Wisteria

Such an amazing plant. Comes back year after year. There are some really ancient ones in Cambridge.

Quote of the Day

”Comparative religion is an admirable recipe for making people comparatively religious.

• Ronald Knox

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Samuel Barber | Adagio for Strings

Link

Long Read of the Day

(Spoiler alert: it’s a really long read!)

Universities as factories

If you’re puzzled about what the so-called ‘leadership’ of Columbia University is up to, then join the club. The President of the institution is Minouche Shafik, described by Wikipedia as

a British-American academic and economist. She has been serving as the 20th president of Columbia University since July 2023. She previously served as president and vice chancellor of the London School of Economics from 2017 to 2023.

From 2014 to 2017, Shafik served as deputy governor of the Bank of England and also previously as permanent secretary of the United Kingdom Department for International Development from 2008 to 2011. She has also served as a vice president at the World Bank and as deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund. She was created a life peeress by Elizabeth II in 2020.

(Footnotes: Actually Shafik was the Director of the LSE; it’s only since her departure that the role has been rebranded as “President and Vice-Chancellor”. Also, it’s not clear how much of an ‘academic’ Shafik is. She was an Adjunct (i.e. unpaid) Professor in the Economics department of Georgetown University for five years, and an Associate Visiting Professor at the Wharton School, but the bulk of her career thus far suggests someone who is basically an administrator. This may be relevant to what follows.)

On April 30 Shafik wrote to the NYPD asking them to “help to clear all individuals from Hamilton Hall and all campus encampments.” She also also requested that they remain on campus through at least May 17, 2024 — two days after the school’s commencement ceremony is set to take place on May 15.

The cops were reportedly puzzled by this request, but they duly turned up in riot gear. Adam Tooze, who is a Professor at Columbia (and a Financial Times columnist) witnessed what followed and wrote a thoughtful piece about it on his blog. Here’s excerpt from his narrative.

There was no riot last night at Columbia any more than there has been at any other point. The violence came from the police side and it came at the invitation and request of the University administration.

My colleague at the FT Edward Luce is right. It was the adults not the students that caused the real disorder. It is the University administration not the student protestors who have seriously disrupted the end of term and examinations.

When the violence came last night, it was sudden.

When the sign came to force the passage of one of their vehicles, the police first formed up, moving close to the barrier, face to face with the protestors. The protestors formed a soft chain, many reversed, turning their backs to the police ready for what was about to come, knowing they would need to retreat under massive physical pressure.

On an order from their commander, the police pushed. They pushed hard. Very hard. They move fast, as quickly as their bulk and equipment would allow, maximizing momentum. The officers use waist-high steel barriers as plows to drive the protestors back and to pin them in side streets and against walls. Then, after the vehicle was through and the shouting and chanting of the protestors rose to an extreme crescendo, they pulled back and rearranged themselves again, across Broadway behind their barriers. The shouting and staring resumed.

The scene was static. But I would not be honest if I did not say that my stomach churned watching it. The sheer force of the movement, the relentless and sudden drive of the steel barrier against human bodies, moved the air.

Tooze’s point is that riot police are a blunt instrument. They don’t do finesse. As I read that, an episode from my own past came to mind. When the so-called ‘Troubles’ erupted in Northern Ireland in the late 1960s, and the province’s sectarian police force (and their part-time auxiliaries) viciously attacked civilian demonstrations modelled on the US Civil Rights movement, we in the Republic watched in astonishment as the UK government stood by and apparently did nothing while rampant lawlessness reigned in what was — formally — as much a part of the UK as Yorkshire or Northamptonshire.

Eventually, London sent in the army and for a few weeks an uneasy stability was restored, before the army embarked on clumsy and sometimes clueless action against Catholics and republican sympathisers — repressive actions that boosted recruitment into the Provisional IRA, the ruthless and effective terrorist group that then plagued the province for the next three decades.

Many years later, I found myself sitting at a dinner next to the late Merlyn Rees, a prominent British politician who had risen to be Home Secretary (i.e. Minister for the Interior) in a Labour government. As we chatted, I put to him a question that had been on my mind since the late 1960s: “What took you so long to respond to the disorder on the streets of Northern Ireland?” Well, he said, mildly, “What you have to remember is that an army is an extremely blunt instrument.” And so indeed the British army proved to be in Northern Ireland, though it got smarter as time went on.

