The listening post

Dishes in Cambridge’s Lord’s Bridge radio telescope system: listening to the universe.

Quote of the Day

“He would have been considered a great Emperor, had he never ruled.”

• Roman historian Tacitus on the Emperor Galba

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Van Morrison | Green Rocky Road

Link

Long Read of the Day

The State of the Culture, 2024

Or a glimpse into post-entertainment society. (Spoiler alert: it’s not pretty)

Intriguing essay by Ted Gioia.

Here’s how it opens:

Until recently, the entertainment industry has been on a growth tear—so much so, that anything artsy or indie or alternative got squeezed as collateral damage.

But even this disturbing picture isn’t disturbing enough. That’s because it misses the single biggest change happening right now.

We’re witnessing the birth of a post-entertainment culture. And it won’t help the arts. In fact, it won’t help society at all.

Even that big whale is in trouble. Entertainment companies are struggling in ways nobody anticipated just a few years ago…

Read on. It’s good, particularly on how the Tec industry views ‘entertainment’, and where we’re headed.

Andrew Curry also had a nice commentary on it on his Substack.

Books, etc.

Sometimes, serendipity works. I’ve been brooding for ages about whether cybernetics and complexity science would be helpful in understanding the mess we’re in — which led to me re-reading Stafford Beer and other systems theorists. And then, out of nowhere, two interesting books pop up. This is the first one: Doyne Farmer is Professor of Complex Systems Science in Oxford but he’s also attached to the Santa Fe Institute. The book is out on April 25. The other book is  The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions – and How The World Lost its Mind by Dan Davies, who has also been thinking about Stafford Beer and cybernetics. So an interesting few weeks lie ahead.

My commonplace booklet

From Seth Godin’s newsletter, which is a fount of pithy common sense:

Have you ever wondered what the wiring layout behind the control panels at Abbey Road studios was like?

Neither have I.

The Beatles recorded some of their best work there, and I have no idea if it was a rat’s nest of tangled wires, or if each wire was labeled, coded and perfectly aligned.

Just as I have no idea if Eliot Peper writes his novels in Scrivener or Word.

Yes, of course, for sure, it helps if your tools are properly arranged and maintained. Yes, it saves time and effort to embrace mise en place and get your workspace right.

But making it even more right, alphabetizing the pencils and making sure your servers all have the right names–that’s simply stalling.

Yep. One of my favourite adages when talking to students and others about their projects is that “the perfect is the enemy of the good”..

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• *From Cambridge Econometrics

The costs of long COVID – estimated for the UK

While Long Covid remains inadequately understood, the evidence is clear on the adverse effects on people’s lives. The most recent ONS estimates from early March 2023 suggested that there were almost 2m people living with Long Covid in the UK, representing some 3% of the UK population. While diverse in its symptoms, around 80% of people reported Long Covid as affecting their ability to carry out day-today activities in at least some way. For those more severely affected, people have reported being unable to live alone without assistance and either a reduced ability to work or having to leave work altogether. The financial implications for individuals and families may be substantial.

Early hopes that Long Covid might prove to be short-lived have not been realised and at this point, Long Covid should be considered a long-term condition that requires investment in long-term solutions. UK government commitments to addressing Long Covid remain uncertain, with current funding in England of clinics for assessment and rehabilitation only recently extended to March 2025, with no commitment to longer-term support.

With Long Covid now established in the population and clearly affecting health and livelihoods, there are questions about what Long Covid means in the longer term for the UK economy. This report takes the available evidence to examine future scenarios of Long Covid to 2030, considering trends such as future prevalence, effects on the ability to work and the costs of Long Covid treatment.

Using our E3ME macroeconomic model to simulate a Long Covid future, the results suggest that Long Covid may have macroeconomic costs of some £1.5bn of GDP each year, with the impacts increasing if future prevalence were to rise. The main driver of this result is the way in which Long Covid reduces people’s ability to work, leading to lower household incomes and lower economic growth overall. Lower employment of around 138,000 by 2030 follows as a consequence. The pattern of these impacts across the economy reflects a mix of sectors in which more people have Long Covid, leading to reductions in and exits from work; and lower economic activity, which tends to affect market services in an economy such as the UK.

Two million people! 3% of the population. Why aren’t we hearing more about this?

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Light, shade and all that rot

Quote of the Day

”Musk’s management philosophy for Twitter hasn’t so much been a random walk as a grasshopper lepping around on a hotplate.”

• Henry Farrell

(Nice, especially Henry’s use of the derisive Irish term for ‘leaping’).

