Seen on our walk (in freezing cold) the other day

Quote of the Day

”Adolescence is the only time when we can learn something.”

• Marcel Proust, 1918.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Dire Straits | Sultans Of Swing (Ukulele version) | Overdriver Duo

Link

They’re a pretty talented pair who have done lots of other famous cover versions. Thanks to Quentin for spotting it.

Long Read of the Day

 Presidential Cybersecurity and Pelotons by Bruce Schneier

Absolutely fascinating essay, of particular interest to anyone who’s a keen indoor cyclist. Here’s how it begins:

President Biden wants his Peloton in the White House. For those who have missed the hype, it’s an Internet-connected stationary bicycle. It has a screen, a camera, and a microphone. You can take live classes online, work out with your friends, or join the exercise social network. And all of that is a security risk, especially if you are the president of the United States.

Any computer brings with it the risk of hacking. This is true of our computers and phones, and it’s also true about all of the Internet-of-Things devices that are increasingly part of our lives. These large and small appliances, cars, medical devices, toys and — yes — exercise machines are all computers at their core, and they’re all just as vulnerable. Presidents face special risks when it comes to the IoT, but Biden has the NSA to help him handle them.

Not everyone is so lucky, and the rest of us need something more structural.

US presidents have long tussled with their security advisers over tech. The NSA often customizes devices, but that means eliminating features.

President Donald Trump resisted efforts to secure his phones. We don’t know the details, only that they were regularly replaced, with the government effectively treating them as burner phones.

Now why does that last paragraph not surprise us?

Great read from beginning to end.

Bill Janeway’s course is online

Bill Janeway is one of the most interesting people I know. Sometimes also the most annoying, because just when I’ve read something interesting it turns out that he read it ten years ago. His book  Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy: Reconfiguring the Three-Player Game between Markets, Speculators and the State changed the way I thought about tech, investment and irrational speculation. He’s had a remarkable career as a venture capitalist and an academic economist, so you could say he’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing. And that he’s not just a theoretician.

Every year he gives a lecture course in Cambridge on “Venture Capital in the 21st Century”. But this year he’s marooned in New York. So he’s decided to give the course online, and make it publicly available. This is a big deal IMHO.

This trailer may give you a hint of why I think that.

Link

With Covid, we’re fighting the last war — as usual

Remember the first lockdown — now almost a year ago — and the hysteria about cleaning surfaces, disinfecting doorknobs etc.? And the dismissive official attitude towards wearing masks? And the scepticism about the evidence that actually the virus was more likely to be spread by aerosols? Me too. So this article — in Nature, no less — will make you feel wearily cynical:

A year into the pandemic, the evidence is now clear. The coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 is transmitted predominantly through the air — by people talking and breathing out large droplets and small particles called aerosols. Catching the virus from surfaces — although plausible — seems to be rare (E. Goldman Lancet Infect. Dis. 20, 892–893; 2020).

Despite this, some public-health agencies still emphasize that surfaces pose a threat and should be disinfected frequently. The result is a confusing public message when clear guidance is needed on how to prioritize efforts to prevent the virus spreading.

The article goes on to report that the New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority estimates that its annual COVID-related sanitation costs will be close to US$380 million between now and 2023. Late last year, the authority asked the US federal government for advice on whether to focus solely on aerosols. It was told to concentrate on fomites (i.e. surface contamination), too, and has so far directed more resources towards cleaning surfaces than tackling aerosols.

Now that it is agreed that the virus transmits through the air, in both large and small droplets, efforts to prevent spread should focus on improving ventilation or installing rigorously tested air purifiers. People must also be reminded to wear masks and maintain a safe distance.

It’s not rocket science. Which is why agencies such as the WHO and the US CDC need to update their guidance on the basis of current knowledge. They have a clear responsibility to present clear, up-to-date information that provides what people need to keep themselves and others safe.

And then I found a piece on ‘Hygiene Theatre’ that Derek Thompson had written in The Atlantic last week:

Six months ago, I wrote that Americans had embraced a backwards view of the coronavirus. Too many people imagined the fight against COVID-19 as a land war to be waged with sudsy hand-to-hand combat against grimy surfaces. Meanwhile, the science suggested we should be focused on an aerial strategy. The virus spreads most efficiently through the air via the spittle spray that we emit when we exhale—especially when we cough, talk loudly, sing, or exercise. I called this conceptual error, and the bonanza of pointless power-scrubbing that it had inspired, “hygiene theater.”

My chief inspiration was an essay in the medical journal The Lancet called “Exaggerated Risk of Transmission of COVID-19 by Fomites.” (Fomites is a medical term for objects and surfaces that can pass along an infectious pathogen.) Its author was Emanuel Goldman, a microbiology professor at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School. At the time, Goldman was a lonely voice in the wilderness. Lysol wipes were flying off the shelves, and it was controversial to suggest that this behavior was anything less than saintly and salutary. Other journals had rejected Goldman’s short essay, and some were still publishing frightening research about the possible danger of our groceries and Amazon packages.

But half a year later, Goldman looks oracular.

He does. And the rest of us look a bit foolish.

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• Radio.Garden. A combination of Google Earth and all the world’s radio stations. Magical. Link Thanks to Gerard de Vries for the link.
• Scientists Stored This Famous Japanese Painting in Protein Molecules. According to researchers, using this method, the entire contents of the New York Public Library could be stored within a teaspoon of protein molecules. Link
• Facebook’s Dead Users Could Outnumber the Living Within 50 Years. If Facebook’s growth continues at its current rate, more than a billion users will die before 2100 — effectively making the social network a mass grave. Quaint. Assumes Facebook will survive more than a decade or two more. Link.

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if your decide that your inbox is full enough already!

Digging into The Dig contd.

From Pete Ashton…

I too saw The Dig recently and have enjoyed the ongoing saga on your blog. It seems we as a culture find it impossible to deal with the phrase “based on a true story”, as in not a true story, just inspired by one. I would prefer these films dispense with the whole “true” thing and fully fictionalise everything, but I guess that’s not financially prudent. For me the film (and presumably the novel (fiction, not history) it was based on) wasn’t about the Sutton Hoo find or even archeology. It was a meditation on death on the eve of a period of mass slaughter in Europe. It’s doubtless frustrating for those who know the facts, but the facts are just raw material for the storytellers. Or to put it another way, it’s art, innit. (See also, Black Swan isn’t really about ballet, Armageddon isn’t really about extinction-event meteorites, The Crown isn’t really about the royal family, and so on)

Re historical (in)accuracy of movie blockbusters, I heard a nice story about an American scholarly friend who, when asked by her father how historically accurate Braveheart was, replied, carefully: “Well, there was a man named William Wallace”.

