Quote of the Day

”I have a number of literary projects on my desk at the moment, but I’ve decided to take time out to do a take-down of a youngish journalist, a New Yorker writer, named Malcolm Gladwell, whose books on semi-social-scientific subjects (their titles are Blink, Tipping Point and Outliers) rest for long periods atop the New York Times bestseller lists. Gladwell is a Village Explainer: with the aid of second-line academic psychologists he’ll tell you why certain shoes come back into style or how people decide to hire tall CEOs or why Korean airline pilots had a strong propensity for crashing their planes. None of it is quite convincing: all of it flattens out the world, robbing it of its rich complexity. Gladwell himself is a terrific self-starter; he is said to give talks to corporations for as much as $40,000 a whack ( that’s a pretty good whack, I’d say). He is youngish, bi-racial with an Afro hairdo in such dishabille that he looks as if, instead of combing his hair, he chose to put his thumb into a live electric socket.”

• Joseph Epstein, writing to Frederic Raphael in Distant Intimacy

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Randy Newman | Sail Away | Live in London

Link

One of my favourites, beautifully recorded. And poignant in the age of Trump and Brexit.

Long Read of the Day

What Happened? by Kieran Healy

If you read nothing else today, read this.

Healy is a very smart sociologist who teaches at Duke. This essay is a strikingly plausible interpretation of what happened on January 6. And, in a way, it’s consoling for those of us who believe in the superiority of the cock-up theory of history.

Censorship, Parler and Antitrust

Cory Doctorow, Whom God Preserve, has a very thoughtful post about the implications of the extensive ‘de-platforming’ of Trump and his supporters following les eventments on January 6.

There’s an obvious, trivial point to be made here: Twitter, Apple and Google are private companies. When they remove speech on the basis of its content, it’s censorship, but it’s not government censorship. It doesn’t violate the First Amendment.

And yes, of course it’s censorship. They have made a decision about the type and quality of speech they’ll permit, and they enforce that decision using the economic, legal and technical tools at their disposal.

If I invited you to my house for dinner and said, “Just so you know, no one is allowed to talk about racism at the table,” it would be censorship. If I said “no one is allowed to say racist things at the table,” it would also be censorship.

Having got that out of the way, he goes back to Parler, which has been thrown off Amazon’s AWS cloud and seems currently to be trying to find an alternative host on the Web.

It’s true that no one violates the First Amendment (let alone CDA 230) (get serious) when Parler is removed from app stores or kicked off a cloud.

But we have a duopoly of mobile platforms, an oligopoly of cloud providers, a small conspiracy of payment processors. Their choices about who make speak are hugely consequential, and concerted effort by all of them could make some points of view effectively vanish.

This market concentration didn’t occur in a vacuum. These vital sectors of the digital economy became as concentrated as they are due to four decades of shameful, bipartisan neglect of antitrust law.

And while failing to enforce antitrust law doesn’t violate the First Amendment, it can still lead to government sanctioned incursions on speech.

The remedy for this isn’t forcing the platforms to carry objectionable speech.

The remedy is enforcing antitrust so that the censorship policies of two app stores don’t carry the force of law; and it’s ending the laws (copyright, cybersecurity, etc) that allow these companies to control who can install what on their devices.

Right on! There’s a deep connection between antitrust and democracy.

The backstory of an insurgent permalink

Matt Stoller has a thought-provoking post about the Trump supporter who was shot while trying to break into the Speaker’s Chamber in the Capitol building on January 6. Her name is Ashli Babbitt and she was the subject of a New York Times profile, on which Stoller drew extensively.

According to the New York Times, Babbitt was a 35 year-old woman from California who spent 14 years serving in the U.S. Air Force, deploying to both Iraq and Afghanistan. The U.S. government sent Babbitt abroad eight times, and though not every time was in a combat zone, such repeated deployments into violent areas tend to cause brain damage.

After her time at war, Babbitt had a modest propensity for violence, threatening a rival love interest by rear ending her with a car in 2016. She married, and bought a small business with her husband, a pool supply company called Fowlers Pool Service and Supply. There she ran into commercial problems common to small businesses these days.

She borrowed money at an extortionate rate (169%), then defaulted, but sued on the grounds that her lender had cheated her with too high of an interest rate. She lost, as “courts have held that such arrangements don’t amount to loans and are not bound by usury laws.” At which point she became more into politics through social media, and then was sucked into the QAnon conspiracy-theory-cum-cult.

So, says Stoller,

here’s the profile of a rioter, a working class person who went overseas eight times in military service, including two combat zones, who then tried her hand at a small business where financial predators and monopolists lurked. She then fell in with conspiratorial social media, and turned into a violent rioter who, like most of the rioters, thought she was defending America by overturning an election.

It’s easy to mock this kind of thinking, to see rioters as losers or racists. And no doubt there’s a strain of deep-seated racial animus that is with us and always will be, but I think ascribing all of it to such an explanation is too simple. Racist or no, Babbitt really was at one point a patriotic American, serving in the military for over half her adult life. More broadly, she’s far from alone in expressing rage at the status quo. There have protests against the existing social order for almost a decade, starting with the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, and then Black Lives Matter in 2014 and accelerating into protests and riots earlier this year. I’ve written about the relationship between unrest and corporate power in the context of those protests, a sense of alienation that normal political channels, that politics itself is not a realistic path for addressing social problems.

Babbitt, he argues,

was both an adult making dangerous political choices, and a product of our policy regime, having been a soldier in a violent unnecessary war and trying to make her way a society that enables predators to make money through financial chicanery and addictive products. She chose poorly, but she also had few choices to make, one of which was getting on social media and being lured into joining a violent and paranoid cult of personality.

As everyone and his dog has realised by now, the shambolic insurgency on January 6 has been a long-time building. It was the culmination of a decade-long process of alienation, inequality, white supremacy and right-wing and neo-fascist resurgence. But it leaves the US with an almost existential problem.

