Nighttime

Pembroke College, Cambridge on a chilly January night. I arrived early, and instead of waiting in the cold for my host decided to sit in the chapel where an orphan scholar was practising. I’d forgotten how beautifully spare the building is. And then I remembered that it was designed by Christopher Wren.

Quote of the Day

”I went from adolescence to senility, trying to bypass maturity.

• Tom Lehrer

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bruce Springsteen | Shenandoah (The Seeger Sessions)

Link

Long Read of the Day

 How to Raise Your Artificial Intelligence

A conversation with Alison Gopnik and Melanie Mitchell.

This is an absolutely riveting read. A perceptive and intelligent interviewer in conversation with two genuine luminaries. Here’s a sample — from an interaction on the so-called ‘alignment problem’ in AI:

How important for this next generation of robots and AI systems is incorporating social traits such as emotions and morality?

Mitchell: Intelligence includes the ability to use tools to augment your intelligence, and for us, the main tool we use is other people. We have to have a model of other people in our heads and be able to, from very little evidence, figure out what those people are likely to do, just like we would for physical objects in the real world. This theory of mind and ability to reason about other people is going to be essential for getting robots to work both with humans and with other intelligent robots.

Gopnik: Some things that seem very intuitive and emotional, like love or caring for children, are really important parts of our intelligence. Take the famous alignment problem in computer science: How do you make sure that AI has the same goals we do? Humans have had that problem since we evolved, right? We need to get a new generation of humans to have the right kinds of goals. And we know that other humans are going to be in different environments. The niche in which we evolved was a niche where everything was changing. What do you do when you know that the environment is going to change but you want to have other members of your species that are reasonably well aligned? Caregiving is one of the things that we do to make that happen. Every time we raise a new generation of children, we’re faced with this difficulty of here are these intelligences, they’re new, they’re different, they’re in a different environment, what can we do to make sure that they have the right kinds of goals? Caregiving might actually be a really powerful metaphor for thinking about our relationship with AIs as they develop…

Do read it. It sheds different lights on things that baffle us at the moment.

Books, etc.

The social life of ideas

Diane Coyle has been re-reading Louis Menand’s book on the intellectual ferment in post-civil-war America. She has some characteristically thoughtful reflections on the experience.

I re-read a book I first read in 2002 when the first UK paperback was published, Louis Menand’s magnificent The Metaphysical Club: A story of ideas in America. It takes a sweeping view of the reshaping of the climate of ideas in the US after the Civil War, when pre-war traditions were replaced thanks to a combination of influences: the professionalisation of intellectual life in universities, the impact of scientific discovery particularly Darwin, and indeed the consequences of the Union victory. By the late 19th century the broadly defined pragmatist perspective that lasted until the 1960s – including an accommodation among White Americans over the status of African-Americans – was in place. The story is told though the intertwined histories of William James, Charles Peirce, Oliver Wendell Holmes and John Dewey.

The book lived up to my memory of its excellence, although newly poignant as the idea of an intellectual life among the new US ruling class seems increasingly like a contradiction in terms…

Yep. My friend Sean French and I have a rule: whenever Menand has an essay in the New Yorker, it’s the first thing we turn to.

Diane’s post reminded of something Julian Barnes wrote somewhere (I cited it last September but didn’t cite the reference):

“If reading is one of the pleasures – and necessities – of youth, rereading is one of the pleasures – and necessities – of age. You know more, you understand both life and literature better, and you have the additional interest of checking your younger self against your older self.”

My commonplace booklet

This is from 1930. Plus ca change!

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

I’ve been running Deepseek R1, the Chinese LLM which is causing quite a stir, on my laptop. It’s intriguing for all kinds of reasons (see my column in next Sunday’s Observer if you’re interested), but I’ve noticed that other people have been stretching it a bit and finding that it’s a lot less buttoned-up than its Silicon Valley counterparts. Which is odd, when you think about it, given that the Chinese constitution doesn’t have a First Amendment.

Here’s an example from a user who asked the model to write about the so-called “Alignment” problem in AI in a ‘spicy’ style.

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Multimodal transport

King’s Cross Station, London.

Quote of the Day

”Always tell the truth and no one will believe you.”

