the same tricks as the remainder of the “big six” – as regularly featured in the Guardian’s consumer column”.

Errata

Yesterday’s reference to Heather Cox ‘Robinson’ should have been to Heather Cox Richardson. And the link to the excerpt I quoted is https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/october-5-2021.

Many thanks to Jack Whyte for spotting it, and apologies to Professor Richardson for misnaming her.

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The Church Gate

On a walk yesterday afternoon I came on a lovely village church I hadn’t seen before and went in. On my way out I noticed the gate.

Quote of the Day

“To corral the damage Facebook does to democracy, we need government action. It complicates matters that half of that government has done far more damage to American democracy than Facebook ever could. (Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley are going to rein in Facebook for the good of democracy? Really?) It’s also notable that many of the key stories about Facebook’s malfeasance have been published by The Wall Street Journal, owned by Fox News mogul, Rupert Murdoch. And Fox News has done more damage to American democracy than Facebook. (Rupert Murdoch is going to rein in Facebook in the name of truth and transparency? Really?) Frances Haugen has done a good job connecting Facebook to the Jan 6 insurrection. But again, punishing Facebook for damaging democracy while letting Trump and his enablers walk free would be the biggest farce in American history.“

• Dave Pell in his daily newsletter

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Dire Straits & Eric Clapton | Brothers in arms | live at Wembley at Nelson Mandela’s 70th birthday celebration

Link

Wonderful. One of those performances you never forget.

Long Read of the Day

Hanging Out With Joan Didion: What I Learned About Writing From an American Master

By Sara Davidson

Link

She’s probably the most imitated writer since Hemingway, and her voice, like his, is catchy but can’t be imitated without the attempt being obvious. I’ve interviewed her many times for publications over the years, though, and found that the habits and practices she described could be helpful in developing and sharpening one’s own writing. Lovely piece. Via the invaluable Lit Hub.

America’s existential crisis

From Heather Cox Robinson:

The fall of the Republican Party into the hands of extremists who are willing to destroy it recently prompted former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to declare, “I’m astonished that more people don’t see, or can’t face, America’s existential crisis.”

Restoring sanity to the country will require free and fair elections, which, after years of Republican gerrymandering and voter suppression, will require federal legislation. The time for that to be most effective is running out, as Republican-dominated states are currently in the process of redistricting, which will determine their congressional districts for the next decade.

The longer this goes on, the more often I think of the famous Benjamin Franklin reply to the woman who allegedly asked him “what have we got?” as he emerged from the Constitutional Convention” “A Republic, if you can keep it.” We will find out in 2024 whether they can.

The existential threat faced by Chinese tech companies’

From the New York Times:

Chinese tech companies are reeling from regulation. Nervous creditors are hoping for a bailout for China’s largest developer. Growing numbers of executives are going to jail. An entire industry is shutting down.

For China’s leader, Xi Jinping, it’s all part of the plan.

Under Mr. Xi, China is reshaping how business works and limiting executives’ power. Long in coming, but rapid in execution, the policies are driven by a desire for state control and self-reliance as well as concerns about debt, inequality and influence by foreign countries, including the United States.

Emboldened by swelling nationalism and his success with Covid-19, Mr. Xi is remaking China’s business world in his own image. Above all else, that means control. Where once executives had a green light to grow at any cost, officials now want to dictate which industries boom, which ones bust and how it happens. And the changes offer a glimpse of Mr. Xi’s vision for managing the economy, ahead of a political meeting expected to solidify his plans for an unprecedented third term in charge.

Meanwhile in the Western democracies politicians seem unable to rein in tech giants and American legislators are reduced to simply yelling at Facebook.

Which brings me back to a question I’ve been asking for ages. Is it only authoritarian regimes that can bring these companies under control?

When I ask that question in public fora the most common response is an awkward silence.

My Commonplace booklet

(For an explanation see here)

• From a New Statesman interview.

“Jackson accuses the management of the UK energy grid as being stuck in the past, describing the National Grid as a “monopoly” and its control room as “like a minicab office. There’s some blokes with phones, and what they’ve always done is phoned up coal and gas power stations and told them to turn on and off. What we have to do now is… a million times more complicated.”

The result of this simplified central planning could be seen the previous week, when “electricity prices were colossally high, we were having to use lots of back-up supplies… [and] we were literally paying wind generators in Scotland to turn off, because there weren’t enough cables connecting Scotland, where the electricity was being generated, to England, where we needed it.”

