From Adam Gopnik’s lovely New Yorker essay on Shachar Pinsker’s book, A Rich Brew: How Cafés Created Modern Jewish Culture:

The still extant Café Central had an interior like a miniaturized San Marco, with hallucinatory Byzantine columns and swooping enclosing spandrels and squinches. (The fin-de-siècle modernist writer Peter Altenberg listed his address as “Vienna, First District, Café Central.”) Yet in its prime it was a “place of politics,” and crowded with émigré revolutionaries. A famous story had Leopold Berchtold, the Foreign Minister of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, being warned that a great war might spark a revolution in Russia. “And who will lead this revolution?” he scoffed. “Perhaps Mr. Bronshtein sitting over there at the Café Central?” Mr. Bronshtein took the name Leon Trotsky, and did.

Someone who believes that…

1. Conflict in society is inescapable
2. Unlimited human power is untrustworthy
3. Progress is nevertheless achievable; and
4. There are moral restraints on the legitimate exercise of power.

From Isaiah Berlin via Edmund Fawcett’s *Liberalism: The Life of an Idea.

One of the things that really baffles me about British politics at the moment is Brexiteers’ insistence that putting the Theresa May deal to a second referendum would be “undemocratic”. Au contraire, I think it’s the only democratic thing to do. One of the basic principles of good interface design in software is that whenever a user indicates that s/he deliberately or inadvertently intends to do something that would be damaging or that s/he might regret, the system first puts up a dialog box to check that the signalled action was in fact deliberate and that the user is comfortable with the consequences. If there were a second referendum and a majority voted to leave on the May terms or remain in the EU then that would be a truly democratic decision (you could call it informed consent) and even those of us who disagreed with it would have to accept it.

From the Christmas edition of The Economist:

Britain’s ramshackle constitution allows plenty of scope for such shenanigans. [Deciding not to hold an important Parliamentary vote that you are certain to lose.] Whereas every other Western democracy has codified its system of government, Britain’s constitution is a mish-mash of laws and conventions, customs and courtesies. Britain sees no need for the legalistic or (worse) European idea of writing down its constitution in one place. Instead it relies on the notion that its politicians know where the unwritten lines of the constitution lie, and do not cross them. “The British constitution is a state of mind,” says Peter Hennessy, a historian who calls this the “good chap” theory of government. “It requires a sense of restraint all round to make it work.” Yet amid Britain’s current crisis, such restraint has been lacking.

In 2018 the good-chap principle has taken a battering. Gaming the rules has become the only way for the Conservative government, which lacks an effective majority in the Commons, to cling on. Brexit has strained the hardware of Britain’s constitution, such as the civil service and the courts. But the software—the norms that govern day-to-day politics—has been infected with a virus, too. The chaps in government are less inclined to be good…

The NYT’s Kevin Roose sums up the Senate’s Intelligence Committee reports about Russian weaponisation of social media:

If anything has changed since 2016, it’s that social media is no longer seen as just a useful tool for influencing elections. It’s the terrain on which our entire political culture rests, whose peaks and valleys shape our everyday discourse, and whose possibilities for exploitation are nearly endless. And until we either secure that ground or replace it entirely, we should expect many more attacks, each one in a slightly different form, and each leaving us with even more doubt that what we see online reflects reality, or something close to it.

And then this from one of the researchers who worked on the Senate report:

In official statements to Congress, tech executives have said that they found it beyond their capabilities to assess whether Russia created content intended to discourage anyone from voting. We have determined that Russia did create such content. It propagated lies about voting rules and processes, attempted to steer voters toward third-party candidates and created stories that advocated not voting.

Our analysis underscores the fact that such influence operations are not specific to one platform, one malign actor or one targeted group. This is a global problem. The consolidation of the online social ecosystem into a few major platforms means that propagandists have ready audiences; they need only blanket a handful of services to reach hundreds of millions of people. And precision targeting, made possible by a decade of gathering detailed user behavior data (in the service of selling ads), means that it is easy and inexpensive to reach any targeted group.

And here are five takeaways from the two reports:

1. To a degree not fully appreciated, the Russian operation relentlessly targeted African-Americans.
2. One clear Russian goal, pursued on multiple fronts, was to suppress Democratic turnout in 2016.
3. All of the emphasis on Facebook has obscured the huge role of Instagram, as well as the Russian activity on many smaller platforms.
4. Why are we still talking about this more than two years after the election? (Answer: because it’s still going on.)
5. After the United States government and the social media companies exposed their operations, did the Russians stop doing this? (Answer: of course not.)