More on dental services in Tenerife…

Readers may have been amused (or perhaps outraged) by yesterday’s revelations of my countrymen’s Cummings-style ingenuity in discovering how to travel (including overseas) for ‘medical’ reasons. Some of them have been booking dental appointments in Tenerife, getting email confirmations, and then flying gaily off to the sun having waved these tokens of authorisation at the airport. (Looks like this loophole has now been closed, btw.)

The one saving grace in all this is that others among my fellow-countrymen and women have a lively sense of humour, evidence of which keeps popping up in my WhatsApp and Signal feeds. For example, this:

Or this:

I was also reminded of a story I told on my lockdown audio diary about similar evasive tricks employed by Dublin’s drinkers in 1939:

Link

(Text version available here)

Quote of the Day

“Growing old is like being increasingly punished for a crime you haven’t committed.”

• Anthony Powell, 1973.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Johnny Cash | My Old Kentucky Home (Turpentine and Dandelion Wine)

Link

I love this song and prefer Randy Newman’s version. On the other hand, nobody has a rich gravy voice like Johnny Cash.

The real conspiracy theory…

… is not to mention the reality of Brexit, as it is now being discovered by British subjects (Britain doesn’t have citizens, remember; only republics have those) and firms.

Terrific column by my Observer colleague, Nick Cohen. Sample:

We have the hardest of possible Brexits because the Conservative right insisted we must leave the European customs union and single market. Every promise they made to the public is turning to ashes in their mouths as a result. Take trade. Boris Johnson and Michael Gove’s Vote Leave swore to the electorate in 2016 that Brexit would free Britain to strike deals “with major economies like China and India”. It was just another in the interminable list of false pledges they made, safe in the knowledge that, by the time the truth came out, Brexit would be done. Yet, even now, they try to maintain the pretence. Last week, the Sun announced that Liz Truss, the international trade secretary, had created a post-Brexit “Enhanced Trade Partnership” with Delhi. Already it had “created” 1,540 jobs, courtesy of the Indian tech firm Tata Consultancy Services.

It was pure propaganda: utter bullshit. No one knows what “Enhanced Trade Partnership” means, the former government trade official David Henig told me. I asked Truss’s department when it was signed and how might exporters read its terms. They can’t. There’s nothing there beyond a “commitment” to a “long-term India-UK partnership” and the hope of drawing up a “road map”. The UK and India have signed no agreement. Tata Consultancy is already in Britain. Indeed, it was ranked as the “UK’s top employer”. Truss’s department accepts Tata’s new jobs are “not linked directly” to the alleged partnership.

Amazing to be governed by such stupid charlatans. But the most important point in Nick’s piece is this: why is the Labour party not calling the government out on this?

(Answer: because there are too many Brexiteers in what were once safe Labour seats.)

Universities need to wise up – or risk being consigned to history

This morning’s Observer column:

Eli Noam’s point was that the new technologies could not be ignored because they involved a reversal of the historic direction of information flow that determined how universities functioned. “In the past,” he wrote, “people came to the information, which was stored at the university. In the future, the information will come to the people, wherever they are. What then is the role of the university? Will it be more than a collection of remaining physical functions, such as the science laboratory and the football team? Will the impact of electronics on the university be like that of printing on the medieval cathedral, ending its central role in information transfer? Have we reached the end of the line of a model that goes back to Nineveh, more than 2,500 years ago? Can we self‐reform the university, or must things get much worse first?”

When that article came out I was teaching at the Open University, and to me and my academic colleagues Noam’s article seemed like an elegant, pithy statement of the obvious. This was because we were running a university that had many, many thousands of students, none of whom ever came near the campus. So in that sense, we were already living in the future that Noam was envisaging. But what was astonishing – to me, anyway – was that no one in the conventional university sector paid much notice to the warning. Every so often, when I ran into a vice-chancellor of a traditional institution, I would ask what he or she made of Noam’s essay. “Eli who?” was generally the response.

And so it went on for 25 years.

Do read the whole thing.

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90%—And That’s Made the U.S. Less Secure. Yep. Link
• I’ve Seen the Evidence, and There’s a Lot of It, and It’s Overwhelming and Very Persuasive, and I’ve Decided to Ignore It. Eli Grober has a stab at getting inside Mitch McConnell’s brain. Link

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if you decide that your inbox is full enough already!

Trinity Hall at night.

Quote of the Day

”There are three roads to ruin — women, gambling and technicians. The most pleasant is women, the quickest is with gambling, but the surest is with technicians.”

• President George Pompidou on technocrats.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Schubert | Trio op. 100 | Andante con moto

Link

Three Covid anecdotes and a (tentative) conclusion

1. From someone who flew from Ireland to Budapest the other day. The plane was packed. Social distancing was therefore non-existent. Almost nobody, except my informant, wore a mask. A young boy sitting in the aisle seat was having an argument with his sister, sitting in the opposite aisle seat. At one point the boy spat at his sister. Nobody batted an eye.

2. RTE News reports that “A dental practice in Tenerife has stopped taking appointments from Irish patients after it experienced a surge in bookings in the past fortnight, only for some of the patients not to show up. It comes as the Police National Immigration Bureau at Dublin Airport reported that up to 40% of those travelling to sun destinations have letters for dental appointments. Clinica Dental in Southern Tenerife said it has received around five requests per day over the past two weeks from Irish people who were specifically looking for confirmation in writing of their appointments. The surgery’s Office Manager, Roberta Beccaris, told RTÉ’s Today with Claire Byrne programme that she became suspicious when some of these patients, who she said were noticeably younger than their usual Irish customers, subsequently failed to show for the appointments. The national Police Commissioner has now said that “From this morning, we warn people that we do not regard a dentist’s appointment as a reasonable excuse to travel and that they may be prosecuted if they carry on with their journey.” Speaking on The Late Late Show, he said the €500 fine was not the deterrent the authorities thought it might be but “today we found that people have turned back rather than be prosecuted and risk imprisonment or a suspended sentence”.

3. From an academic colleague currently in Bulgaria, where she has done some teaching at the University of Sofia. She was nonplussed to receive a call from the University offering her an immediate (and unsolicited) appointment for a Covid-19 vaccine jab. Given her relative youth — early 30s, I’d guess — she was surprised, given that priority was being given to older people and she hadn’t expected her name to come up for several months at least. So why had the appointment come so soon? The answer turned out to be that many senior professors at the university had refused to be vaccinated. On further investigation, it turns out that anti-vaxx propaganda is rife in Bulgaria and there is little or no central messaging from the government.

