Hmmm… I found this mong the junk mail in our letterbox. Is someone trying to tell me something? Years ago I remember a comic giving out ‘life tips’. One was: “the last cheque you should ever write should be to the undertaker. And it should bounce!”
Facebook moves into global banking
This morning’s Observer column:
We’ve known for ages that somewhere in the bowels of Facebook people were beavering away designing a cryptocurrency. Various names were bandied about, including GlobalCoin and Facebook Coin. The latter led some people to conclude that it must be a joke. I mean to say, who would trust Facebook, of Cambridge Analytica fame, with their money?
Now it turns out that the rumours were true. Last week, Facebook unveiled its crypto plans in a white paper. It’s called Libra and it is a cryptocurrency, that is to say, “a digital asset designed to work as a medium of exchange that uses strong cryptography to secure financial transactions, control the creation of additional units and verify the transfer of assets”.
Like bitcoin, then? Er, not exactly…
LATER Merryn Somerset Webb of the Financial Times had a really good column ($) about the Facebook venture. Among the points she raises are:
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Real cryptocurrencies are about privacy and freedom. They are decentralised and permissionless — no one runs them, no one can be prevented from using them and the system never needs reference to a central authority. (This last assertion is dubious — see Vili Lehdonvirta’s Turing Institute talk — but we will leave that pass for now.) Libra is to be none of these wonderful things. It is to be run by a single organisation based in Switzerland. It is centralised and permissioned — and its value will not depend on anything intrinsic to it but to a basket of fiat currencies.
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The interest from the deposits and government bonds that back Libra will not go to the people holding the currency. It will be used to pay for the system’s operating costs and, once those are covered, to the founding members as dividends.
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There are real privacy concerns raised by Libra, especially in relation to Facebook’s role in it in relation to the metadata that Libra will throw up. “If you are worried about the way financial apps might use data on your spending patterns, you should be really worried about how a vast social network morphing into a financial network might use it. Anyone with your social media data can guess what you might buy. Anyone with your financial data knows already.”
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If Libra really is based on a basket of fiat currenties and is stable as a result, it might not take long for us to refer to the value of things in Libras. A Libra could just be a Libra. That, says Webb, “is a sovereignty game-changer”.
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If Libra succeeds, it won’t because it’s a real cryptocurrency. It’ll be because it isn’t.
In the West, Facebook is becoming an older person’s network
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.
Why China won’t be democratised any time soon
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’.
Over a quarter of US adults are “almost constantly” online
From Mary Meeker’s ‘State of the Internet’ report, 2019.
Every sub-editor’s nightmare
Pressing the ‘publish‘ button by mistake!
HT to Brian Naughton.
How Silicon Valley lost its shine
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…
Happy Bloomsday!
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.
Western civilisation, not
King’s Cross, this evening.
The Self-Destruction of American Power
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.