Totem pole?

On a Norfolk beach.

Quote of the Day

“You feel that its words are coming of out of your body and then you dig the words into the page. It’s a physical experience.”

• The late Paul Auster on why he preferred composing in longhand.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Rolling Stones | Sympathy For The Devil (Live at Tokyo Dome 1990)

Link

Well, the devil has always had the best tunes.

Long Read of the Day

The Tyranny of Content Algorithms

Nice essay by a fellow-photographer, Om Malik, on what seems to be an endemic feature of the online world.

No matter who you are, how skilled you may be, or how much knowledge you possess, excessive activity will inevitably lead to a return to the average. This phenomenon is observable every day on the Internet. Before Instagram became a competition for the lowest common denominator, there were a few photographers I followed. They consistently shared captivating images, always managing to evoke a sense of inspiration with each viewing of their work.

I wasn’t alone in this appreciation—over time, they gained more recognition and accumulated larger followings. Or perhaps it was the other way around. The ‘larger following’ meant they were able to monetize their audience. However, soon the tail was wagging the dog.

As the years passed, I noticed them sharing more frequently, yet the quality of their work declined. They gradually transitioned from being exceptional to merely average…

Perceptive piece.

The internet needs rewilding

Yesterday’s Observer column:

The internet was, as one scholar later described it, “an architecture for permissionless innovation” or, more prosaically, a global machine for springing surprises. The first such surprise was the web. And because it was decided the web would grow better without profit considerations, Berners-Lee released it as a platform that would also enable permissionless innovation.

However, the next generation of innovators to benefit from this freedom – Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple et al – saw no reason to extend it to anyone else. They built fabulously profitable enterprises on the platform that Berners-Lee had created. The creative commons of the internet has been gradually and inexorably enclosed, much as agricultural land was by parliamentary acts from 1600 onwards in England.

The result, as Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon put it in a striking essay in Noema magazine, is that our online spaces are no longer open ecosystems. Instead “they’re plantations; highly concentrated and controlled environments, closer kin to the industrial farms that madden the creatures trapped within”…

Read on

Books, etc.

This one of the most remarkable books on my shelves. Francis Spufford is a gifted polymath who can not only write great fiction (see his On Golden Hill) but also really good history of technology (see his Backroom Boys: The Secret Return of the British Boffin — published in 2003). Red Plenty, though is something else: tech history interwoven with imaginative fiction, it’s about a moment in the 1950s when some scientists and officials in the USSR thought that their country would eclipse the US with a non-capitalist model that would bring greater prosperity. (Adam Kotska’s review gives a pretty good idea of the book.)

I read it some time after it came out in 2010, but I’ve been re-reading it because in a strange way it has become salient again. As Kotska puts it,

it’s more interesting to read Red Plenty as a fairy tale about our own age, where we are stuck in an economic system that is clearly no longer delivering on its promises, but attempts to reengineer it are either squandered through half-measures or, more often, simply dismissed out of hand. People more or less live their lives in this system, as they did in the post-Stalin Soviet Union, yet with the melancholy, forcibly retired Khrushchev, we hear a rustling in the wind asking: “can it be otherwise?”

In May 2012, Henry Farrell and his fellow-bloggers on Crooked Timber organised a fascinating seminar on Spufford’s book with essays by (among others) Kim Stanley Robinson, Cozma Shalizi, George Scialabba, Antoaneta Dimitrova, Carl Caldwell, Felix Gilman and Rich Yeselson, plus responses by Francis Spufford.

Last month there was a discussion at the Santa Fe institute on the question of whether advances in computation might make possible the dream (memorably described by Spufford) that Soviet Planners had in the 1950s — of running a command economy without markets. In conjunction with the event, Henry Farrell and Francis Spufford had a fascinating conversation in the Lensic Performing Arts Center in Sante Fe. It’s an hour long, but worth eavesdropping on if you’re interested in this stuff.

My commonplace booklet

Musk loses the plot — again

One of the smartest things Tesla did at the beginning was to start building a charging infrastructure — the ‘Supercharger’ network — so that if you bought a Tesla you could charge it on the move. It was, for many of us (me included), the clinching reason for buying a Tesla rather than one of the nicer alternatives. That network was what Warren Buffett would call a ‘moat’, something that protected the company against competitors.

And now, guess what?

After firing its entire Supercharger team, Tesla has sent out an email to suppliers which shows just how chaotic the decisionmaking leading up to the firings must have been.