Now of course all of this is just anecdotal, but it seems to me that these stories help to explain why our societies are finding it so difficult to suppress the virus to the point where it’s under control. There are, I suspect, two main reasons for this:

• the first is that many people have no choice but to expose themselves to risk if they are to keep their employment. For example, Irish workers employed as moderators for Facebook have been required to show up at the office every day, but have been forbidden by a Non-Disclosure Agreement from speaking to the Deputy Prime Minister about their working conditions. Millions of other workers have been forced to work in Covid-unsafe conditions either by financial need or bullying by employers.
• the other reason is that many people don’t give a damn and are not prepared to have their freedoms curtailed by what they see as a nanny state.

Given that democracies have been trying to balance public health with preserving economic activity and some notion of civil liberties (together, perhaps, with fears that the state lacks the capacity for practical and remorseless enforcement of lockdowns), this virus is set to become endemic. And the corollary is that only authoritarian states have the capacity to get it under control.

The Dig – contd.

My naiveté about the Netflix film is a gift that keeps on giving. Anthony Barnett (Whom God Preserve), for example, thought I was too kind to the film.

Ralph Fiennes’s performance was marvellous and he had clearly studied the black and white films of Brown. I was willing to accept artistic license on the other characters although I thought (and Sheila Hayman confirms) that it was a lot of stereotyping. But what I thought was unforgivable was (not) showing the actual excavations of the treasure. It was all hauled out in one short sequence. There is a huge audience fascinated by restoration and excavation. We wanted to see the amazing face mask. This was apparently restored from hundreds of pieces. Were they large or tiny, were they together, did they realise what it was when they dug them up? How did they excavate the bracelets etc, we saw Brown himself being excavated – I powerful scene I thought and a metaphor for the film itself seeking to excavate him as the person who did the crucial work – but there wasn’t any equivalent on the actual discovery and unearthing of the objects. This is what I was really looking forward to seeing reconstructed and I found myself shouting at the screen in disappointment!

And Sheila Hayman returned to the fray:

Apparently the bike had the wrong kind of brakes, too . Shocking. Even the Spitfire was wrong. Shocking!

Climate change and pandemics – contd.

Further to the research paper I mentioned yesterday on the consequences of human destruction of wildlife habitats, Patrick O’Beirne sent me a link to a piece in Paris Match — and a translation of a relevant extract about the Nipah virus.

In 1998, a forest in Borneo is burnt to plant palm-oil trees, and indigenous bats have to flee from the flame and smoke. They fall back on Malaysia, land on mango trees for food, defecate on pigs raised under trees in an industrial manner. Via the pigs, the workers are contaminated — even in the slaughterhouses located in… Singapore! Result: 105 deaths out of 265 infected people, and the slaughter of more than 1 million pigs to stop the epidemic.

And the moral: Bats are not inherently dangerous; they become dangerous if they are dislodged — which is what humans are doing. It’s depressingly obvious, really.

Long Read of the Day

 Can Capitalist Democracy Survive? 

Good question. Great essay by Bill Janeway.

For two generations after World War II, the constructive coexistence of capitalism and democracy was largely taken for granted in developed countries – including the former Axis powers. This deep-seated complacency was reinforced by the collapse of the Soviet Union. But the 2008 global financial crisis put an end to faith in the supposed inevitability of liberal economics and democratic politics.

To those who were paying attention, signs of an emerging discontinuity between market capitalism and representative democracy were already evident in the later decades of the twentieth-century. The digital revolution had ushered in another wave of globalization, opening and expanding markets in capital, goods, and services – including labor services – while also incrementally transforming the nature of work (like every wave of technological innovation before it). At the same time, China, after 1979, began to demonstrate the effectiveness of an alternative system of authoritarian capitalism.

100 Not Out! — my lockdown diary, is out as a Kindle book. You can get it here

Webinar next Thursday (February 18): Can Democracy Keep Pace with Digital Technology?

Joshua Fairfield on his new book: Runaway Technology: Can Law Keep Up? in conversation with Julia Powles and Simon Deakin

Open to all: Book here.

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if you decide that your inbox is full enough already!

At last: a good use for a Zuckerberg

Turns out, we used this issue of the Financial Times to line a cupboard in our utility room!

Sheila Hayman on ‘The Dig’

My appreciative encomium of the Netflix film, The Dig, yesterday prompted a wonderful blast from Sheila Hayman, a terrific film-maker who is on the Advisory Board of our new Research Centre. It reads:

For the sake of your female – and perhaps more, male – readers, I really, really would like you to at least know the truth about The Dig

1 Edith Pretty was 55 years old in 1938. She was not a lissom flower, but a radical who refused a CBE for Sutton Hoo as she disapproved of the honours system.

2 The photographer was not a handsome young man, but two women, Mercie Lack ARPS and Barbara Wagstaff ARPS. After the war, they both successfully submitted for membership to the Royal Photographers Society, using their photo essays of the excavation at Sutton Hoo. Their work in documenting the excavation was vitally important. The archive of 447 photographs taken on Leica cameras, 72 Agfa 35mm colour slides and film of Basil Brown excavating captured on a 16mm cine-camera, today forms a critical component of the excavation record. Their work at Sutton Hoo included some of the first colour images in British archaeology (I included all this detail as, being a photographer, I thought you might like it.)

3 Peggy Piggott was not a naive slip of a girl, but a highly qualified and experienced field archaeologist.

4 Dorothy May Brown was far from a neglected, lonely wife; Basil wrote to her all the time.

For all of this I am grateful to this blog and the researches of my equally pissed off female friends).

A few thoughts sparked by Sheila’s message.

• It provides yet another confirmation of my view that one of the great consolations of blogging is the fact that one’s readers are often/usually better informed than oneself!
• It also illustrates the fact that making a feature film with an eye on Oscar nominations always means (a) being economical with the actualité (as Alan Clark used to say); (b) introducing simplifications and distractions (like the apparently dysfunctional marriage of Peggy Piggott); (c) twisting the story to provide an opening for attractive actors — making Edith Pretty a tragic lissom flower with heart trouble rather than the doughty 58-year old she was at the time; having a handsome male photographer to record the excavation rather than the two women who actually took the pics; and (d) introducing gratuitous mistakes (see below).
• As a photography buff I did wonder afterwards whether the Rolleiflex camera used by the fictional photographer could have been the right model. It looked like an early 1940s Rollei. But in fact even a 1938 Rollei (the old ‘standard model’) looks surprisingly modern and so I concluded that this detail was accurate.