Greg Jackson is the founder and CEO of Octopus Energies, the disruptive outfit that supplies our electricity (and charges the car on a low tariff at night). He’s not impressed by the current fantasies of the UK government about achieving “net-zero”. Nor am I.

• From Andrew Curry: “Housing inequality, not income inequality, primarily determines how much wealth inequality there is in most Western countries.” The conclusion he draws from an interesting new research paper. You only have to walk the streets of London, Oxford or Cambridge to see confirmation of this.

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Remembering Steve Jobs

Photo credit: Matthew Yohe, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=82773576

He died 10 years ago today. The following day Dave Winer wrote a lovely piece about him.

I wish Jobs had been a blogger, had written about his design process, so I could quote something. But he was the opposite of a blogger. Jobs was a mass communicator. No one in my generation has mastered the art as Jobs did. Today, with the outpouring of feeling on the net, are people mourning the man, or the phenomena he could unleash, just by saying “One more thing.” #

And he was a designer, even though people seem to be overlooking that in their remembrances, calling him more of a visionary. He got down in there and made small but very important design decisions about his products. Ones that had wide impact, for better, or worse. And often they weren’t things his products did, rather things his products didn’t do that defined them. #

The Mac was full of them. No cursor keys, so you had to use the mouse to navigate. I doubt if money was the reason, though leaving out the cursor keys probably saved a bit, and allowed the other keys to be bigger. It also meant Apple had to design its own keyboard, because they all had cursor keys. #

No hard drive. No expansion slots. No fan. #

And, of course, a standardised user interface — which puzzled and annoyed developers like Dave. But which also led to Umberto Eco’s wonderful essay on why the Mac was a Catholic machine, and the IBM PC a Protestant one.

Dave’s piece is very insightful. Do read it.

Quote of the Day

”If God had been a Liberal, we wouldn’t have had the Ten Commandments — we’d have the ten suggestions.”

• Malcolm Bradbury

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Keith Jarrett | Over the Rainbow | Tokyo 1984

Link

Long Read of the Day

 Another World Is Coming: Liberals, Socialists and the New Right

Interesting off-piste essay by Chris Horner arguing that capitalism and the nation state are undergoing one of their periodic metamorphoses.

Here’s where we’re headed, in Horner’s view:

It is a much more authoritarian tendency in politics, with the national-popular-leader and state at its heart. It is often headed by a faux populist ‘strong man’ – think of Trump, Bolsonaro and Johnson. National borders are emphasised, the limits of demonstration and dissent underlined, the fringes of the far right, with its racist suprematism and violence moves from the margins to the centre. Groups are demonised as a way to get the ‘real patriots’ focused on an external threat, or on the ‘enemy within’ – immigrants of all kinds, asylum seekers, anyone who doesn’t fit the national image, very much including the political left.

Public spending may be increased, selectively, partly to shore up an electoral base among certain groups, but crucially as the state is seen as essential in helping the economy out of the problems the last 20 years of neoliberalism left it with: rampant inequality (which suppresses demand in the economy), massive private debt, a bloated finance sector etc. To be clear, conservative fiscal policies, for instance, haven’t gone away, but a new attitude to using the state, and to spending, definitely has emerged. And so has a turn to harsher, more repressive politics. An illiberal time has come, and it may be that worse is on the way, particularly in view of the worsening climate crisis. All this has led to some recent discussion of the common roots of liberalism and socialism with a view to seeing how they can better oppose their common enemy. How might that proceed?

Gone in Minutes, Out for Hours: Outage Shakes Facebook

Useful NYT roundup on the screw-up.

Within minutes, Facebook had disappeared from the internet. The outage lasted over five hours, before some apps slowly flickered back to life, though the company cautioned the services would take time to stabilize.

Even so, the impact was far-reaching and severe. Facebook has built itself into a linchpin platform with messaging, livestreaming, virtual reality and many other digital services. In some countries, like Myanmar and India, Facebook is synonymous with the internet. More than 3.5 billion people around the world use Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp to communicate with friends and family, distribute political messaging, and expand their businesses through advertising and outreach.

Facebook is also used to sign in to many other apps and services, leading to unexpected domino effects such as people not being able to log into shopping websites or sign into their smart TVs, thermostats and other internet-connected devices.