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Handel | Semele HWV 58 / Act II | Where’er you walk | Bryn Terfel

Link

I love this aria, and have even been tempted to sing it in the shower, even if the lyrics are premier-grade tosh.

Long Read of the Day

Death is a Feature

Striking blog post by Doc Searls (Whom God Preserve).

Here’s how it opens:

Elon Musk wants to colonize Mars.

This is a very human thing to want. But before we start following his lead, we might want to ask whether death awaits us there.

Not our deaths. Anything’s. What died there to make life possible for what succeeds it?

From what we can tell so far, the answer is nothing.

To explain why life needs death, answer this: what do plastic, wood, limestone, paint, travertine, marble, asphalt, oil, coal, stalactites, peat, stalagmites, cotton, wool, chert, cement, nearly all food, all gas, and most electric services have in common?

They are all products of death. They are remains of living things or made from them…

Brilliant.

How one engineer’s curiosity may have saved us from a devastating cyber-attack

Yesterday’s Observer column

On Good Friday, a Microsoft engineer named Andres Freund noticed something peculiar. He was using a software tool called SSH for securely logging into remote computers on the internet, but the interactions with the distant machines were significantly slower than usual. So he did some digging and found malicious code embedded in a software package called XZ Utils that was running on his machine. This is a critical utility for compressing (and decompressing) data running on the Linux operating system, the OS that powers the vast majority of publicly accessible internet servers across the world. Which means that every such machine is running XZ Utils.

Freund’s digging revealed that the malicious code had arrived in his machine via two recent updates to XZ Utils, and he alerted the Open Source Security list to reveal that those updates were the result of someone intentionally planting a backdoor in the compression software. It was what is called a “supply-chain attack” (like the catastrophic SolarWinds one of 2020) – where malicious software is not directly injected into targeted machines, but distributed by infecting the regular software updates to which all computer users are wearily accustomed. If you want to get malware out there, infecting the supply chain is the smart way to do it…

Read on

Books, etc.

On reading ‘A Room of One’s Own’

Andrew Curry has been reading Virginia Woolf’s little masterpiece. He hadn’t read it before, and so was coming to it fresh. And he plans three blog posts about it, of which this is #1.

When she gave the pair of lectures to Cambridge undergraduates, her reputation as a leading modernist novelist was secure. She was in her 40s, and had already published Mrs Dalloway and To The Lighthouse. But the persona that Virginia Woolf adopts for the pair of lectures, to women undergraduates in Cambridge, is of the poorly educated woman who is struggling to understand the things that male authority figures are saying about women in general, and about women writers in particular.

For example, in an early sequence in the British Library she ploughs through a large pile of books written by men about women, while also noting that there are far fewer books the other way around:

How shall I ever find the grains of truth embedded in all this mass of paper? I asked myself, and in despair began running my eye up and down the long list of titles. Even the names of the books gave me food for thought. Sex and its nature might well attract doctors and biologists; but what was surprising and difficult of explanation was the fact that sex—woman, that is to say—also attracts agreeable essayists, light-fingered novelists, young men who have taken the M.A. degree; men who have taken no degree; men who have no apparent qualification save that they are not women.

It’s one of my favourite books, so I’m looking forward to seeing what Andrew makes of it.

My commonplace booklet

I discovered these on the faded back of an old postcard that had been pinned to the notice board of an office I used to have.

Techniques of argument

1. Avoiding giving evidence
2. Using carefully selected evidence
3. Over-extending your opponent’s argument
4. Appealing to ‘authority’, epistemic or otherwise
5. Appearing to be clever
6. Sarcasm, innuendo, etc.
7. Appealing to people’s prejudice
8. Asking rhetorical questions
9. Appealing to your opponent’s vanity

In my time I have been guilty of #2,3,6 and 8. I tried #5, but it didn’t work (because I’m not).

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Anyone for truffles?

Provence (where else?)

Quote of the Day

”A toy car is a projection of a real car, made small enough for a child’s hand and imagination to grasp. A real car is a projection of a toy car, made large enough for an adult’s hand and imagination to grasp.”

• Michael Frayn

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

George Lewis | Burgundy Street Blues | Acker Bilk & his Band (1965)

Link

Long Read of the Day

 Angus Deaton: Rethinking My Economics

This is one of the most encouraging things I’ve read this week — a great economist thinking out loud about how he’s been wrong . I wish more people in public life could do this.