There are, Stoller thinks, only two paths in a representative democracy which has a large group of its citizens who live in a cult-like artificial world of misinformation, and many more who rightly or wrongly don’t trust any political institution.

One is to try to strip these people of representation and political power; that is the guiding idea behind removing Trump, as well as a whole host of conservatives, off of Silicon Valley platforms that have become essential to modern society.

The trouble is that “Removing these people is a choice to not have a society, to pretend that we can put these people into a closet somewhere and ignore them.”

It’s not going to work.

The alternative Stoller sees is less dramatic.

We can take on the legal framework behind social media so these products aren’t addictive and radicalizing. As I’ve written, there are legal immunities and policy choices that allow Facebook to profit in especially toxic ways through compiling detailed user profiles and targeting them with ads. If we change how social media companies make money, we can change how these services operate to make them socially beneficial instead of engines of radicalization.

Yep. The business model is the key to this. If it’s not brought under control then the game’s up. So there is an urgent connection between antitrust and other forms of regulation and the future of the US as a functioning democracy. Trump may or may not be finished, but the line of elected Republican presidential-hopefuls who lined up in the Senate and House to try to overturn the election shows that the supply-line of prospective autocrats is filling up nicely.

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An ideal gift for Trump on January 20?

January 6 in 180 seconds

Great video by Politico.

Quote of the Day

“According to a snap YouGov survey released on Thursday, just 27 per cent of Republicans considered the attack on the Capitol a threat to democracy, while 45 per cent of them approved of the storming of the halls of Congress.”

• Financial Times, 9 January.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Vivaldi Four Seasons: Winter, complete; Cynthia Freivogel, Voices of Music

Link

Well, it is Winter!

The original version performed on original instruments by Cynthia Miller Freivogel and the Early Music ensemble Voices

Long Read of the Day

 How @realDonaldTrump Changed Politics — and America

Not that long, but thoughtful throughout. Derek Robertson on how Trump ‘governed’ 140 characters at a time.

Katharine Whitehorn RIP

One of the great figures of British journalism has died, at the age of 92, after some tough years with Alzheimer’s.

I started writing for the Observer in 1982, by which time the was already a legend (she had started on the paper in 1963, when I was still an undergraduate) and I was, frankly, in awe of her. She had the accent and bearing of a dowager duchess, combined with the sense of humour of a longshoreman. And that voice! “Two parts Diana Rigg to one part James Mason” as my Observer colleague Rachel Cooke put it.

She may have looked and sounded like a duchess, but in person she was friendly, warm, welcoming and supportive, especially to younger hacks. Many women journalists particularly remember her encouragement with affection and gratitude. For them, she was a lodestar: the first woman to hold down a serious editorial job in a major British newspaper.

And not just journalists. I had a lovely email today this morning from a friend who remembered Katharine as “a shining light in my girlhood… She responded very generously to my letter seeking advice, in the face of strong parental opposition, on how to become a writer. I read her column in the Spectator avidly- a magazine provided with astonishing forethought by my Manchester girls’ grammar school. I miss who she was.”

When it became clear to her that she would have to get to grips with “the dreaded email” she and I had several conversations on the subject in which I tried to be encouraging. I think that initially her household must have had a Virgin connection, so I still treasure the email she sent me on 20 April 2011 from her new @gmail address which read: “I am no longer Virgin!”

May she rest in peace. If I were a believer I think I’d have fun imagining the exchanges between her and St Peter before he felt obliged to hold the door open (and roll out the red carpet) for her.

The Guardian had a nice obituary of her and Barbara Ellen has a generous tribute in today’s paper.

How FarmVille and Facebook helped to cultivate a new audience for gaming

My Observer column this morning.

Two deaths you may have missed last week – for the simple reason that you have better things to do with your time than monitoring the tech industry. One was the end of FarmVille, a simplistic, time-wasting online game that consumed the attention of millions of Facebook users over the years; the other was the much-delayed execution of Flash, the animation tool that powered countless games and assorted website tricks for two decades, but which will no longer be supported by most web browsers or by its maker, Adobe.

As it happens, both deaths are related, because one application used the other, but both were ubiquitous for different reasons. The FarmVille story is about human nature and the dynamics of addiction, social media and surveillance capitalism, whereas Flash is really just about tech and the evolution of the web…

Do read the whole piece

Boris Johnson on Trump

From an interesting FT piece by Kim Darroch, the former UK Ambassador to the UK (who Johnson declined to support when he was attacked by Trump):

Through much of this time, Mr Johnson was foreign secretary and a frequent Washington visitor. On policy, he was poles apart from Mr Trump: an advocate of action on climate change, a liberal on immigration, a supporter of the Iran nuclear deal. Yet he was also intrigued, I believe, by Mr Trump’s rise to power, by the devotion he inspired among supporters, and by his never-give-an-inch approach to the media. Mr Johnson also thought he could manage Mr Trump, build a much stronger relationship than Mrs May, and make domestic capital out of his support for Brexit and a UK-US trade deal.

These were reasonable objectives. It’s important that the British prime minister be close to the US president. But Mr Johnson never knowingly understates, and this led him to statements he didn’t need to make: asserting that Mr Trump had “many, many, good qualities”, was “making America great again”, and even suggesting he was as good a candidate as Barack Obama for a Nobel Peace Prize.

Other, hopefully interesting, links

•  The Impractical but Indisputable Rise of Retrocomputing. Digital nostalgia, really. I still have my original Macintosh. Sigh. Link
•  Let there be lights! Lovely use of drone technology. Thanks to Quentin, who spotted it. 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!

Word-processing, antique style

Quote of the Day

“Mark Zuckerberg is what happens when you replace civics with computer science.”

• Scott Galloway (see below)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Grace Kelly Blues | Eels

Link

One of my favourite tracks.