But back to the question that had puzzled Tooze and many of his academic colleagues: why did the university’s administration take such action to deal with what were essentially peaceful demonstrations of support for Palestinians and criticism of Israeli actions in Gaza?

To this question the economist Branko Milanovic provides a perceptive answer in a blog post entitled “Universities as Factories”. As someone who grew up in Serbia, he had seen quite a lot of the blunt instruments of state power. “The novelty, for me, in the current wave of freedom of speech demonstrations in the United States”, he writes,

was that it was the university administrators who called for the police to attack students. In at least one case, in New York, the police were puzzled why they were brought in, and thought it was counter-productive. One could understand that this attitude by the administrators might happen in authoritarian countries where the administrators may be appointed by the powers-to-be to keep order on campuses. Then, obviously, as obedient civil servants, they would support the police in its “cleansing” activity although they would rarely have the authority to call it in.

But in the US, university administrators are not appointed by Biden, nor by Congress. Why would they then attack their own students? Are they some evil individuals who love to beat up younger people?

No, he says. They’re not necessarily evil. They’re just in the wrong job.

They are not seeing their role as what traditionally was the role of universities, that is to try to impart to the younger generation values of freedom, morality, compassion, self-abnegation, empathy or whatever else is considered desirable. Their role today is to be the CEOs of factories that are called universities. These factories have a raw material which is called students and which they turn, at regular annual intervals, into graduates. Consequently, any disturbance in that production process is like a disturbance to a supply chain. It has to be eliminated as soon as possible in order for the production to resume. Graduating students have to be “outputted”, the new students brought in, moneys from them have to be pocketed, donors have to be found, more funds to be secured. Students, if they interfere with the process, need to be disciplined, if necessary by force. Police has to be brought in, order to be restored.

Which is why it matters that Shafik is really just an administrator. She has done what a CEO of Walmart or Burger King would do in the same circumstances. These people, says Milanovic, are not interested in values, but in the bottom line. That doesn’t mean of course that they won’t

use the talk about values, or “intellectually-challenging environment”, or “vibrant discussion” (or whatever!), as described in a recent article in The Atlantic, as the usual promotional, performative speech that top managers of companies nowadays produce at the drop of a hat.

Yep. One wonders how long it will take the Columbia Trustees to fire ‘Professor’ Shafik.

A more general thought is that the ‘elite’ university system — at least in the US — is in deep trouble. This, at any rate, is the conclusion I draw from a long essay by Louis Menand in the current issue of the New Yorker.

Here’s his conclusion:

The fact remains that all the emphasis on diversity and inclusion did not prevent October 7th from becoming a powder keg. The real problem is that all these issues are playing out in the public eye, and universities are not skilled at public relations. Since 1964, they have been adapting to a legal environment created largely by Democratic Congresses and a Supreme Court still marginally liberal on racial issues. Now a different political regime is in the saddle, in Congress and on the Court, and there are few places left to hide.

Academic freedom is an understanding, not a law. It can’t just be invoked. It has to be asserted and defended. That’s why it’s so disheartening that leaders of great universities appear reluctant to speak up for the rights of independent inquiry and free expression for which Americans have fought. Even after Shafik offered up faculty sacrifices on the congressional altar and called in the N.Y.P.D., Republicans responded by demanding her resignation. If capitulation isn’t working, not much is lost by trying some defiance.

Yep. The trouble is that CEOs don’t do defiance.

My commonplace booklet

And while we’re on the subject of what’s been happening to elite American universities, there’s also the extent to which they are being ‘presidentialized’ — as this terrific post by David Pozen puts it.

It therefore came as a rude awakening for many faculty members at Columbia to learn just how little decisional authority we collectively wield at the university level. When the senate executive committee opposed Shafik’s crackdown on the student encampment, she went ahead and did it anyway — and there was nothing, under the University Charter and Statutes, that the committee or its formidable chair Jeanine D’Armiento could do about it. The full senate then considered a censure resolution. Had it passed, this act of resistance likewise would have had only symbolic effect. President Shafik was hired by, serves on, and reports to the board of trustees, whose members are largely chosen by … the board of trustees. Faculty are on the outside looking in.

To simplify somewhat, we might say that professors are granted a number of basic rights within the university, including rights to free speech and due process and quasi-property rights in the job itself. Students and staff are granted a partially overlapping, though weaker, bundle of rights. What none of us have are governance rights against the trustees who really run the place. We enjoy various individual privileges and protections, but not the franchise.

And that’s definitely enough about universities for today.