I’ve had email from readers wondering why other (non-Facebook) services that they use had apparently been slowed down. Various possible reasons, not the least of which is that many people (foolishly, IMO) use their Facebook id to sign into other services (as the NYT piece mentions). Another partial explanation is that when 3 billion people continually try — and fail — to connect to Facebook it has implications for key DNS servers on the network — as this piece implies.

Also, Josh Taylor had a good informative piece in the Guardian.

And the big takeaway from all this?

“Today’s outage brought our reliance on Facebook — and its properties like WhatsApp and Instagram — into sharp relief,” said Brooke Erin Duffy, a professor of communications at Cornell University. “The abruptness of today’s outage highlights the staggering level of precarity that structures our increasingly digitally mediated work economy.” Yep.

A Commonplace booklet

(For an explanation see here)

I’ve always thought of September/October as the beginning of the year — a side effect of working in universities, I suppose. Which is why the Autumn of 2020 was so upsettingly weird — no new students, away from home for the first time, wandering around dazed by the new world opening up to them. But walking through Cambridge yesterday on my way to lunch I found myself sharing pavements with throngs of kids. And remembered my own first day at university way back in the 1960s. It was — as PG Wodehouse put it in another context – like having died and gone to heaven without the trouble or expense.

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The behemoth stumbles

From Krebs on Security

Doug Madory is director of internet analysis at Kentik, a San Francisco-based network monitoring company. Madory said at approximately 11:39 a.m. ET today (15:39 UTC), someone at Facebook caused an update to be made to the company’s Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) records. BGP is a mechanism by which Internet service providers of the world share information about which providers are responsible for routing Internet traffic to which specific groups of Internet addresses.

In simpler terms, sometime this morning Facebook took away the map telling the world’s computers how to find its various online properties. As a result, when one types Facebook.com into a web browser, the browser has no idea where to find Facebook.com, and so returns an error page.

In addition to stranding billions of users, the Facebook outage also has stranded its employees from communicating with one another using their internal Facebook tools. That’s because Facebook’s email and tools are all managed in house and via the same domains that are now stranded.

“Not only are Facebook’s services and apps down for the public, its internal tools and communications platforms, including Workplace, are out as well,” New York Times tech reporter Ryan Mac tweeted. “No one can do any work. Several people I’ve talked to said this is the equivalent of a ‘snow day’ at the company.”

Now comes the interesting bit: The outages came just hours after CBS’s 60 Minutes broadcast a much-anticipated interview with Frances Haugen, the Facebook whistleblower who recently leaked a number of internal Facebook investigations showing the company knew its products were causing mass harm, and that it prioritized profits over taking bolder steps to curtail abuse on its platform — including disinformation and hate speech.

Hmmm…

(And see the Musical Alternative below.)

Quote of the Day

“Mainstream economics is replete with ideas that “everyone knows” to be true, but that are actu- ally arrant nonsense. For example, “everyone knows” that: • Aggregate production functions (and aggregate measures of the capital stock) provide a good way to characterize the economy’s supply side; • Over a sufficiently long span—specifically, one that allows necessary price adjustments to be made—the economy will return to a state of full market clearing; and, • The theory of household choice provides a solid justification for downward-sloping market demand curves.

None of these propositions has any sort of empirical foundation; moreover, each one turns out to be seriously deficient on theoretical grounds.1 Nevertheless, economists continue to rely on these and similar ideas to organize their thinking about real-world economic phenomena. No doubt, one reason why this situation arises is because the economy is a complicated system that is inherently difficult to understand, so propositions like these—even though wrong—are all that saves us from intellectual nihilism.

• Jeremy B. Rudd, Federal Reserve Board, September 23, 2021

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Handel |’Hallelujah Chorus’ from The Messiah | Royal Choral Society

Link

The only suitable way of celebrating the Facebook outage.

Or, if you are of a gentler disposition, try Sheku Kanneh-Mason’s lovely recording of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, arranged by Tom Hodge.

Long Read of the Day

And while we’re on the subject…

Facebook Is an Authoritarian State

Facebook is acting like a hostile foreign power; it’s time we treated it that way, writes Adrienne LaFrance in The Atlantic.

