- 2019: the year when revolt went global Martin Gurri’s answer to the question implied by Tyler Cowen’s observation that “As 2019 enters its final quarter, there have been large and often violent demonstrations in Lebanon, Chile, Spain, Haiti, Iraq, Sudan, Russia, Egypt, Uganda, Indonesia, Ukraine, Peru, Hong Kong, Zimbabwe, Colombia, France, Turkey, Venezuela, the Netherlands, Ethiopia, Brazil, Malawi, Algeria and Ecuador, among other places.” Why the frenzy of protests – and why now? Is this just a random series of coincidences? Or is there something more systemic at work?
- How the Iranian regime shut off the Internet Balkanisation proceeds apace. The New York Times also has a good report
- Why private equity should not exist Terrific essay by Matt Stoller on one of the most pernicious types of capitalist exploitation.
- The American Room Paul Ford’s great essay on the rooms in which YouTube videos are made.
A (rare) defence of David Cameron
From Tyler Cowen of all people:
I remain a supporter of Remain, for reasons I will not recap here, but I am also a realist and I recognize that a commitment to the European Union requires a substantial commitment from the population, more than a mere fifty percent and in the United Kingdom we do not see that close to that. You probably know that the Tories seem to have won a smashing victory in today’s election, and by campaigning on Brexit as their main issue. And you can’t just blame Corbyn — his ascendancy and leadership were endogenous to the broader process, and getting rid of him to reverse Brexit it turned out was not the priority.
So do you know who looks much better in retrospect? Yes, David Cameron. After the initial referendum I heard from the usual elites the notion that Cameron committed some kind of inexplicable, aberrant error by allowing the referendum in the first place. That notion is much harder to entertain after today. Even if you are pro-Remain, we should now see that either the referendum, or something like it, was indeed a necessary step in British politics. Cameron himself saw this, and thought that a later referendum, run by an EU-hostile Tory government, could in fact go much worse than what he chanced. So it seems with hindsight that Cameron was pretty prescient, even if he did not get what he wanted.
The only flaw in that argument is its assumption that Cameron was thinking of the population as a whole, rather than of the Europhobes in his own party.
Biased machines may be easier to fix than biased humans
This morning’s Observer column:
One of the things that really annoys AI researchers is how supposedly “intelligent” machines are judged by much higher standards than are humans. Take self-driving cars, they say. So far they’ve driven millions of miles with very few accidents, a tiny number of them fatal. Yet whenever an autonomous vehicle kills someone there’s a huge hoo-ha, while every year in the US nearly 40,000 people die in crashes involving conventional vehicles.
Likewise, the AI evangelists complain, everybody and his dog (this columnist included) is up in arms about algorithmic bias: the way in which automated decision-making systems embody the racial, gender and other prejudices implicit in the data sets on which they were trained. And yet society is apparently content to endure the astonishing irrationality and capriciousness of much human decision-making.
If you are a prisoner applying for parole in some jurisdictions, for example, you had better hope that the (human) judge has just eaten when your case comes up…
Tony Brooker R.I.P.
Tony Brooker, the guy who developed Autocode, arguably the world’s first machine-independent programming language, has passed away at the age of 94. He did it to make one of the early computers, the Ferranti Mark 1 in Alan Turing’s lab in Manchester University, useable by human beings. There’s a lovely recording of him talking about it on the British Library site. Also, a nice obit in the New York Times.
Quote of the Day
“The truth is that these companies won’t fundamentally change because their entire business model relies on generating more engagement, and nothing generates more engagement than lies, fear and outrage.”
- Sacha Baron Cohen speaking about Facebook, Google et. al.
Linkblog
- How reading has changed in the 2010s Good summary of a decade by Erica Wagner.
- This is water David Foster-Wallace’s famous Kenyon College Commencement Address.
- Nabokov’s pugilistic spirit Jennifer Wilson’s entertaining (and informative) review of a new edition of Vladimir Nabokov’s essays and journalistic work. He was a harsh reviewer of other people’s work.
- How the Loss of the Landline Is Changing Family Life The shared phone was a space of spontaneous connection for the entire household. Most American homes don’t now have a landline. Sobering insight into a world we are losing.
What comes after Spotify?