Earlier this week, Tesla abruptly fired its entire Supercharging team, leading to an immediate pullback in Supercharger installation plans. Now we’ve seen the email that Tesla has sent to suppliers, and it’s not pretty.

“You may be aware that there has been a recent adjustment with the Supercharger organization which is presently undergoing a sudden and thorough restructuring. If you have already received this email, please disregard it as we are attempting to connect with our suppliers and contractors. As part of this process, we are in the midst of establishing new leadership roles, prioritizing projects, and streamlining our payment procedures. Due to the transitional nature of this phase, we are asking for your patience with our response time.

I understand that this period of change may be challenging and that patience is not easy when expecting to be paid, however, I want to express my sincere appreciation for your understanding and support as we navigate through this transition. At this time, please hold on breaking ground on any newly awarded construction projects and planned pre-construction walks. If currently working on an active Supercharging construction site, please continue. Contact (email redacted) for further questions, comments, and concerns. Additionally, hold on working on any new material orders. Contact (email redacted) for further questions, comments, and concerns. If waiting on delayed payment, please contact (email redacted) for a status update. Thank you for your cooperation and patience.”

How not to run a business.

Source

Chart of the Day

 AI hype has echoes of the telecoms boom and bust

Interesting chart from the FT drawing a parallel between the first Internet boom (1995 – 2000) when Cisco routers were hot property in the same way that Nvidia GPUs are nowadays.

We’re in a bubble. Funny how nobody seems to acknowledge that.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Bumblebee nests are overheating to fatal levels Link

One year recently, bumble bees took over one of the nest boxes in the garden — a box that was bathed in bright sunlight for hours during the day. We were astonished to see stationary bees flapping their wings at the entrance to the box, and then twigged that they were trying to cool the nest.

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Present at the Creation

Screenshot

This is a pic of the world’s very first Web server — Tim Berners-Lee’s NEXT machine at CERN. Note the handwritten note on the machine.

(Source: Jeremy Reimer on ArsTechnica.)

Quote of the Day

”The rain will stop, the night will end, the hurt will fade. Hope is never so lost that it can’t be found.”

• Ernest Hemingway

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Scott Joplin | Solace | Phillip Dyson

Link

Long Read of the Day

We Need To Rewild The Internet

This essay by Maria Farrell and Robin Berton in Noema is the best thing I’ve read in ages. It’s about how diversity was stripped out of the original Internet, and the perils of the resulting monoculture. It starts with the story of how, in the late 18th century, officials in Prussia and Saxony began to rearrange their complex, diverse forests into straight rows of single-species trees, and the ecological disaster that ensued.

The story of German scientific forestry transmits a timeless truth: When we simplify complex systems, we destroy them, and the devastating consequences sometimes aren’t obvious until it’s too late.

That impulse to scour away the messiness that makes life resilient is what many conservation biologists call the “pathology of command and control.” Today, the same drive to centralize, control and extract has driven the internet to the same fate as the ravaged forests.

The internet’s 2010s, its boom years, may have been the first glorious harvest that exhausted a one-time bonanza of diversity. The complex web of human interactions that thrived on the internet’s initial technological diversity is now corralled into globe-spanning data-extraction engines making huge fortunes for a tiny few.

Our online spaces are not ecosystems, though tech firms love that word. They’re plantations; highly concentrated and controlled environments, closer kin to the industrial farming of the cattle feedlot or battery chicken farms that madden the creatures trapped within.

We all know this. We see it each time we reach for our phones. But what most people have missed is how this concentration reaches deep into the internet’s infrastructure — the pipes and protocols, cables and networks, search engines and browsers. These structures determine how we build and use the internet, now and in the future…

It’s terrific, and worth your time.

Books, etc.

I’m reading Dan Davies’s new book and am blown away by it. In it he examines why markets, institutions and governments systematically generate outcomes that everyone involved claims not to want. From my point of view, the most interesting thing is the way he casts new light on the writings of Stafford Beer, a legendary thinker who argued in the 1950s that we should regard organisations as artificial intelligences, capable of taking decisions that are distinct from the intentions of their members. Since I’m working on a book about corporations as “Slow AIs” (as Charlie Stross calls them) this is right up my street.

