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

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!