So the independent ‘scientific’ advice that the UK government is supposedly ‘following’ turns out not to be entirely independent
When on March 12 the government announced its fatuous ‘herd immunity’ strategy for dealing with Covid-19, some of us wondered what the eminent members of SAGE, its ‘independent’ body of scientific advisers, had been smoking. In the edition of this blog on March 13 I tried to do the maths:
Suddenly (yesterday) the UK government started to talk about “herd immunity” in relation to COVID-19. What it basically means is that if lots of people get the virus and survive it (which is likely for the majority of cases), then we will be in a better state to deal with it in future because those people will have immunity to it. Sounds reassuring, doesn’t it?
Er, perhaps not. Say 60% of the population gets it. That’s 40m infectees. With a 1% mortality rate, that’s 400,000 deaths. So we have to hope that the mortality rate will be a lot less than 1%. No matter how you look at it, this is deadly serious. Herd immunity doesn’t come cheap.
When I was composing that blog post the thought that was running through my mind was “this sounds to me like a classic Dominic Cummings stunt” but I dismissed it on the grounds that (a) the guy announcing it was an eminent (and I presumed independent) scientific knight, and (b) SAGE was entirely composed of folks like him who are not going to be pushed around by any swivel-eyed fanatic.
And now what do we find?
The Guardian today has a major scoop revealing that Cummings and one of his data-science buddies have been in SAGE meetings.
The prime minister’s chief political adviser, Dominic Cummings, and a data scientist he worked with on the Vote Leave campaign for Brexit are on the secret scientific group advising the government on the coronavirus pandemic, according to a list leaked to the Guardian.
It reveals that both Cummings and Ben Warner were among 23 attendees present at a crucial convening of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) on 23 March, the day Boris Johnson announced a nationwide lockdown in a televised address.
Yeah, but what about all the meetings before the March 23rd one? Well,
Multiple attendees of Sage told the Guardian that both Cummings and Warner had been taking part in meetings of the group as far back as February. The inclusion of Downing Street advisers on Sage will raise questions about the independence of its scientific advice.
So now we have even stronger grounds for demanding that the membership of SAGE be publicly revealed.
En passant, I’m also wondering why none of these eminent scientific advisers didn’t walk out the moment Cummings appeared in the room. Their much-vaunted ‘independence’ has now been tainted. Their only consolation is that when the government tries to fit them up for the role of guilty men and women when the time comes to allocate responsibility for the catastrophic handling of the pandemic, they can always say “it was Cummings wot done it, guv”.
And as for “following the science” from now on read “following the politics”.
What the UK government knew — last year
From the leaked report for 2019. Yes, that’s 2019. And note particularly the last line.
So the next time you hear a government minister say that nobody saw this coming, just wave this at him/her.
Aw, isn’t that nice. I’m in the money at last.
From today’s inbox.
A blast from the past! Once upon a time this kind of crap was routine.
Can this be genuine?
From Dave Winer’s blog. If it is real, then it suggests that the NYT really needs to unlock itself from the “balance as bias” trap. When talking about this I still use Paul Krugman’s example in a talk he gave to Harvard students many moons ago.
“Dick Cheney [then the Vice President] says the earth is flat”.
“Here’s how the New York Times reports it. ‘Vice President says earth is flat; others disagree’.”
Autocrats are using the pandemic as cover for power-grabs
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So who is providing the ‘science’ that the UK government claims to be following?
Answer: the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies — SAGE. But here’s the strange thing: its list of members is secret, its meetings are closed, its recommendations are private and the minutes of its deliberations are published much later, if at all.
Yet, as the New York Timesnotes, government ministers endlessly invoke SAGE’s name without ever explaining how it comes up with its advice — or even who these scientists are.
Why is this? Various possible explanations. One is Whitehall’s traditional (and pathological) dislike of openness and transparency in favour of official secrecy. Another is a desire to shield scientists and medics from hysterical trolling like what has happened in the US to Dr Anthony Fauci.
But there is a more sinister explanation. It is that it will provide this chaotic Johnson administration with a cast-iron alibi for escaping responsibility for their catastrophic mismanagement of the pandemic when the time comes for an inquiry into what happened. “We were just following scientific advice”, they will say. It’s a variant on the old WW2 excuse about just following orders.
This lack of transparency was once a puzzle. Now that the economy is tanking as a result of how the pandemic has been handled, it’s become a scandal. Will any of the journalists who (virtually) attend the government’s daily briefings ask why SAGE’s membership and advice is not being published?
According to a BBC report, YouTube has banned any coronavirus-related content that directly contradicts World Health Organization (WHO) advice.
The Google-owned service says it will remove anything it deems “medically unsubstantiated”.
Chief executive Susan Wojcicki said the media giant wanted to stamp out “misinformation on the platform”.
The move follows YouTube banning conspiracy theories falsely linking Covid-19 to 5G networks.
Mrs Wojcicki made the remarks on Wednesday during her first interview since the global coronavirus lockdown began.