Chart of the Day

From Tortoise Media’s newsletter:

The campus protests have revealed shifts in US opinion on Israel that have been developing for years. A 2023 Gallup poll found net sympathy towards Israel at +46 points among those born between 1946 and 1964; that drops to -2 among those born after 1980. In a 2021 survey of Jewish voters, respondents under 40 were twice as likely to agree that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians as those over 64.

In 2011 the American historian Daniel Rodgers published The Age of Fracture, an astonishingly perceptive book about how American society was changing in during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. His argument, neatly summarised by one reviewer (Doug Rossinow in The Journal of American History), was that

the major intellectual trends of the twentieth century’s last quarter, ranging from the ascendancy of microeconomics and market fundamentalism to the explosion of postmodernism in cultural theory, were of a piece. The weakening of social structures as perceived determinants of human life and the “thinning” of conceptions of society, to use a term favored by Rodgers, crossed inherited political boundaries.

What was so remarkable about the book was the way it tried to pin down subtle shifts that we often perceive only with the benefit of hindsight. My hunch is that we’re now living through another period of major cultural change and the best we can do is to catch glimpses of things that might yield clues to what’s happening.

IMO, the response of US students (and of citizens in a raft of Western democracies like Ireland) to the Hamas atrocity — and the Israeli response to it — is one of those clues. And it has taken the ruling elites of these societies completely by surprise. After the atrocity, the prevailing expectation was that the West would fall into line behind Netanyahu’s policy (even while collectively holding its nose). That has kind-of happened. But it has not resonated with entire generations, as we’re seeing. So maybe this time is different (to coin a phrase). Something’s up.

My commonplace booklet

Misha Valdman on the philosopher Derek Parfit:

I met Parfit on several occasions but I got to know him mainly through Larry Temkin – my thesis advisor and Parfit’s former student – who’d regale us with tales of Parfit’s eccentricities and brilliance. Under Parfit’s tutelage, Temkin wrote a dissertation on the nature of inequality. As Temkin tells it, Parfit had him write 50 pages on the topic, which Parfit returned without comment and a request for 50 more. This continued until Temkin had written about 300 pages, at which point Parfit systematically tore it all to shreds. It was the philosophical equivalent of a massacre. A year’s labor lay in ruins. He then told Temkin to begin anew, as he was now prepared to write in earnest.

In 2002 I attended a Festschrift in honor of his 60th birthday. Many of the world’s top ethicists were there. Most of them had worked with Parfit or had been trained by him. In one way or another, they were all his students. I was there for the philosophy but mostly for the spectacle. Parfit was being honored in the only way philosophers know how: by being publicly eviscerated. Speaker after speaker would rise, approach the podium, and launch into a withering critique, trying to do to Parfit what he had done to Temkin two decades prior. Parfit would sit in stony silence and then leap to his feet the second they were finished, well into rebuttal before even reaching the podium, as if he were a gladiator determined to show that none of his opponent’s blows had landed and that not a drop of his blood had been spilled. Occasionally the proceedings would veer into eulogy – it was, after all, a celebration of a lifetime’s worth of achievement – but Parfit would have none of it. “I’m not dead yet,” he’d remind the room. In all it was a riveting performance full of pageantry and drama and what I’m sure was some top shelf philosophy, though nothing comes to mind in particular. In the end the weary scholars shuffled out of the arena but Parfit was as spry as ever. It seemed the only way to beat him was to outlast him or to render him speechless. By that standard, there was no doubt who had won.

He was a truly extraordinary person. I never met him but, late in life, he married a friend and former colleague of mine, Janet Radcliffe Richards. From her I learned that Parfit was also a keen, nay fanatical, photographer. As a New Yorker profile puts it,

There were only about ten things in the world he wanted to photograph,… and they were all buildings: the best buildings in Venice —Palladio’s two churches, the Doge’s Palace, the buildings along the Grand Canal — and the best buildings in St. Petersburg, the Winter Palace and the General Staff Building.

When he came home, he developed his photographs and sorted them. But,

Of a thousand pictures, he might keep three. When he decided that a picture was worth saving, he took it to a professional processor in London and had the processor hand-paint out all aspects of the image that he found distasteful, which meant all evidence of the twentieth century—cars, telegraph wires, signposts—and usually all people. Then he had the colors repeatedly adjusted, although this was enormously expensive, until they were exactly what he wanted—which was a matter of fidelity not to the scene as it was but to an idea in his head.

They don’t make them like that any more.