Economics has achieved much; there are large bodies of often nonobvious theoretical understandings and of careful and sometimes compelling empirical evidence. The profession knows and understands many things. Yet today we are in some disarray. We did not collectively predict the financial crisis and, worse still, we may have contributed to it through an overenthusiastic belief in the efficacy of markets, especially financial markets whose structure and implications we understood less well than we thought. Recent macroeconomic events, admittedly unusual, have seen quarrelling experts whose main point of agreement is the incorrectness of others. Economics Nobel Prize winners have been known to denounce each other’s work at the ceremonies in Stockholm, much to the consternation of those laureates in the sciences who believe that prizes are given for getting things right.

Like many others, I have recently found myself changing my mind, a discomfiting process for someone who has been a practicing economist for more than half a century. I will come to some of the substantive topics, but I start with some general failings. I do not include the corruption allegations that have become common in some debates. Even so, economists, who have prospered mightily over the past half century, might fairly be accused of having a vested interest in capitalism as it currently operates. I should also say that I am writing about a (perhaps nebulous) mainstream, and that there are many nonmainstream economists.

He thinks economics as a discipline had been wrong in:

1. ignoring the role of power in economic (and real) life.
2. stopping thinking about philosophy and ethics — and especially equating well-being with money or consumption, missing much of what matters to people.
3. being obsessed with efficiency. (The engineers who run tech companies have the same destructive obsession.)
4. having an obsession with empirical methods that focus attention on local effects, and away from potentially important but slow-acting mechanisms that operate with long and variable lags.
5. Lacking humility in the face of the complexity of the real world.

Books, etc.

The Miseducation of Kara Swisher

Nice demolition job by Edward Ongweso Jr. on the noted tech columnist’s apologia for an over-credulous life.

Though she’d been covering the industry for decades in the likes of the New York Times, Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, Swisher could not understand how our enlightened stewards of innovation would capitulate so quickly to an authoritarian-in-waiting. “Welcome to the brave new world,” she concluded. “Yeah, you can say it: Fuckfuckfuck.”

This apparent about-face of Silicon Valley prompted Swisher to undertake some agonized soul-searching, the results of which have been published as Burn Book: A Tech Love Story, a tortured and tortuous memoir that, in remixing swaths of past reporting and commentary, as well as regurgitating tales she’s told ad nauseam, tries to answer two burning questions: How did Silicon Valley end up in that room with Trump? And, more importantly, how did a tech journalist as good and uncompromising as Kara Swisher fail to anticipate this turn to the dark side?

The long and short of it is that Swisher is not a good journalist — or, framed more generously, that she thrived in an industry with remarkably low standards for which we are still paying the price. For decades, tech journalism and criticism has primarily consisted of glowing gadget reviews, laudatory profiles, and reprinted press releases, all of it colored by Silicon Valley’s self-aggrandizing vision of itself as a laboratory of a brighter future.

This is largely identical to what Swisher admits to having believed up until 2016.

Yep.

My commonplace booklet

How to interview a tech man-child

An object lesson from Don Lemon in how to do it properly as he politely exposes the slippery, callow gaucheness of the world’s richest man.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Neo-Utilitarians Are Utter Philistines Enjoyable rant by Justin Smith-Ruiu.

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Whitegate

As regular readers will know, I am trying to re-learn the art of black-and-white photography, after years and years of working in colour. B&W requires one to ‘see’ things differently — to look for structure, contrast, subtle changes in light and shadow.

This gate would look banal in colour, and yet it struck me as interesting when I passed it yesterday.

Quote of the Day

”If God wanted us to fly, He would have given us tickets.”

• Mel Brooks

(Came to mind while reading some fatuous nonsense about flying cars.)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Namadingo Ft. Giddes Chalamanda | Linny Hoo

Link

Enchanting song by an extraordinary musician.

Thanks to Anne Chapel for suggesting it.

Remembering Ross

Ross Anderson died unexpectedly in his sleep last Thursday, leaving a large group of us devastated. He was one of those unforgettable people — fabulously erudite, generous with his knowledge and friendship, fiercely independent, and fearless. He had a kind of flinty integrity that was wholly admirable, which meant that he was often a thorn in the side of university, governmental and academic establishments, who discovered that he was no pushover.

He was a Fellow of the Royal Society and a recipient of the British Computer Society’s Ada Lovelace Medal. He was a world authority on computer security, cybercrime and cryptography. He was Professor of Security Engineering at Cambridge, and leaves behind a remarkable cohort of PhD students who were lucky enough to have him as a supervisor.