• And then I find that the two female photographers used Leicas — which are nothing like as photogenic as the Rolleiflex!

Quote of the Day

”To the Tennis Court, and there saw the King play at tennis and others; but to see how the King’s play was extolled, without any cause at all, was a loathsome sight.”

• Samuel Pepys, 4 January, 1664

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

She Moves Through The Fair | Tír Eolas

Link

The link between climate change and Covid-19

The short-term question of where this particular coronavirus originated is still contentions and unsettled, but the long-term link between the proliferation of coronaviruses and bats seems pretty secure. And climate change and human encroachment on wildlife habitats has a lot to do with it. Which is why a new scientific paper is particularly interesting. The Abstract reads:

Bats are the likely zoonotic origin of several coronaviruses (CoVs) that infect humans, including SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2, both of which have caused large-scale epidemics. The number of CoVs present in an area is strongly correlated with local bat species richness, which in turn is affected by climatic conditions that drive the geographical distributions of species. Here we show that the southern Chinese Yunnan province and neighbouring regions in Myanmar and Laos form a global hotspot of climate change-driven increase in bat richness. This region coincides with the likely spatial origin of bat-borne ancestors of SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2. Accounting for an estimated increase in the order of 100 bat-borne CoVs across the region, climate change may have played a key role in the evolution or transmission of the two SARS CoVs.

The study has revealed large-scale changes in the type of vegetation in the southern Chinese Yunnan province, and adjacent regions in Myanmar and Laos, over the last century. Climatic changes including increases in temperature, sunlight, and atmospheric carbon dioxide – which affect the growth of plants and trees – have changed natural habitats from tropical shrubland to tropical savannah and deciduous woodland. This created a suitable environment for many bat species that predominantly live in forests.

The number of coronaviruses in an area is closely linked to the number of different bat species present. The study found that an additional 40 bat species have moved into the southern Chinese Yunnan province in the past century, harbouring around 100 more types of bat-borne coronavirus. This ‘global hotspot’ is the region where genetic data suggests SARS-CoV-2 may have arisen.

“Climate change over the last century has made the habitat in the southern Chinese Yunnan province suitable for more bat species,” said Dr Robert Beyer, a researcher in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Zoology and first author of the study, who has recently taken up a European research fellowship at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Germany.

He added: “Understanding how the global distribution of bat species has shifted as a result of climate change may be an important step in reconstructing the origin of the COVID-19 outbreak.”

Mary-Kay Wilmers: Miss Skippit

Mary-Kay Wilmers, the co-founder and long-time Editor of the London Review of Books, has retired. Andrew O’Hagan has written a lovely LRB piece about her. Excerpt:

The​ other day, I was talking to a man who was once the head of an Oxford college. He recalled an occasion in the late 1950s when he was a student himself and Kingsley Amis had come to address his college’s literary society. When Amis eventually asked for questions, a young woman said something that came as a surprise. ‘Can you give us your “Sex Life in Ancient Rome” face?’ she asked. (Jim Dixon, the hero of Lucky Jim, is keen on making faces, and is stumped at the end of the book because he is more or less happy, and so, ‘as a kind of token, he made his Sex Life in Ancient Rome face.’) Amis, suddenly befuddled, didn’t quite know what to say and the audience laughed. 

The young woman was Mary-Kay Wilmers. After working at Faber & Faber, the Listener and the TLS, she became one of the founders of this paper in 1979, and has just retired after more than thirty years as its editor. I wanted to begin with one of her jokes, an early one, because her gift for amusement has always been there, a crucial element in a career of giving life to arguments. Alan Bennett, a friend of hers since Oxford, gives an account of a posh dinner she once attended with her then fiancé, Tim Binyon. A flunkey at the door asked for their names so that he could announce them. ‘Paralysed with shyness,’ Bennett writes, Mary-Kay ‘told him it didn’t matter (and may even have said that she didn’t matter). Tiresomely, this gilded fly persisted, still wanting her name. “Oh, skip it,” she snapped, whereupon the flunkey announced: “Mr Timothy Binyon and Miss Skippit.”’ The wish to be noticed and not noticed (and noticed as being unnoticed) would remain with her, and it was fundamental to her talent as an editor. She was present and not present in every text published under her editorship.

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if you decide that your inbox is full enough already!

The Dig

We watched this lovely film on Netflix last night. Based on a true story, it tells of how Basil Brown (played by Ralph Fiennes), an English self-taught archaeologist and astronomer, in 1939 discovered and excavated a 7th-century Anglo-Saxon ship burial at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk on the estate of Edith Pretty (Carey Mulligan). The find was, as one archeological journal described it, “the greatest treasure ever discovered in the UK” and the fabulous artefacts it yielded are now in the British Museum. It’s a beautifully made, acted and photographed film with a script that has an acute ear for the subtle — and not so subtle — dimensions of English snobbery and class distinction. Think it of as Merchant Ivory does archeology. Strongly recommended.

Link

I love the ‘goofs’ one finds on imdb pages. The one for the film has this:

“When Mrs Pretty has Grateley turn on the wireless, the broadcast is heard immediately. Before the advent of transistors, the vacuum tubes used in radios and televisions would have to warm up for 10 – 20 seconds before operating.”

Quote of the Day

“The most important thing in acting is honesty. Once you’ve learned to fake that, you’re in.”

• Sam Goldwyn

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Andrew Lloyd Webber | A song for Jackie Weaver

Link

This is fun. Jackie Weaver (for those who have been vacationing on Mars) is the lady who restored some element of decorum and sanity to the unruly Zoom meeting of Handforth Parish Council, a recording of whose proceedings went viral on the Web. More background here

Cognitive reflection correlates with behavior on Twitter

Hmmm… This article in Nature Communications comes to unsurprising conclusions. Here’s an excerpt from the Abstract:

We find that people who score higher on the Cognitive Reflection Test—a widely used measure of reflective thinking—were more discerning in their social media use, as evidenced by the types and number of accounts followed, and by the reliability of the news sources they shared. Furthermore, a network analysis indicates that the phenomenon of echo chambers, in which discourse is more likely with like-minded others, is not limited to politics: people who scored lower in cognitive reflection tended to follow a set of accounts which are avoided by people who scored higher in cognitive reflection. Our results help to illuminate the drivers of behavior on social media platforms and challenge intuitionist notions that reflective thinking is unimportant for everyday judgment and decision-making.