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Many happy returns

Quote of the Day

”Anxiety is the price we pay for the ability to imagine the future.”

• NYU neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Deep River (Arr. Coleridge-Taylor, Kanneh-Mason) | Sheku Kanneh-Mason

Link

Long Read of the Day

Technological risks are not the end of the world

Terrific essay by Jack Stilgoe in Science on the obsession with existential risk of AI which — deliberately or inadvertently — sucks the oxygen out of the discourse we should be having about the technology, namely the harms it’s already doing, and the future harm it will do to the environment of the planet.

Worth your time.

Social media’s business model is incompatible with the elimination of online horror

Yesterday’s Observer column:

Way back in the mid-1990s, when the web was young and the online world was buzzing with blogs, a worrying problem loomed. If you were an ISP that hosted blogs, and one of them contained material that was illegal ,sor defamatory, you could be held legally responsible and sued into bankruptcy. Fearing that this would dramatically slow the expansion of a vital technology, two US lawmakers, Chris Cox and Ron Wyden, inserted 26 words into the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which eventually became section 230 of the Telecommunications Act of the same year. The words in question were: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” The implications were profound: from now on you bore no liability for content published on your platform.

The result was the exponential increase in user-generated content on the internet. The problem was that some of that content was vile, defamatory or downright horrible. Even if it was, though, the hosting site bore no liability for it…

Read on

The real threat…

(In a nutshell)

AI doesn’t have to be sentient to pose a threat — sentient actors are the threat. The 2024 election is going to be the World Cup of online disinformation, as AI supercharges these tactics. Social media bots sound like real people and can engage one-on-one in real time with millions. Deepfake audio and video clips show candidates saying hateful or foolish things. India offers a preview: A skilled AI content creator says hundreds of politicians have asked him for fake material. Some even want badly produced fakes of themselves they can release to discredit any bad press, even legitimate press. China used fake AI content to attempt to sway an election in Taiwan and is using the same tactics in the U.S. Congress is considering legal barriers, but nothing will come of it before the election. The people running the platforms that will deliver these threats to our screens are predictably claiming “it’s too complex” and “this is government’s problem” and “free speech” — all of which is bullshit. However, the liability shield of Section 230 will be enough to keep them unaccountable for another cycle.

Scott Galloway

My commonplace booklet

Why Jonathan Haidt and Andrew Przybylski might BOTH be right about social media and teenagers 

From Charles Arthur:

What the research data (such as it is) suggests:

• children who spend low amounts of time online tend to be unhappy. They’re missing out, they’re shut out of online discussion, they’re unable to participate as others do.

• those who spend a moderate time online are connected, participating, happy. Of course the key thing is that they don’t spend all their time online. The big question is what the top and bottom limits of “moderate” are.

• those who spend a large amount of time online are connected, over-participating, unhappy. Whether their unhappiness is due to the amount of time they spend online, or if they spend a lot of time online because they’re unhappy (and in effect seeking people who they can connect with, to make friends).

This means that both Haidt and Przybylski could both be right: using social media does make some children unhappy, and using social media hasn’t got a global association with well-being.

Linkblog

Some things I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

*  Hunting for AI metaphors. Nice blog post on one of my pet obsessions. (h/t to Laura James)

• Neil Turok on the simplicity of nature. Fascinating and informative interview with one of of the great theoretical physicists of our time.

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Warning!

I often think I should put this cautionary pic up as a spoiler alert when writing about stuff that’s above my intellectual pay-grade.

Quote of the Day

”You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic. Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being.”

• Evelyn Waugh

Probably true. The problem is that he was also a gifted satirist.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Kate Rusby | Who Will Sing Me Lullabies

Link

Long Read of the Day

The Cultural Contradictions of Neoliberalism

Neoliberalism is generally thought of as an economic project, but in fact it’s something much more pervasive — a mindset that has infected most institutions in Western societies. Which means that it has also been a cultural project, and we are living with the cultural wreckage brought about by neoliberal policies and ideology. The Roosevelt Institute has produced an interesting 50-page report on the pervasiveness of this mindset, which I guess is a bit of a stretch for busy subscribers. But the Executive Summary usefully lays out the basic arguments of the report.