“So people saying, ‘Take vitamin C, take turmeric, we’ll cure you,’ those are the examples of things that would be a violation of our policy,” she told CNN. “Anything that would go against World Health Organization recommendations would be a violation of our policy.”
Well, we should be thankful for small mercies, I suppose. So that’s Coronavirus dealt with then? But is YouTube now going to take down all the conspiracy theories about MMR that have been uploaded by anti-vaxx nutters and disseminated by YouTube? After all, as Charles Arthur remarked on this morning’s Overspill, measles kills people too.
Correction: in the first edition of this blog yesterday the reference to ‘MMT’ should have been to MMR. Thanks to the reader who pointed out the error.
How to deal with credulous fools
The quotation at the top comes from a lovely essay by Bertrand Russell. I particularly liked the way he ended it.
I admire especially a certain prophetess who lived beside a lake in Northern New York State about the year 1820. She announced to her numerous followers that she possessed the power of walking on water, and that she proposed to do so at 11 o’clock on a certain morning. At the stated time, the faithful assembled in their thousands beside the lake. She spoke to them, saying: “Are you all entirely persuaded that I can walk on water?” With one voice they replied: “We are.” “In that case,” she announced, “there is not need for me to do so.” And they all went home much edified.
As the Italians say, even if it’s not true it deserves to be.
If people have to stay at home are are thereby unemployed, there are lots of jobs they could do
We need to think like FDR about this. There are lots of things that need doing, but at the moment are not being done. Alex Tabarrok has some useful ideas in that line:
Sick pay pays sick people to stay home but to defeat the virus we also want lots of healthy people to stay home. We also want to support people who are at home because they can’t find work. We can accomplish these goals by subsidizing work using services like Upwork or Mechanical Turk. Jobs on platforms like Upwork are the shovel-ready work of the 21st century. A 21st century jobs program would pay people to stay home and isolate, support people without work, and produce some useful output all at the same time.
Instead of paying people to dig and then fill ditches* we could pay people to help train machine-learning apps, enter data, subtitle videos. take surveys, maybe even fold proteins to disrupt viruses.
More generally, how about paying people to take online courses? i.e. an income support program and a human capital investment program at the same time. Of course, not everyone would do well and people would cheat but think of these programs as a combination of paying people to isolate, maintaining aggregate demand and providing a source of income when low-wage restaurant and other service-jobs are declining but with a work requirement.
Footnote This was a reference to a famous passage in Keynes’s General Theory:
“If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coalmines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again… the note-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is. It would, indeed, be more sensible to build houses and the like; but if there are political and practical difficulties in the way of this, the above would be better than nothing.”
A book for its time
David Vincent’s new book is out! Talk about timing!
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At a time when the entire country would love to throw off the shackles of self-isolation and quarantine I thought this might lift spirits. It’s from a series of photographs I took of kite-surfers on Brancaster beach in North Norfolk last year.
Click on the image for a bigger version.
Who’s behind all those “reopen” sites in the US?
Cory Doctorow runs Pluralistic, a clever site which is also available as a daily email newsletter. I’m finding it a great source of news and information which mainstream outlets seem to miss. Today he pointed to a remarkable piece of detective work by Brian Krebs, who runs one of the best security websites on the Internet. As Trump-fuelled demonstrations against the lockdown started to appear in (mostly) Democrat-governed states, he noticed a spike in new websites supporting these demonstrations. So he started to investigate who was behind this surge in new domains. Answer: (in Cory’s words) “Koch Network, grifters, GOP orgs and musketfuckers.” Some of the sites were basically fronts for selling libertarian tee-shirts. But it’s an interesting example of how how gun-fanatics and alt-right activists will exploit any opening for both political and financial gain.
Also illustrates how the US is morphing into a failing state.
A rhyme for our time
A friend who has a lovely wry sense of humour sent me this.
She described it in her email as “a piece of doggerel that I wrote to cheer myself up”. Well, it certainly cheered me up. But doggerel it certainly isn’t.
Contact-tracing apps. Our looming Faustian bargain
If you’re worried about proximity-sensing apps then this podcast episode with David Aaronovitch and Danny Fortson provides a very accessible explanation of the technology and why we might plausibly accept a Faustian bargain between privacy and escape from lockdown.
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This morning Elsie Pinniger, my mother-in-law and Grandma to two of my children, succumbed to Covid-19 in hospital in Stoke-on-Trent. She was a sweet, cheery, feisty soul, and it was awful to think of her dying alone, though it seems that she slipped peacefully away. This is such an inordinately cruel disease because it prevents family members being with their loved ones at the end. But it’s also very hard on the nurses who in addition to providing professional care become the humans who hold the hands of patients coming to the end. I’ve seen so many accounts of nurses who are distressed by being the ones who hold a mobile phone close to a patient who is saying goodbye to those s/he has loved. This afternoon, looking through all the family photographs I have, I found this one of Elsie as a lovely young woman around the time of her marriage to Gordon, who died some years ago.
May she rest in peace.