This is news?

Long Read of the Day

 The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review

This is an impressive report by a Treasury team led by the Cambridge economist Partha Dasgupta. It’s massive — 600 pages, but cleverly presented in a range of sizes to suit all tastes and capacities. There’s a 100-page “abridged” monograph (pdf), for example, and a short ‘headline messages’ document (also a pdf). There’s a very brief summary online which isn’t much cop. I’ve read only the ‘Headline Messages’ version. The overall message is, in a way, what everyone should know: if there is to be a solution to the damage we are inflicting on the planet and its inhabitants we have to start by accepting a simple truth: our economies are embedded within Nature, not external to it. You’d have thought that maybe the pandemic might have convinced people of this. But I wouldn’t bet on it.

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• Missing your favourite bar? Why not re-create its soundscape? This is a lovely, interactive, idea. Try it. Link
• The lawyer who’s definitely not a cat. (So he swears.) Link

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if your decide that your inbox is full enough already!

Vive la France!

No wonder the food tastes different there.

Quote of the Day

”Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.”

• Lester Pearson

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Altan | The Jug Of Punch

Link

Altan is one of the great Irish folk groups. They were formed in Gweedore, County Donegal in 1987 by Mairéad Ní Mhaonaigh and her late husband Frankie Kennedy. They brought Donegal’s rich collection of Irish language songs and instrumental styles to audiences around the world, and they remain as the world’s foremost Irish traditional group with over a million records sold. They were the first traditional group to be signed to a major label when they signed with Virgin Records in 1996. They’ve worked with a wide variety of world-famous musicians including Dolly Parton, Enya, The Chieftains, Bonnie Raitt and Alison Krauss.

Martin Luther Rewired Your Brain

Lovely little essay on how learning to read rewired our brains.

Your brain has been altered, neurologically re-wired as you acquired a particular skill. This renovation has left you with a specialized area in your left ventral occipital temporal region, shifted facial recognition into your right hemisphere, reduced your inclination toward holistic visual processing, increased your verbal memory, and thickened your corpus callosum, which is the information highway that connects the left and right hemispheres of your brain. What accounts for these neurological and psychological changes? You are likely highly literate. As you learned to read, probably as a child, your brain reorganized itself to better accommodate your efforts, which had both functional and inadvertent consequences for your mind. So, to account for these changes to your brain—e.g, your thicker corpus callosum and poorer facial recognition—we need to ask when and why did parents, communities, and governments come to see it as necessary for everyone to learn to read. Here, a puzzle about neuroscience and cognition turns into a historical question.

For most of human history only a tiny minority could read. So, when did people decide that everyone should learn to read? Maybe it came with the rapid economic growth of the Nineteenth Century? Or, surely, the intelligentsia of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, imbued with reason and rationality, figured it out?

No, it was a religious mutation in the Sixteenth Century. After bubbling up periodically in prior centuries, the belief that every person should read and interpret the Bible for themselves began to rapidly diffuse across Europe with the eruption of the Protestant Reformation, marked in 1517 by Martin Luther’s delivery of his famous ninety-five theses. Protestants came to believe that both boys and girls had to study the Bible for themselves to better know their God. In the wake of the spread of Protestantism, the literacy rates in the newly reforming populations in Britain, Sweden, and the Netherlands surged past more cosmopolitan places like Italy and France. Motivated by eternal salvation, parents and leaders made sure the children learned to read.

Fascinating piece, drawn from the Prelude of Joseph Henrich’s latest book, The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous.

Reminds me of Maryanne Wolf’s lovely book on the influence of literacy on our brains —  Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.

A tag-team reading of In Search of Lost Time

A gargantuan project that mimics the mood of Proust’s masterpiece.

This is such a nice idea. I came on it in the Economist.

From Bali to Paris, the readers in Véronique Aubouy’s huge project, “Proust Lu” (“Proust Read”), have been captured in bedrooms, offices, supermarkets, factories and beauty spots. Farmers, schoolchildren, businessmen, even the French director’s doctor have participated. “It’s a slice of life,” Ms Aubouy says; “a reading about time, in time.” The cast is as diverse as the novel’s, brought together by their own web of connections and coincidences.

Proust’s seven-volume masterpiece runs to more than 4,000 pages. Each participant reads just two of them, so at the current rate the project will not be completed until 2050—57 years after filming began. It is already 150 hours long (much of the footage is available to watch on YouTube). By contrast, Proust took a mere 14 years to write the book, finishing it in 1922, shortly before his death. Tracing the narrator’s life from childhood to old age, “it offers a singularly accurate depiction in fiction of how consciousness works,” says Patrick McGuinness of the University of Oxford. “His writing forces you to inhabit time. It doesn’t do the normal thing of compressing narrative into chunks—it makes the narrative more like life.”

Ms Aubouy set out to make a screen equivalent. Instead of condensing the text into a conventional plot, thereby losing its rich detail, she divided it into filmable snapshots. Trusting in happenstance, she finds and recruits interesting people. Readers then recommend friends. She likens the project to a locomotive, “each new person adding a wagon”.

Long Read of the Day

The Data Void problem

The idea of a data void was new to me and sounded intriguing.

It is — as this paper by Michael Golebiewski and danah boyd explains.

Search plays a unique role in modern online information systems. Unlike people’s use of social media, where they primarily consume algorithmically curated feeds of information, people’s ap- proaches to search engines typically begin with a query or question in an effort to seek new information. However, not all search queries are equal. Many more people search for “basket- ball” than “underwater basket weaving.” Likewise, a lot more content is created about the sport than the absurdist activity (although the latter’s pictures are pretty great!) As a result, when search engines like Bing and Google try to provide users with information about basketball, they have a lot more data to work with.

There are many search terms for which the available relevant data is limited, non-existent, or deeply problematic. We call these “data voids.” Most of these searches are rare, but in the cases where people do search for these terms, search engines tend to return results that may not give the user what they want because of limited data and/or limited lessons learned through previous searches. If you type a random set of characters into a search engine – e.g., “aslkfja- stowerk;asndf” – you will probably return no results—simply because no pages contain that random set of letters. But there is a long tail between a term like “basketball,” which promises a seemingly infinite number of results, and one with zero results. In that long tail, there are plenty of search queries that can drop people into a data void rife with problematic results.

Why is this interesting? Because data voids create vulnerabilities in our information ecosystem — weaknesses that can be exploited by bad actors.