Long video of the Day

A TED talk by Mustafa Suleyman, a co-founder of DeepMind and Inflection and now — I think — working for Microsoft. It has the usual TED bugs/features — including the illusion that wisdom can be compressed into 20 minutes. It’s also imbued with the boosterish tech pretence that machine-learning technology is somehow weightless in environmental and societal terms. But his metaphor — which is basically that we should think of AI as a new ‘digital species’ that has arrived on earth — at least provides a different lens for thinking about this stuff. Hence this recommendation.

My commonplace booklet

Legal Fiction

If you want a striking illustration of the degeneration of the UK over the last two decades then this LRB blog post by Nicholas Reed Langen would be hard to beat. It’s written in the aftermath of the passage into law of the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill, which has been relentlessly pushed by the Tory Prime Minister to appease his party’s xenophobic base. In passing the legislation, Langen writes, the UK has effectively become a rogue state which violates international treaties to which it is a signatory. It also runs counter to the judgment of the country’s Supreme Court. So much for the rule of law.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• From Quanta Magazine…

In 2022, researchers at the Bee Sensory and Behavioral Ecology Lab at Queen Mary University of London observed bumblebees doing something remarkable: The diminutive, fuzzy creatures were engaging in activity that could only be described as play. Given small wooden balls, the bees pushed them around and rotated them. The behavior had no obvious connection to mating or survival, nor was it rewarded by the scientists. It was, apparently, just for fun.

The study on playful bees is part of a body of research that a group of prominent scholars of animal minds cited today, buttressing a new declaration that extends scientific support for consciousness to a wider suite of animals than has been formally acknowledged before.

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Quai d’Orsay

But not the one on the bank of the Seine. This one found its way to Ely, Cambridgeshire!

“Quai d’Orsay” is often synonymous with the French Foreign Ministry, which occupies a magnificent building there. I remember a veteran Foreign Correspondent (I think it may have been the BBC’s John Simpson) once saying that he “never believed anything was true until it had been denied three times by the Quai d’Orsay.”

Quote of the Day

“I don’t necessarily agree with everything that I say.”

• Marshall McLuhan

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

John Williams | Schindler’s List Theme | Itzhak Perlman

Link

Long Read of the Day

AI isn’t useless. But is it worth it?

Lovely, astute assessment by Molly White, one of my favourite commentators on tech.

As someone known for my criticism of the previous deeply flawed technology to become the subject of the tech world’s overinflated aspirations, I have had people express surprise when I’ve remarked that generative artificial intelligence toolsa can be useful. In fact, I was a little surprised myself.

But there is a yawning gap between “AI tools can be handy for some things” and the kinds of stories AI companies are telling (and the media is uncritically reprinting). And when it comes to the massively harmful ways in which large language models (LLMs) are being developed and trained, the feeble argument that “well, they can sometimes be handy…” doesn’t offer much of a justification.

Some are surprised when they discover I don’t think blockchains are useless, either. Like so many technologies, blockchains are designed to prioritize a few specific characteristics (coordination among parties who don’t trust one another, censorship-resistance, etc.) at the expense of many others (speed, cost, etc.). And as they became trendy, people often used them for purposes where their characteristics weren’t necessary — or were sometimes even unwanted — and so they got all of the flaws with none of the benefits…

Full of good common sense. Worth a read.

Books, etc.

We’re reading — and enjoying — this fascinating group biography by Penelope Fitzgerald (neé Knox) of her four uncles, who were all (to put it mildly) er, distinctive. I had read and loved Evelyn Waugh’s biography of one of them — Ronald — but the others were a mystery to me. No longer.

My commonplace booklet

Every year on his birthday Kevin Kelly offers bits of homespun advice, and last year he collected them into a book — Excellent Advice For Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier. He’s just coming up to his 73rd birthday, and so he’s issued 101 more. Here are a few that struck me.

• You owe everyone a second chance, but not a third.
• Admitting that “I don’t know” at least once a day will make you a better person
• Whenever you hug someone, be the last to let go
• Read a lot of history so you can understand how weird the past was; that way you will be comfortable with how weird the future will be
• Most arguments are not really about the argument, so most arguments can’t be won by arguing
• There should be at least one thing in your life you enjoy despite being no good at it. This is your play time, which will keep you young. Never apologize for it.
• Changing your mind about important things is not a consequence of stupidity, but a sign of intelligence.
• You have 5 minutes to act on a new idea before it disappears from your mind.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Back to the Future A new Huawei smartphone has a pop-out camera lens, just like ye olde point-and-shoot cameras — Ars Technica

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Lakeland

Glenteentassig Lake on the Dingle peninsula. One of Ireland’s loveliest hidden lakes.

