Westward Ho!
This weekend we’re heading to Dingle for the Other Voices festival. This is a view of the Blasket Islands, a few miles west of the town. So we’re heading to the most western point in Europe.
Quote of the Day
”I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody’s head.”
- John Updike
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Ooh La La | The Faces
Long Read of the Day
The long game
This blast from Cory Doctorow (Whom God Preserve) is welcome because it sets out the historical context for what I wrote about in last Sunday’s Observer column about the failure of the antitrust suit launched against Meta for its anti-competitive behaviour in buying Instagram and WhatsApp as preemptive strikes against potential competitors. “This is particularly galling,” writes Cory,
because Mark Zuckerberg repeatedly, explicitly declared that these mergers were undertaken to reduce competition, which is the only circumstance in which pro-monopoly economists and lawyers say that mergers should be blocked.
Let me take a step back here. During the Reagan years, a new economic orthodoxy took hold, a weird combination of economic theory and conspiracy theory that held that:
a) It was bad economic policy to try and prevent monopolization, since monopolies are “efficient” and arise because companies are so totally amazing that we all voluntarily buy their products and pay for their services and;
b) The anti-monopoly laws on the books are actually pro-monopoly laws, and if you look at them just right, you’ll find that what Congress really intended was for monopolies to be nurtured and protected:
The one exception these monsters of history were willing to make to their pro-monopoly posture was this: if a corporation undertakes a merger because they are seeking a monopoly, then the government should step in and stop them. This is a great standard to come up with if what you really want to do is nothing, because how can you know why a company truly wants to buy another company? Who can ever claim to know what is in another person’s heart?
This is a great wheeze if you want to allow as many monopolies as possible, unless the guy who’s trying to get that monopoly is Mark Zuckerberg, because Zuck is a man who has never had a criminal intention he did not immediately put to writing and email to someone else.
This is the guy who put in writing the immortal words, “It is better to buy than to compete,” and “what we’re really buying is time,” and who described his plans to clone a competitor’s features as intended to get there “before anyone can get close to their scale again”:
https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/29/21345723/facebook-instagram-documents-emails-mark-zuckerberg-kevin-systrom-hearing
Basically, Zuck is the guy who works until 2:30 every night, and then, before turning in, sends some key executive a fully discoverable, immortally backed-up digital message that reads, “Hey Bob, you know that guy we were thinking about killing? Well, I’ve decided we should do it. And for avoidance of doubt, it’s 100% a murder, and right now, at this moment, I am premeditating it.”
And despite this wealth of evidence as to Zuckerberg’s intention at the time, US regulators at the FTC and EU regulators at the Commission both waved through those mergers, as well as many other before and since. Because it turns out that in the pro-monopoly world, there are no bright lines, no mergers so nakedly corrupt that they should be prevented. All that stuff about using state power to prevent deliberate monopolization was always and forever just bullshit. In the pro-monopoly camp, all monopolies are warmly welcome.
It wasn’t always this way…
Read on. It’s worth it.
Books, etc.
(I’ve been thinking for ages about a way of celebrating books that have had a timeless appeal. So think of this as the first in an occasional series.)
Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, was on Desert Island Discs recently. This is a venerable BBC radio programme in which a guest (usually a prominent individual) is invited to choose eight pieces of music that have meaning for them, and to choose one book to take with them on their virtual term in exile.
I was intrigued by Tim’s choice of book — A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander which has been timeless because it offered something generic and powerful: a practical, human-centred grammar for designing spaces, buildings, cities, and — later — even software systems. Ward Cunningham, the man who designed the first Wiki (and co-authored the Manifesto for Agile Software Development), said that the wiki design was inspired by Alexander’s work. The book gives non-experts a vocabulary for making sense of why some spaces feel alive and others dead. It democratised design thinking and challenged the assumption that architects always know best, arguing instead that ordinary people can design their own homes, neighbourhoods, and communities if given the right tools. For me, the great revelation of his thinking was that the huge software systems we were building in the second half of the 20th century ought to be designed with evolution and change in mind, rather like buildings for communal use. Otherwise these programmed monsters become like tombs or ancient monuments.
My commonplace booklet
From Jonathan Haidt:
Earlier this year, someone started a viral trend of asking ChatGPT this question: If you were the devil, how would you destroy the next generation, without them even knowing it?
Chat’s responses were profound and unsettling: “I wouldn’t come with violence. I’d come with convenience.” “I’d keep them busy. Always distracted.”
“I’d watch their minds rot slowly, sweetly, silently. And the best part is, they’d never know it was me. They’d call it freedom.”
As a social psychologist who has been trying since 2015 to figure out what on earth was happening to Gen Z, I was stunned. Why? Because what the AI proposed doing is pretty much what technology seems to be doing to children today. It seemed to be saying: If the devil wanted to destroy a generation, he could just give them all smartphones.
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