When search engines have little natural content to return for a particular query, they are more likely to return low quality and problematic content. This is because there is little high-quality content for the search engine to return. And it’s the “low quality and problematic content” that you have to look out for.

Other, hopefully interesting, links

•  Mount Sinai study finds Apple Watch can predict COVID-19 diagnosis up to a week before testing Link]7
• ATM use in UK fell precipitously during lockdown. Surprise, surprise. I haven’t used a banknote or a coin since last March. Link

100 Not Out! — my lockdown diary, is out as a Kindle book. You can get it here

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if you decide that your inbox is full enough already!

Fontenay

Abbaye de Fontenay near Montbard in Burgundy is one of the world’s magical places. I’ve loved it ever since I discovered it in the 1980s.

Quote of the Day

“Many epidemiologists expect SARS-Cov-2’s long-term future to become an endemic virus causing mild illness, rather like four other human coronavirus Ed that cause cold-like symptoms.”

• Clive Cookson, Financial Times, 6/7 February 2021

Now that’s the kind of future we can live with.

How Bruce Springsteen Agreed To Do a Super Bowl Commercial for Jeep

Link

Interesting story in Variety of how the legendary singer — who doesn’t do endorsements — was persuaded to make this little movie to be shown on Super Bowl night.

Springsteen didn’t take a laissez-faire approach to the project. Jeep offered to let him film scenes at his home in New Jersey, then mix them in with footage captured at the Kansas church, but Springsteen insisted on flying out to the chapel a week ago. His attention to detail was fervent, Francois says. There was no “glam squad” for makeup and no complaints about how cold it was outdoors.

“He spent 12 hours on site. He was totally hands-on about the editing. He was very, very, very active with the editing and the process,” says Francois. “He knew what he wanted, and he got what he wanted.”

The ad executive would not change anything about the process. “It took me ten years to get him in, but once he was in, he was all in.” Can’t see it going down well with the Trump crowd, though. Not that he will give a toss about that.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Daniel Grimwood | John Field | Nocturne no 6 in F major | Live

Link

GameStop contd. — Playing the market

Two related questions… 1/ Are share-trading apps a safe way to play the markets? Alex Hern has a useful guide to them in the Guardian:

This has resulted in billion-dollar losses for some hedge funds, and big profits for traders who cashed out before the stock fell back to less than $100. Many of these speculators were using a new generation of share-trading apps, such as eToro, Robinhood and Trading 212. Have these services tipped the scales of financial power in favour of the little guy? Here we answer some key questions …

What’s the difference between these new apps and an established platform, such as Hargreaves Lansdown?

There are two main differences between the new breed of trading apps and old-fashioned brokers. One is the cost, the other is the market. Apps, from Robinhood to Trading 212, have broken ground by offering trades “fee-free”. That’s a big difference from before, when an old-fashioned human broker would take a substantial cut for providing trading services and even newer online services – so-called eBrokers – would charge a flat fee per trade.

Just as important is market access. Until recently, most small investors focused on buying and selling equities (shares), bonds (loans to companies and governments) and funds that aggregate bundles of tens or hundreds of other financial products.

Trading apps broaden that out substantially. At one end of the spectrum, a growing number, including Robinhood and eToro, allow or even focus on trading cryptocurrencies – digital assets such as bitcoin, Ethereum and Monero – which tend to be very volatile. For those who want to stick with comparatively simple equities, the apps also offer financial tools that can increase the risk – and return – of bets, from buying on margin (taking out a loan to buy extra shares) to the world of options (bets that a particular stock will rise or fall a certain amount). These pay off handsomely if they’re correct, but are wiped out if they’re wrong.

2/ Hern has a link to an interesting NBER paper on the impact of smartphone trading apps on investor behaviour. The Abstract reads:

Using transaction-level data from two German banks, we study the effects of smartphones on investor behavior. Comparing trades by the same investor in the same month across different platforms, we find that smartphones increase purchasing of riskier and lottery-type assets and chasing past returns. After the adoption of smartphones, investors do not substitute trades across platforms and buy also riskier, lottery-type, and hot investments on other platforms. Using smartphones to trade specific assets or during specific hours contributes to explain our results. Digital nudges and the device screen size do not mechanically drive our results. Smartphone effects are not transitory.

In other words, if you want to play the market, do it from your laptop, not your phone. That sounds plausible to me.

T-cells, the South African variant and the AstraZeneca vaccine

Given that I’d been musing about the conjectured inadequacy of the AstraZeneca vaccine to protect against the South African variant of the coronavirus, Seb Schmoller (Whom God Preserve) send me a link to this interesting Twitter thread. On this analysis, it all comes down to one’s T-cells:

I never did biology in school, and it shows.

Dave Winer on the New York Times’s firing of Don McNeil

I’m baffled by why the New York Times would fire a great reporter like Don McNeil and concluded that there must be something going on that I don’t know about. Dave Winer is much more vocal on the matter:

I was asked why I care that the NYT fired Donald McNeil. It’s pretty simple. We all have an interest in how journalism works. They like to say that journalism is an essential part of democracy, but do the people have any influence over journalism? To really press the point, democracy is about the people, right? You can’t be of democracy without being of the people. We have a role in this, which journalism hasn’t embraced, in fact by fighting Facebook they are actively undermining our participation. And when they fire a great reporter who helps people, I, simply as a person and nothing more, have a stake in that, as does everyone who depends on good information from news orgs. And sure I care how 150 reporters at the NY Times feel, but I don’t care about them that much, compared to how much I care about the service McNeil was providing.

Another reason the firing of McNeil was such a concern is this question: Would the 150 people at the NY use their power to cancel against the people they cover, for an infraction like McNeil’s. Are we ready to accept that as a proper role of reporters at a news organization?

Facebook’s WhatsApp land-grab

Perceptive piece by Wafa Ben-Hassine.

On January 4, domestic terrorists were using Facebook as a tool to execute a violent attack on the US Capitol. On the same day, Facebook executives put the finishing touches on their own power grab. The plot? Wrest data from WhatsApp’s users.

Facebook’s plan started in 2018, after both of WhatsApp’s founders had left WhatsApp over clashes about data privacy. Now, three years later, WhatsApp’s updated privacy policy is the final stage. The policy change is simple: WhatsApp users no longer have the freedom to choose if their information can be shared to Facebook, other Facebook-owned companies or third parties. Now, billions of people across the globe must surrender their data to Facebook or lose access to the essential messaging app.