Quote of the Day

“One of my best decisions was being born before the Internet and smartphones.”

• Robert Shrimsley

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Berlioz | Symphonie Fantastique | 5th movement

Link

I can never decide which is the more dramatic — the music or the acrobatics of the conductor (Leonard Bernstein)!

Long Read of the Day

Remembering Daniel Dennett

A remarkable and provocative thinker has passed away. Gary Marcus sums him up neatly as the man who “arrived at what many would see as shocking conclusions about consciousness (essentially that it is just an emergent effect of physical interactions of tiny inanimate components)”, and who from then on,

was a dead-set opponent of dualism (the idea that there is an ethereal nonphysical elixir called “consciousness”, over and above the physical events taking place in the enormously complex substrate of a human or animal brain, and perhaps that of a silicon network as well). Dan thus totally rejected the notion of “qualia” (pure sensations of such things as colors, tastes, and so forth), and his arguments against the mystique of qualia were subtle but very cogent.

Marcus has passed on a lovely memoir of Dennett written by his friend Douglas Hofstadter:

Dan was also a diligent and lifelong “student” (in the sense of “studier”) of evolution, religion, artificial intelligence, computers in general, and even science in general. He wrote extremely important and influential books on all these topics, and his insights will endure as long as we humans endure. I’m thinking of his books Brainstorms; The Intentional Stance; Elbow Room; Consciousness Explained; Darwin’s Dangerous Idea; Kinds of Minds; Inside Jokes; Breaking the Spell; From Bacteria to Bach and Back and of course his last book, I’ve Been Thinking, which was (and is) a very colorful self-portrait, a lovely autobiography vividly telling so many stories of his intercontinental life. I’m so happy that Dan not only completed it but was able to savor its warm reception all around the world.

Among other things, that book tells about Dan’s extremely rich life not just as a thinker but also as a doer. Dan was a true bon vivant, and he developed many amazing skills, such as that of house-builder, folk-dancer and folk-dance caller, jazz pianist, cider-maker, sailor and racer of yachts (not the big ones owned by Russian oligarchs, but beautifully crafted sailboats), joke-teller par excellence, enthusiast for and expert in word games, savorer of many cuisines and wines, wood-carver and sculptor, speaker of French and some German and Italian as well, and ardent and eloquent supporter of thinkers whom he admired and felt were not treated with sufficient respect by the academic world.

Worth reading in full. I’ve Been Thinking is such a lovely title for a philosopher’s autobiography.

The big tech firms want an AI monopoly – but maybe the UK CMA can bring them to heel

Yesterday’s Observer column:

“Monopoly,” said Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley’s answer to Darth Vader, “is the condition of every successful business.” This aspiration is widely shared by Gamman, the new acronynm for the Valley’s giants – Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon and Nvidia. And the arrival of AI has sharpened the appetite of each for attaining that blessed state before the others get there.

One symptom of their anxiety is the way they have been throwing unconscionable amounts of money at the 70-odd generative AI startups that have mushroomed since it became clear that AI was going to be the new new thing. Microsoft reportedly put $13bn (about £10.4bn) into OpenAI, for example, but it was also the lead investor in a $1.3bn funding round for Inflection, Deepmind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman’s startup. Amazon put $4bn into Anthropic, the startup founded by refugees from OpenAI. Google invested $500m in the same outfit, with a promise of $1.5bn more, and unspecified sums in A121 Labs and Hugging Face. (Yeah, I know the names make no sense.) Microsoft has also invested in Mistral, the French AI startup. And so on. In 2023, of the $27bn that was invested in AI startups, only $9bn came from venture capitalist firms – which until recently had been by far the biggest funders of new tech enterprises in Silicon Valley.

What’s going on here?

Read on to find out.

My commonplace booklet

Two cheers for Immanuel Kant

The political philosopher Lea Ypi had a nice essay on Kant in the FT on Saturday. I was struck by this passage:

To be free, in a Kantian sense, is to be able to take a critical distance from your passions and inclinations, and to ask yourself if they contribute to “enlightened” thinking: the exit, as Kant puts it, from “humanity’s self-incurred own immaturity”. The process of enlightenment rests on three maxims: to think for oneself, to think putting oneself in the place of everyone else, and to always think consistently. Such maxims, he believed, could be advanced through “the public use of reason”, a modus operandi that is fundamentally different from the “private” use people make of it in their professions (say as students, teachers, doctors, politicians, lawyers or asset managers). While the latter is premised on the acceptance of authority, the former requires pluralistic, impartial and critical engagement.