This Blog is also available as an email three days a week. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays delivered to your inbox at 6am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

Totem pole?

On a Norfolk beach.

Quote of the Day

“You feel that its words are coming of out of your body and then you dig the words into the page. It’s a physical experience.”

• The late Paul Auster on why he preferred composing in longhand.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Rolling Stones | Sympathy For The Devil (Live at Tokyo Dome 1990)

Link

Well, the devil has always had the best tunes.

Long Read of the Day

The Tyranny of Content Algorithms

Nice essay by a fellow-photographer, Om Malik, on what seems to be an endemic feature of the online world.

No matter who you are, how skilled you may be, or how much knowledge you possess, excessive activity will inevitably lead to a return to the average. This phenomenon is observable every day on the Internet. Before Instagram became a competition for the lowest common denominator, there were a few photographers I followed. They consistently shared captivating images, always managing to evoke a sense of inspiration with each viewing of their work.

I wasn’t alone in this appreciation—over time, they gained more recognition and accumulated larger followings. Or perhaps it was the other way around. The ‘larger following’ meant they were able to monetize their audience. However, soon the tail was wagging the dog.

As the years passed, I noticed them sharing more frequently, yet the quality of their work declined. They gradually transitioned from being exceptional to merely average…

Perceptive piece.

The internet needs rewilding

Yesterday’s Observer column:

The internet was, as one scholar later described it, “an architecture for permissionless innovation” or, more prosaically, a global machine for springing surprises. The first such surprise was the web. And because it was decided the web would grow better without profit considerations, Berners-Lee released it as a platform that would also enable permissionless innovation.

However, the next generation of innovators to benefit from this freedom – Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple et al – saw no reason to extend it to anyone else. They built fabulously profitable enterprises on the platform that Berners-Lee had created. The creative commons of the internet has been gradually and inexorably enclosed, much as agricultural land was by parliamentary acts from 1600 onwards in England.

The result, as Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon put it in a striking essay in Noema magazine, is that our online spaces are no longer open ecosystems. Instead “they’re plantations; highly concentrated and controlled environments, closer kin to the industrial farms that madden the creatures trapped within”…

Read on

Books, etc.

This one of the most remarkable books on my shelves. Francis Spufford is a gifted polymath who can not only write great fiction (see his On Golden Hill) but also really good history of technology (see his Backroom Boys: The Secret Return of the British Boffin — published in 2003). Red Plenty, though is something else: tech history interwoven with imaginative fiction, it’s about a moment in the 1950s when some scientists and officials in the USSR thought that their country would eclipse the US with a non-capitalist model that would bring greater prosperity. (Adam Kotska’s review gives a pretty good idea of the book.)

I read it some time after it came out in 2010, but I’ve been re-reading it because in a strange way it has become salient again. As Kotska puts it,

it’s more interesting to read Red Plenty as a fairy tale about our own age, where we are stuck in an economic system that is clearly no longer delivering on its promises, but attempts to reengineer it are either squandered through half-measures or, more often, simply dismissed out of hand. People more or less live their lives in this system, as they did in the post-Stalin Soviet Union, yet with the melancholy, forcibly retired Khrushchev, we hear a rustling in the wind asking: “can it be otherwise?”

In May 2012, Henry Farrell and his fellow-bloggers on Crooked Timber organised a fascinating seminar on Spufford’s book with essays by (among others) Kim Stanley Robinson, Cozma Shalizi, George Scialabba, Antoaneta Dimitrova, Carl Caldwell, Felix Gilman and Rich Yeselson, plus responses by Francis Spufford.

Last month there was a discussion at the Santa Fe institute on the question of whether advances in computation might make possible the dream (memorably described by Spufford) that Soviet Planners had in the 1950s — of running a command economy without markets. In conjunction with the event, Henry Farrell and Francis Spufford had a fascinating conversation in the Lensic Performing Arts Center in Sante Fe. It’s an hour long, but worth eavesdropping on if you’re interested in this stuff.

My commonplace booklet

Musk loses the plot — again

One of the smartest things Tesla did at the beginning was to start building a charging infrastructure — the ‘Supercharger’ network — so that if you bought a Tesla you could charge it on the move. It was, for many of us (me included), the clinching reason for buying a Tesla rather than one of the nicer alternatives. That network was what Warren Buffett would call a ‘moat’, something that protected the company against competitors.

And now, guess what?

After firing its entire Supercharger team, Tesla has sent out an email to suppliers which shows just how chaotic the decisionmaking leading up to the firings must have been.