• Ronald Knox

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bach | Italian Concerto BWV 971 (orchestral version, Alessandrini)

Link

If this isn’t a great way to start the day, then I don’t know what is.

Long Read of the Day

The PKD Dystopia

When, decades ago, I started thinking about the implications of the Internet the two most persuasive visions of our future seemed to be those of two Old Etonians — George Orwell and Aldous Huxley. Orwell thought that we would be destroyed by the things we fear, while Huxley imagined that we would be undone by the things that delight us.

Then along came surveillance capitalism with Google, Facebook & Co and Edward Snowden revealed the comprehensiveness of state surveillance and I thought that the two nightmares had converged — that we had acquired two dystopias for the price of one.

Henry Farrell, though, came to a different conclusion — that the world we inhabit looks a bit like the world envisaged in the writings of Philip K. Dick. This recent, characteristically thought-provoking essay, of his updates that nicely. Which is why I think it’s well worth your time.

My commonplace booklet

 How to Take Notes (& Why)

Years ago, on one of the little coffins-with-wings that shuttle you from Cedar Rapids to whichever hub will send you where you actually want to go, the man sitting beside me asked me what I was doing. I was doing what generally I’m always doing when I travel: strenuously trying to seem the sort of person who isn’t spoken to on planes, and also marking up a book. But what are you marking it up for, he pursued, as I knew he would; the problem with talking to people on planes is that they don’t stop. He had never understood it, he said, back in high school and college when he had teachers who wanted him to mark up his books, he didn’t see the point. It just slowed you down…

Lovely mini-essay on a subject dear to my heart – note-taking.

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Hello or Goodbye?

St Pancras Station, London

Quote of the Day

”To see Stephen Spender fumbling with our rich and delicate language is to experience all the horror of seeing a Sevres vase in the hands of a chimpanzee”.

• Evelyn Waugh

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Decemberists | All I Want Is You

Link

Long Read of the Day

Trump sniffs money in ‘saving’ TikTok

Yesterday’s Observer column

ate on Saturday 18 January, TikTok, the short-video app beloved of millions of users mostly aged between 18 and 24, went dark in the US. This was not because of a power outage, but because its owner switched it off. For an explanation of why it did so, though, we have to spool back a bit. For years, TikTok has been a thorn in the sides of US legislators and national security officials for two reasons. First, it’s owned by a Chinese company, ByteDance, which doubtless does whatever Xi Jinping tells it to do. Second, TikTok hoovers up phenomenally detailed data about its young users. The average session lasts 11 minutes and the video length is about 25 seconds. “That’s 26 ‘episodes’ per session,” says blogger Prof Scott Galloway, “with each episode generating multiple microsignals: whether you scrolled past a video, paused it, rewatched it, liked it, commented on it, shared it, and followed the creator, plus how long you watched before moving on. That’s hundreds of signals. Sweet crude like the world has never seen, ready to be algorithmically refined into rocket fuel.” The thought of personal data with this granularity falling into Chinese hands seemingly drove the American deep state, not to mention Meta, Google and co wild. And Congress got the message.

In April last year, Joe Biden signed into law the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, a statute that had attracted unprecedented bipartisan support on its path through a divided Congress. The act basically mandated that TikTok’s owner would have to sell it to an American company or be banned in the US. It was scheduled to come into force on Sunday 19 January 2025.

ByteDance/TikTok duly launched a legal campaign to have the act declared unconstitutional, but on 17 January the US supreme court disagreed. At which point the owner of the platform decided to hit the off button. And that, some of us naively thought, was that.

But then, magically, around noon on Sunday 19 January, the app reappeared…

Read on

Books, etc.

Working titles of famous novels

First Impressions (Pride and Prejudice)
Alice’s Doings in Elf-Land (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland)
Trimalcio in West Egg (The Great Gatsby)
Catch-18 (Catch-22)
Something That Happened (Of Mice and Men)
All’s Well That Ends Well (War and Peace)

Source: FT Magazine, 25/26 January

I find these oddly reassuring. I’m working on a book with the working title HWGH (How we got here).

My commonplace booklet

Ofcom has released an interactive digital toolkit to help providers of online user-to-user and search services to understand how to comply with the illegal content rules of the Online Safety Act.

The deadline for creating a risk assessment is 16 March.