Long Read of the Day

Lawrence Wright: The Plague Year

Truly extraordinary (long) New Yorker essay by Lawrence Wright. Includes some very good reasons why you should not be blasé about Covid. For example:

“There are three things this virus is doing that blow me away,” Brooks told me. “The first is that it directly infects the endothelial cells that line our blood vessels. I’m not aware of any other human respiratory viruses that do this. This causes a lot of havoc.” Endothelial cells normally help protect the body from infection. When SARS-CoV-2 invades them, their powerful chemical contents get dumped into the bloodstream, resulting in inflammation elsewhere in the body. The rupture of individual endothelial cells coarsens the lining in the blood vessels, creating breaks and rough spots that cause turbulent blood flow.

The second surprise was hypercoagulability—patients had a pronounced tendency to develop blood clots. This reminded Brooks of Michael Crichton’s 1969 novel, “The Andromeda Strain,” in which a pathogen causes instant clotting, striking down victims in mid-stride. “This is different,” Brooks said. “You’re getting these things called pulmonary embolisms, which are nasty. A clot forms—it travels to the lung, damaging the tissues, blocking blood flow, and creating pressures that can lead to heart problems.” More puzzling was evidence that clots sometimes formed in the lungs, leading to acute respiratory distress. Brooks referred to an early report documenting autopsies of victims. Nearly all had pulmonary thromboses; until the autopsy, nobody had suspected that the clots were even present, let alone the probable cause of death.

“The last one is this hyperimmune response,” Brooks said. Most infectious diseases kill people by triggering an excessive immune-system response; COVID, like pneumonia, can unleash white blood cells that flood the lungs with fluid, putting the patient at risk of drowning. But COVID is unusual in the variety of ways that it causes the body to malfunction. Some patients require kidney dialysis or suffer liver damage. The disease can affect the brain and other parts of the nervous system, causing delirium, strokes, and lasting nerve damage. COVID could also do strange things to the heart. Hospitals began admitting patients with signs of cardiac arrest—chest pains, trouble breathing—and preparing emergency coronary catheterizations. “But their coronary vessels are clean,” Brooks said. “There’s no blockage.” Instead, an immune reaction had inflamed the heart muscle, a condition called myocarditis. “There’s not a lot you can do but hope they get through it.” A German study of a hundred recovered COVID patients with the average age of forty-nine found that twenty-two had lasting cardiac problems, including scarring of the heart muscle.

Even after Brooks thought that COVID had no more tricks to play, another aftereffect confounded him: “You get over the illness, you’re feeling better, and it comes back to bite you again.” In adults, it might just be a rash. But some children develop a multi-organ inflammatory syndrome. Brooks said, “They have conjunctivitis, their eyes get real red, they have abdominal pain, and then they can go on to experience cardiovascular collapse.”

You get the idea. It’s an amazing piece. Very long. And an example of what only a few high-end magazines can do. Must have taken ages to research and write.

The best commentary I’ve read on what happened this week

It came from Scott Galloway in his terrific blog. Lots of great stuff in this week’s edition and it’s worth reading in full. But here are a few striking extracts:

One:

Record deaths from Covid-19 and the U.S. Capitol overrun by a mob on the same day. How did this happen?

The virus has broken containment, preying on our comorbidities.

The ascendant comorbidity is the steady denigration of our public institutions, particularly government and its agencies, over the last four decades. Since the Reagan Revolution in 1980, a conservative philosophy of limited government has morphed to an anti-government creed. President Trump is the manifestation of that narrative. The President blames the “deep state” for every setback and has stocked his cabinet with appointees opposed to the departments they lead, from a Secretary of Education who doesn’t appear to believe in public education to a Secretary of Energy who once proposed eliminating the Department of Energy.

Two:

Just as elected officials helped hollow out the government they are charged with leading, the mandarins of media bear blame for the weakness of their branch. Conservative outlets have shelved citizenship as they recognize that novelty and tribalism make more cabbage than truth. Social media firms are doing the same — but at greater scale. Liberal media, terrified of being labeled “elitist,” has fallen back on a feeble bothsidesism that normalizes, and brings oxygen to, outrageous conduct. Progressives have a guilty need to understand and feel the pain of anybody who claims victimhood. Among liberals, being offended and angry means you are right.

Three:

As our institutions have retreated, private capital has emerged as a shadow government. Banks command our economy, the shareholder class commands the politicians, and big tech reigns over it all. Our idolatry of innovators equates wealth with virtue, and does not hold the innovator class, or their firms, to the same standards as old economy firms (or the general population). Twenty-four hours after a failed coup, the lead story on Twitter is Elon Musk becoming the wealthiest man in the world.

Four:

If there is any question that big tech is our new government, then register that these are the only entities whose actions seem to have a meaningful impact (or what we view as meaningful). Which has had more impact? Futile discussions about the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, or Facebook and Twitter suspending President Trump’s accounts and Shopify closing MAGA stores? Applaud these actions if you like, but accountability for sedition should not be meted out by private companies (in the case of Shopify, a foreign one). We should not be pandering to part-time CEOs to save the nation they demonstrate no regard for.

And, Five:

Under some f..ked up version of wokeness, we have decided that stupid people are a special interest group who warrant empathy and latitude re the damage they levy. We excuse Trump’s mob, as they are the ones America left behind or who didn’t have access to higher education. No, they’re just stupid — even the ones with “Senator” before their name. The President and his mob registered a deep blow to our democracy and global standing … with no commensurate benefit. If Betsy DeVos and Elaine Chao have reached their limit, the insurrectionists and their dear leader are either going to jail or losing advertisers for the launch of his network. We are only awakening to the profane assault on America, our forefathers, and the sacrifices of previous generations after the unprecedented events of Wednesday.

We need to recognize that stupid is a thing and, per Professor Cipolla, encourage our youth to discern how not to be stupid and to aspire to be “intelligent,” which also is a thing … and a noble thing, and not derived from a place of privilege that demands apology and self flogging…

But do read the whole thing. And sign up to his blog.