Many people found him formidable and indeed sometimes forbidding. He didn’t do small talk. And yet when you were lucky enough to get to know him (as I was) he was great company. He and I used to walk round the ‘800’ Wood near Cambridge with his two lovely dogs, deep in conversation about the sordid ingenuity of cyber-criminals, the short-sightedness of academic administrators, the intrusiveness of national security agencies, as well as about Celtic folk music of which he knew a lot. (He was a piper and shared my interest in Uileann piping.)

I learned such a lot from those conversations. Ross changed the way I looked at computing, and alerted me to the political economy of the technology which has shaped my thinking ever since. He always spoke his mind — which is why when an email from him would arrive at 8am on Sunday mornings I knew that he had read my Observer column and had something to say about it, and accordingly braced myself before reading further.

The last time I saw him was a few weeks ago, when we both snuck into a talk given by Matt Clifford (who has become Rishi Sunak’s go-to man on “AI Safety”). He had been invited by a student group, and Ross and I were the only two grizzled veterans in the room. Before Clifford embarked on his boosterish talk, I got out my pen to take notes, and then noticed that Ross had opened his MacBook. So I put my pen away. He always took the most detailed and accurate notes of any event he attended, and I knew that if I needed to check something later about Clifford’s performance, Ross’s record would provide the evidence I needed.

Ross was furious about Cambridge University’s remorseless determination to force academics to retire at 67, and he had been mounting a campaign against the policy. At 5pm on the day he died, he had an email conversation with one of his colleagues, Jon Crowcroft, about the possibility of harnessing generative AI to add spice to the campaign. Ross sent Jon a link to a song he had just prompted suno.ai to create.

As Jon observed afterwards, it could almost serve as an obituary.

Ross’s death marks the passing of the last of the five computer scientists who made Cambridge such a pioneering centre of research in the field — Maurice Wilkes, Roger Needham, David Wheeler, Karen Spärck Jones and Ross.

May he rest in peace. We were lucky to have known him.

Frank Stajano, one of Ross’s colleagues in the Computer Lab, has written a lovely tribute to him in the blog that Ross and his colleagues have been running since 2006.

Long Read of the Day

What Have Fourteen Years of Conservative Rule Done to Britain?

You know the answer, but this sharp New Yorker essay by Sam Knight gives some useful detail.

Sample:

Some people insisted that the past decade and a half of British politics resists satisfying explanation. The only way to think about it is as a psychodrama enacted, for the most part, by a small group of middle-aged men who went to élite private schools, studied at the University of Oxford, and have been climbing and chucking one another off the ladder of British public life—the cursus honorum, as Johnson once called it—ever since. The Conservative Party, whose history goes back some three hundred and fifty years, aids this theory by not having anything as vulgar as an ideology. “They’re not on a mission to do X, Y, or Z,” as a former senior adviser explained. “You win and you govern because we are better at it, right?”

Another way to think about these years is to consider them in psychological, or theoretical, terms. In “Heroic Failure,” the Irish journalist Fintan O’Toole explains Brexit by describing Britain’s fall from imperial nation to “occupied colony” of the E.U., and the rise of a powerful English nationalism as a result. Last year, Abby Innes, a scholar at the London School of Economics, published “Late Soviet Britain: Why Materialist Utopias Fail,” which argues that, since Thatcher, Britain’s political mainstream has become as devoted to particular ideas about running the state—a default commitment to competition, markets, and forms of privatization—as Brezhnev’s U.S.S.R. ever was. “The resulting regime,” Innes writes, “has proved anything but stable.”

Read on. It’s perceptive, realistic … and depressing (if you live in the UK).

How did a developer of graphics cards for gamers become the third most valuable firm on the planet?

Yesterday’s Observer column:

A funny thing happened on our way to the future. It took place recently in a huge sports arena in San Jose, California, and was described by some wag as “AI Woodstock”. But whereas that original music festival had attendees who were mainly stoned on conventional narcotics, the 11,000 or so in San Jose were high on the Kool-Aid so lavishly provided by the tech industry.

They were gathered to hear a keynote address at a technology conference given by Jensen Huang, the founder of computer chip-maker Nvidia, who is now the Taylor Swift of Silicon Valley. Dressed in his customary leather jacket and white-soled trainers, he delivered a bravura 50-minute performance that recalled Steve Jobs in his heyday, though with slightly less slick delivery. The audience, likewise, recalled the fanboys who used to queue for hours to be allowed into Jobs’s reality distortion field, except that the Huang fans were not as attentive to the cues he gave them to applaud.

Still, it made for interesting viewing. Huang is an engaging speaker and he has built a remarkable company in the years since 1993, when he first sketched his idea for Nvidia in a Silicon Valley diner. And the audience were in awe of him because they regard him as a man who saw the future long before they did, and hoped to catch a glimpse of what might be coming next.