Earlier this week, Tesla abruptly fired its entire Supercharging team, leading to an immediate pullback in Supercharger installation plans. Now we’ve seen the email that Tesla has sent to suppliers, and it’s not pretty.

“You may be aware that there has been a recent adjustment with the Supercharger organization which is presently undergoing a sudden and thorough restructuring. If you have already received this email, please disregard it as we are attempting to connect with our suppliers and contractors. As part of this process, we are in the midst of establishing new leadership roles, prioritizing projects, and streamlining our payment procedures. Due to the transitional nature of this phase, we are asking for your patience with our response time.

I understand that this period of change may be challenging and that patience is not easy when expecting to be paid, however, I want to express my sincere appreciation for your understanding and support as we navigate through this transition. At this time, please hold on breaking ground on any newly awarded construction projects and planned pre-construction walks. If currently working on an active Supercharging construction site, please continue. Contact (email redacted) for further questions, comments, and concerns. Additionally, hold on working on any new material orders. Contact (email redacted) for further questions, comments, and concerns. If waiting on delayed payment, please contact (email redacted) for a status update. Thank you for your cooperation and patience.”

How not to run a business.

Source

Chart of the Day

 AI hype has echoes of the telecoms boom and bust

Interesting chart from the FT drawing a parallel between the first Internet boom (1995 – 2000) when Cisco routers were hot property in the same way that Nvidia GPUs are nowadays.

We’re in a bubble. Funny how nobody seems to acknowledge that.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Bumblebee nests are overheating to fatal levels Link

One year recently, bumble bees took over one of the nest boxes in the garden — a box that was bathed in bright sunlight for hours during the day. We were astonished to see stationary bees flapping their wings at the entrance to the box, and then twigged that they were trying to cool the nest.

This Blog is also available as an email three days a week. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays delivered to your inbox at 6am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

Present at the Creation

Screenshot

This is a pic of the world’s very first Web server — Tim Berners-Lee’s NEXT machine at CERN. Note the handwritten note on the machine.

(Source: Jeremy Reimer on ArsTechnica.)

Quote of the Day

”The rain will stop, the night will end, the hurt will fade. Hope is never so lost that it can’t be found.”

• Ernest Hemingway

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Scott Joplin | Solace | Phillip Dyson

Link

Long Read of the Day

We Need To Rewild The Internet

This essay by Maria Farrell and Robin Berton in Noema is the best thing I’ve read in ages. It’s about how diversity was stripped out of the original Internet, and the perils of the resulting monoculture. It starts with the story of how, in the late 18th century, officials in Prussia and Saxony began to rearrange their complex, diverse forests into straight rows of single-species trees, and the ecological disaster that ensued.

The story of German scientific forestry transmits a timeless truth: When we simplify complex systems, we destroy them, and the devastating consequences sometimes aren’t obvious until it’s too late.

That impulse to scour away the messiness that makes life resilient is what many conservation biologists call the “pathology of command and control.” Today, the same drive to centralize, control and extract has driven the internet to the same fate as the ravaged forests.

The internet’s 2010s, its boom years, may have been the first glorious harvest that exhausted a one-time bonanza of diversity. The complex web of human interactions that thrived on the internet’s initial technological diversity is now corralled into globe-spanning data-extraction engines making huge fortunes for a tiny few.

Our online spaces are not ecosystems, though tech firms love that word. They’re plantations; highly concentrated and controlled environments, closer kin to the industrial farming of the cattle feedlot or battery chicken farms that madden the creatures trapped within.

We all know this. We see it each time we reach for our phones. But what most people have missed is how this concentration reaches deep into the internet’s infrastructure — the pipes and protocols, cables and networks, search engines and browsers. These structures determine how we build and use the internet, now and in the future…

It’s terrific, and worth your time.

Books, etc.

I’m reading Dan Davies’s new book and am blown away by it. In it he examines why markets, institutions and governments systematically generate outcomes that everyone involved claims not to want. From my point of view, the most interesting thing is the way he casts new light on the writings of Stafford Beer, a legendary thinker who argued in the 1950s that we should regard organisations as artificial intelligences, capable of taking decisions that are distinct from the intentions of their members. Since I’m working on a book about corporations as “Slow AIs” (as Charlie Stross calls them) this is right up my street.