Other, hopefully interesting links

•  The end of the Swedish model. Link
•  Anger increases susceptibility to misinformation. Well, well. Who knew? Link
•  The 147 Republicans Who Voted to Overturn Election Results. If you want a real rogue’s gallery, this is it. 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!

Motoring, French-style

Quote of the Day

’Everywhere wander thousands of rumours, falsehoods mingled with the truth, and confused reports flit about. Some of these fill their idle ears with talk, and others go and tell elsewhere what they have heard; while the story grows in size, and each new teller makes contribution to what he has heard. Here is Credulity, here is heedless Error, unfounded Joy and panic Fear; here sudden Sedition and unauthentic Whisperings…

• Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book 12

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Billy Preston | My Sweet Lord | Live

Link

Long Read of the Day

Welcome to the splinternet – where freedom of expression is suppressed and repressed, and Big Brother is watching

Useful essay by Danny Bradbury on how the global Internet might wind up as just a fond memory, broken into ‘splinternets’ — internets of various geopolitical actors like Iran, China, and Russia.

Mail-In Voter Fraud: Anatomy of a Disinformation Campaign

Really interesting study by Yochai Benkler and a team from the Berkman-Klein Centre, which comes to conclusions that challenge conventional wisdom about the power of social media.

Contrary to the focus of most contemporary work on disinformation, our findings suggest that this highly effective disinformation campaign, with potentially profound effects for both participation in and the legitimacy of the 2020 election, was an elite-driven, mass-media led process. Social media played only a secondary and supportive role. This chimes with the study on networked propaganda that Yochai, Robert Faris and Hal Roberts conducted in 2015-16 and published in 2018 in  Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics. They argued that the right-wing media ecosystem in the US operates fundamentally differently than the rest of the media environment. Their view was that longstanding institutional, political, and cultural patterns in American politics interacted with technological change since the 1970s to create a propaganda feedback loop in American conservative media. This dynamic has, they thought, marginalised centre-right media and politicians, radicalised the right wing ecosystem, and rendered it susceptible to propaganda efforts, foreign and domestic.

The key insight in both studies is that we are dealing with an ecosystem, not a machine, which is why focussing exclusively on social media as a prime explanation for the political upheavals of the last decade is unduly reductionist. In that sense, much of the public (and academic) commentary on social media’s role brings to mind the cartoon of the drunk looking for his car keys under a lamppost, not because he lost them there, but because at least there’s light. Because social media are relatively new arrivals on the scene, it’s (too) tempting to over-estimate their impact. Media-ecology provides a better analytical lens because it means being alert to factors like diversity, symbiosis, feedback loops and parasitism rather than to uni-causal explanations.

There’s a whole chapter on this — with case-studies — in my book From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg — published way back in 2012!

On the importance of everyday things

Tim Harford has a lovely essay on his Blog about the humble but magical things we take for granted — like pencils and toasters. He writes about Thomas Thwaites, an artist and designer whose “Toaster Project” was an attempt to design and build an ordinary toaster, beginning with assembling his own raw materials — quarrying mica, refining plastic, smelting steel.

“You could easily spend your life making a toaster,” he told me when I interviewed him about the project more than a decade ago. And indeed he took various short-cuts. Nevertheless, his finished toaster cost about £1,000 and required several months of work. It looked like a cake iced by a three-year-old, and when plugged into the mains it immediately caught fire.

A budget shop-bought toaster does not catch fire and costs less than a hardback book. It is unlikely to move anyone to tears, yet the people who mine metals, refine plastics, generate our electricity and design safe electrical appliances no doubt work at least as hard as any author. The results are so cheap and reliable we overlook them. Indeed, we are surrounded by products we barely understand, produced by people we never meet, often at a quality so high and a price so low — relative to our wages — that our ancestors would be staggered.

Great piece. I’m a sucker for these kinds of of reflective essays. One of my favourites is Henry Petroski’s The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance. Another book of his — To Engineer is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design — is also a (salutary) delight.

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• Decoding the insurrectionist’s flags. Link from Quartz.
• Trump Is Said to Have Discussed Pardoning Himself. Yep, you read that correctly. Why are you not surprised? 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!

There are times when facial-recognition might come in useful. This is one of them.

Quote of the Day

“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”

• Voltaire, 1765

Thanks to Quentin

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Schubert Ensemble | Schubert “Trout” Quintet | 4th Movement

Link

This is a morning for something peaceful.

Yesterday in Washington DC

After watching what was going on for a while I could barely sleep. So here, in no particular order, are the thoughts that came to what is loosely called my mind.

1. The mob was overwhelmingly white and male. If they had been predominately black, you can guess what would have ensued. Racism runs though American society like the slogan in sticks of Blackpool rock.

2. Why didn’t people — media and security — see it coming? Clearly they don’t log into Parler  where, as Buzzfeed pointed out, this half-assed ‘insurrection’ was enthusiastically planned. The journalists covering the events were particularly pathetic. It’s clear that few of them have ever been outside of Washington, never covered war-zones, never been to autocratically-governed countries or places where dysentery and warlords come with the job. Their faux-shock-and-horror was nauseating. They have been covering Trump for four years, and they are still shocked by the stuff he gets up to.

3. Why weren’t there any proper state-security and police preparations for an event that had been billed for weeks? It’s not so long ago since the BLM demonstrators in Lafayette Square were brutally cleared away to make space for Trump’s upside-down Bible-waving stunt. (A stunt to which he was shamefully accompanied by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the most senior military officer in America.) And the Department of Justice that day was ‘protected’ by heavily armed and kitted out Federal security agents whose official identity was cloaked.

4. The answer to that question is, I think, obvious. Because the ‘event’ was the Commander-in-Chief’s gig. And calling out the National Security fuzz to keep it under control would have been seen as a bad career move in the Federal government.

5. Facebook and Twitter eventually did the right thing — to deny Trump his megaphone. But ponder the implications of that: who elected the creeps who run these platforms?