And in this they were not disappointed…

Do read the whole thing

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Railway sleeper

My homage to Annie Ernaux’s Exteriors!

Quote of the Day

”Tragedy is what happens to me; comedy is what happens to you.”

• Mel Brooks

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Eels | Mr. E’s Beautiful Blues (Road Trip)

Link

An old favourite.

Long Read of the Day

Capitalism Can’t Solve Climate Change

Really good piece in Time by Brett Christophers of Uppsala University.

Like everyone else I suffer from confirmation bias, which explains why I found this interesting. I’ve been arguing for yonks that we need a theory of incompetent systems — ones that can’t fix themselves — to explain the mess we’re in.

The author’s basic argument is that relying on the capitalist system to avoid climate catastrophe is a toxic example of magical thinking.

As Christophers observes,

How profitable are wind and solar power generation? What sort of returns do investors earn? Inevitably, there is no single, consistent answer: returns vary – often considerably – both historically and geographically. But most analyses of the issue conclude that an internal rate of return of around 5–8 percent would be what investors on average expect and achieve.

Little wonder, then, that companies accustomed to much higher returns than this serially thumb their noses at renewables. Most notable here are the big U.S. oil and gas companies, which typically do not proceed with new hydrocarbon projects unless returns of a minimum of 15 percent are anticipated. Asked at his company’s 2015 annual meeting why Exxon continued to snub solar and wind, CEO Rex Tillerson responded witheringly, ‘we choose not to lose money on purpose’…

Another interesting thing is that the one country in the planet that is making most progress on building renewables capacity is China.

IEA, for its part, expects China to continue to be the sole meaningful over-achiever. It recently revised upwards by 728 GW its forecast for total global renewables capacity additions in the period 2023–27. China’s share of this upward revision? Almost 90 percent…

Worth your time.

My commonplace booklet

The word ‘populism’ is a gift to the far right – four reasons why we should stop using it 

Good advice from Aurelien Mondon and Alex Yates.

And the ‘four reasons’?

1. It masks the threat posed by the far right
2. It exaggerates the strength of the far right
3. It legitimises far-right politics
4. It blocks democratic progress by distracting us

Yep to all of those.

Linkblog

Something I noticed while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• From the you-couldn’t-make it-up department.

Saudi Arabia was on Wednesday appointed chair of the United Nations’ top forum for women’s rights and gender equality. [

Link

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Picasso’s guitar?

No, mine, viewed through a distorting lens.

Quote of the Day

”The McDaniel hiring speaks to a long-running poverty of imagination at television’s news divisions. Network bosses have come to believe that the news is a river that flows out of the mouths of official sources and is then routed to viewers by former members of the club.”

• Jack Shafer, commenting on NBC’s decision to hire Ronna McDaniel, the recently sacked Republican National Committee chair (and accomplished Trump accomplice) — to a paid gig in its studio.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Planxty | Live On Aisling Ghael Special | Scoil Lorcáin, Monkstown, Dublin, Nov 1979

Link

Plenty was the greatest Irish folk group of my time. I first heard them in August 1972, when they had been going for about six months. It was in a small, hot crowded room in an hotel on the northern shore of Galway Bay, and I vividly remember being transfixed by them, and — mesmerised by the Uileann piper, Liam O’Flynn, who went on to become the greatest piper of his generation. It was one of those evenings one never forgets.

The video of this recording is pretty crude, and the audio quality poor. But what I liked about it is the way it accurately evokes the mood of that Summer evening in Connemara.

Long Read of the Day

Jonathan Haidt on ‘The Great Rewiring of childhood’.

Haidt is a prominent social psychologist on a mission: to persuade the (Western) world that the levels of mental illness we are currently seeing in teenagers are due mainly to two things — the over-protective parenting they have had, and the pathological impact of social media on them (especially girls). His latest book seems to place most of the blame on the latter.

I haven’t read the book (yet), but was intrigued by an interview David Epstein did with him. The transcript is long but well worth reading.

Sample:

DE: You make a point in the book that’s in my mind, because I just saw some clips from the recent Congressional hearings with social media executives, where they were discussing harm and sexual exploitation and harassment of teenage girls. And at one point Mark Zuckerberg is made to turn around and apologize to families who were there who say that their children were victimized or died for reasons linked to social media. And I don’t know how to parse all of that, but it did remind me of a recurring theme in your book: that we became obsessed about safety for kids outdoors — while by every measure outdoors was getting safer since the 1990s — and completely ignored safety in the virtual world. We ignored it so much that — as you write — by law, a 13-year-old can essentially sign a contract with a company to give away their data, and even the 13-year-old age limit has no meaningful enforcement.