No exit via the app store
The The UK Government and NHSX are looking to smartphone-based proximity-sensing technologies to provide an exit from COVID-19 emergency lockdown measures. The Ada Lovelace Institute has done an impressive (and rapid) inquiry into whether such measures would be be safe, fair and equitable.
Summary of their findings
There is an absence of evidence to support the immediate national deployment of symptom tracking applications, digital contact tracing applications and digital immunity certificates.
Effective deployment of technology to support the transition from the crisis will be contingent on public trust and confidence, which can be strengthened through the establishment of two accountability mechanisms: the Group of Advisors on Technology in Emergencies (GATE) to review evidence, advise on design and oversee implementation; and an independent oversight mechanism to conduct real-time scrutiny of policy formulation.
Clear and comprehensive primary legislation should be advanced to regulate data processing in symptom tracking and digital contact tracing applications. Legislation should impose strict purpose, access and time limitations.
Until a robust and credible means of immunity testing is developed, focus should be on developing a comprehensive strategy around immunity that considers the deep societal implications of any immunity certification regime, rather than on developing digital immunity certificates.
Full and robust Parliamentary scrutiny and legislation will be crucial for any future regime of immunity testing and certification.
Technical design choices should factor in privacy-by-design and accessibility features and should be buttressed by non-technical measures to account for digital exclusion.
The most important point IMHO is that any deployment of this technology has to be authorised not by a ministerial order but by Parliament in the form of a new bill which has a sunset clause and periodical reviews built into the legislation.
Marc Andreessen on the need to build
Marc Andreessen is the guy who, while still a student, was largely responsible for bringing what had hitherto been a playground for geeks — the Internet — into the mainstream. He did this by creating (with Eric Bina) the first real web browser, Mosaic, and then co-founding Netscape. Some years later he became a successful Silicon Valley venture capitalist.
He’s a thoughtful,perceptive, opinionated chap, and every so often produces a think-piece which seems to have a lot of influence on how people think about tech. Some years ago, for example, he published “Why software is eating the world”. Now, stunned by the Coronavirus disaster, he’s taken up his word-processor again with an essay entitled “It’s Time to Build”. Here’s the opener:
Every Western institution was unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic, despite many prior warnings. This monumental failure of institutional effectiveness will reverberate for the rest of the decade, but it’s not too early to ask why, and what we need to do about it.
Many of us would like to pin the cause on one political party or another, on one government or another. But the harsh reality is that it all failed — no Western country, or state, or city was prepared — and despite hard work and often extraordinary sacrifice by many people within these institutions. So the problem runs deeper than your favorite political opponent or your home nation.
Part of the problem is clearly foresight, a failure of imagination. But the other part of the problem is what we didn’t do in advance, and what we’re failing to do now. And that is a failure of action, and specifically our widespread inability to build.
We see this today with the things we urgently need but don’t have…
It’s a good read, and one nods along. But, as Charles Arthur pointed out to me today, it’s really a stump speech rather than a manifesto. Andreessen knows an awful lot about the non-physical, online world where winners take all, marginal costs are near-zero and margins are huge. But in the physical world, where little of that applies, he’s as much of an amateur as the rest of us.
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One of the great comedians of his generation. I love his epitaph: “I told you I was ill”.
Politico’s daily summary
One of the joys (well, sometimes) of my early morning is finding Politico’s daily London Playbook (i.e. newsletter) by Jack Blanchard in my inbox. This is how it opens today:
THEY’RE BACK! Parliament returns today from its extended Easter recess to lead a country utterly changed from just one month before. When the House rose on March 25, Britain had been in lockdown for less than 48 hours, and fewer than 500 U.K. citizens had died from COVID-19. Boris Johnson was still running the country and a picture of jovial health; Jeremy Corbyn was leader of the opposition and taking part in his final PMQs. The Premier League was due to resume from its brief hiatus on April 30, and most people thought “Zoom” was an ice lolly from 1986.
Fast-forward 4 weeks … and Zoom has become such a crucial part of our lives that MPs will be using it to hold debates in the Commons chamber as of tomorrow. More than 16,500 Britons have died from the illness; a fierce debate is underway about when to lift a lockdown now destroying the U.K. economy; Johnson is recuperating at Chequers after almost losing his life to COVID-19, and Keir Starmer is leading a Labour Party already plunged into fresh civil war. Dominic Raab has the nuclear codes in his pocket; Liverpool’s title charge has been suspended indefinitely, and NHS nurses have been dressing in bin bags after supplies of protective kit ran out. So MPs shouldn’t be short of things to talk about when proceedings get underway.
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Zoom’s security woes were no secret to business partners like Dropbox
Well, well. On the day that the UK House of Commons ‘returns’ using Zoom (the House of Lords is apparently going to use a Microsoft system), the New York Timesreports that Dropbox became so concerned about Zoom’s security holes that the company commissioned a number of hackers to find the holes, which they then reported to Zoom.