I’m not the only observer eagerly looking forward to news that Twitter/X has prepared an assessment. (And even more eagerly looking forward to what Ofcom will do if it hasn’t. Stay tuned.)

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Wikenigma: a compendium of known unknowns. Interesting idea. Link

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Why I buy Private Eye

Quote of the Day

“We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”

• Marshall McLuhan

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Randy Newman | You’ve Got a Friend in Me

Link

Long Read of the Day

On Writing

Helen Lewis is IMO one of the best long-form journalists writing today. She’s also a very reflective thinker about the craft of journalism, which is why I wanted to highlight this guide which she published last March.

Here’s a sample:

Don’t be braver on the page. What I mean by this is—if you plan to make a spicy observation about someone in your copy, make it to their face. Give them a chance to respond, first of all, and not to feel misled by your approach. (Don’t be nice as pie to an interviewee and go to your laptop and zing them, it’s not fair.) Also, confrontations done right are clarifying: your interviewee might offer a perspective you hadn’t considered, or an insight into their own life. They might even change your mind.

Don’t save people from themselves (too much). As a writer, you have an ethical responsibility to people you write about: don’t lie about them, don’t set them up, don’t mischaracterise them. But also: don’t impose your values onto them. If you are talking to an adult and they tell you something that makes you uncomfortable—about their private medical history, past addiction, odd sexual fetish—resist the urge to tidy that away.

Instead, repeat it back to them and see if they panic horribly because they said it to a journalist, or in fact if they wanted you to know, because they are trying to smash the stigma around depression, or they are an adult diaper activist, or whatever it might be. Just because you wouldn’t want to talk to a stranger about your rape, don’t make that decision for someone else.

She also very good on how to use notebooks, and what to remember just after you’ve done a long interview.

Hope you enjoy this as much as I did.

Books, etc.

We’re cat people, not dog people, but I bought Rory Cellan Jones’s book about the experiences he and his family have had after adopting a terrified rescue dog (Sophie) from Romania. It turned out to be a great read, not just because it was a salutary tale about what you let yourself in for when adopting a rescue dog, but also because it’s also about how Rory is dealing with Parkinson’s and the remarkable podcast series he started with several friends who also have the condition. It has a really clever title: Movers and Shakers!

My commonplace booklet

In Microsoft’s early days the software teams had a rule about “eating your own dog food”, by which they meant that you shouldn’t release anything that you wouldn’t use yourself. My version of that is that one should use software and services that one writes about.

Ever since advent of LLMs I’ve been trying to do that with AI, so I use a few of the big models regularly. In most cases, that involves a certain amount of bad faith, in the sense that I know that using them uses more energy and generates more emissions that most other uses of the cloud.

But recently I bought one of the new high-end MacBook Pros with Apple silicon enables me to run a couple of LLMs — Llama 3.2 and Deepseek-R1 — on my desk. It’s an interesting experience which I’ll write about eventually.

The only problem is that the AI tool I like best — Google’s NotebookLM — runs in one’s browser (and therefore in the cloud), with attendant environmental downsides. It’s terrific, though, because it was clearly designed with the needs of writers in mind. So it was interesting to learn yesterday, when watching an FT interview with Demis Hassabis, that it’s his favourite AI tool too.

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Riverbank

By the Rhone, Arles.

Quote of the Day

”When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.”

• Steve Jobs

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Elvis Costello | I Felt The Chill Before The Winter Came

Link

Long Read of the Day

TikTok is deploying platform power in unprecedented ways

A characteristically insightful essay by Henry Farrell on a major shift in the power of tech platforms. It builds on an argument about that kind of power expressed in an academic paper by two political scientists (Culpepper and Thalen) which is linked to in the essay, but which you don’t have to read to understand what Henry is on about. What his piece suggests is a truly delicious irony — that TikTok has exploited Trump rather than the other way round! This, he contends,

“amounts to a new kind of exercise of platform power. Rather than using platform power against regulations, in the ways that Culpepper and Thelen describe, TikTok is putting this power at the service of a politician, presumably in order to gain his favor. TikTok has built up a powerful relationship with its users, who weave the app and its content into their lives. TikTok is now using its ability to communicate directly with those users to create a narrative in which the incoming U.S. president has saved these users’ ability to create, share, and discover as they want to. This radically expands on Culpepper and Thelen’s logic.”