Mark Zuckerberg, unlike Einstein, did not dream up Facebook out of a sense of moral duty, or a zeal for world peace. This summer, the population of Zuckerberg’s supranational regime reached 2.9 billion monthly active users, more humans than live in the world’s two most populous nations—China and India—combined.

To Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and CEO, they are citizens of Facebookland. Long ago he conspicuously started calling them “people” instead of “users,” but they are still cogs in an immense social matrix, fleshy morsels of data to satisfy the advertisers that poured $54 billion into Facebook in the first half of 2021 alone—a sum that surpasses the gross domestic products of most nations on Earth.

GDP makes for a telling comparison, not just because it gestures at Facebook’s extraordinary power, but because it helps us see Facebook for what it really is. Facebook is not merely a website, or a platform, or a publisher, or a social network, or an online directory, or a corporation, or a utility. It is all of these things. But Facebook is also, effectively, a hostile foreign power.

An interesting way of viewing the corporation. Thomas Hobbes would have seen it that way too.

Inside the strange world of Peter Thiel

My Observer review of Max Chafkin’s biography of Silicon Valley’s leading contrarian.

Chafkin is a terrific journalist and he has provided a detailed, impeccably researched account of this journey. In a way, The Contrarian is a chronicle of the evolution of a weird personality cult: the Thielverse, whose members, overwhelmingly, young, rightwing single males, worship their hero as someone gifted with godlike prescience and wisdom.

The strange thing is that the record doesn’t really support this hagiographical vision. Thiel isn’t a gifted geek, just someone who is good at spotting an opportunity. His investment record is patchy, although it shows that he has always been good at getting out before the peak. And although he masquerades as a visionary who derides liberal democracy as too slow and stupid to survive, in practice he has devoted much of his career to building businesses that feed off its governments. In that sense, his actual legacy is Palantir, a supposedly omnipotent and omniscient corporation that can do magic with data analytics; in fact, it is a humdrum government contractor like the rest of the aerospace and global consultancy firms. Think of it as Accenture with added halitosis.

The most interesting thought that emerges from Chafkin’s book is that Thiel isn’t really a visionary at all. That’s because he’s defined only by what he’s against – liberal democracy, liberal elites, multiculturalism, and so on. But if you ask what is he for then only one answer can be extracted from this book: he’s for Peter Thiel.

Chart of the Day

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Quote of the Day

”Painting is the art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to critics.”

• Ambrose Bierce (who else?)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ry Cooder | The Prodigal Son (Live in studio)

Link

Long Read of the Day

Extinct

What does the disappearance of once popular or ubiquitous objects — ranging in scale from tools and equipment to structures and infrastructures — tell us about the world we have created?

Terrific essay by Barbara Penner, Professor of Architectural Humanities at the Bartlett School.

No sex, goddammit — we’re males

Scott Galloway has an interesting blog post about the increasing percentage of men in the US who report not having sex and who are “without any onramp to the intimate relationships upon which so much of their happiness, and our social capital, is built.”

So what? America spent its first 300 years treating women as second-class citizens — what’s wrong with young men getting the short end of the stick for a while? If this were just about fairness or feelings, then fine, let there be churn. But there are several externalities that could have profound effects on our commonwealth and the global community.

First, less partnering and propagation means fewer babies. Declining birth rates are toxic for economic health. For a glimpse at the declining-birth-rate future, look at Japan, where birth and marriage rates have fallen to record lows. There are now just 2.1 working-age Japanese for every retiree, the lowest ratio in the world. In the United States there are 3.9. The world average is 7.

At the Code Conference this week, automaker and future Martian Elon Musk said: “Possibly the single greatest risk to human civilization is the rapidly diminishing birth rate … No babies, no humanity.”

Second, a large and growing cohort of bored, lonely, poorly educated men is a malevolent force in any society, but it’s a truly terrifying one in a society addicted to social media and awash in coarseness and guns.

Men are already more likely than women to believe in conspiracy theories. Increased frustration about their lack of life choices and greater jealousy stoked by the images of success they see on their screens will push underachieving men further toward conspiracy theories, radicalization, and nihilist politics. I say “will” because I’m focused on the future, but a preview of that future is already here. Of the 620 people charged so far in the January 6 riot, 86% are men. Yep.

Richard Nixon delivers the speech he never delivered

A deep fake masterpiece. Six minutes well spent, IMO.

Not quite perfect yet, but the technology’s getting there.