JH: We’ve overprotected our children in the real world, and we’ve underprotected them online. And you laying it out that way just made me realize something: that the real world used to be quite dangerous. It used to be for the last, you know, 200 or 300 million years, that when your kids wandered off out of sight, there was a good chance they’d be eaten. So the real world has always been dangerous for young mammals, yet they evolved to play. Play is so important for brain development that even when the world was insanely dangerous, for hundreds of millions of years mammal babies still went out and played, often out of sight of their mothers. That’s how important it is to play. And then we get to civilization, and murder rates plummet. Predation rates drop to zero; there are no animals eating our kids. And the chance that they’ll be murdered is microscopic, in modern societies, so things get safer and safer. But when I was growing up in the ‘70s and ‘80s, there was a huge crime wave. There were a lot of weirdos, there were a lot of drunk drivers. So even in the ‘70s and ‘80s, it was much safer than previous times in history, but even still, there were risks. All those risks plummeted by the ‘90s. Drunk drivers were locked up and dissuaded; there’s much less drunk driving now. And, you know, my sister was flashed when she was a teenager — a guy just opened his raincoat. And that sort of thing happened a lot, because we didn’t lock those people away for 20 years, but now we do. So there are still people out there, but they have learned: don’t approach a kid, you’ll be arrested; just go on to Instagram — it’s safe. So as I say in the book, if we want to keep our kids safe, get them off of Instagram and send them out to play.

DE: This reminded me of the part of the book that discusses the decline in ER visits, particularly among boys, because they’re not outside engaging in risky play as much. So does this indicate that, in a way, we might want some more broken bones? Not for their own sake, of course, but as indicators that kids are outside taking some risks that might get them hurt, but not permanently, and are important for development…

In some ways Haidt reminds me of the late lamented Neil Postman, who was (IMO) the greatest cultural critic of his day. He too was a persuasive critic of the technology of his time, particularly broadcast TV, and he wrote a series of perceptive, readable and often very witty books about it, notably Amusing Ourselves to Death, The Disappearance of Childhood and Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, all of which are sitting on my bookshelves as I write.

My commonplace booklet

Cultural Memory in the Digital

Thoughtful little essay by René Walter on the intrinsic hostility to cultural memory in a digital world.

As W. David Marx in No Canon for Old Memes correctly writes, “Memes are cheap, fast, and disposable. They lose their cultural value instantly (…) Memes should be understood as a medium for expression on contemporary matters. But what is said or celebrated at any moment is only meant for that moment.”

There is no mechanism for a longterm cultural memory in the digital, everything stays fluid and is edited by a giant swarm of humans in every moment. The digital turns cultural memory in a constant river of changing cultural expressions.

But a cultural memory by definition is fixed, it’s canonized knowledge, it expresses itself over time in crystalized shapes and in things that shall not be changed. Society memorizes its history in mythologies, expressed in the arts, in rituals, in literature, in architecture and monuments, in a shared practice of doing things. Comparable to the biological neural memory in the single human brain we collectively write our history into culture.

Feedback

Karel Tripp was moved by the strange photograph at the head of Monday’s edition to send me a remarkable photograph she had taken during the funeral of the late Queen.

“My picture”, she wrote,

“reminded me of the composite shot I took from the TV coverage of the Queen’s lying in state in Westminster. With a careful look you can see many aspects of the occasion all captured in one opportune moment with my iPhone 13 Pro. I am quietly proud of this even though it required absolutely no skill on my part.

That’s not quite right, IMO. Sure, the iPhone camera did the work. But it took a photographer’s ‘eye’ to see it.

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Director’s cut

Strange juxtaposition of Andrew ‘Brillopad’ Neil and someone else. Shot in 2007.

Quote of the Day

“Ideas rot if you don’t do something with them. Don’t hoard them. Blog them or otherwise tell people.”

• Ed Dumbill

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Claude Debussy | Petite Suite for Piano Duet: En bateau | Dorota and Paweł Motyczyńska

Link

Long video of the Day

This documentary, The Last Repair Shop, won an Oscar this year. It’s about the dedicated people who repair broken musical instruments for Los Angeles kids, and it’s the loveliest thing I’ve seen in a while. And the great thing is that it’s on YouTube, with occasional brief interruptions for ads. It’s 40 minutes long, but once you’ve embarked on it you’ll stay the course. So take a break, pour some coffee and enjoy a reminder of the better angels of our nature.