6. On the morning after as some kind of normality returned and people breathed easier, the most disturbing thoughts were: (a) nearly half the US electorate voted for Trump, in full knowledge (after four years) of what he was like and what he was capable of; and (b) — and more worryingly — an opinion poll found that 70% of Republican voters approved of the attack on the Capitol!

7. And a raft of elected Republican Senators and Representatives tried to have the result of the election overturned in the House and the Senate.

8. Finally — and returning to the aghast journalism of the night — it has seemingly never occurred to these hacks that democracy has never been the default condition of human societies. Autocracy or worse is the default (as Adam Gopnik, to his credit, acknowledged in a New Yorker piece). The truth is that the post-war democracy we have enjoyed until recently is an improbable, fragile accident — a blip in the history of the human race. It was a way of people who disagreed with one another managing to live together without killing one another. What we were seeing last night was not a new normal, but an ancient one.

9. It was, as Rebecca Solnit put it in a memorable piece in this morning’s Guardian,

a long time coming, building up for years with white rage, especially white male rage fuelled by everyone from Trump himself to the National Rifle Association, Fox News and the various rightwing pundits, the Republican party, the various faces of white supremacy, and far-right groups such as the Proud Boys. It is a rage against the fact that other people might be equal under the law, that women and people of color might also govern as power begins to be distributed more equally, the same rage that attempted to delegitimize a black president with birtherism and obstruction. It is a rage against equality.

Democracy is a set of agreements to make decisions together and respect the outcome whether you like them or not. The kind of violence we saw on Capitol Hill is authoritarian, a way to try to force other people to submit to the will of the perpetrators. This violence comes from the white men who were long the only people with power in this country imagining themselves as marginalized and oppressed outsiders because others might also have power and a voice. We saw these kind of men last summer, when they invaded the Michigan capital while carrying semiautomatic rifles and saw them again when a handful of them were arrested for a plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. We saw them in racist shootings from the Texas border to a Pennsylvania synagogue.

So, although, mercifully, the system worked eventually and Biden was confirmed this morning, the problem remains. The US is broken.

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• Italian court rules that Deliveroo used a ‘Discriminatory’ Algorithm.Of course it did. That’s what platform capitalism is all about. Big news, nevertheless, because it provides a useful precedent. Link
• The Pro-Trump Movement Was Always Headed Here. For years, professional grifters, trolls, true believers and political opportunists have sowed conspiratorial lies. We are now witnessing the reaping. Charlie Warzel in the NYT

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!

Thanks to Andrew Ingram for the image.

It’s Deja Vu all over again

This is the first day of Lockdown 2.0. It all feels eerily familiar — except that the weather is much worse, and it’s cold outside.

Out of interest, I dug out my blog for the period — it was when I started my audio diary

Here’s the first episode.

Link

I did the diary for the first 100 days and then stopped, because it was taking up quite a lot of time and our new Research Centre was starting up, so I was becoming busier again. Eventually I put the (lightly-edited) scripts together in a book — 100 Not Out! A Lockdown Diary. I didn’t think it merited felling any trees and so published it as a Kindle book (in itself an interesting learning experience, btw). If you’re interested you can find it here.

Quote of the Day

If a lot of Big Tech is starting to lose its conjuring power, there is one technology that manages to be both hype and, to some, fake news: the vaccine(s). Grateful as I am for the incredible effort that went in to accomplishing the vaccines so quickly, my concern for the coming year and beyond is how the story is being rewritten into a fable that our technological prowess omnia vincit. It might be hard to imagine now that the history of the pandemic could be turned into a triumphant narrative of human control over nature, but lost battles have been transformed into glorious conquest before.

Already some are losing sight of the failures in organization, in humanity, in preparedness that have made the vaccine glow like a grail. This is unlikely to be the only challenge we see in the coming decade, or the coming year, that can be solved more easily, quickly, and cheaply through changing human behavior and which we prefer to attack using money and technology. The climate crisis leaps to mind. I hope that we can engrave some of the lessons of this past year into our collective consciousness, but I have little confidence that they will function any better than the Japanese stones warning “Do Not Build Below This Point” that became so celebrated after the tsunami hit.

• Bruce Sterling, in his contribution to this years annual start-of-year online discussion on THE WELL — the world’s first online discussion group.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mark Knopfler | Brothers In Arms | Albert Hall | 2019

Link

Robotic euphemisms Magnificent rant from Dave Winer:

Tuesday, January 5, 2021 Audible just gave me a status upgrade to “nibbler.’ I don’t know who designs these things, but did they think that I, a sentient human being of 65 years and many accomplishments would appreciate being labeled as such by a fucking algorithm? This is right up there with Heroku telling me (again via algorithm) that I am a “hobbyist” developer. Excuse me. I have a MS in Computer Science from a fine school. I have won awards for my software, and invented many things, probably as many as anyone at your fine company, so please keep your opinion of my programming ability to your robot self. Sincerely, Dave Winer, a master of science.

Long Read of the Day

An Oscar Winner Made a Khashoggi Documentary. Streaming Services Didn’t Want It.

Now I wonder why that might be?

Link

Brexit freezes .eu domains for Brits

If you own one of the 81,000 .eu domains registered by UK residents then you have work to do – and just three months in which to do it.

Link

How much are tech workers paid?

Interesting numbers from the New York Times:

These are the most recent yearly compensation figures for the typical worker at these companies, from documents released for annual meetings of shareholders:

• Alphabet (Google’s parent company): $258,708

• Facebook: $247,883

• Microsoft: $172,142

• Apple: $57,783

• Amazon: $28,848 ($36,640 for full-time workers in the U.S.)

For comparison, the typical pay for full-time, year-round workers in the United States was about $52,000 in 2019. Apart from Amazon, these companies only disclose the pay calculated from their global work forces. 

What’s odd about these numbers are the figures for Apple and Amazon. The reason seems to be the composition of the companies’ staff. Apple has a large number of employees at its retail stores. And a big chunk of Amazon’s rapidly growing global work force of more than 1.2 million are people who are working in warehouses and package sorting centres, whereas Google and Facebook’s employees are mostly office workers in relatively highly paid jobs like engineers.