The truth about artificial intelligence? It isn’t that truthful

Yesterday’s Observer column:

Recently, a group of researchers at the AI Alignment Forum, an online hub for researchers seeking to ensure that powerful AIs are aligned with human values, decided to ask how truthful GPT-3 and similar models are. They came up with a benchmark to measure whether a particular language model was truthful in generating answers to questions. The benchmark comprises 817 questions that span 38 categories, including health, law, finance and politics. They composed questions that some humans would answer falsely due to a false belief or misconception. To perform well, models had to avoid generating false answers learned from imitating human texts.

They tested four well-known models, including GPT-3. The best was truthful on 58% of questions, while human performance was 94%. The models “generated many false answers that mimic popular misconceptions and have the potential to deceive humans”. Interestingly, they also found that “the largest models were generally the least truthful”. This contrasts with other NLP tasks, where performance improves with model size. The implication is that the tech industry’s conviction that bigger is invariably better for improving truthfulness may be wrong. And this matters because training these huge models is very energy-intensive, which is possibly why Google fired Timnit Gebru after she revealed the environmental footprint of one of the company’s big models.

Having typed that last sentence, I had the idea of asking GPT-3 to compose an answer to the question: “Why did Google fire Timnit Gebru?” But then I checked out the process for getting access to the machine and concluded that life was too short and human conjecture is quicker – and possibly more accurate.

After this was published I had a nice email from an AI researcher who had put the question to GPT-3:

Q: Why did Google fire Timnit Gebru?

A: Google fired Timnit Gebru because of her political beliefs.

US mainstream media are turning into the GOP’s ‘useful idiots’

From Heather Cox Richardson:

As political scientist and foreign relations expert David Rothkopf tweeted: “Are the Dems the ones in disarray when they are crafting specific programs while the GOP offers up only cynical Tweets & obstruction? The only GOP agenda items are voter suppression, defending the worst president in history & when they have power, pushing tax cuts for the rich.”

For my part, I’m not sure what is driving the stories that seem to paint Biden’s work as a lost cause: The recent position that Democrats are hapless? That it’s safer to be negative than positive? That our news cycle demands drama?

Whatever it is, I continue to maintain that the issue right now is not Democrats’ negotiations over the infrastructure bills—regardless of how they turn out—but that Republican lawmakers are actively working to undermine our democracy.

She’s absolutely right. The key story in the US is not Biden’s attempts to do sensible and important things, but the Trump-Republican’s determination to do everything they can to frustrate him until their State-based arrangements to disenfranchise enough voters to win the mid-terms are complete. In that sense, mainstream US media are playing their rule in the undermining of the republic.

Dave Winer (Whom God Preserve) has been saying this for a long time. And he’s right.

Heather’s Substack blog is wonderful, btw.

A Commonplace booklet

(For an explanation see here.)

Just discovered that Whistler’s title for his most famous painting was not ‘Whistler’s Mother’ but ‘Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1’. It’s still a lovely work, though.

“A sense of humour is just common sense, dancing.” — Clive James

“The real challenge, when it comes to thinking about supply chains, isn’t making sure that a container ship is unloaded. It’s deciding how we want to live.” — Amy Davidson Sorkin in the New Yorker

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Quote of the Day

“Strange thought this morning: I bought an electric car and everyone else in the UK has range anxiety!”

• Quentin Stafford-Fraser on his (terrific) blog.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Louis Armstrong | We Have All The Time In The World

Link

Long Read of the Day

Bitcoin miners align with fossil fuel firms, alarming environmentalists

Useful NBC Report which should be mandatory reading for anyone who thinks that digital tech is environmentally ‘weightless’. Of course Bitcoin mining is a specially egregious case, but the large machine-learning systems that big tech company use may also have the same kind of carbon footprint.

Four years ago, the Scrubgrass power plant in Venango County, Pennsylvania, was on the brink of financial ruin as energy customers preferred to buy cheap natural gas or renewables. Then Scrubgrass pivoted to Bitcoin.

Today, through a holding company based in Kennerdell, Pennsylvania, called Stronghold Digital Mining that bought the plant, Scrubgrass burns enough coal waste to power about 1,800 cryptocurrency mining computers. These computers, known as miners, are packed into shipping containers next to the power plant, the company stated in documents filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ahead of its initial public offering. Coal waste is a byproduct from decades of mining in the region, left behind in enormous black piles. Stronghold estimated that it’s currently burning about 600,000 tons of it per year at Scrubgrass.

