This is interesting.
All the bad press about Facebook might be catching up to the company. New numbers from Edison Research show an an estimated 15 million fewer users in the United States compared to 2017. The biggest drop is in the very desirable 12- to 34-year-old group. Marketplace Tech got a first look at Edison’s latest social media research. It revealed almost 80 percent of people in the U.S. are posting, tweeting or snapping, but fewer are going to Facebook.
I’m reading an extraordinary book by Kai Strittmatter, a German journalist who has lived in, and studied, China for many years. It’s a sobering account of how the Chinese Communist Party is making the transition from what Rebecca Mackinnon christened “networked authoritarianism” to networked totalitarianism. Digital technology is their tool of choice for enabling this transition, and the book provides some graphic insights into its potential for such a project.
The recent remarkable demonstrations in Hong Kong — which caused the territory’s Chief Executive to make a humiliating climb-down over a proposed extradition law — have led some people to wonder if this might prompt a reversal of Xi Jinping’s remorseless progress to totalitarian power. Tyler Cowen doesn’t think so, and neither do I. Here’s the money quote from his latest Bloomberg Column:
It’s also worth thinking through exactly what changes Chinese democracy is supposed to bring. China’s urbanization has been so rapid — it has had more urban than rural residents for less than a decade — that a national election might well reflect the preferences of rural voters, which after all most Chinese were until very recently. If you belong to the Chinese upper class or even middle class along the eastern coast, you may end up asking yourself the following question: Who is more likely to protect my basic economic interests, the current Chinese Communist Party, or a democratic representative of Chinese rural interests? China is also growing rich during a time of extreme economic inequality, which may make many Chinese elites think twice about democratization.
Sadly, I think he’s right. Besides, I can’t see Xi having any truck with ‘democracy’.
From Mary Meeker’s ‘State of the Internet’ report, 2019.
Pressing the ‘publish‘ button by mistake!
HT to Brian Naughton.
This morning’s Observer column:
Remember the time when tech companies were cool? So do I. Once upon a time, Silicon Valley was the jewel in the American crown, a magnet for high IQ – and predominately male – talent from all over the world. Palo Alto was the centre of what its more delusional inhabitants regarded as the Florence of Renaissance 2.0. Parents swelled with pride when their offspring landed a job with the Googles, Facebooks and Apples of that world, where they stood a sporting chance of becoming as rich as they might have done if they had joined Goldman Sachs or Lehman Brothers, but without the moral odium attendant on investment backing. I mean to say, where else could you be employed by a company to which every president, prime minister and aspirant politician craved an invitation? Where else could you be part of inventing the future?
But that was then and this is now…
It’s Bloomsday — June 16 — the day when all the action in James Joyce’s Ulysses takes place. For years — since the early 1990s — I’ve celebrated it by giving a lunch in my college at which guests have Gorgonzola sandwiches and drink Burgundy (same as Leopold Bloom did in Davey Byrne’s pub in the novel) and read from the great book. I can’t hold the lunch this year because of coincidental diary conflicts, but the lovely Bronac Ferran, a regular attendee, sent me (as a consolation prize) this photograph she’d taken recently while on a trip to Zurich — the city where Joyce died and is buried together with Nóra, his wife, and Giorgio, their son.
King’s Cross, this evening.
For anyone interested in escaping from “the sociology of the last five minutes”, this long essay by Fareed Zakaria about the ending of American hegemony is a great read.
Sometime in the last two years, American hegemony died. The age of U.S. dominance was a brief, heady era, about three decades marked by two moments, each a breakdown of sorts. It was born amid the collapse of the Berlin Wall, in 1989. The end, or really the beginning of the end, was another collapse, that of Iraq in 2003, and the slow unraveling since. But was the death of the United States’ extraordinary status a result of external causes, or did Washington accelerate its own demise through bad habits and bad behavior? That is a question that will be debated by historians for years to come. But at this point, we have enough time and perspective to make some preliminary observations.
As with most deaths, many factors contributed to this one. There were deep structural forces in the international system that inexorably worked against any one nation that accumulated so much power. In the American case, however, one is struck by the ways in which Washington—from an unprecedented position—mishandled its hegemony and abused its power, losing allies and emboldening enemies. And now, under the Trump administration, the United States seems to have lost interest, indeed lost faith, in the ideas and purpose that animated its international presence for three-quarters of a century.
Worth reading in full.
David Runciman has a lovely essay in the current issue of The London Review of Books.
Most British prime ministers since Margaret Thatcher, he observes, have wanted to be Thatcher in one way or another.
This pattern is now repeating itself among the farcically long list of would-be contenders for the Tory leadership. They all, in their different ways, want to be another Thatcher. And they are all desperate to demonstrate that they won’t be another May. How to make that case? By frantically channelling their inner iron lady. ‘Dominic is the male Thatcher,’ Raab’s supporters will tell anyone who’ll listen. ‘Like Thatcher, he is “unyielding”,’ one former cabinet minister said. What this seems to mean is that he will keep hammering away until he gets his way. Raab puts it like this: ‘I would use every lever of the executive to make sure we could execute government policy.’ He is hardly alone in this kind of talk. As his rivals lay out their various Brexit plans, one thing they have in common is the promise to supply the sense of purpose that has been missing until now. Whether it’s outright no deal, managed no deal, renegotiation, revival of the existing deal or even a second referendum, they will avoid the fate that befell May by being more resolute than she was. They won’t let the Europeans or the civil service or the judges or the Speaker or the parliamentary opposition or the chatterati knock them off course. They are not for turning.
There is, however, one problem with this.
It is hard to imagine any politician being more resolute than May. Remember, she thought she was Thatcher too. She went at it with an iron determination not to be deflected from her course. And look where that got her. What are the levers they can pull which she couldn’t? Parliament has shown that it does not take kindly to being bullied on the question of Brexit, and the Speaker is barely on speaking terms with the executive. Talk of proroguing Parliament to force through a no deal Brexit before 31 October is surely for the birds. Ignoring the views of the judges is not a way to avoid being troubled by them; it’s what gets you into trouble with them. The Irish government is not going to budge any more than the Brexit negotiators in Brussels are. In any case, Westminster’s authority barely extends to the devolved parts of the UK these days, let alone any further afield. Trying to browbeat the civil service doesn’t make sense unless the goal is to get nothing done at all. There is no magic switch that can be flicked to make the Irish border question go away; whatever fantasies of a technological solution have been entertained, it remains beyond the present government’s grasp. Raab can huff and puff all he likes. Being a successful prime minister is not just a question of willpower. Getting the job done depends on bringing people along with you. And people are not levers you can pull.
Great piece. Worth reading in full.
King’s Cross station, London.