Zoom’s defenders, including big-name Silicon Valley venture capitalists, say the onslaught of criticism is unfair. They argue that Zoom, originally designed for businesses, could not have anticipated a pandemic that would send legions of consumers flocking to its service in the span of a few weeks and using it for purposes — like elementary school classes and family celebrations — for which it was never intended.
“I don’t think a lot of these things were predictable,” said Alex Stamos, a former chief security officer at Facebook who recently signed on as a security adviser to Zoom. “It’s like everyone decided to drive their cars on water.”
Motherboard is reporting that there are currently two Zoom zero-day exploits, one for Windows and one for MacOS, on the market.
And there’s a report that over 500,000 Zoom accounts are being sold on the dark web and hacker forums for less than a penny each, and in some cases, given away for free.
But still…amphibious cars — now there’s a good idea!
Another previously-profitable business is suddenly defunct
The big in-person conferencing event is suddenly passé. As someone who has always loathed conferences, this troubles me not at all. But to those who are addicted to them, it’s obviously depressing news. Here’s one gloomy take on it all:
At the same time, it’s becoming increasingly clear that conferences won’t be returning to normal anytime soon. Mark Zuckerberg said Thursday that Facebook won’t host any events with 50 people or more until June 2021; Microsoft announced that it won’t be having in-person conferences until at least July 2021. California Gov. Gavin Newsom said this week that large gatherings in the state are “unlikely” until the availability of a coronavirus vaccine, and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti suggested that his city won’t see large-scale events until 2021. Some in the tech industry are already predicting that CES in January will be canceled, as well.
Brightcove’s Larsen acknowledged that she wouldn’t send her own team members to in-person events right now, adding: “Until there is a vaccine that works, it is going to be really hard to get 10,000 people together in a space.”
The trouble is that while Zoom and streaming technology can replace some of what people get from in-person gatherings, there are still things that will be missing. As Ben Evans says in his current newsletter:
Conferences are a bundle: the content (which works as video, mostly), but also the chance meetings & networking, and the meetings you book because everyone’s in town, and sometimes also a trade fair, and none of those work as video, far less a random text chat room. And if you do switch the in-person meeting in a hotel room in that particular city to a video call from across the world, why do you need to do it on that particular date? There’s a second wave of products to be created here, I suspect.
America’s ‘underlying conditions’
Terrific, long essay by George Packer, whose book [The Unwinding: Thirty Years of American decline] (https://amzn.to/3eF7fc6) set the scene for what the country is now experiencing. This is how the essay begins:
When the virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly. Chronic ills—a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public—had gone untreated for years. We had learned to live, uncomfortably, with the symptoms. It took the scale and intimacy of a pandemic to expose their severity—to shock Americans with the recognition that we are in the high-risk category.
The crisis demanded a response that was swift, rational, and collective. The United States reacted instead like Pakistan or Belarus—like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering. The administration squandered two irretrievable months to prepare. From the president came willful blindness, scapegoating, boasts, and lies. From his mouthpieces, conspiracy theories and miracle cures. A few senators and corporate executives acted quickly—not to prevent the coming disaster, but to profit from it. When a government doctor tried to warn the public of the danger, the White House took the mic and politicized the message.
Every morning in the endless month of March, Americans woke up to find themselves citizens of a failed state. With no national plan—no coherent instructions at all—families, schools, and offices were left to decide on their own whether to shut down and take shelter. When test kits, masks, gowns, and ventilators were found to be in desperately short supply, governors pleaded for them from the White House, which stalled, then called on private enterprise, which couldn’t deliver. States and cities were forced into bidding wars that left them prey to price gouging and corporate profiteering. Civilians took out their sewing machines to try to keep ill-equipped hospital workers healthy and their patients alive. Russia, Taiwan, and the United Nations sent humanitarian aid to the world’s richest power—a beggar nation in utter chaos.
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There was a duff link in yesterday’s edition. The Safra Center’s briefing paper on contact-tracing technology is here. Apologies for the error. And thanks to Seb for spotting it.
What’s the secret of coronavirus’s success?
One of the ‘existential risks’ that researchers in Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risks study is a naturally-evolved or maliciously-engineered pathogen which could wipe out the human species. Pondering how SARS-COv-2 operates, one thought is that anyone designing a lethal pathogen could learn a lot from it. For example, one of the things that makes the Coronavirus so difficult to combat is that infected people don’t display symptoms until days after they have actually become infectious.
Dr Zania Stamataki, a research virologist, has an interesting article in today’s Guardian about this.
In fact, viruses generally have to follow certain rules if they want to get ahead. Stealth is critical, because these pathogens are unable to thrive and reproduce alone. Instead, they invade host cells and rely on them to, first, decode their genetic information to produce components for new virus particles, next, assemble those components, and finally, release new viruses to infect more cells. If this process causes tissue damage that leads to organ failure, the virus risks perishing along with its host.
So we move from the selfish gene to the stealthy virus.