Ireland opens its arms to tech titans, but…

…Tax revenues from Silicon Valley giants have made the republic wealthy on paper, but housing and healthcare crises persist.

Yesterday’s Observer column.

In 1956, a chap named TK “Ken” Whitaker, an Irish civil servant who had trained as an economist, was appointed permanent secretary of the finance department in Dublin at the relatively young age of 39. From his vantage point at the top of his country’s treasury, the view was bleak. The Irish republic was, economically and socially, in deep trouble. It had no natural resources, very little industry and was mired in a deep depression. Inflation and unemployment were high. Ireland’s main export was its young people, who were fleeing in thousands every year, seeking work and better lives elsewhere. The proud dream of Irish independence had produced a poor, priest-ridden statelet on the brink of failure.

Whitaker immediately put together a team of younger officials who did a critical analysis of the country’s economic failings and came up with a set of policies for rescuing it. The resulting report, entitled First Programme for Economic Expansion, was published in November 1958, and after Seán Lemass was elected taoiseach (prime minister) in 1959, it became Ireland’s strategy for survival…

Do read on

Books, etc.

An old friend of mine was in Paris last week (lucky devil) and he messaged me (is that really a verb?) about a terrific photographic exhibition he’d just been to at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP). The show was curated by Lou Stoppard and celebrates the relationship between Annie Ernaux’s writing (especially her Exteriors book) and photography. Since I love her work and see no prospect of getting to Paris in the near future, I spent some time growling quietly about the Unfairness of Life, etc.

And then, two days ago, I came home after giving a talk in College and what should I find on the doorstep but this delicious little book.

It’s basically a companion-piece to the exhibition, in which snippets from Ernaux’s book Exteriors are accompanied by photographs drawn from the MEP’s collections each of which in some way resonates with the accompanying snippets.

As it happens, I had read Exteriors earlier and loved it. It’s basically a compendium of unconnected snippets — observations of things, people, situations that Arnaux has seen while going about her daily life.

Here’s an example:

The lights and clammy atmosphere of the Charles-de-Gaulle Étoile station. Women were buying jewellery at the foot of the twin escalators. In one corridor, on the ground, in an area marked out by chalk, someone had scribbled: ’To buy food. I have no family.’ But the man or woman who had written that had gone, the chalk circle was empty.. People avoided walking across it.

Time and again, the thought that came to me as I read was that “these are really photographs written in text”. And of course that’s what Ernaux had in mind. “I have sought”, she writes, “to describe reality as though the eyes of a photographer and preserve the mystery and opacity of the lives I encountered.”

So it was clever and original of Lou Stoppard to have come up with the idea for the show. Her intention, she writes in an postscript, was

to compare Ernaux’s Ernaux’s texts with photographs, placing them next to images as if working on a speculative group show. I was intrigued by what this process would reveal about how we approach literature, as opposed to photography. What would it expose about the expectation and ideals we project onto each media? Can you see a text? Can you read a photograph? Do we presume a text has more narrative, or more bias, than a photograph? Do we presume that texts can never capture the same sense of reality as photographs, cannot be ‘proof’ or ‘evidence’ (to use words that Ernaux favours). What does it mean to see ‘as if through the eyes of a photographer’? And, could you say that in Exteriors Ernaux was actually making images, rather than writing texts?

Fabulously interesting throughout. And I came away with the idea that as a photographer one should sometimes try to capture the banal rather than seeking out the exceptional.

If you haven’t read Ernaux, the New Yorker had a nice essay about her by Alexandra Schwartz after she won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2022.

My commonplace booklet

A closer look at Nvidia’s 120kW DGX GB200 NVL72 rack system

From The Register. It’s quite something. A real supercomputer in a rack.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Stripe’s annual report. Now when was the last time you read a corporate report that was this readable?

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Figures in a cloister

Quote of the Day

“I’ve been accused of vulgarity. I say that’s bullshit.”

• Mel Brooks

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Liam O’Flynn | The Rocks Of Bawn

Link

Long Read of the Day

A World Nobody Wants

If you approach the beautiful, historic city of Cambridge from the south, travelling on the M11, what is the first thing you see? Why, a vast wall of hideous Stalinist apartment blocks of the kind that Erich Honecker might have admired, if only the GDR had been able to muster the materials to build them.

This depressing vista is what came to mind when I started on David Schaengold’s bracing essay in Compact Magazine.