“The big omission from these compensation figures,” says the Times,

is the shadow work force of contractors at pretty much all the Big Tech companies. At Google, for example, direct employees are outnumbered by temps and contractors, who tend to have lower pay and less opportunity for advancement than the company’s full-time workers.

I’ll bet they get paid a lot less. And have fewer (or no) perks.

Another, hopefully interesting, link

• An AI-generated album in the style of the Beatles. Link. Hmmm… Nice try, but gamma-minus.

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Newton’s apple tree

The tree in the garden of Isaac Newton’s home in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire. It’d be nice to think that it’s a descendant of the one from which the apple apochryphally fell on his head, prompting his musings about gravity.

One of my favourite cartoons shows the young Isaac rubbing the bump on his head and saying: “Now comes the hard part — getting a research grant to write it up.”

Quote of the Day

”All I’ve got against golf is that it takes you so far from the clubhouse.”

• Eric Linklater

(This for Ivan Morris, a talented golfer who is currently recovering from a bad fall.)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Alistair Anderson, Richard Thompson & Kathryn Tickell Link

If you’ve never heard the glorious sound of Northumbrian pipes before then this is your chance.

Long Read of the Day

Economics with a Moral Compass Link

Really long (13,700 words) but worth it. Transcript of a conversation between two Nobel laureates — Amaryta Sen, and Angus Deaton — and Tim Besley of LSE. It’s 13,700 words, so you need to make an appointment with yourself and get some coffee. But if you’re interested in the modern history of economics, or how the discipline got to be the way it is, this is just great.

Here, for example, is Sen remembering Joan Robinson, the great, imperious maverick of the Cambridge Economics Faculty:

I don’t know how to describe a person as other than “vigorously intolerant” when she told me, as my PhD supervisor, that “I have read the first chapter and a part of the second, and it’s the kind of thing that will be praised by established economists, and you will have no difficulty in getting your PhD.” At Cambridge, your supervisor is not one of your examiners, unlike in America. She said, “I’m not going to read the rest of your thesis.” I said, “But you’re supposed to say that the thesis is fit to be submitted for the PhD.” She said, “I will say it.” So I asked her, “On what basis?” “On the basis of what I have read already.”

The thesis had eight chapters, by the way. She said, “It’s good. Clearly, clearly, it’s good. Good in the way that these people understand it. But it’s not worthy of you. You have to promise me that someday you will come back to real economics.” I don’t know whether “vigorously” or not, but she was certainly intolerant of what I wanted to work on.

I had an odd relationship with her, but I liked her very much. She was very kind to me, took great interest even in my personal life. Later on, when my marriage with Nabaneeta broke up, she commanded me to come and see her, and told me that Nabaneeta and I should not go for a divorce. I didn’t say, “None of your business.” She said, “It’s a bad thing once you have children”—and we did have two children—“it’s very bad for the children.” In a sense, she was describing her own life, when she didn’t break up despite the distance between her and her husband. I knew that she never wanted anything other than the best thing for me, as she understood it.

To predict government policy, listen to Boris and wait for the opposite

John Crace on Boris Johnson’s incapacity.

At one time Crace seemed to fit perfectly the mould of the Parliamentary sketch-writer: witty, irreverent, observant of petty but revealing detail, etc. He’s still all of those things, but his observation of Boris Johnson’s manifest unsuitability as Prime Minister has been so devastatingly accurate that we no longer laugh. This is way beyond a joke.

It’s now becoming easier and easier to predict government policy. Just listen to what the prime minister said in the morning and the opposite is likely to be true come the middle of the afternoon. It’s almost like clockwork – the government does what most reasonable people would have done several weeks earlier.

At every stage in the coronavirus pandemic, the government has been hopelessly behind the curve. From being late to lockdown in March while the Cheltenham festival and Carrie Symonds’s baby shower went ahead. From ignoring the Sage advice in September for a second national lockdown and being forced into one in November by both Keir Starmer and the rapidly rising rates of infection. From announcing a five-day Christmas free-for-all in early December – everyone knew Covid liked to take time off over the holiday period – which he then had to cancel after everyone had already made their plans.

During the biggest national health crisis in 100 years, it’s just our luck to have Johnson in charge. A man pathologically unable to make the right calls at the right time. The prime minister is a narcissistic charlatan. The Great Dick Faker. Someone who can’t bear to be the bearer of bad news or to be proved wrong by people who disagree with him. So he stubbornly ignores the evidence until he becomes overwhelmed by it and public opinion has turned against him. He isn’t just a liability as a leader, his indecision has cost lives. His hubris will only cost him his job.

“The mother of all U-turns”

From Politico:

MOTHER OF ALL U-TURNS: The schools debacle marks one of the most mind-melting U-turns yet in the short history of this government. Here’s a brief timeline of how it played out … December 14: Williamson threatened councils in Greenwich and Islington with legal action, forcing them to keep schools open despite rising COVID cases … December 21: Williamson said mass-testing meant schools can reopen in the new year … December 22: SAGE advised ministers to close schools in January … December 31: Williamson delayed secondary school reopening by two weeks, but told primary schools in much of London they should reopen … January 2: Williamson U-turned on London primary schools and kept them closed, but said other primaries across England should open … January 3: The PM told Andrew Marr there was “no doubt in my mind that schools are safe” and told primaries to reopen the following day … But schools across the country defied the order and emailed parents to say they were shutting … January 4: In the morning, DfE civil servants were told there were no plans to close schools or cancel exams (h/t John Johnston) … In the evening, Johnson shut all schools for seven weeks and canceled exams this summer.

‘Peak hype’: why the driverless car revolution has stalled

At one level, the driverless car project has been a surprising success — in the sense that it succeeded in getting autonomous vehicles to the level where they are remarkably capable in some contexts. But getting them to the point where they would be accepted as real alternatives to human-driven vehicles in all environments — the last 20% — turns out to be really, really hard. And of course it would require significant changes to urban areas and country roads on a significant scale. So, despite the hype it turns out that reality is a hard master — as this Guardian piece says.