Absent large-scale testing, the outlook is grim, he said. “As soon as we stop the shutdowns, we’ll go right back to exponential growth. It won’t even help us much if we get down to very low rates of infection first, because exponential growth is so fast you get right back there very quickly.” Given the limits to testing capacity and the Trump Administration’s refusal to take the lead in this area, Romer suggested that the most likely outcome is a series of reopenings and renewed shutdowns, as the infection rate rebounds. “From an economic perspective, that is almost as bad as a permanent shutdown,” he said. “Nobody is going to invest. Nobody is going to reopen a restaurant.”
Romer (who is a Nobel laureate) has been experimenting with simple agent-based simulation models) which suggest that a viable strategy would require massive testing and quarantining only those who tested positive, rather than quarantining by random sampling. The former would mean that a controlled resumption to some kind of economic normality might be relatively safe. But at the moment, that’s entirely theoretical given that so few states — and certainly not the US — have anything like the testing capability required.
When I looked at his simulation models I thought they’d been built using NetLogo, which is a tool I’ve used myself in the past. But no: he built them himself in Python.
Peter Beard, a New York photographer, artist and naturalist to whom the word “wild” was roundly applied, both for his death-defying photographs of African wildlife and for his own much-publicized days — decades, really — as an amorous, bibulous, pharmaceutically inclined man about town, was found dead in the woods on Sunday, almost three weeks after he disappeared from his home in Montauk on the East End of Long Island. He was 82.
The obit is an account of an astonishing life. His artwork is extraordinary — see some of it on his site. But read the obit first.
HT to Tomasz Ulanowski for alerting me to Beard’s death.
The US government’s bailout program is basically a corporate racket
The Trump narrative about the government bailout is that it’s about protecting the most vulnerable. As Scott Galloway points put, it’s nothing of the kind. It’s basically about buttressing the most wealthy.
As long as they keep making old people, and younger people want to take their kids to Disney’s Galaxy’s Edge, there will be cruise lines and airlines. Since 2000, US airlines have declared bankruptcy 66 times. Despite the obvious vulnerability of the sector, boards/CEOs of the six largest airlines have spent 96% of their free cash flow on share buybacks, bolstering the share price and compensation of management … who now want a bailout. They should be allowed to fail. Bondholders will own the firms. Ships and planes will continue to float and fly, and there will still be a steel tube with recirculated air waiting for you post molestation by Roy from TSA.
One principle (applicable everywhere) is that any corporate claim for government assistance on the grounds that its business has been ruined by the virus should be denied if the firm has engaged in share buybacks over the last two decades. Also private-equity firms should be denied government assistance, on the grounds that no civilised society rewards pirates.
”An alien might someday ask how the entire population was bugged. The answer would be that humans gave each other surveillance devices for Christmas, cleverly named Echo and Home.”
The most important implication of the breakneck changes currently under way, though, is that there’s no going back to normality. That train has left the station. The coronavirus isn’t going away. And even when there is a vaccine, the risk will endure, because climate change and the erosion of wildlife habitats will ensure a ready supply of zoonotic viruses. Companies will have learned to build supply chains with resilience built in. White collar workers will have discovered that they don’t have do as much commuting as before. Air travel will go back to being a luxury. And so on.
A useful metaphor for the new normal will be what happens when driving a car on black ice. The worst thing to do is to slam on the brakes, because then you completely lose control. Instead you pump them – brake a little, then back off and repeat the process until back on gritty tarmac. Our immediate futures will be like that: a combination of what some people are beginning to call “the hammer and the dance” – the hammer of successive lockdowns followed by digital dances in which we use surveillance and testing to find and control outbreaks. We are heading into a cautious, rather than a brave, new world – with Orwellian overtones. I wonder what Aldous Huxley would have made of that.
This is a TED talk that Bill Gates in 2015. That’s five years ago. “Today” he said, “the greatest risk of global catastrophe doesn’t look like this”. At which point up came a photograph of the mushroom cloud of a nuclear bomb. “Instead”, he went on, “it looks like this”. And up popped an electron microscope image of a corona virus.
It’s called foresight.
The Andreessen manifesto
Marc Andreessen is one of the most interesting (and sometimes annoying) people around. As a graduate student he more or less made the Internet mainstream: with Eric Bina he wrote Mosaic, the first proper browser — the program that made ordinary people realise what this Internet thingy was for. Now he runs a major Silicon Valley venture capital firm. And every so often he launches a broadside on the world. His latest is entitled “It’s Time to Build” and this is how it begins…
Every Western institution was unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic, despite many prior warnings. This monumental failure of institutional effectiveness will reverberate for the rest of the decade, but it’s not too early to ask why, and what we need to do about it.
Many of us would like to pin the cause on one political party or another, on one government or another. But the harsh reality is that it all failed — no Western country, or state, or city was prepared — and despite hard work and often extraordinary sacrifice by many people within these institutions. So the problem runs deeper than your favorite political opponent or your home nation.
Part of the problem is clearly foresight, a failure of imagination. But the other part of the problem is what we didn’t do in advance, and what we’re failing to do now. And that is a failure of action, and specifically our widespread inability to build.