This ultimatum, as others have astutely observed, is actually a ham-handed admission by Facebook. WhatsApp started sharing its data with Facebook in 2016, and since then new users have never had the opportunity to opt out — even if the user’s experience is limited to WhatsApp. These latest changes are so egregious that 50 million users, and counting, are rushing to find a WhatsApp replacement with which to talk to family and friends. International users, who rely on WhatsApp as a business tool, have to rethink their business plans.

Alarmed by the exodus of annoyed WhatsApp users to Signal and Telegram, Facebook pushed back the ultimatum’s deadline by three months, but this is transparently just a stalling tactic. It’s also clearly influenced by the investigation by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and more than 40 states for illegally building a monopoly through acquisitions, coercion, and by bullying smaller companies. Facebook, says the FTC, has been engaging for years in a “systematic strategy” that includes “its 2014 acquisition of WhatsApp. So integrating WhatsApp more tightly into the Facebook corporate web is doubtless a preemptive move to make it more difficult for courts to compel it to set WhatsApp free.

100 Not Out! — my lockdown diary, is out as a Kindle book. You can get it here 

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if you decide that your inbox is full enough already!

Frozen stiff

On our walk this afternoon.

Quote of the Day

“If the war didn’t happen to kill you it was bound to start you thinking. After that unspeakable idiotic mess you couldn’t go on regarding society as something eternal and unquestionable, like a pyramid. You knew it was just a balls-up.”

• George Orwell

I’m hoping the Covid mess has something of the same effect, especially on the people who think we’re going back to ‘normal’.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Alison Krauss – In my mind I’m going to Carolina

Link

Sartorial functionalism

I had a zoom call this morning which meant that I needed to look reasonably respectable and so looked in the wardrobe for the one really good, handmade suit that I possess. But then I looked at it and wondered: will I ever get to wear this again? The answer, I hopefully guess, is yes. But it won’t be for a while yet.

The thing about being locked down is that the only appearances one really has to worry about are those on conferencing systems like Zoom, Teams, FaceTime or WebEx. In pre-pandemic times I had various roles (Vice President of a Cambridge College, for example, formal dinners, receptions, public lectures) where one was expected to be neat, tidy and, well, grown up. But since last March the only requirement has been to look superficially presentable. So all Summer long I wore shorts, boat shoes or sandals and short-sleeved, open-necks shirts or t-shirts. Throughout the Autumn and the winter so far I’ve mostly worn zipped sweaters or, occasionally, a wool cardigan.

And this morning? I looked at the suit, then out the window at the falling snow, and instead reached for a warm shirt, a pair of Land’s End flannel-lined jeans and a zipped sweater. And wound up feeling warm and almost presentable.

Corporate sociopathy contd.

Sunday’s Observer column and yesterday’s blog post clearly touched a nerve. For Robert Cosgrave it sparked a memory of where he “first ran across the concept of a corporation as an AI, or at least as an intelligence not human. It was in the blog of Scottish science fiction writers and futurist Charles Stross in 2010″.

Corporations do not share our priorities. They are hive organisms constructed out of teeming workers who join or leave the collective: those who participate within it subordinate their goals to that of the collective, which pursues the three corporate objectives of growth, profitability, and pain avoidance. (The sources of pain a corporate organism seeks to avoid are lawsuits, prosecution, and a drop in shareholder value.)

Corporations have a mean life expectancy of around 30 years, but are potentially immortal; they live only in the present, having little regard for past or (thanks to short term accounting regulations) the deep future: and they generally exhibit a sociopathic lack of empathy.

Collectively, corporate groups lobby international trade treaty negotiations for operating conditions more conducive to pursuing their three goals. They bully individual lawmakers through overt channels (with the ever-present threat of unfavourable news coverage) and covert channels (political campaign donations). The general agreements on tariffs and trade, and subsequent treaties defining new propertarian realms, once implemented in law, define the macroeconomic climate: national level politicians thus no longer control their domestic economies.

Corporations, not being human, lack patriotic loyalty; with a free trade regime in place they are free to move wherever taxes and wages are low and profits are high. We have seen this recently in Ireland where, despite a brutal austerity budget, corporation tax is not to be raised lest multinationals desert for warmer climes.

For a while the Communist system held this at bay by offering a rival paradigm, however faulty, for how we might live: but with the collapse of the USSR in 1991 — and the adoption of state corporatism by China as an engine for development — large scale opposition to the corporate system withered.

We are now living in a global state that has been structured for the benefit of non-human entities with non-human goals. They have enormous media reach, which they use to distract attention from threats to their own survival. They also have an enormous ability to support litigation against public participation, except in the very limited circumstances where such action is forbidden. Individual atomized humans are thus either co-opted by these entities (you can live very nicely as a CEO or a politician, as long as you don’t bite the feeding hand) or steamrollered if they try to resist.

In short, we are living in the aftermath of an alien invasion.

Covid futures

Yesterday I wrote about “Long Covid” as a possible future scenario in which we have to learn to live with the virus over a long period. This morning I find two piece of relevant information in my incoming mail and messages.

1/ The first is that the AstraZeneca vaccine (the one I had) may not be effective against the South African variant of the virus. As the (paywalled) FT put it:

The Oxford/AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine does not appear to offer protection against mild and moderate disease caused by the viral variant first identified in South Africa, according to a study.

Although none of the more than 2,000 mainly healthy and young patients in the study died or was hospitalised, the findings, which have not yet been peer reviewed, could complicate the race to roll out vaccines as new strains emerge.

In both the human trials and tests on the blood of those vaccinated, the jab showed significantly reduced efficacy against the 501Y.V2 viral variant, which is dominant in South Africa, according to the randomised, double-blind study seen by the Financial Times. If confirmed, this is worrying but not a showstopper given the new vaccine-creation tools that have evolved in the last year. But it probably means that, for me, 2021 will be a three-jab year.

2/ The second info-byte came in a text from a good friend. It read:

One of the steering groups I’m on is full of scientists who are involved in the vaccine programmes etc and one of them said to me last week that he thought that we had to get used to at a least a Covid ‘shadow’ that would last 6-10 years, and that was the optimistic scenario…

Often when I cite stuff like this people respond by chiding me for being “pessimistic”. Actually I think of myself as a realistic optimist. Even the gloomy ‘Long Covid’ scenario is something we will learn to live with and manage. We’re an ingenious, adaptive species. What I dislike is idiotic boosterist talk (like the current Prime Minister’s) about how we will “beat” the virus and stride triumphant into the glorious future. This kind of nonsense is reminiscent of the cant in August 1914 about how the war would be “over by Christmas”. It wasn’t, and this one won’t be either.