Reading it made me wonder what the Gartner Hype Cycle for autonomous vehicles would look like. So I went searching. It looks like this:

Trump’s authoritarian moment is here

John Cassidy in the New Yorker.

If there were any doubt remaining that Donald Trump still represents a dire threat to American democracy, the events of this weekend dispelled it. As a new Congress gathers to confirm that the voters chose Joe Biden to be the next President, a proceeding that should be a mere formality, Trump is desperately trying to overturn the result and stay in office. Even more disturbing, large numbers of elected Republicans are joining in this unprecedented effort to reject the popular will. If the Republic gets through the next two weeks without a catastrophe, we must surely take steps to protect ourselves against the next would-be authoritarian, which could well be Trump himself in 2024.

It is like we are living in a horror movie, and just when we think it’s over, the monster comes back, stronger than ever.

My private nightmare, listening to Boris Johnson last night, is that this virus will overwhelm the capacity of even rich states to subdue it. That, in the end, we will just have to let it rip.

Pessimistic? Probably. But then I read Tyler Cowen’s latest Bloomberg column. The heading on this post is actually the last line of the column.

Preliminary data indicate that the new strain in the U.K. allows the virus to spread from one person to another more easily. The practical upshot is that even the strict lockdowns of early 2020, such as the one just ordered in the U.K. by Prime Minister Boris Johnson, may not be enough to reverse the spread of the virus.

It is far from obvious that politicians will be able to sell voters on strict lockdowns if they still allow the virus to spread. Furthermore, vaccine distribution has been sufficiently slow that a full lockdown would have to last for many months, and that probably isn’t feasible or desirable. Yet not having lockdowns would lead to a much more rapid spread of the virus, overloading hospitals and public health facilities.

It’s hard to come up with the moral language to compare those outcomes when all of them are unacceptably bad. Trust in elites is already weak in the U.S., and it is likely to wane further. Whatever one might think is the correct course of action, how exactly would or should a President Joe Biden present and defend it to the public?

He also points out the irony that the new variant could catch states that have done well at suppressing the original version of the virus, because they will have thought it less urgent to get on with vaccinating everyone.

I felt from the beginning that we in the West were underestimating the virus. I still think that’s true.

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HNY???

I saw this on Quentin’s blog. He got it in a WhatsApp feed, and so couldn’t give it an attribution. But one of his readers had a go and found an earlier version on Reddit. So, in a way, it’s sort-of generic. But it made me laugh this morning because it expresses what many people were thinking on Friday last!

Quote of the Day

ONE YEAR AGO TODAY: The World Health Organization tweeted: “China has reported to WHO a cluster of pneumonia cases — with no deaths — in Wuhan, Hubei Province. Investigations are underway to identify the cause of this illness.” (H/T Anne Alexander.) A year on, the WHO says there have been 83,322,449 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 1,831,412 deaths.

• From Politico this morning

Errata — Jerry Garcia and Bernard Malamud

This blog, the product of a multitasker equipped with the wrong algorithm, is prone to typos and occasional howlers — which, in general, are pointed out by sympathetic but razor-sharp readers. One, for example, pointed out an intriguing (but for a Deadhead like me deeply embarrassing) Spoonerism when Jerry Garcia of The Grateful Dead became Gerry Jarcia. And then the other day I described Bernard Malamud as a ‘playwright’ when he was, in fact, a novelist and short story writer. Many thanks to the readers who politely drew my attention to these gaffes.

When these things happen, I fondly recall Dr Johnson’s response to the indignant lady who asked him how could he have come to define “pastern” as “the knee of a horse” in his great Dictionary. “Ignorance, Madam, pure ignorance!” he replied. It’s always best to come clean.

Distant intimacy

I’ve been reading this over Christmas and really enjoying it. Raphael and Epstein are two writers I admire. But they’ve never met, nor even spoken to one another. They decided, however, as an experiment, to embark on a year-long email correspondence as a way of producing a book. As the weeks progress, one can see their friendship growing, and also appreciate the way they are egging one another on. Since they’re pretty good writers, it makes for great reading at times. They’re particularly good on their pet hates, which include Susan Sontag (Raphael) and Gore Vidal (Epstein). Here’s the latter on Vidal:

Gore Vidal is now in his early eighties and is perhaps best likened to a car with a dead engine whose horn nonetheless keeps sounding off. His act has been that of the crusty American aristocrat — Henry Adams with a bit of Edmund Wilson thrown in, the Wilson who claimed to look at Life magazine and not recognise the America in which he grew up — who finds his country vulgar, make that greedy, vile and vastly ignorant. The twist Vidal rang on this great American crank act was to hate America from the left instead of, more traditionally for this role, from the right. Nothing in the country he couldn’t look down his nose upon: its politics, its literature, its entertainment, above all its people. All this was admixed with a strong homosexual strain; Vidal used to call himself a “homosexualist,” a term that always reminded me of “aerialist”.

Music

Zadok the Priest | Choir of Westminster Abbey

Link

If that’ll doesn’t get you going on the first working day of 2021 then nothing will!

How to Get Rich Sabotaging Nuclear Weapons Facilities

With every passing day, assessment of the extent of the damage caused by Russia’s penetration of one company’s software update grows more sombre. But not enough attention has been focussed on the software company whose laxity let the hackers in — SolarWinds.

Matt Stoller has done sterling work in remedying this omission.

The point of entry for this major hack was not Microsoft, but a private equity-owned IT software firm called SolarWinds. This company’s products are dominant in their niche; 425 out of the Fortune 500 use Solar Winds. As Reuters reported about the last investor call in October, the CEO told analysts that “there was not a database or an IT deployment model out there to which [they] did not provide some level of monitoring or management.” While there is competition in this market, SolarWinds does have market power. IT systems are hard to migrate from, and this lock-in effect means that customers will tolerate price hikes or quality degradation rather than change providers. And it does have a large market share; as the CEO put it, “We manage everyone’s network gear.”