We see this today with the things we urgently need but don’t have…
And Tyler Cowen points out in his Bloomberg column that the coming societal dependence on smartphone technology will create a new digital divide. “All of a sudden the US will have a new segregation — between those who have smartphones and those who don’t. If you’re on the wrong side of that divide many places and services will be hard if not impossible to reach”.
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If, like me, you are getting so pissed off by the government’s daily Corona briefings, then Marina Hyde’s wonderful column this morning will be music to your ears. Here’s a sample:
News that Matt Hancock, the health secretary, used Friday morning to announce a “six-point battle plan” stirs memories of yore – Thursday afternoon – when the supply prime minister, Dominic Raab, announced his “five tests”. Indeed, those five tests themselves felt like the twitch of a phantom limb, redolent of the time Hancock announced his “five pillars”. Five pillars – like Islam, or the lost Temple of Cybele in Rome, or a Floridian McMansion where the contractor went bust halfway through completing the portico.
You don’t hear a whole lot about Matt’s five pillars these days, though the announcement of them did the job at the time. On Wednesday, Hancock drew attention away from the desperate shortage of PPE in care homes by re-announcing an NHS-style badge for those who work in care. Alas, in a development best described as ironicidal, the care badge website then swiftly ran into difficulties, leaving visitors greeted with the news that there was now a shortage of care badges. Until production is “ramped up”, it’s hard not to conclude that the chief success of the care badge was to form a psychic shield around the health secretary. It will, however, take more than a badge if he doesn’t hit his 100,000 tests a day target for the end of April, having already missed the 25,000-a-day target for the middle of the month.
Can you recall if the 100,000 tests was ever technically a pillar? It all feels beyond living memory. If you told me he had announced them sometime in the mid-Cretaceous period, staring soulfully into the camera even as a T-Rex pursued him, I’d believe you. In fact, it was a fortnight ago…
The twin problem of the British system: government by amateurs and state (in)capacity
It has taken a while, but this is what the virus has taught us so far. The UK has two big problems:
We are governed by amateurs who until recently thought that responsibility for one’s actions was something that only lesser mortals worried about. In recent times, this is mainly about the Tory party and the people who have led it. After its defeat by Tony Blair in 1997, the party was led by a succession of screwballs and jokers — William Hague, Ian Duncan-Smith and Michael Howard. Then along comes David Cameron, who actually won a couple of elections and swaggered into the 2016 Referendum with Etonian swagger: he would convince the Europeans to give him a few token concessions that would be enough to sideline the swivel-eyed nutters in his own party, and the warnings of Establishment capitalism would frighten the punters to deliver the correct verdict. All delusional. He was then briefly succeeded by Theresa May, the embodiment of the Head Girl of a Grammar School; she did at least understand responsibility but unfortunately couldn’t run a bath. And then comes Boris Johnson, the most egregious bluffer of the lot, with an entitlement obsession bordering on the pathological and a smug confidence that there was nothing he couldn’t get through with a few jokes and some faux-Churchillian bluster. And even when he ran into an immovable obstacle called Covid-19 he didn’t get it for a while — as this fascinating Guardian account makes clear. It’s possible that his near-death experience might transform him into a serious human being, but I wouldn’t bet on it once he’s back firing on all cylinders. But thousands of people are paying with their lives for the complacent failures of Johnson and his Brexit-obsessed crew to mobilise earlier.
We have also belatedly discovered the extent to which the British state suffers from a capacity deficit. This is what we learn every day in these government ‘briefings’. And it’s becoming more embarrassing by the minute as European states like Germany and Italy — yes Italy! — demonstrate their superior capacity to address the challenges of the virus. This state incapacity has clearly been building for a long time: it’s partly a product of ideology and an obsession with the short-term; it may also be partly due to the obsession with terrorism over and above other risks (even though pandemic risk was, in theory, the #1 item on the national risk register, with terrorism as #3). We will need a proper inquiry into this when the panic subsides.
The looming battle over smartphone-based proximity tracking tech
Very useful Techcrunch report on the developing row between those who want to have centralised tracking and those who believe the data should be kept on users’ phones, with a server basically just doing notifications to users. This row presages a nightmare scenario with real divergence between centralisers and de-centralisers. The EU seems to be leading the centralised charge (while of course denying that it is favouring anything of that kind), and seeming to consider leaning on Apple and Google to make sure that their forthcoming APIs allow centralised tracking.
Needless to say, the argument for centralised tracking is that the pandemic overrides namby-pamby reservations about privacy and the danger of constructing the architecture of a surveillance state. Behind this lies the framing of the pandemic as a “war” on the virus, accompanied by the usual soothing bromides that the powers and the tech will be withdrawn once the war is over. But ‘wars’ like this never end (just like the ‘war on terror’ after 9/11), and the architecture of surveillance is therefore never dismantled.