Shortly after I wrote Building vs. Streaming in popped an email from Drew Austin, who was musing about what happens when a new product/service fills a void and thereby leads to the decline of whatever filled it beforehand.
Here’s the money quote:
The increasingly-maligned model of VC-funded, loss-leading hypergrowth in the pursuit of market dominance, understood another way, is a quest to create voids that matter, voids that will hurt if we let them emerge by rejecting the product currently filling them (the fissures of a post-WeWork world are at least perceptible now). In the early ‘00s, when Blockbuster died out, it was clear that something better was replacing it (there’s a nostalgic counterargument that I’m tempted to indulge, but let’s just accept this). Today, it’s more common to watch something decline without a replacement that’s clearly better. It’s easy to understand why physical media led to file-sharing and then streaming, but what comes after Netflix and Spotify? Does anyone think it’s likely to be another improvement? I don’t, and the companies’ Facebook-like pursuit of absolute ubiquity is why. Unlike the immediately-filled Blockbuster void, I fear the Spotify void. I already got rid of all my CDs. The residue of buildings and cities determines what gets built on top of them, and if we’re conscientious, we’ll build with a more distant future in mind.
Impeachment and the democracy business
Dave Winer has come up with an nice metaphor for the impeachment process:
If you think of the United States as a company, we’ve had a strategic partnership with Russia for the last three years, kind of like the one Microsoft had with IBM. Russia is analogous to Microsoft. They’re about to roll over us in the 2020 election. Our last gasp is the impeachment.
[…]
Impeachment is like IBM shipping OS/2 and the Micro Channel Architecture. Both were designed to rid IBM of Microsoft once and for all. But it didn’t work. It was too little too late. Microsoft came out with Windows 3.0, and IBM became a global consulting company. The company that dominated the computer business left the computer business. With the US and Russia analogy substitute “computer business” with “democracy business.”
Ouch! Full disclosure: I was foolish enough to fall for IBM’s ploy. On a research budget I bought an IBM PS2 computer running OS2. It was a turkey with only one good point: a really nice keyboard!
Building vs. Streaming
Every Saturday morning for as long as I can remember, BBC Radio 3 has had a programme at 9am called “Building a Library”, in which a group of experts review recordings of classical music with a view to recommending the one(s) that the listener should contemplate adding to his or her ‘library’. The implicit model is that the music comes on a disc, which made complete sense in the pre-streaming era. The fact that the channel is still running the programme suggests that lovers of classical music still buy discs, which I guess really marks them out nowadays from lovers of pop, rap, etc., most of whom probably get their music from streaming sources. In which case a ‘library’ is now a playlist, I guess.
On the other hand…
Further to Andrew Sullivan’s essay, discussed below, here’s an alternative interpretation from Kenneth Armstrong:
There has been some speculation that the political freedom the Prime Minister will enjoy will allow him to reveal his “true self” and to pursue a policy on Brexit that is less beholden to the extreme Eurosceptic elements in his own party. The argument then runs that we could be looking at a much less “hard” Brexit than the rhetoric might have suggested. For two reasons this assumption looks doubtful.
The first is that the idea that there is a different Boris Johnson waiting to be revealed doesn’t have an obvious basis. That he is prepared to adopt different positions to suit circumstances and to seek political advantage is a better characterisation of his pollical demeanour. That could, of course, mean that the Prime Minister might seek to adjust his Brexit strategy in light of the new political realities but that is not the same as the revelation of an intrinsic and authentic political credo hitherto constrained by prevailing political conditions.
The second reason for doubting a less “hard” Brexit is to do with the problematic characterisation of different choices as “hard” or “soft”. This language suggest a continuum of possibilities with positions hardening or softening. In reality, the choice the Prime Minister will have to make will be much more binary. It’s a choice between a loose “free trade” discipline in which a future EU-UK relationship will be better than World Trade Organisation terms but significantly reduced compared to those of EU membership, and a “free movement” discipline in which the future relationship entails a pre-commitment to regulatory alignment with the EU as a condition for maintaining market access on terms similar to those currently enjoyed. There seems little reason to believe that a Johnson Government will shift from a free trade approach to a free movement approach anytime soon.
So, as Ken says, “ Getting Brexit Done turns out to be Getting Brexit Started.”