Chart of the Day

From Tortoise Media’s newsletter:

The campus protests have revealed shifts in US opinion on Israel that have been developing for years. A 2023 Gallup poll found net sympathy towards Israel at +46 points among those born between 1946 and 1964; that drops to -2 among those born after 1980. In a 2021 survey of Jewish voters, respondents under 40 were twice as likely to agree that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians as those over 64.

In 2011 the American historian Daniel Rodgers published The Age of Fracture, an astonishingly perceptive book about how American society was changing in during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. His argument, neatly summarised by one reviewer (Doug Rossinow in The Journal of American History), was that

the major intellectual trends of the twentieth century’s last quarter, ranging from the ascendancy of microeconomics and market fundamentalism to the explosion of postmodernism in cultural theory, were of a piece. The weakening of social structures as perceived determinants of human life and the “thinning” of conceptions of society, to use a term favored by Rodgers, crossed inherited political boundaries.

What was so remarkable about the book was the way it tried to pin down subtle shifts that we often perceive only with the benefit of hindsight. My hunch is that we’re now living through another period of major cultural change and the best we can do is to catch glimpses of things that might yield clues to what’s happening.

IMO, the response of US students (and of citizens in a raft of Western democracies like Ireland) to the Hamas atrocity — and the Israeli response to it — is one of those clues. And it has taken the ruling elites of these societies completely by surprise. After the atrocity, the prevailing expectation was that the West would fall into line behind Netanyahu’s policy (even while collectively holding its nose). That has kind-of happened. But it has not resonated with entire generations, as we’re seeing. So maybe this time is different (to coin a phrase). Something’s up.

My commonplace booklet

Misha Valdman on the philosopher Derek Parfit:

I met Parfit on several occasions but I got to know him mainly through Larry Temkin – my thesis advisor and Parfit’s former student – who’d regale us with tales of Parfit’s eccentricities and brilliance. Under Parfit’s tutelage, Temkin wrote a dissertation on the nature of inequality. As Temkin tells it, Parfit had him write 50 pages on the topic, which Parfit returned without comment and a request for 50 more. This continued until Temkin had written about 300 pages, at which point Parfit systematically tore it all to shreds. It was the philosophical equivalent of a massacre. A year’s labor lay in ruins. He then told Temkin to begin anew, as he was now prepared to write in earnest.

In 2002 I attended a Festschrift in honor of his 60th birthday. Many of the world’s top ethicists were there. Most of them had worked with Parfit or had been trained by him. In one way or another, they were all his students. I was there for the philosophy but mostly for the spectacle. Parfit was being honored in the only way philosophers know how: by being publicly eviscerated. Speaker after speaker would rise, approach the podium, and launch into a withering critique, trying to do to Parfit what he had done to Temkin two decades prior. Parfit would sit in stony silence and then leap to his feet the second they were finished, well into rebuttal before even reaching the podium, as if he were a gladiator determined to show that none of his opponent’s blows had landed and that not a drop of his blood had been spilled. Occasionally the proceedings would veer into eulogy – it was, after all, a celebration of a lifetime’s worth of achievement – but Parfit would have none of it. “I’m not dead yet,” he’d remind the room. In all it was a riveting performance full of pageantry and drama and what I’m sure was some top shelf philosophy, though nothing comes to mind in particular. In the end the weary scholars shuffled out of the arena but Parfit was as spry as ever. It seemed the only way to beat him was to outlast him or to render him speechless. By that standard, there was no doubt who had won.

He was a truly extraordinary person. I never met him but, late in life, he married a friend and former colleague of mine, Janet Radcliffe Richards. From her I learned that Parfit was also a keen, nay fanatical, photographer. As a New Yorker profile puts it,

There were only about ten things in the world he wanted to photograph,… and they were all buildings: the best buildings in Venice —Palladio’s two churches, the Doge’s Palace, the buildings along the Grand Canal — and the best buildings in St. Petersburg, the Winter Palace and the General Staff Building.

When he came home, he developed his photographs and sorted them. But,

Of a thousand pictures, he might keep three. When he decided that a picture was worth saving, he took it to a professional processor in London and had the processor hand-paint out all aspects of the image that he found distasteful, which meant all evidence of the twentieth century—cars, telegraph wires, signposts—and usually all people. Then he had the colors repeatedly adjusted, although this was enormously expensive, until they were exactly what he wanted—which was a matter of fidelity not to the scene as it was but to an idea in his head.

They don’t make them like that any more.

This Blog is also available as an email three days a week. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays delivered to your inbox at 6am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!