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Emmanuel Macron says it is time to think the unthinkable
Today’s Financial Times has a very interesting, wide-ranging interview with the French President. One segment in particular stood out for me:
There is a realisation, Mr Macron says, that if people could do the unthinkable to their economies to slow a pandemic, they could do the same to arrest catastrophic climate change. People have come to understand “that no one hesitates to make very profound, brutal choices when it’s a matter of saving lives. It’s the same for climate risk,” he says. “Great pandemics of respiratory distress syndromes like those we are living through now used to seem very far away, because they always stopped in Asia. Well, climate risk seems very far away because it affects Africa and the Pacific. But when it reaches you, it’s wake-up time.”
“Mr Macron likened the fear of suffocating that comes with Covid-19 to the effects of air pollution. “When we get out of this crisis people will no longer accept breathing dirty air,” he says. “People will say . . . ‘I do not agree with the choices of societies where I’ll breathe such air, where my baby will have bronchitis because of it. And remember you stopped everything for this Covid thing but now you want to make me breathe bad air!’”
This is the top story today IMHO. One way of looking at the Coronavirus crisis is as a dry run for the really existential crisis that’s on its way further down the line — catastrophic climate change. And the question is: will the trauma of the pandemic persuade publics worldwide that we can’t go on as before?
Just now, though, the yearning is for the current crisis to be over. Alas, that moment might be some way off. So it’s worth thinking trying to figure out what a realistic scenario might look like, and what needs to be prioritised as we make the transition into that new future.
In that context, a recent YouGov survey of British public opinion is interesting. According to one report, the survey found that:
Only 9% of Britons want life to return to “normal” after the coronavirus outbreak is over.
People have noticed significant changes during the lockdown, including cleaner air, more wildlife and stronger communities.
More than half (54%) of 4,343 people who took part in the poll hope they will make some changes in their own lives and for the country as a whole to learn from the crisis.
42% of participants said they value food and other essentials more since the pandemic, with 38% cooking from scratch more.
61% of people are spending less money and 51% noticed cleaner air outdoors, while 27% think there is more wildlife.
Two-fifths said there is a stronger sense of community in their area since the outbreak began and 39% say they are catching up with friends and family more.
A global poll conducted by Ipsos/Mori found wide divergences of views when people were asked if they believed that things would get back to normal soon.
Personally, I don’t take this poll seriously simply because the question it was asking (“do you expect things to return to normal by June?”) is daft. But it does suggest wide cultural divergence in expectations on how long this crisis will last.
The YouGov poll was commissioned by a number of organisations, one of which was the Royal Society of Arts. Matthew Taylor, its Chief Executive, has an interesting essay on what comes next. “It is natural to think about the next few months of the pandemic as ‘the crisis’ and ‘the world afterwards’”, he writes. “But it may be more useful to think of three stages:”
the immediate crisis
the transitional period
the emergence of a new normal.
The transition period may last some time and it is important to start exploring the principles that could and should govern it. Emergency powers and measures aren’t right for an extended period of time.
Democracy, transparency, devolution, protecting health, and protecting the most vulnerable should be some of our priority principles for transition.
Taylor’s essay spells some of this out in more detail.
The WHO shouldn’t be a plaything for great powers
Just because Trump is scapegoating it doesn’t mean the WHO hasn’t made mistakes. Trump’s ploy to de-fund the WHO is a transparent effort to distract from his administration’s failure to prepare for the COVID-19 pandemic. It would also be disastrous because many countries, especially poor ones, currently depend on the WHO for medical help and supplies. However, writes Zeyney Tufecki, it is also true that in the run-up to this pandemic, the WHO failed the world in significant ways.
It failed, she argues, because it’s unduly attentive to the whims of the nations that fund it and choose its leader. In July 2017, China moved aggressively to elect its current leadership, for example. Instead of fixing any of the problems with the way the WHO operates, though, Trump seems to merely want the United States to be the bigger bully than China.
Tufecki’s argument is that one can see the desire not to offend China in the WHO’s initial response to the outbreak in Wuhan. The organisation, she continues, should
not have brazenly tweeted, as late as January 14, that “preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China.” That claim was false, and known by the authorities in Wuhan to be false.. Taiwan had already told the WHO of the truth too. On top of that, the day before that tweet was sent, there had been a case in Thailand: a woman from Wuhan who had traveled to Thailand, but who had never been to the seafood market associated with the outbreak—which strongly suggested that the virus was already spreading within Wuhan.
The trouble with the WHO is the problem that every major UN organisation has — it’s dominated by the countries that fund it. And ever since China has begun to become more involved in international organisations — and stumping up funding for them — they have become more attentive. Much the same seems to be happening to the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) which is being pushed by China and a number of other authoritarian states to change Internet protocols to make the network more susceptible to central control — using as a rationale the need to update the network to be able to serve the Internet of Things.
Libra turns out to be a feeble duck, but, sadly, one that is not yet dead.