It is difficult to relate to Kant’s aspirations in an age like ours where public-spiritedness is constantly threatened by the clash between private interests. Our mode of communication is wider and more inclusive than in the 18th century (for example, political participation is formally no longer limited to property-holders) but it is also shallower, more certain of itself and less critical. Dissent manifests itself more in clamorous acts of individual self-expression (preferably recorded on a mobile phone) and less in collective critical engagement.

Like us, Kant lived in an age of crisis marked by great advances in science and technology but a collapse in values. Yet he carved out a role for reason as a universal communicative capacity that tries to steer a middle path between scepticism and dogmatism: between having faith in nothing and blindly following trends. That conception of reason seems harder to revive in our societies, strangled as they are between destructive interests and the individualisation of political commitment.

Yep.

Linkblog

What is it about fancy wristwatches?

As a (cynical) reader of publications which target people with more money than sense, I am continually intrigued by the advertisements for expensive men’s wristwatches, and in particular by the way so many of them make a song-and-dance about the water depth that they can allegedly withstand. I’m looking at one which is even badged as “Fifty Fathoms” to indicate that it will still tell the time 300 feet below the ocean surface. But here’s the strange thing: I’ve never seen a man wearing one of these watches who has been closer to ocean depths than you get in an infinity pool on the French Riviera. So, basically, these things are just male jewellery. Pathetic, really.

One cheery thought, though. Apparently, it’s not a good idea to flaunt your flashy status-symbol in some parts of London nowadays. At any rate the FT reports that “the Metropolitan Police is grappling with a spate of muggings that has sent jitters as far as Delhi and Geneva.”

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Gateway to ‘Global Britain’

Heathrow Airport Terminal 2, on a quiet Saturday afternoon.

Quote of the Day

”He who hesitates is poor.”

• Mel Brooks

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mark Knopfler | Two Pairs Of Hands

Link

Long Read of the Day

Why trade unions matter

Interesting and perceptive Long Read by Neil Bierbaum.

During performance related workshops, the question comes up about expectations; what to do about bosses and colleagues who send out emails late at night, expecting an immediate answer—or latest by the next morning? And what to do about the need to prove that you’re on top of things by meeting that expectation? I call it the “cult of busyness”, and point to “wearing busyness as a badge of honour”. What are we to do about that, comes the question.

What I notice is that everybody is looking for an individual answer, a personal solution, as though it’s their problem to resolve. I always ask myself; can nobody see the naked emperor? It’s all very well doing all you can to manage yourself, but what if the system doesn’t leave you alone? I try to steer people towards the idea that it’s a systemic problem and needs a systemic solution, but mostly I get met with blank stares. (I hope by writing it down here and showing some graphs, it will land with more impact.)

The short answer I would offer is that the epidemic of busyness and the dearth of work-life balance is driven systemically by what I call the “primacy of shareholder value”. In other words, placing profit over people. Despite all the talk of the “triple bottom line” (profit, people, planet), it seldom happens in practice. The systemic solution is to make people matter at least as much as profit. To achieve that, we need our leaders, those high priests of profit, to do more than just pay lip service to the “triple bottom line”. To get there, we ourselves need to stop worshipping at the altar of efficiency for the sake of shareholders. We need to start walking and working among the time poor (as much as I dislike that term, I shall use it here for its poetic ease).

This is an interesting and sharp essay (and I’m not saying that because at one point Bierbaum quotes me). One of the axioms of the neoliberalism that took hold of Western governing elites in the 1970s was that corporations needed to reduce operating costs sharply, which meant in practice reducing labour costs, which in turn meant curbing union power. And both Ronald Reagan in the US and Margaret Thatcher in the UK took this to heart. One of the first things Reagan did after taking office, remember, was to sack 11,359 unionised air-traffic controllers workers overnight on August 5, 1981. And over in the UK Thatcher introduced legislation curbing trade-union power (by outlawing secondary picketing, for example) and, later, by taking on — and defeating — the National Union of Mineworkers.

And then came the tech industry, to which the very idea of unionisation was anathema, resulting in the growth of gigantic firms which were effectively neoliberal wet dreams in which the idea of a counterveiling power to managerial fiat was ridiculed as a quaint throwback to the era of Fordist mass production.