It does. Enjoy.

Cringing before tech giants is no way to make Britain an AI superpower

My Observer OpEd on Keir Starmer’s aspirations to harness AI to Make Britain Great Again.

Sir Keir Starmer doesn’t do visions. But last Monday he broke the habit of a lifetime in a speech delivered at University College London. It was about AI, which he sees as “the defining opportunity of our generation”. The UK, he declared “is the nation of Babbage, Lovelace and Turing”, not to mention the country “that gave birth to the modern computer and the world wide web. So mark my words – Britain will be one of the great AI superpowers.”

Stirring stuff, eh. Within days of taking office, the PM had invited Matt Clifford, a smart tech bro from central casting, to think about “how we seize the opportunities of AI”. Clifford came up with a 50-point AI Opportunities Action Plan that Starmer accepted in its entirety, saying that he would “put the full weight of the British state” behind it. He also appointed Clifford as his AI Opportunities Adviser to oversee implementation of the plan and report directly to him. It’s only a matter of time before the Sun dubs him “the UK’s AI tsar”.

Clifford’s appointment is both predictable and puzzling…

Do read the whole thing

My commonplace booklet

How to survive being online in a Trump era  Some sound advice from Mike Monteiro

The first four years of Donald Trump was a continuous panic attack. I’m not going through that again. You don’t have to either. They’re on stage, but you don’t have to be their audience.

Am I telling you to bury your head in the sand? Far from it. I am telling you to moderate your exposure to the bullshit. Your retweet or reskeet or repost is not going to save democracy. Your hot take on some idiot’s confirmation hearing is, at most, freaking out your friends. And if you want to remain on social media, as I will be, do your best to separate the signal from the noise. Follow people who are engaged in your community, follow people who are engaged in helping others, follow people who are posting pictures of their new puppy because puppies are awesome, follow artists making cool weird shit, follow people who are creating new stages. Stages where you are welcome. Stages built on love and kindness and inclusion. Stages where the audience can take a turn getting up there as well and tell their story. And yes, follow some trusted news sources, and double check their shit with a second news source…

One of my techniques is to have the radio tuned to a music station (in my case BBC Radio 3) so that when you come down in the morning to make a cup of tea, all you hear is music. That’s also why this blog has a ‘Musical Alternative’ section.

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> 1000 words

Barry Blitt’s masterly New Yorker cover says everything you need to know about the tryst between Trump and his favourite Techlord. It also cleverly suggests the strategy that will in the end do for Musk — continually to ask the question: who really speaks for the US now? The detail is exquisite: note the size of the hands, and who has the wider grip of the bible. Trump’s narcissism means that he will eventually find Musk’s infinitely greater wealth and public profile intolerable. Which is why from the moment he became invaluable to Trump before the election, I thought of Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell. And, as students of contemporary Russia know, politics can be deadly for oligarchs (gift article).

Quote of the Day

”When the people are afraid of the government, that is tyranny. But when the government is afraid of the people, that is liberty.”

• Thomas Jefferson

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Richard Wagner | Ride of the Valkyries

Link

Seems appropriate, somehow.

Long Read of the Day

 With his toxic revamp, Emperor Zuckerberg is preparing to be Trump’s puppet

My column in yesterday’s Observer

Years ago the Economist magazine had a striking cover in which Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, was portrayed as a languid clone of the Roman emperor Augustus. This was inspired by stories that Zuck was fascinated by Gus. On honeymoon in Rome in 2012, for example, he took so many photos of the emperor’s sculptures that his wife joked it was as if there were three people on the holiday. The couple even named their second daughter August.

Explaining his fascination for Rome’s first emperor, Zuckerberg told the New Yorker that “basically, through a really harsh approach, he established 200 years of world peace… What are the trade-offs in that? On the one hand, world peace is a long-term goal that people talk about today but that didn’t come for free, and he had to do certain things.”

He had indeed. And guess what? Last November, Zuckerberg – who had thrown Donald Trump off Facebook and Instagram in the wake of 6 January 2021 – flew to Florida to dine with the US’s new emperor, a man who a few months earlier had said that his dinner guest would “spend the rest of his life in prison” if he attempted to interfere in the 2024 US election.