SolarWinds sells a network management package called Orion, and it was through Orion that the Russians invaded these systems, putting malware into updates that the company sent to clients. Now, Russian hackers are extremely sophisticated sleuths, but it didn’t take a genius to hack this company. It’s not just that criminals traded information about how to hack SolarWinds systems; one security researcher alerted the company last year that “anyone could access SolarWinds’ update server by using the password “solarwinds123.’”

The New York Times had a story about one “security adviser” at SolarWinds, who said that he warned management … that unless it took a more proactive approach to its internal security, a cybersecurity episode would be “catastrophic.” The executive in charge of security quit in frustration. Even after the hack, the company continued screwing up; SolarWinds didn’t even stop offering compromised software for several days after it was discovered.

This level of idiocy seems off-the-charts, says Mr Stoller, but it’s not that the CEO, Kevin Thompson, is stupid.

Far from it. “Employees say that under Mr. Thompson,” the Times continued, “an accountant by training and a former chief financial officer, every part of the business was examined for cost savings and common security practices were eschewed because of their expense.” The company’s profit tripled from 2010 to 2019. Thompson calculated that his business could run more profitably if it chose to open its clients to hacking risk, and he was right.

And yet, not every software firm operates like SolarWinds. Most seek to make money, but few do so with such a combination of malevolence, greed, and idiocy. What makes SolarWinds different? The answer is the specific financial model that has invaded the software industry over the last fifteen years, a particularly virulent strain of recklessness typically called private equity.

Of all the abuses of neoliberal capitalism in recent decades, private equity seems to me to head the list. The argument for it is that it provides a kind of corrective to lazy and incompetent management of viable businesses. In practice, much of the activity of private equity investors looks more like that of termites tearing an ageing wooden building apart.

Of course I’m prejudiced. Compared to Mr Stoller, though, I’m a Panglossian optimist. Private equity investors are, he writes,

financiers who raise large amounts of money and borrow even more to buy firms and loot them. These kinds of private equity barons aren’t specialists who help finance useful products and services, they do cookie cutter deals targeting firms they believe have market power to raise prices, who can lay off workers or sell assets, and/or have some sort of legal loophole advantage. Often they will destroy the underlying business. The giants of the industry, from Blackstone to Apollo, are the children of 1980s junk bond king and fraudster Michael Milken. They are essentially are super-sized mobsters who burn down businesses for the insurance money.

Except that in this case they seem to have burned down not just a lot of companies who depended on SolarWinds software, but a good deal of the US government as well.

Other, hopefully interesting or useful, links

• The immediate future of European travel for British Citizens. Useful info. Link

• The Mediterranean nearly dried up. A cataclysmic flood revived it. Wow! Who knew? Link

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When tourists roamed the earth

Quote of the Day

”Everything you see I owe to spaghetti.”

• Sophia Loren

Hmmm… I wonder.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bob Dylan – Subterranean Homesick Blues | 1965

Link

My favourite version of this song.

Long Read of the Day

 Monopoly Versus Democracy in the New Gilded Age

Terrific Foreign Affairs essay by Zephyr Teachout about lessons from previous progressive, anti-monopoly movements.

The parallels with the present day are obvious, and it has become commonplace to hear the current era described as a new Gilded Age. As the journalist Barry Lynn points out in his book Liberty From All Masters, the robber barons shared with today’s high-tech monopolists a strategy of encouraging people to see immense inequality as a tragic but unavoidable consequence of capitalism and technological change. But as Lynn shows, one of the main differences between then and now is that, compared to today, fewer Americans accepted such rationalizations during the Gilded Age. Today, Americans tend to see grotesque accumulations of wealth and power as normal. Back then, a critical mass of Americans refused to do so, and they waged a decades-long fight for a fair and democratic society. On the other hand, today’s antimonopoly movements are intentionally interracial and thus avoid a massive failure of the populists and progressives of the late Gilded Age, who abandoned Black Americans even though they had played a crucial role in fostering both movements.

Worth a read. The obvious takeaway is that you can have democracy or you can have powerful monopolies, but you can’t have both. Another historical lesson is that in order to deal with corporate power, we have to tackle it in a wider framework — for example, it’s necessary to clean up the mess of private funding of political campaigns. And in the UK we’d also need to make the electoral system more fairly representative. Nearly 4m people voted for UKIP in the 2015 general election and got… precisely one MP.

All I want for 2021 is to see Mark Zuckerberg up in court

This morning’s Observer column. The tech giants’ law-free bonanza is coming to an end on both sides of the Atlantic, but let’s speed up the process.

Interestingly, Stoller suggests that another approach (inspired by the way trust-busters in the US acted in the 1930s) could have useful leverage on corporate behaviour from now on. Monopolisation isn’t just illegal, he points out, “it is in fact a crime, an appropriation of the rights and property of others by a dominant actor. The lengthy trial is essentially akin to saying that bank robbers getting to keep robbing banks until they are convicted and can probably keep the additional loot.”

Since a basic principle of the rule of law is that crime shouldn’t pay, an addition of the possibility of criminal charges to the antitrust actions might, like the prospect of being hanged in the morning (pace Dr Johnson), concentrate minds in Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple. As an eternal optimist, I cannot think of a nicer prospect for 2021 than the sight of Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai in the dock – with Nick Clegg in attendance, taking notes. Happy new year!

Do read the whole thing.

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• How to read 50 books in 2021. Some useful tips from James Crabtree. Link
• 21 Things That Kept Me Going In 2020. Some lovely discoveries from Jason Kottke (Whom God Preserve). Link
• Adobe Flash rides off into the sunset. Adobe terminated support for its Flash software on Christmas eve. It won’t start blocking Flash content until January 12th but major browsers seem to have shut it down already and Microsoft will block it in most versions of Windows. It’s over. 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!