Facebook thrives on criticism of “disinformation”

Really intriguing essay by Cory Doctorow pointing out the intriguing symbiosis between (a) Facebook critics’ belief in the corrupting power of the disinformation it facilitates, and (b) the company’s pitch to advertisers that it is uniquely good at enabling them to target people with tailored ads.

FB critics say that the company’s machine learning and data-gathering slides disinformation past users’ critical faculties, poisoning their minds.

Meanwhile, Facebook itself tells advertisers that it can use data and machine learning to slide past users’ critical faculties, convincing them to buy stuff.

In other words, the mainline of Facebook critics start from the presumption that FB is a really good product and that advertisers are definitely getting their money’s worth when they shower billions on the company.

Which is weird, because these same critics (rightfully) point out that Facebook lies all the time, about everything. It would be bizarre if the only time FB was telling the truth was when it was boasting about how valuable its ad-tech is.

Great essay. Worth reading in full. It picks up, in part on a fine piece in Harpers by Joseph Bernstein on the same contradiction who went back to Mark Zuckerberg in 2016 saying that it was a “pretty crazy idea” that bad content on his website had persuaded enough voters to swing the 2016 election to Donald Trump.

Denial was always untenable, for Zuckerberg in particular. The so-called techlash, a season of belatedly brutal media coverage and political pressure in the aftermath of Brexit and Trump’s win, made it difficult. But Facebook’s basic business pitch made denial impossible. Zuckerberg’s company profits by convincing advertisers that it can standardize its audience for commercial persuasion. How could it simultaneously claim that people aren’t persuaded by its content?

The Bullwhip effect

For those puzzled by the increasingly ragged shortages on our supermarkets shelves Quartz had a terrific ‘explainer’ on how small changes in demand for certain goods can create disruptions that ripple through a supply chain, causing bigger and bigger headaches. The bullwhip effect has made those wild demand swings all but impossible for manufacturers to keep up with.

It happens because demand signals get exaggerated as they travel through a supply chain. Different people control different parts of the chain. They often don’t communicate with one another well (so they’re short of accurate information about other parts of the chain), and each tries to manage his or her own bit of it. The combination of information shortages and time lags can lead to wild fluctuations if there are even modest surges in demand.

The concept was first developed by Jay Forrester, an interesting (and pioneering) MIT professor who founded a simulation technique called system dynamics to model the dynamics of feedback systems, and it was initially known as the ‘Forrester Effect’. (It seems that business school academics came up with the more colourful ‘Bullwhip’ metaphor.) In 1961 Forrester developed an interactive game — the Beer Game — as a way to teach students how the effect manifests itself. As Quartz puts it:

In the game, each player controls a different piece of the supply chain for beer: the retailer, the wholesaler, the regional distributor, and the manufacturer. Every turn, customers buy a certain amount of beer from the retailer, and every player puts in an order for more beer from their supplier. The trouble is, orders take several turns to arrive, and no one knows what’s happening in any other piece of the supply chain. Inevitably, small changes in beer consumption lead to panic ordering, shortages of beer, and massive spikes and crashes in beer production.

Anyone can sign up to play a version of the game online. Or if you’re just curious, there’s an online demo which gives you the idea.

So next time you’re enraged by the fact that you can’t get Geeta’s Premium Mango Chutney anywhere, spare a thought for ol’ Jay Forrester.

General Willey’s second thoughts

Several readers have written to suggest that I was a bit unfair to General Mark Willey in yesterday’s edition. That the top US military officer felt obliged to assure his Chinese counterpart that his President was not going to launch a nuclear attack seemed to me a graphic illustration of the depths to which American democracy had descended. And my sarky pay-off line about General Willey was a reflection of my outrage at seeing him walking in Trump’s entourage on June 1. “Would this be the same General Willey”, I asked rhetorically, “who accompanied Trump on his Bible-thumping stunt at Lafayette Square on June 1st? Surely not.”

My correspondents directed me to Willey’s subsequent apology for the error of judgement implicit in his presence at Lafayette Square that day.

“I should not have been there,” he said in a prerecorded video commencement address to National Defense University. “My presence in that moment and in that environment created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics.”

It did. Which is why I was irritated by it on the day. But it was good that he apologised.

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