It seems that the Meta boss emerged from Mar-a-Lago convinced that – like Augustus before him – he had “to do certain things”…

Read on

Books, etc.

Anne Applebaum’s prescient book came out last year, when Trump was just a threat on the horizon. Now, I guess people are speed-reading it everywhere. Wikipedia describes it thus:

The book describes the relationships between Autocratic governments in the 21st century, which are no longer based on shared ideology but “rather by a ruthless, single-minded determination to preserve their personal wealth and power”. This networking of autocracies, that include Russia, China, Islamic Republic of Iran, Venezuela and others, use the global economic system and personal connections to support each other to maintaining their personal wealth and keeping their peoples oppressed. The author explores how these autocracies cooperate in several key areas: propaganda and media control, trade in weapons and technologies, and money laundering.

Another book published last year may also be useful for understanding how things will pan out.

Here’s the summary:

Since the end of World War II, democracies typically fell apart by coup d’état or through force. Today, however, they are increasingly eroding at the hands of democratically elected incumbents, who seize control by slowly chipping away at democratic institutions. To better understand these developments, this book examines the role of personalist political parties, or parties that exist primarily to further their leader’s career as opposed to promote a specific policy platform. Using original data capturing levels of personalism in the parties of democratically elected leaders from 1991 to 2020, this book shows that the rise of personalist parties around the globe is facilitating the decline of democracy. Personalist parties lack the incentive and capacity to push back against a leader’s efforts to expand executive power. As such, leaders backed by personalist parties are more likely to succeed in their efforts to dismantle institutional constraints on their rule. Such attacks on state institutions, in turn, reverberate throughout society, deepening political polarization and weakening supporters’ commitment to democratic norms of behaviour. In these ways, ruling party personalism erodes horizontal and vertical constraints on a leader, ultimately degrading democracy and raising the risk of democratic failure.

Note the bit about “parties that exist primarily to further their leader’s career as opposed to promote a specific policy platform”. It’s a pretty a good description of what the Republican Party has become.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Daron Acemoglu’s Nobel Lecture One of the better things that happened in 2024. Link

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The big tent

The Schlumberger Centre in West Cambridge at dusk yesterday. It’s an oil exploration research lab on my cycle-path to and from college. It was designed by Hopkins to “foster interactions between scientists within its laboratories, workshops and office areas”.

Rather than relegate the noisy drilling-rig test station to a less prominent location, this main 24m-wide workshop is placed at the heart of the building, overlooked on either side by acoustically-insulated laboratories facing inwards. These single storey wings are flanked by individual scientists’ rooms facing outwards over the Fens landscape.

The roof is made of Teflon-coated glass fibre, suspended on a network of cables by four suspension bridge-like structures. It was built in 1992 and has withstood the elements rather well.

Quote of the Day

”Novel-writing is a highly skilled and laborious trade. One does not just sit behind a screen jotting down other people’s conversation. One has for one’s raw material every single thing one has ever seen or heard or felt, and one has to go over that vast, smoldering rubbish-heap of experience, half stifled by fumes and dust, scraping and delving until one finds a few discarded valuables. Then one has to assemble these tarnished and dented fragments, polish them, set them in order, and try to make a coherent and significant arrangement of them.

• Evelyn Waugh

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

John Field | Nocturne No. 9 in E Minor, H. 46 | Alice Sara Ott

Link

Long Read of the Day

Reasons for pessimism in Europe — Crooked Timber

The title of this essay by Chris Bertram on the Crooked Timber blog says it all, but does so in an elegant and restrained way.

Those of us who live in Europe have reason to be very pessimistic about the next four years. The state that Europeans have relied upon as their security guarantee is now in the hands of the nationalist extreme right and the information space is saturated by the output of tech oligarchs such as Elon Musk who are either aligned with or beholden to that nationalist right and who openly fantasize about replacing elected European governments. These pressures come on top of military aggression from Russia in Ukraine and elsewhere, austerity in public services, increased energy costs, stagnant living standards, a difficult green transition, demographic decline, and anxiety about immigration and cultural diversity. Most of these pressures are likely to be deliberately worsened by the incoming Trump regime in the hope of having its ideological allies come to power in European countries. In fact the very same figures who vaunted the importance of national sovereignty are salivating at the prospect of a great power interfering to their benefit in domestic affairs: so much for patriotism!