Some may continue to tell themselves we live in a time of great innovation, but at least in the world of architecture, engineering, and construction, the sense of stagnation is undeniable. In 13th-century France, entire new technologies of church construction were invented, boomed, and turned into clichés in the course of 50 years. What was built during those rushes of collective mania includes some of the most beautiful and magnificent objects human hands have ever touched. America has used the same amount of time to ensure that every construction worker always wears a hard hat and a shiny vest. The only big change since 1974 is that back then, some people still believed the future might be better.

Why have we built an entire world that nobody loves? Why are the riches of the wealthiest civilization in history spent on hideous highway viaducts that crumble as soon as they are built, instead of temples, monuments, towers, boulevards, and gardens?

The world of buildings, streets, cities, and rooms is a world made by human hands. The developer thought brick veneer would sell better than something else; the architect chose a brick pattern; the bricklayer laid down the mortar and set the brick in its proper place. Someone selected the particular sink in your bathroom. Someone wrote the words of the fire code that regulates the construction of the new apartment building around the corner. And yet no one chose the whole thing, and no one likes the whole thing…

You get the idea. Do read on. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Books, etc.

After watching Timothy Garton Ash’s recent talk on “Europe at War and How the World Responds to It”, I went back to his absorbing and compulsively readable personal history of Europe. I had read it shortly after it came out and loved its combination of sharp political reporting, historical analysis and personal reflections on the continent he loves and understands.

Interestingly, it seems even better second time around. He’s such a sharp observer of recent history, and is particularly good at putting events in perspective. He views post-war history as having three phases: post-war (1945-1988); post-Wall (1989-2008); and Post-Western-World (the phase we’re now in). In that context the findings of some of his recent global polling research are sobering, especially in how they reveal the sharp divide between how Europeans view the war in Ukraine and how the rest of the world (especially the post-colonial global South) sees it.

Listening to Tiim, one begins to rethink assumptions hitherto regarded as foundational — like the notion of a bipolar world dominated by two hegemonic powers — US/‘West’ and China. He thinks we’ve moved into what he calls an “a la carte world” in which states feel free to pick and choose between the potential alliances on offer, depending on where their national interests lie. So while they may disapprove of (for example) the way China treats the Uyghurs, that doesn’t stop them buying Chinese EVs.

Re-reading this marvellous book in the light of how his thinking has evolved since its publication is a real treat.

My commonplace booklet

Carlota Perez’s ‘five surges’ model of technology evolution

Perez is one of the most profound thinkers about technology-driven cycles. We all know about the Gartner Hype Cycle, and the fact that new technology usually follows a sigmoid curve — an elongated S-shape which asymptotically flattens out at the end.

But for a while Perez has been struck by the fact that our current sigmoid seems to have broken in the middle. “With the current ICT revolution”, she muses,

we seem to be stuck in the installation period or in what I call the ‘turning point’, which is the mid-way time of recessions and uncertainty, revolts and populism that reveals the pain inflicted on society by the initial ‘creative destruction’ process. It is precisely when the system is in danger and is being questioned and attacked that politicians finally understand they must set up a win-win game between business and society. And it is the time when much of business understands it must be done.

Of course, each revolution is unique, and the pattern is not mechanical. It depends on the context and on the particularities of each set of new technologies. And yet this time, although installation has been more intense than ever, both in jobs and regional destruction and in lifting new areas and whole countries to development, post bubble crashes have not led to an institutional rethinking to unleash the better and fairer times of the Information revolution. Expectations for a golden age after the NASDAQ collapse, and again after the 2008 financial crash, have been disappointed…

She goes on to try to figure out why this time may be different.

One reason might be that

“after four revolutions replacing manual labour, the new technologies have found an enormous new territory to mechanise: mental labour!”

(Cue ‘AI’?)

Another could be that the globalisation that accompanied the digital revolution

“implies a more complex process of propagation of production and demand across many countries. The ease of internet penetration to the most hidden corners of the world, and the access to information about conditions anywhere, have made it easy to reach many more parts of the globe and much more deeply than the first globalisation from the 1870s, which was based on telegraph, railways and steamships.

It’s refreshing to encounter a thinker who manages to rise above contemporary discourse about technology, which mainly involves thinkers with short attention-spans thrashing about in the reeds.

(h/t to the incomparable Andrew Curry for reminding me about Perez. And to Bill Janeway, who first alerted me to her work.)

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Double Helix Lacing

I like wearing boots, both for everyday use as well as long walks, but find that lacing them up can be a pain. Yesterday, my friend Quentin (Whom God Preserve) pointed me to Ian’s Shoelace Site, which in turn pointed me to this video and made my day! And maybe yours too. Sometimes, the Internet is wonderful.

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