Trollope and irrational exuberance

During the original Internet boom (1995-2000) I remember reading Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now and being struck by how contemporary it seemed. Now, in the light of the GameStop frenzy, the same thought has occurred to Paul Tuckwell of Surrey, a reader of the Financial Times. Saturday’s edition published a nice letter from him:

In Anthony Trollope’s novel The Way We Live Now there was a good understanding of the difference between company valuation driven by retail enthusiasm and actual value… Of a new company’s directors “there was not one other then present who had not after some fashion been given to understand that his fortune was to be made, not by the construction of the railway, but by the floating of the railway shares.” So the directors saw it was of no consequence whether the purpose of the company (to build a railway in the US) ever actually happened; the money was to be made creating a share frenzy which they “were to have the privilege of manufacturing”. The current retail hysteria hysteria and the resulting fantastical equity valuations, would have had Trollope reaching for his pen!

”We don’t recognise these figures”

Or how to spin bad news. Nice blast from Jonty Bloom

As a cynical old hack nothing raises my hackles more than the non-denial “We don’t recognise these figures….”. Because you can, without even crossing your fingers behind your back, say exactly that if the figure mentioned is 68.9% and you know the true amount is 70.1%. It sounds great but is utterly meaningless.

Its latest use, over whether trade to the EU has been slashed since Brexit is a reminder that the power of the Government to spin, delay, hide and smudge is almost limitless, so it is obvious how Brexit will play out. First there are the denials, nothing to see here. Then its, teething problems, nothing to see here it is already over. Then it will be throwing money and resources at the problem, nothing to see here we are fixing it. Then it will be, this has been going on for months, nothing to see here it isn’t new and anyway it is the EU’s fault.

Yep.

100 Not Out! — my lockdown diary — is out as a Kindle book. You can get it here.

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if you decide that your inbox is full enough already!

Crossing point

London’s Millennium Bridge, in the days when people could casually be outdoors.

Quote of the Day

“Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work, and then they get elected and prove it.”

P.J. O”Rourke

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Wailin’ Jennys | Wildflowers | Live

Link

Tech corporations as sociopathic machines

This morning’s Observer column:

A few years ago, during a period when there was much heated anxiety about “superintelligence” and the prospects for humanity in a world dominated by machines, the political theorist David Runciman gently pointed out that we have been living under superintelligent AIs for a couple of centuries. They’re called corporations: sociopathic, socio-technical machines that remorselessly try to achieve whatever purpose has been set for them, which in our day is to “maximise shareholder value”. Or, as Milton Friedman succinctly put it: “The only corporate social responsibility a company has is to maximise its profits.”

Given that, it doesn’t really matter whether those who sit at the top of giant tech corporations are saints, sinners or merely liars and hypocrites. Facebook could be staffed entirely by clones of St Francis of Assisi and it would still be a toxic organisation, relentlessly pushing to achieve the purpose assigned to it by Professor Friedman. So if we want to make things better, our focus has to be changing the machine’s purpose and obligations, not on trying to persuading its helmsman to attend to the better angels of his nature.

Later. The point about corporations being sociopathic, superintelligent machines prompted an interesting email from Ross Anderson (Whom God Preserve), gently pointing out that he had made a similar point to the philosopher Daniel Dennett during a lecture Dennett gave in Cambridge in June 2019, which of course led me into an interesting dive back through diaries and notebooks.

Tracing the genesis of an idea can be a fool’s errand, especially if it’s a powerful idea. But this one proved more fruitful than I expected.

On the chronology, the Dennett lecture that Ross mentioned was in June 2019, but I had come across the ‘sociopathic’ idea before then in one of four seminars that David Runciman ran for the Centre for the Future of Intelligence in 2017-8 and I attended. It came up because he’s an expert on Hobbes and he argued at one point that Hobbes’s Leviathan was, essentially, an AI. The political philosopher, Philip Pettit, who was also at the seminar took up the idea and argued that corporations are intrinsically sociopathic — which is what I took away from that particular conversation (so I may have been wrong in attributing the sociopathy attribute to David rather than to Philip).

But it seems that the question of corporate sociopathy was been around a long time in American constitutional discourse. In part this seems to have been about the (ancient) legal doctrine that companies were granted “legal personhood” long ago. In 2003 Joel Bakan, a legal scholar, published The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, a book which was accompanied by a documentary film, The Corporation (which I haven’t seen — https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0379225/) but which gave rise to lots of commentary about psycho/socio-pathy (e.g. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/machiavellians-gulling-the-rubes/201605/are-corporations-inherently-psychopathic). And then, of course, there was the 2010 ‘Citizens United’ judgment of the US Supreme Court which held that the First Amendment prohibits the government from restricting independent expenditures for political communications by corporations, including nonprofit corporations, labor unions, and other associations. Which effectively means that in the US these sociopaths have free speech rights and can fund politicians who advance their interests.

I’m sure there’s a lot more but the bottom line is that this is an older idea than I had thought and it’s been been around for quite a while.

And then I remembered a joke that my friend Larry Lessig cracked a long time ago. “I’ll believe a corporation is a person”, he said, “when Texas executes one.”

Options for our future

I was out in the front garden this morning when two young women, out on their brisk, daily-exercise walk passed the front gate. “When this rubbish is over…”, one of them was saying and went on to outline some elaborate plan or other she had for when the Covid crisis is over.

Which brought to mind Simon Kuper’s column in the weekend edition of the Financial Times. In terms of where we might be a year from now, he writes, two main scenarios emerge.

The first is the good news one. Covid-19 keeps circulating, but gradually loses its sting. Most people, at least in rich countries, get vaccinated this year. The vaccines prevent disease caused by all strains of the virus and it becomes no worse than a nasty cold.

The second scenario is the bad news one — “less likely”, says Kuper, “yet so momentous that we need to think it through”. It is that the world gets “Long Covid” with vaccine-resistant mutations causing years of mass deaths, repeated lockdowns, economic meltdown and political dysfunction or collapse.

While we’re on the subject, there is, alas, an even worse scenario — outlined by Ian Goldin, Professor of globalisation and development at Oxford. He thinks that a new pandemic is actually a more likely possibility than Long Covid. His argument, as summarised by Kuper, is based on “the growing frequency of pandemics this century, as habitats of animals and humans become compressed, and global travel increases transmission”.

So let’s hope that young woman passing my gate this morning is right, and that “when this rubbish is over” we can go back to some kind of life.

100 Not Out!

My Lockdown Diary is out as a Kindle eBook. You can get it here

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if you decide that your inbox is full enough already!