Resistance will be hampered on several fronts…

It makes me think of a motto which I attribute (perhaps wrongly) to Gramsci — that what we need is “pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will”.

But underneath the piece is a less bleak comment.

I consider myself to be a pretty pessimistic guy, who usually thinks things won’t work out well and are at least as likely to get worse than to get better, but I think this is probably a bit too pessimistic. For all this to happen, a bunch of people who are not that smart, not that organized, are hard to get along with, and have other serious problems would have to have a lot of things go right for them. That might happen! But, I think the above is close to an absolute worst-case scenario, and the more likely outcome, while bad, is less bad than this…

Who knows? And we won’t find out, though, for quite a while. So maybe what we liberals need just now is realism of the intellect and optimism of the will?

My commonplace booklet

Hugging Face has just announced a new Large Language Model (LLM), Deepseek-V3, which apparently has a performance close to other leading models but requires only a tenth of the computing power for its training. Impressive, eh?

Here’s how the designers introduce it:

We present DeepSeek-V3, a strong Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language model with 671B total parameters with 37B activated for each token. To achieve efficient inference and cost-effective training, DeepSeek-V3 adopts Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA) and DeepSeekMoE architectures, which were thoroughly validated in DeepSeek-V2. Furthermore, DeepSeek-V3 pioneers an auxiliary-loss-free strategy for load balancing and sets a multi-token prediction training objective for stronger performance. We pre-train DeepSeek-V3 on 14.8 trillion diverse and high-quality tokens, followed by Supervised Fine-Tuning and Reinforcement Learning stages to fully harness its capabilities. Comprehensive evaluations reveal that DeepSeek-V3 outperforms other open-source models and achieves performance comparable to leading closed-source models. Despite its excellent performance, DeepSeek-V3 requires only 2.788M H800 GPU hours for its full training. In addition, its training process is remarkably stable. Throughout the entire training process, we did not experience any irrecoverable loss spikes or perform any rollbacks.

Of course this will be incomprehensible to any non-technical reader — not just because of all the jargon and acronyms, but also because it assumes a conceptual grasp how LLMs are created. But it’s an impressive example of good technical writing: compressed, efficient and informative.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Terrific conversation between Ian Hislop and Andrew Marr about Elon Musk Link

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Bath time in the West End

Amazing what you see when you wander round London with a camera.

Quote of the Day

“One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”

• F Scott Fitzgerald, ‘The CrackUp’

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Altan | Béidh Aonach Amárach (There’s A Fair Tomorrow)

Link

Lovely rendition of an old Irish song.

Long Read of the Day

Machinery hurtful to commonality

Really insightful essay by Rob Miller on the relevance of an old (and comprehensively misunderstood) story that’s suddenly become dead relevant again.

The Luddites weren’t demanding the destruction of all machinery and the banning of automation. They wanted machines to be operated by workers who had undergone an apprenticeship and who were paid well, and they wanted them to be used to produce high-quality – rather than high-margin – goods. They demanded the return to a system, challenged by the industrial revolution, in which it was possible to make a good living as a skilled manufacturer. In their own words, they fought against “all machinery hurtful to commonality”.

It used to be possible to make a good living as a jobbing musician; in the era of pitiful streaming revenues, AI-generated slop and muzak on Spotify, it no longer is. It used to be possible to make a good living as an ordinary, non-A-list screenwriter or film crew; in the era of collapsing streaming budgets and the elimination of residuals, it no longer is. It used to be possible to make a good living writing for a niche audience on the web, funded by either advertising or membership fees; in the era of ad fraud and subscription fatigue, it no longer is.

We’re all just making algorithmic dogfood for the content factory…

It brings to mind Brian Merchant’s terrific book and Dave Karpf’s memorable review of it.

My commonplace booklet

After the Facebook boss made his pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the Great Dictator’s ring and announced that corporate bosses needed to be more ‘masculine’ in future, an interesting thing happened back at the Meta ranch:

That same day at Meta’s offices in Silicon Valley, Texas and New York, facilities managers were instructed to remove tampons from men’s bathrooms, which the company had provided for nonbinary and transgender employees who use the men’s room and who may have required sanitary pads, two employees said.

