The search for the ultimate ‘man-cave’

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My eye was caught by an extraordinary piece in the FT last weekend which, in a strange way, relates to my Observer column about the Silicon Valley crowd’s obsession with dodging mortality. The FT article is about the new market in apocalypse bunkers.

The location that has become something of an unlikely media sensation is the Survival Condo Project in the usually rather less than super-prime plains north of Wichita, Kansas. Situated on a 1960s Atlas F missile launch site, the 15 condos in the first site are all sold and orders are being taken for places in the second silo. The reason there has been so much interest, from media and buyers, is the spec.

We might think of bunkers as places of desperate last resort, bleak, damp concrete cellars with industrial shelving stacked with cans of beans and musty-smelling gas masks. These, however, are something altogether different. The “Penthouse” units, comprising 3,600 sq ft of living space spread over two storeys, start from $4.5m. LED screens offer a window onto a fantasy outside world of trees and waterfalls (not the actual, frazzled and burnt-out landscape). The communal facilities include a climbing wall, dog park, pool, cinema and shooting range (of course). They also provide hydroponic and aquaponic agriculture and aquaculture, and the machinery to filter air and water indefinitely. These are bunkers for the long haul: five years or more completely off-grid.

The FT piece claims that “the latest real estate trend among internet billionaires and hedge fund tycoons is, apparently, buying bunkers”. If this is indeed true then one wonders what it means. These, after all, are people who made their fortunes from correctly guessing the short- and medium-term future. Does their appetite for these hideous, inhuman residences suggest that they have real fears for the future? Or are they so rich that blowing $4.5m on a holiday house they might never need is a bit like the rest of us buying a ticket in the lottery? The cost is relatively trivial, and you never know… you might get lucky.

Making death optional

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This morning’s Observer column:

In this world,” wrote Benjamin Franklin, “nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” This proposition doesn’t cut much ice in Silicon Valley, where they take a poor view of paying taxes. What’s interesting is that they are also coming to the view that perhaps death is optional too, at least for the very rich.

You think I jest? Well, meet Bill Maris, the founder and former CEO of Google Ventures, the investment arm of Alphabet, Google’s owners. Three years ago, Maris decided to create a company that will “solve” death…

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Dreaming in Zero Gravity

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From Frank Pasquale’s review of Peter Frase’s Four Futures: Life after Capitalism.

The assumption of abundance that drives half of Four Futures reminds me of a critical discussion of dance under conditions of zero gravity. It’s fun to imagine what might happen if choreographers could devise movements unbounded by the risk of hard falls, broken bones, and twisted knees. But whatever art of human movement was devised in space would quickly diverge in its standards of excellence from the standards governing dance here on earth. Weightless artistic movement relates to present dance as Frase’s political economy of abundance relates to ordinary political economy. Given that the primary economic problem is scarcity, it may not be a form of political economy at all, but rather, pure politics.

Unmasking sock puppets

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So called ‘sock puppets’ are multiple social media accounts which are actually controlled by a single person. They’re a pain and the pain is getting worse — as we discovered in 2016 — because they can have a distorting impact on online discourse.

But now comes some good news. New Scientist reports that researchers have developed some tools that can detect these pests with reasonable accuracy.

[Srijan] Kumar and his colleagues at the University of Maryland and Stanford University in California analysed commenter accounts on news websites including CNN, NPR, Breitbart and Fox News. They identified the sock puppets by finding accounts that posted from the same IP address in the same discussion at similar times. This approach isn’t always possible, so they wanted to develop a tool that automatically detects sock puppets based only on publicly accessible posting data.

They found that sock puppets contribute poorer quality content, writing shorter posts that are often downvoted or reported by other users. They post on more controversial topics, spend more time replying to other users and are more abusive. Worryingly, their posts are also more likely to be read and they are often central to their communities, generating a lot of activity.

Based on their findings, the researchers created a machine learning tool that can detect if two accounts belong to the same person 91 per cent of the time. Another tool can distinguish between a regular account and a sock puppet with 68 per cent accuracy. The research will be presented this week at the World Wide Web Conference in Perth, Australia.

How our German friends see Brexit

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Nice summary from today’s ei newsletter:

In The Times Edward Lucas says the Brexit vote hit anglophile Germans especially hard. We seem to regard leaving the European Union as something like getting out of an unsatisfactory flat-share: too many arguments about the bills and washing up, not enough control over house guests. Move out, move on; sad in a sense, and our new living arrangements may not be quite as convenient, but that’s life. Germans see it differently. For them, the past 44 years were not a flat-share, but a shared life.

That squares with what I hear from my German friends and colleagues.

From Great Britain to Little England

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Interesting insights from Michael O’Sullivan and David Skilling into what lies ahead for the UK:

Britain chose to leave the EU because it had an outsized opinion of itself. But it will soon have to follow a small-country model, like that of Switzerland or Norway. Forty years after leaving New Zealand in the lurch to join the European Economic Community, the UK might soon have less access to the European market than New Zealand does. Its journey from Great Britain to Little England may well be complete.

The general thrust of the article is that if the UK is to recover from Brexit, then it will have to become a very different country. It’s not like Switzerland or Norway or Singapore. And to date no G20 economy has had to make such a dramatic pivot.

So the iPad is “done”. Really?

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This morning’s Observer column:

My eye was caught by a headline in the Register, an invaluable online source of tech news and opinion. “Clearance sale shows Apple’s iPad is over. It’s done,” it read. This was a quotation from a piece by Volker Weber on the latest product announcements from Apple. “iPad is the biggest news,” he wrote, “and it says: the iPad is done. Apple is just refining the components, but there isn’t much they can do these days to make yet another super-duper Earth-shattering innovation here.”

Since I was reading this on my iPad Pro, which is probably the most useful electronic device I have ever owned, it came as a bit of a shock. But in fact Volker was really just articulating a truth about digital hardware, which is that the evolution of all such products (and a good deal else besides) follows a sigmoid curve.

It sounds complicated, but it isn’t really…

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