When Facebook unveiled its Libra cryptocurrency project last June, the company described it as a futuristic global money that could serve as the foundation for a new kind of financial system. But on Thursday it rolled out a feebler design for Libra after the effort encountered numerous hurdles and heavy regulatory scrutiny. It’ll basically be just another PayPal. Couldn’t happen to nastier people.
Twitter, masks and expertise.
So, it turns out that the medical establishment is no longer quite so sure that wearing masks in public is not necessary. That, at any rate, is my reading of this editorial in the British Medical Journal, a pukka source if ever there was one.
“Covid-19: should the public wear face masks?”, it asks. And the answer: “Yes — population benefits are plausible and harms unlikely”. This is really interesting because the “expert” advice relied upon by the government was dismissive of the importance of masks except in clinical settings, and the only places where the case for wearing masks was consistently argued were social media, and especially Twitter.
This makes uncomfortable reading for those of us — including me — who are deeply suspicious of much of the stuff that circulates on those media. What it highlights — as Ben Thompson has been pointing out in his (paywalled) newsletter — is that the abundance of information on social media has both a good and a bad side: there’s a lot of crap but there’s a lot of good stuff too. And in a situation like the current pandemic, where so much is unknown (for example the mortality rate and the proportion of the population that is asymptomatically infected) then mainstream media has been too dependent on ‘expert’ opinion — that has been shown to be faulty.
The tech giants are here to stay
One of the few certainties about the post-pandemic world is that the dominance of the big five tech giants we be further enhanced. See Farhad Manjoo’s piece in the NYT for a fuller exposition. This will change the regulatory landscape; and the debate about what to do about this kind of corporate power.
“It’ll be all over by Christmas”
No it won’t. But if you want a real dystopian take on the next phase of this, then Charlie Stross’s blog post should see you right.
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“Neoliberalism shrinks public budgets; solutionism shrinks public imagination. The solutionist mandate is to convince the public that the only legitimate use of digital technologies is to disrupt and revolutionise everything but the central institution of modern life – the market.”
Someone asked me the other day how I plan the content of this blog. Answer: I use the wonderful Little Outliner created by Dave Winer. It’s everything a tool should be — lightweight, always-on (it runs in the browser) and agile. Here’s a screenshot of yesterday’s plan.
Dave was the author of the first great outliner — ThinkTank for the Apple Macintosh. I still remember the first day I saw it. And I used it — and its successors — ever since.
An outliner is really a tool for thinking with. One of the great ideas Microsoft had when creating PowerPoint was to build into it an ‘outliner’ mode which allowed one to focus on the flow of the argument rather than fiddling with the slides.
The tech ‘solutions’ for coronavirus take the surveillance state to the next level
Sobering and perceptive essay by Evgeny Morozov. He’s long been a critic of a particular Silicon Valley ideology — “solutionism” — the belief that for every problem, social or otherwise, there is a tech solution. But solutionism has transcended
its origins in Silicon Valley and now shapes the thinking of our ruling elites. In its simplest form, it holds that because there is no alternative (or time or funding), the best we can do is to apply digital plasters to the damage. Solutionists deploy technology to avoid politics; they advocate “post-ideological” measures that keep the wheels of global capitalism turning.
Morozov sees solutionism and neoliberalism as a sinister pair of ideological twins.
If neoliberalism is a proactive ideology, solutionism is a reactive one: it disarms, disables and discards any political alternatives. Neoliberalism shrinks public budgets; solutionism shrinks public imagination. The solutionist mandate is to convince the public that the only legitimate use of digital technologies is to disrupt and revolutionise everything but the central institution of modern life – the market.
Great essay. Worth reading in full.
Why does it suddenly feel like 1999 on the Internet again?
You see it in the rekindling of old relationships. Before sentimentality was replaced by an annual Facebook friends spring cleaning, it was a treat to keep in touch with middle school classmates and rediscover primary school teachers. Now we’re back to cherishing faraway old friends; after all, there’s no longer much difference between hanging out with them and those closer to home. People are going analog, too: sending postcards, leaving voicemail messages for family, putting together care packages.
The internet also used to be a place where you could learn about anything—that is, until the information overload became overwhelming. Now cabin fever and boredom have led people back to the internet to learn again, crowdsourcing the best sourdough recipe, mastering new languages, or picking up any number of other useless or handy skills.
Even Millennial-dominated apps have become more fun, less filtered, like the days before Photoshop and AI-powered touch-ups made us more vain about our digital appearance. The glossiness that pervaded Instagram the past few years has crumbled. Now there’s a delightful rawness to virtual yoga sessions done in cluttered living rooms, Martha Stewart and Ina Garten sharing their culinary tips from unflattering angles, even celebrities chiding their mother-in-law for being too loud.
Nice piece, but it will only make sense to those of us who were early users of the Net. 1999 was the year before the first Internet bubble burst. Google and Blogging were still new. And Facebook wasn’t even a glint in an eye.
And, as Andrew Sullivan of the Internet Society points out, in 1999 the Internet was much smaller. Also, many people still accessed it via dial-up lines, which meant that it could be expensive scrolling through endless messages etc.
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