Some employees were livid at what they saw as efforts by executives to hide changes to the “Hateful Conduct” policy before it was announced, two people said. While people across the policy division typically view and comment on significant revisions, most did not have the opportunity this time.

On Workplace, Meta’s Slack-like internal communications software, employees began arguing over the changes. In the @Pride employee resource group, where workers who support L.G.B.T.Q. issues convene, at least one person announced their resignation as others privately relayed to one another that they planned to look for jobs elsewhere, two people said.

Link

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• A free AQI (Air Quality Indicator) for Apple devices Link

Interesting

All proceeds from previous sales of this app have been donated to one of several climate change foundations:

Clean Air Task Force
Climate Change Emergency Fund
Union of Concerned Scientists

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Webbed!

Yeah, well it’s been cold round here.

Quote of the Day

”Mark Zuckerberg’s commitment to free speech is as deep as Exxon’s commitment to clean energy.”

• Dave Karpf

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Norah Jones | Don’t Know Why

Link

Long Read of the Day

Wrecking Balls

Tina Brown is on Substack, and bloody good she is too. Here’s how her latest blast opens:

In Trump Season Two, deranged masculinity is all the rage. It’s as if the New Orleans truck ramming and the Las Vegas Cybertruck explosion were the overture to what comes next. The former decorated Green Beret who chose to blow himself up in one of Elon Musk’s 6,000-pound electric cyber-monsters outside a Trump hotel could not have provided a more fitting pre-credit sequence for the new era. We are all playthings now in Elon’s daily Circus Maximus as he hurls his thunderbolts not just at us, but at the Brits, the Norwegians, and the Germans. “Don’t feed the troll,” warned German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who is now about to be out on his ass. Ditto Canada’s friendly feminist Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, dubbed by Musk “an insufferable tool,” who jumped yesterday before he was pushed…

Includes a pic of the Cybertruck inferno next to the entrance to Trump’s pad.

Note to No 10: one speed doesn’t fit all when it comes to online safety

Yesterday’s Observer column:

London Fixed Gear and Single-Speed (LFGSS) is an admirable online community of fixed-gear and single-speed cyclists in and around London. Sadly, this columnist does not qualify for membership: he doesn’t reside in (or near) the metropolis, and he requires a number of gears to tackle even the gentlest of inclines – and therefore admires hardier cyclists who disdain the assistance of Sturmey-Archer or Campagnolo hardware.

There is, however, bad news on the horizon. After Sunday 16 March, LFGSS will be no more. Dee Kitchen, the software wizard (and cyclist) who is the core developer of Microcosm, a platform for running non-commercial, non-profit, privacy-sensitive, accessible online forums such as LFGSS, has announced that on that date he will “delete the virtual servers hosting LFGSS and other communities, and effectively immediately end the approximately 300 small communities that I run, and the few large communities such as LFGSS”.…

Read on

Books, etc.

The Great Gatsby was published 100 years ago this Spring

Richard Ford wrote this about it:

“I believe it is one of the maturest, more sophisticated and seamless books I have read, and I don’t fault myself for not getting it back in 1964, since it has, I think, more to teach an older man than a young one.”

My commonplace booklet

John Banville, the distinguished Irish critic and novelist, is working on his memoirs.

The writer toiled as a subeditor in the 1970s. Recounting this period in the interview, he recalled returning home late one night to his then wife, the American artist Janet Dunham, who died in 2021.

“Janet had been asleep for hours and the house was in total darkness, so I didn’t turn any lights on. I just got undressed and crept into bed beside her, this lovely, warm body. And she turned over and things got amorous, as they do. Given the circumstances, it was quite quick and quiet, you know. And afterwards there was a bit of a pause, and then, with her superb sense of comic timing, my wife said: ‘John, is that you?’”

From a lovely Guardian interview

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• How Ernest Wright Makes Scissors.. Ever noticed how terrible mass-produced scissors are? Me too. Which is why I loved this video. The Kutrite model is what emerges from the production process. It might seem expensive, but it’ll last your lifetime, and maybe your grandchildrens’ too.

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Bread — and Circuses?