In that context, one of the most interesting findings to emerge from Acemoglu’s and Johnson’s magisterial survey of society’s thousand-year experience with technology is that the only periods in which technology-generated wealth was more equitably shared with the non-owners of capital coincided with the growth of counterveiling powers like unions together with societal mobilisation against overweening corporate power.

Chart of the day

Source: Tortoise Media, which commented that:

Despite the attack’s apparent failure, Tehran gathered useful information about Israel’s defences and forced Israel and the US to spend more than $1 billion in one night to counter an attack that cost around one tenth of that to launch.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• From The Economist, 26/03/2024

“China’s government spends $6.6bn a year censoring online content, estimates the Jamestown Foundation, a think-tank in America. In one two-month period last year the authorities claim to have deleted 1.4m social-media posts and 67,000 accounts (ironically, they branded many of the posts “misinformation”). More recently officials launched an investigation into short-video platforms that were spreading “pessimism” among young people, many of whom are struggling to find jobs.”

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Manuel Castells, the first great scholar of cyberspace

Quote of the Day

“If you’re too open-minded; your brains will fall out.”

• Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mark Knopfler’s Guitar Heroes | Going Home (Theme From Local Hero)

Link

There’s an interesting story behind this.

Mark Knopfler’s new special recording of his anthemic ‘Going Home (Theme From Local Hero)’, produced by his longtime collaborator Guy Fletcher (who has edited the contributions into a 9 minute piece), features an unprecedented line-up of some of the greatest guitarists in history. ‘Legendary’ does not begin to cover it – David Gilmour to Ronnie Wood, Slash to Eric Clapton, Sting to Joan Armatrading, Bruce Springsteen to Pete Townshend, Nile Rodgers to Joan Jett, Brian May to Tony Iommi, Joe Walsh, Sam Fender and many more jaw dropping names.

And, in a great honour, the track opens with Jeff Beck’s final recording. Roger Daltrey, Teenage Cancer Trust’s Honorary Patron and co-founder of Teen Cancer America (with Pete Townshend), added harmonica, and Beatles icon Ringo Starr is on drums along with his son Zak Starkey, their two drum tracks switching from one to the other, revealing an unmistakable family style. Sting completes an extraordinary rhythm section on bass. With artwork designed by Sir Peter Blake (The Beatles, The Who, Band Aid, Paul Weller etc), this release is a landmark in rock music history.

Long Read of the Day

 From Bauhaus to Buchenwald .. to mid-century cool

Extraordinary essay by Adam Tooze about the famous design school, its historical legacy and the enigmatic career of one of its students, Franz Ehrlich.

As a canonical lieu de mémoire for global modernism, Bauhaus, truly came into its own with a retrospective exhibition hosted in Stuttgart, one of the industrial centers of postwar West Germany, in 1968. According to art historian Iris Dressler, the show with the programmatic title – 50 years of Bauhaus – was a sensational success, traveling to eight museums—in Europe, the United States, Canada, South America and Asia – and attracting more than 800,000 visitors in total. From 1974, a reduced version of the show put together by Germany’s Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (Institute for Foreign Relations) toured the globe for a further eight years. The stakes were high:

The title, 50 years of the Bauhaus, already ascribes an unbroken continuity to the school—which, as is well known, existed for only 14 years, and in his opening speech the German Federal Minister for Building and Urbanism, Dr. Lauritz Lauritzen, claimed: “The Bauhaus … has significantly contributed to the cultural philosophy of a state designed (to be) democratic and of a democratic society. It is unthinkable without the democratic constitution of the Weimar Republic,” which, as he went on to explain, failed not for political reasons but due to the lack in Germany of an authentically liberal, open society. “The Bauhaus was of global vibrancy. … Without any national hubris one can say that it is a German contribution to culture and civilization in this world of the twentieth century, a contribution to the humanization of the technical century.” He then added: “The men of the Bauhaus who left Germany kept the spirit of German humanism alive in their exiles.”

As Dressler remarks, the exhibition said nothing about the activities of the Bauhaus students who were not forced to leave Germany. Indeed, the entire exhibition was a complex exercise in self-fashioning…

Thanks to Robert Amundsen for alerting me to it.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Extraordinary video of Emperor Penguin chicks having to make a momentous decision.

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