Arles, on a July evening in 2022

Quote of the Day

”Communications tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring.”

• Clay Shirky (in Here Comes Everybody)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Decemberists | January Hymn

Link

Long Read of the Day

 How to solve a problem like Elon Musk

Peter Geoghegan on why European democracies need to start taking action against foreign interference.

That elections should be protected from outside interference is a core principle in many modern democracies. In Britain, foreign donations are prohibited. It’s the same in the United States, France, Ireland and numerous other countries.

We are, however, quickly discovering the limits of the rules and regulations that are supposed to protect our democracies.

Especially when the foreign interference is coming from a multi-billionaire who has complete control over a social media platform where many voters get their information.

Few realised it at the time, but Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter/X in 2022 has given him an unrivalled power to influence politics. His increasingly erratic attacks on governments and public institutions are fast becoming the biggest driver of the news agenda.

Politicians are being forced to react…

Good piece by a great journalist. Time to think about using the Online Safety Act to regulate Musk’s abusive tweeting on Twitter/X

Books, etc.

Shapiro picked up an abused-looking iPhone from his desk. “You’re talking to someone who has only owned a smartphone for a year—I resisted,” he said. Then he saw that it was futile. “Technology in the last twenty years has changed all of us,” he went on. “How has it changed me? I probably read five novels a month until the two-thousands. If I read one a month now, it’s a lot. That’s not because I’ve lost interest in fiction. It’s because I’m reading a hundred Web sites. I’m listening to podcasts.” He waggled the iPhone disdainfully. “Go to a play now, and watch the flashing screens an hour in, as people who like to think of themselves as cultured cannot! Stop! Themselves!” Assigning “Middlemarch” in that climate was like trying to land a 747 on a small rural airstrip.

James Shapiro, an English professor at Columbia, talking to Nathan Heller in “The End of the English Major”

My commonplace booklet

A cautionary tale for Wall Street from China

From Stella Yifan Xie in Nikkei…

China has issued a directive to the country’s brokerage firms as it aims to change perceptions of its flagging economy: monitor speeches by top economists and fire them if necessary. Chief economists at Chinese brokerages must “play a positive role in interpreting government policies and boost investor confidence,” the industry watchdog Securities Association of China (SAC) told its members last week, according to the state-run financial newspaper Securities Times. However, if the individuals have “repeatedly triggered reputational risk over inappropriate commentaries or behaviors” within a certain period of time or caused “major negative impacts,” the company shall “severely deal with the person until termination of employment,” said the notice, without elaborating on the definition of inappropriate comments. The order marks a fresh attempt by Beijing to rekindle confidence and hasten growth by avoiding negative takes on the world’s second-largest economy. But some analysts and economists are concerned that censorship would only deepen the public’s frustration over the economy’s sluggish performance and increase the risk of policy missteps. One Chinese economist at a bank received an internal warning in recent months, in part for making public comments on the economy, Nikkei Asia learned. … At the annual economic work conference last year, Beijing urged officials to promote the “bright theory” of the economy, as it battled against a property market meltdown and slumping stocks. The country’s top intelligence agency warned the public against those who “denigrate China’s economy through false narratives.” Negative commentaries and articles about the state of the economy have vanished from Chinese media.

This should be interesting to some of the free-booting Tech capitalists fawning upon Trump. The First Amendment might come back to bite them when they seek to redact Wall Street analysts’ reports that are critical of their companies!

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

 Jimmy Carter Says Best Part of Heaven is He Will Never See Trump

From Andy Borowitz…

HEAVEN (The Borowitz Report) — In a wide-ranging interview on Thursday, former President Jimmy Carter said that the best part of Heaven “by far” is the knowledge that he will never see Donald J. Trump again.

“Don’t get me wrong, I’m very grateful for the gift of eternal life,” he said. “But an eternity without Trump is the greatest gift of all.”

Carter said that he was “far from alone” in appreciating his Trump-free existence, adding, “Nelson Mandela just said the same thing.”

Asked if he had seen Trump on cable news criticizing his sale of the Panama Canal, Carter responded, “We don’t have cable news up here. I’ve heard it’s on nonstop in the other place.”

Seen and/or heard

In a friend’s guest bedroom.

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!